TRANSFORMING A VISION TO MAKE DREAMS REALITY
Dilapidated Detroit building becomes haven for learning
Room by room.
FOR MORE INFO
Horatio Williams Foundation Center, 1010 Antietam, Detroit, www.horatio williamsfoundation.org Saturday, June 29, 2013
Detroit: Haven for Learning Center (Variations on a Theme and/or Meme........Humm! I Know a Place where.....)
GM Investment Plan 2013 (Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something BLUE ' Note: Pontiac Investment)
GM already tops $1.5 billion investment plan for 2013
DETROIT- General Motors Co. has already exceeded its goal of announcing more than $1.5 billion in new investments this year for production facilities in North America.
Following two Wednesday announcements totaling $344 million, the Detroit-based automaker’s announced investments total about $1.82 billion with six months to go in 2013.
Bill Grotz, a GM spokesman, confirmed the amount of announced investments withMLive, but would not comment on any future investment plans or announcements.
GM North America President Mark Reuss initially announced the $1.5 billion plan during the Automotive News World Congress in January.
“GM, Chrysler and Ford employ two out of every three autoworkers in the U.S., and base more employees in the U.S. than the competition – by a factor of eight,” Reuss said according to prepared remarks for the congress Jan. 16 in Detroit. "For our part, GM has announced North American facility investment of over $10.2 billion since July 2009, creating or retaining more than 26,500 jobs.”
This year’s announced investments now bring that number to $12 billion since four years ago, when the automaker emerged from a government-backed bankruptcy as part of the 2008-2009 automotive bailout.
General Motors President North America Mark Reuss addresses the gathering at the Automotive News World Congress Wednesday, January 16, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. (Photo by John F. Martin for General Motors)
Of the already double-digit major production investments announced by GM this year, Michigan has benefited from about half of them to a tune of $537.2 million.
The announced 2013 investments come as GM is set to replace 70 percent of its U.S. lineup this year with new or significantly redesigned models.
The investments impact three countries, a hand full of states and more than a dozen GM facilities.
Here’s a calendar of the investments with links to more details:
Jan. 16
- GM North America President Mark Reuss announces the $1.5 billion investment plan at the 2013 Automotive News World Congress.
Jan. 28
- $600 million at Fairfax Assembly and Stamping Plant in Kansas for a new 450,000 square-foot paint shop, the installation of a new stamping press and other upgrades.
Jan. 30
- $200 million into its Global Powertrain Engineering Headquarters in Warren to build a new 138,000 sq.-ft. test wing. Under the expansion plan, engineering development work currently being done at leased facilities in Wixom, Mich.; Castleton, Ind. and Torrance, Calif., will move to Pontiac. Also, GM R&D’s Propulsion Systems Research lab in Warren will relocate to the Pontiac campus.
- $3.5 million to move Performance Build Center, currently located at the Wixom facility, to GM’s Chevrolet Corvette assembly plant in Bowling Green, Ky., by the first quarter of 2014.
March 8
- $250 million investment in the CAMI Assembly Plant in Ingersoll, Ontario to install flexible body shop equipment and tooling, converting the manufacturing facility to support future vehicle production.
April 4
- $331.8 million in six facilities, including $246.7 million for facilities in Flint and Bay City to support production of a new Ecotec small gas engine, a new V6 engine, eight-speed transmission and tooling for an existing six-speed transmission.
- $41 million to increase a previous announcement to $256 million for Saginaw Metal Castings Operations to produce castings for the new V6 engine.
- $5 million to increase a previous announcement to $390 million for Romulus Engine Operations to build the new V6 engines.
May 21
- $44.5 million in a new, 400,000-square foot Logistics Optimization Center at the automaker’s Lansing Grand River Assembly plant.
June 26
- $211 million to expand the Toluca Complex to build higher performing, more fuel-efficient powertrains in Mexico.
- $133 million to add a third stamping press for production of its next-generation mid-size pickup trucks at its Wentzville Assembly and Stamping plant in Missouri.
