“Watching today’s generals discuss how to improve leadership development is a little like watching dinosaurs discuss how to evolve,” complains veteran Washington Post and WSJ military correspondent Thomas Ricks, in this withering commentary in Foreign Policy. Essentially, he says, the report boils down to “”Everybody turn left and be creative.” With no suggestions as to how, exactly.
Ricks himself has an answer, though. “In a peacetime force, which is what the Army is about to become, you preserve your seed corn by emphasizing professional military education.” Real education, that is, with high standards, good teachers, tough grades, and at least a 10% failure rate. “Not the slacker sort-of sabbatical that it has become in many places. (I’m looking at you, Air War College.)” he warns. “One reason our senior leaders were better in World War II than in World War I,” he argues, “was that during the interwar period, the military education system was rigorous and respected.” By switching its focus from training to truly strenuous education, the Army might have a chance of developing officers capable of creative thinking.
Why You Don’t Want To Be the Last Interview of the Day (Knowledge @ Wharton)
When Wharton’s Uri Simonsohn and HBS’s Francesca Gino examined MBA admissions data (from neither Wharton nor Harvard), they found that candidates interviewed last consistently got lower scores. Why? They suggest that interviewers are unconsciously applying a daily quota, rather than comparing each candidate to the entire pool. That is, say they knew that only 50% of applicants could be accepted. If by the end of the day they’d already given more than half the people a high rating, they unconsciously gave the last unfortunate soul a lower score to avoid adding another person to the pot. This dynamic can play out anytime people spread decisions out over multiple days, Simonsohn warns, such as when considering bank loan applications or interviewing job candidates
What “Made in the USA” Is Worth (BCG Perspectives)
In a clever experiment, BCG researchers asked consumers about their willingness to pay a premium for products like baby food, cell phones, and furniture that they thought were made in the U.S. over similar (in reality, the exact same) products thought to be made in China. Fully two-thirds of U.S. respondents were willing to pay more for the made-in-the-USA-label for every product in every category. More surprising perhaps is that over 60% of Chinese consumers likewise said they’d pay more for the presumably U.S.-made products. And nearly half said they’d buy American even when they thought the price — and the quality — of the China-made version was exactly the same.
Not What I Would Have Thought
The Jobs with the Biggest and Smallest Pay Gaps Between Men and Women (Planet Money)
Does the Language You Speak Affect How Much You Save? (Marketplace)
Senate Minority Leader Fooled by Report in Military Version of The Onion (Wired Danger Room)