Toyota Engineering & Manufacturing Chief, Osama "Simon" Nagata to Locate in Michigan (Toyota Technical Center in Saline)
June 28, 2013 at 6:59 am
New Toyota boss picks Michigan
North America unit chief will pass over California HQ office
Toyota
Motor Corp.’s new North American engineering and manufacturing chief has decided to put his office in Michigan instead of at the company’s regional headquarters in California.
Motor Corp.’s new North American engineering and manufacturing chief has decided to put his office in Michigan instead of at the company’s regional headquarters in California.
Osamu “Simon” Nagata, who was named president and CEO of Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America Inc. in March, has purchased a home in Novi and will work out of the Toyota Technical Center in Saline.
His predecessors have all been based at Toyota’s North American headquarters in Torrance, Calif., near Los Angeles.
Nagata’s decision underscores the growing importance of Michigan to the world’s largest automaker, as well as the state’s continuing role as the center of automotive research and engineering.
“It doesn’t surprise me. Michigan is still the center of gravity for the entire world when it comes to the automobile industry,” said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research, who met with Nagata last week.
industry,” said David Cole, chairman emeritus of the Center for Automotive Research, who met with Nagata last week.
Cole noted that six major automakers have research-and-development facilities in southeast Michigan: Toyota, Nissan Motor Co. and Hyundai Motor Co., as well as General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler Group LLC. Many of the most important suppliers are also based in the state, which is also home to some of the leading engineering schools in the country.
“Toyota sees that it would really be good to be part of that,” Cole said.
He said Toyota also is doubling down on its North American business, meaning the company’s research and development center near Ann Arbor is becoming more important to its global product strategy.
“The Japanese market is soft and it’s probably going to get softer,” Cole said, adding that the world’s largest car market — China — presents a special challenge for Toyota and other Japanese automakers. “They have a lot of history with China, and it’s not good. So North America remains a key market for them.”
During the past two years, Toyota has pledged investments of more than $2 billion to expand production in North America. Last week, Nagata announced that Toyota would invest $200 million in its Alabama Engine Plant and Bodine Aluminum casting facilities in Missouri and Tennessee to boost production of V-6 engines.
engines.
That investment “demonstrates Toyota’s commitment to North America and our localization efforts,” Nagata said in a statement. “Our commitment to our local communities where we produce engines, engine parts and vehicles has never been stronger thanks to our team members and their continued focus on safety, quality and continuous improvement.”
Toyota is increasingly shifting responsibility for vehicle design and engineering to local markets such as the United States as part of Toyota President and CEO Akio Toyoda’s push to create a more global culture inside the company.
Nagata is a close associate of Toyoda’s and was tapped to spearhead a global communications task force that he set up to improve the dialog between Japan and Toyota’s regional offices in the wake of the embarrassing unintended acceleration debacle in 2010.
Nagata also is a senior managing officer of the company and chairman of the International Committee of the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association.
The Future of Education (Executive Director Marina Gorbis, Institute For the Future)
Join Us To Hear About The Future Of Education
As part of our Futurist Forum, we’re hosting a talk with Institute For The Future Executive Director Marina Gorbis about the changing ways we learn.
In our latest Futurist Forum live discussion, we’ll be talking with Marina Gorbis, author of the new book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World andexecutive director of the Institute For The Future.
Gorbis will share insights from her current research on social production (aggregating microcontributions from large networks of people utilizing social tools and technologies) and specifically look at how it’s changing the face of education--through innovations from MOOCs to educational experiences we haven’t even imagined yet.
You can read some of Gorbis’s talk about how the future classroom won’t exist, because the whole world will be a classroom in our Futurist Forum series here.
Also, be sure to check out our past live webinars on the difficulty of predicting the future, the present vs. the future, and the future of work.
An All Too Familiar Global Educational Tome (China)
Time Magazine Curious Capitalist
China: Just as Desperate for Education Reform as the U.S.
This article is the fourth in Foroohar’s series on Chinese business and economic developments and their effects on the global economy; find the rest of the series here.
While Americans often worry that hordes of Chinese engineers will eat their economic lunch, the Chinese look to the U.S. for the model of how to educate a 21st century workforce. This realization hit me during a recent trip to China, on which I kept hearing about how broken the Chinese educational model was, and how desperately it needed to be reformed in order for the country to move up the economic food chain and create the millions of new jobs required to avoid higher unemployment and the social unrest that often comes with it.
I saw the problem firsthand at Wuhan University, one of the top 10 schools in China. While not as elite as Peking University or Tsinghua (which are often referred to as China’s Harvard and MIT, respectively), Wuhan is certainly one of China’s Ivies. Yet while the dozen or so students I met with there were clearly bright and hard working, they had trouble thinking creatively or outside the box. One young man claimed he wanted to put his economics degree to work fixing China’s environment. But when I asked him how he might go about that — by starting a company? Lobbying the government? Using social media? — he looked confused and simply shrugged.
One reason for this sort of response might be that Chinese education typically encourages students to stay in the box and not question authority. “There is growing concern, among parents, employers and policymakers alike, that the system’s emphasis on rote learning and high-stakes exam taking does not foster the mental agility and innovative flair that the 21st century economy will need,” says a McKinsey report on the Chinese educational system and skills gap released in May. It’s a high-stakes problem. McKinsey estimates that at the lower end of the labor market (meaning factory workers with primary education or less) there will be 23 million more workers than jobs in China by 2020. Meanwhile, at the top end (workers with university degrees or vocational training) there’s an increasing talent shortage — Chinese employers will need about 24 million more workers than the country is likely to supply during the same time span. If the country doesn’t bridge the gap, the opportunity cost is likely to be $250 billion, according to McKinsey.
The big problem is that while China is churning out plenty of university graduates, they don’t have the skills they need to satisfy potential employers — they lack technical training, can’t speak English well enough, don’t know how to work in teams or think critically, can’t problem solve creatively, and don’t have soft skills. (One employer in the McKinsey report complains, “Smiling and shaking hands; I have to teach this to people in their 20s and early 30s.”)
Victor Yuan, the head of Horizon, a Chinese polling firm, blames the overexpansion of higher education in China. “University programs here grew too quickly, and without the proper preparation of teachers and professors,” he says. “You’ve got 500 schools of finance and investment, for example, but sometimes only a single professor to teach you various topics.” Indeed, the statistics would seem to bear out his opinion: There’s a 40% unemployment rate for white collar workers in China, and multinational companies will often import workers for top positions rather than hire locals. While China graduates over 600,000 engineers a year, McKinsey Global Institutes estimates that only 1 in 10 had the skills to make it in a foreign multinational.
This “supply paradox” is being tackled in a variety of ways. Chinese who can afford it are sending their children abroad for school earlier and earlier. Indeed, the hottest area in Chinese for-profit education these days isn’t test prep for Harvard, but for Andover — rich Chinese parents want to send their children to the best boarding schools in the U.S. and the U.K.
Meanwhile, there’s an increasing push to bridge the mismatch between skills and job requirements by connecting employers with workers, a trend that mirrors what’s happening in the U.S. A private company called China Vocational Training Holdings works with carmakers to provide high-end technical training to 100,000 students a year. (Even the Chinese manufacturing sector is under pressure, as rising wages, energy costs and greater productivity in other countries mean work that was once done in China is moving elsewhere in Asia, Latin America and even back to the U.S.) A number of other programs are being set up in areas like Shanghai and Guangdong to teach migrant workers — who might once have gone to work in factories — the kind of skills more useful to China’s growing service sector, like logistics or cosmetology.
Yuan himself has set up a nonprofit organization designed to foster creativity and entrepreneurship among young people, offering students grant money for new businesses and teaching soft skills to college graduates. “When students graduate from university here, they are lost. College in China is a walled garden — they graduate, and they can’t do anything.” If the Middle Kingdom is to spur growth and avoid social discontent, it will have to make sure they don’t languish too long.
Entrepreneurial Funding (The Other "Must Have" Side of the Proverbial Coin / Center for Michigan Bridge Magazine)
Guest commentary: Moving from defense to offense for Michigan’s entrepreneurs
By Chris Rizik/Renaissance Venture Capital Fund
(courtesy image/mlive.com)
Every basketball fan has seen it: Your hard working team plays great and goes into halftime with a big lead. But in the second half that same team looks entirely different, as the players stop doing all the aggressive, scrappy things that gave them the lead, and instead begin playing with the sole goal of not losing. More often than not, by focusing on being safe, they see their lead evaporate.
This basketball analogy is eerily resonant with the story of entrepreneurship in Michigan, a state that grew to unprecedented heights in the 20th century on the backs of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. Then Michigan lost its momentum, beginning a long, slow shift from a hungry, innovative state to one that worked primarily to maintain what it had — playing not to lose. We moved from playing offense to solely playing defense, and it is tough to score while playing defense.
The biggest blow to Michigan was a cultural one. By playing defense, we became a state of risk-avoiders. We spent the first eight years of this century clinging to a two-generations-old model of doing business in Michigan, even as major cracks in that model became apparent.
Well, real change often doesn’t come until you hit bottom, and in 2008-09 the walls came tumbling down — and our blinders came off.
Chris Rizik is CEO of Renaissance Venture Capital Fund in Ann Arbor.
The good news is that since this happened we’ve seen real change. Entrepreneurial support organizations such as Detroit’s TechTown and Ann Arbor’s SPARK were suddenly inundated with budding entrepreneurs. Innovative new programs have been created by private, public and philanthropic sources, ranging from Dan Gilbert’s work in Detroit to the MEDC’s economic gardening and business connection efforts.
An important change has been in the growth of venture capital. Name an important company that has emerged in that time period — from Google to Intel — and chances are that venture capitalists invested millions of dollars before that company could otherwise support itself. Venture capital–backed companies grow 50 percent faster and hire employees at eight times the rate of other companies.
Venture capital tends to cluster around world-class research universities and concentrations of engineers, so Michigan had the attributes of a venture capital haven — though it hadn’t taken advantage of them. But in late 2008, the Renaissance Venture Capital Fund, the organization I am honored to lead, was created by Business Leaders for Michigan to accelerate the growth of venture capital, new companies and jobs in Michigan, with an innovative twist: While other regions had attempted to attract venture capital as an economic development tool, never had the process been led by major businesses in the region who were willing to “go on offense” to drive success.
We tore up the old arcane, protective rules of many similar funds and focused instead on aggressively bringing together the assets that made Michigan so special. And, through Business Leaders for Michigan, we had a secret weapon: major corporations — from DTE Energy to Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan to Meijer, Ford and many others — would not just invest in our fund, but would look to become customers of new Michigan start-ups, dramatically increasing the likelihood of success of those companies.
We are now four years into the life of the Renaissance Fund, and the results have exceeded our most optimistic projections. We have become the largest private fund of our kind in the country. Through 2012, Renaissance investments of $16.7 million have helped bring nearly $300 million of new venture capital investment into 20 Michigan companies, a ratio of more than $17 coming to Michigan for every $1 invested by Renaissance.
These investments have already created hundreds of excellent jobs with average pay of approximately $80,000. At the same time, the fund has provided strong financial returns, proving Michigan is an attractive state in which to invest. We expect that Renaissance’s work will ultimately yield more than $1 billion in venture capital investment in the state and more than 25,000 Michigan jobs.
Our efforts, combined with the state’s Venture Michigan Fund and a series of innovative programs created by the MEDC and philanthropic organizations, have helped Michigan venture capital grow 69 percent over the last five years, while the venture capital has grown only 3 percent nationally. And the rest of the nation is taking notice. At Renaissance we regularly receive calls from other parts of the country hoping to replicate our “Michigan model” of driving entrepreneurship.
Of course, Michigan hasn’t completely turned the corner; it will take years to establish sustained, diversified growth. But it is important to take stock of where we are in the process, and a look at the last five years shows Michigan has come a long way. Young people are flocking to downtown Detroit, Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor. Entrepreneurship is no longer a rarity but something for which hundreds of thousands of us are striving. I’m excited to be part of this renaissance, and one of many, many leaders working toward a day – which I believe is coming soon – when the current excitement leads to a truly prosperous Michigan.
It’s amazing what can happen when you move from defense to offense.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Richard Dawkins on Replicators: Genes, Memes, Design & Creativity (21st Century Digital Mutation in the Mind)
*Blog-site e-mail notification: (See Video: Click-on Link to Blog-site)
Thursday, June 27, 2013
Bi-National Blue Water Regional Collaboration Conference (October 2, 2013)
To All,
Thanks to everyone for sending us their logos.
Here is the Save the Date flyer for the October 2 Conference that's ready to send out. Please send this out to your networks and listservs tomorrow if possible.
Thank you for you continued dedication and participation in the planning of the Bi-National Blue Water Regional Collaboration Conference.
Best,
Leslie Grimm
Research Assistant
Michigan State University
Center for Community and Economic Development
1615 East Michigan Ave.
Lansing, MI, 48912
Office: 517-353-9555
Thanks to everyone for sending us their logos.
Here is the Save the Date flyer for the October 2 Conference that's ready to send out. Please send this out to your networks and listservs tomorrow if possible.
Thank you for you continued dedication and participation in the planning of the Bi-National Blue Water Regional Collaboration Conference.
Best,
Leslie Grimm
Research Assistant
Michigan State University
Center for Community and Economic Development
1615 East Michigan Ave.
Lansing, MI, 48912
Office: 517-353-9555
University of Colorado STEM Center (@STEMconnector)
CU-Boulder lands $500K to bolster STEM education
Grant to complement ongoing science, technology, engineering and math retention
Posted: 06/25/2013 05:00:07 PM MDT
Updated: 06/25/2013 05:00:33 PM MDT
The University of Colorado's bid to bolster undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering and math is being boosted by an infusion of $500,000 over the next three years from the Association of American Universities.
CU is one of eight project sites announced Tuesday as a recipient of that funding. Each of the eight is to receive $500,000 over the next three years.
The CU initiative will be run out of the university's recently formed Center for STEM Learning. Its focus will be on working with professors who teach undergraduate STEM classes, helping them objectively determine the success of their teaching methods. Those evaluations will complement student course evaluations that are completed at the end of semesters.
The grant money will be used, in part, to hire project staff who will help participating faculty members interpret the newly collected evaluation data at each semester's end, and then devise a plan to improve their future teaching methods.
"It's nice to have the money. It's tremendous," said CU physics Professor Noah Finkelstein, a director of the Center for STEM Learning. "This is showcasing the importance of STEM education and CU as a leader in this. It will be enormous for our campus, the system, the state and as the national effort.
"I'm thrilled about this."
Traditionally, the primary tool for judging a faculty member's teaching has been end-of-course student evaluations, which some see as not particularly effective for how successful a particular course was in meeting all the learning objectives, according to Finkeltstein.
CU and other leading universities over the past decade have developed a menu of tools that are believed to better assess the impacts of particular teaching practices. CU's new project will work with faculty on a voluntary basis to find the most appropriate evaluation tools and implement them in their classrooms.
CU's Center for STEM Learning was launched in December and coordinates more than 75 existing programs across 14 departments and six colleges on campus. Previously, it was named as recipient of a $4.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, to further work on determining why college students are leaving STEM majors.
The AAU initiative was funded through a three-year, $4.7 million grant from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust last October. That initiative also received a two-year, $284,000 grant from the National Science Foundation in May.
"This connects us to a national network and national movement that is leading in STEM educational transformation," Finkelstein said. "And, as such, to be part of this network, part of this community, it is a huge feather in the cap for our campus, a tremendous resource for the state of Colorado.
"We are one of the few states selected, and we fully anticipate contributing and leading in the national dialogue around STEM educational transformation."
On the Brain (Update)
Unique Brain Pattern Could Predict Autism in Youngest Children
Genetic changes are almost certainly behind many cases of autism, and the latest research suggests that some of those alterations may be contributing to more densely connected networks of brain nerves.
A highly interconnected brain could mean that signals zooming from sensory nerves to other networks become too overwhelming to parse apart and process, which researchers believe is a hallmark of the autistic brain. And in a study published in JAMA Psychiatry, Stanford University researchers report that this pattern of hyperconnectivity in some brain areas could provide a fingerprint for autism that helps doctors to recognize the condition at its earliest stages.
The scientists scanned the brains of 20 autistic children who ranged in age from 7 to 12 and also imaged 20 typically developing children of the same age for comparison. They found stronger connections within many critical brain networks in the autistic children, including those responsible for introspection, vision and movement.
They also saw more robust links in networks that help the brain to triage the flood of incoming information from both our bodies and our environment that assaults us constantly. Called the salience network, it’s responsible for determining which internal or external sensations need our immediate attention. Using a computer program that the researchers developed to make sense of the brain imaging data, they found that by mapping the salience network alone, they could accurately classify autistic or non-autistic children in their study 78% of the time — and could do so 83% of the time using data from other researchers.
“That’s wonderful,” says Kamila Markram, the Autism Project Director at the Brain Mind Institute of the EPFL, a federal technology institute in Lausanne, Switzerland, who was not associated with the research, “We must move toward biological markers for autism and not just rely on interviews and observations by people.” Markram previously published animal research suggesting that hyperconnectivity may be involved in autism.
Moreover, the more strongly connected the salience network was in autistic children, the worse symptoms they had in terms of repetitive behaviors like rocking and restricted interests such as being obsessed with computers or the periodic table of elements. The findings suggest that from an early age, children with autism develop differently from those without the condition, and that these changes may be detectable through brain imaging.
Hyperconnection could explain both the behavioral deficits associated with autism as well as some of its more positive outcomes. A more highly connected brain, for example, is prone to information overload, which can lead to social withdrawal, restricted interests and repetitive behavior as ways of escaping or coping. But such enmeshed neural networks may also lead to better memory and greater focus.
“It confirms the hypothesis and theories we suggested in our model,” says Markram, whose work in rats showed that exposure at specific times during fetal development to the epilepsy drug valproic acid (VPA), or Depakote, contributed to hyperconnected brains and autism-like symptoms. That led her to develop the ‘intense world’ theory that sees autism as resulting from an overwhelmed brain that is taking in and processing too much information.
According to the theory, the repetitive and obsessive focus that some autistic patients develop toward specific behaviors could be a coping mechanism for this information overload. “Because the [autistic] brain is not adaptively focusing on responding to external information, it can focus on a narrow range of interests,” says the study’s lead author Vinod Menon, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford. “That kind of focus is actually what could give rise to these outstanding but restricted areas of exceptional skill.” He adds that his new research “opens up a nice way of thinking about how the brain is organized that can lead to both deficits and strengths.”
Recognizing a unique autistic brain pattern could also identify children at higher risk of developing the condition well before the first symptoms appear, generally around two years old. Recent studies suggest that intervening with behavioral therapies that help toddlers to learn how to process information in a more organized fashion could reconstruct potentially abnormal networks of brain neurons. And further research may refine these therapies to the point where they could help autistic people to enhance their creative skills and ability to concentrate and mitigate their more unhealthy behaviors.
Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2013/06/27/unique-brain-pattern-could-predict-autism-in-youngest-children/#ixzz2XR3pHolv
Employers: WANT to KNOW WHAT you can DO, With WHAT you KNOW! (Nothing Else Really Matters)
On GPAs and Brainteasers: New Insights From Google On Recruiting and Hiring
“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”
That was just one of the many fascinating revelations that Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, shared with me in an interview that was part of the New York Times’ special section on Big Data published Thursday.
Bock’s insights are particularly valuable because Google focuses its data-centric approach internally, not just on the outside world. It collects and analyzes a tremendous amount of information from employees (people generally participate anonymously or confidentially), and often tackles big questions such as, “What are the qualities of an effective manager?” That was question at the core of its Project Oxygen, which I wrote about for the Times in 2011.
I asked Bock in our recent conversation about other revelations about leadership and management that had emerged from its research.
The full interview is definitely worth your time, but here are some of the highlights:
The ability to hire well is random. “Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Bock said. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.”
Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals. Bock said it’s better to use questions like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” He added: “The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”
Consistency matters for leaders. “It’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.
GPAs don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” Bock said. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.”
That was a pretty remarkable insight, and I asked Bock to elaborate.
“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” he said. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”
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