A Bigger Prize
How We Can Do Better Than the Competition
Margaret Heffernan . 2014 . 658.04 HEF . Beaverton Lib
Part I . Personal Best
p003 ch01 Oh, Brother!
p014 ref. 7 p331 Mark N. Bing 1999 "Hypercompetitiveness in Academia: Achieving Criterion-Related Validity From Item Context Specificity"
- p015 personality is biology, parental attachment, social support, culture, and experience
- p016 family dinners give-and-take, cut-and-thrust, passionate debate
- p017 Parents with mediation training allowed severe disputes, children became creative problem solvers
p017 Psychological de-identification refers to the process of consciously distancing oneself from certain aspects of the self—such as emotions, thoughts, roles, or behaviors—to gain perspective
p017 Frances Schachter children become different in order not to fight.
- p020 Wilbur and Orville Wright argued fiercely and often, benefiting their project
p022 Frans de Waal showed chimps dislike unfairness, reject unequal sharing.
p024 ch02 Making the Grade
p024 Charles Shubert MIT
p027 Amy Chua Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother "self-mocking memoir"
- p028 US youth unemployment rate, 26% unemployed age 25-24, lower wages in 2013 than in 2000
p029 Bright Kids $$$ tutoring for placement exams
- p030 focus on reading and math, not science, literature, history, civics, and the arts
- p031 students promised awards for drawing stopped drawing without rewards
p032 Joy Paul Guilford Convergent "one correct answer" thinking versus divergent thinking
- p032 kill childhood creativity
- (1) work for expected reward
- (2) focus pupils on expected evaluation
- (3) plenty of surveillance
- (4) setting up restricted choices
- (5) creating competitive situations
p033 C. J. Skender accounting teacher at Duke and UNC
- sees the best in his students
- climate of safety where mistakes are part of learning
- p033 worrier students good at homework, warrior students good at exams
- p036 rankings pit students against each other
- p036 people intensely motivated by choice of when and how to work, take ownership
- p037 the cost of motivating top 1 percent is demotivation of other 99 percent
- p037 college entrance résumé padding
- p039 American student debt over a trillion dollars
- 4 million graduates per year, 10 year payoff, $25K per graduate?
p040 Adderall illicit college student performance enhancer
p040 Stuyvesant High School 80% of students cheat rather than waste time on disliked subjects
- p041 95% of US students cheat in one form or another
p041 Turnitin plagiarism detection software
- p043 students of author's entrepreneurship course: "how would I grade them?"
- p044 learning for rewards not useful for future
- p045 Harvard Art|Science Team (?)
p045 St. Joseph Singapore
p047 Blackawton bees Biology Letters 2011 April 23
p049 PISA Program for International Student Assessment
- p049 Germany scored below OECD average, achievement more correlated with family socioeconomic status, students ranked and sorted into three tracks, limiting achievement
- p050 top performing schools do better job of educating everybody
- p050 Luxembourg most expensive schools, ranked near last in achievement
- p050 Margaret Thatcher says nations depend on a talented few
- p050 Finns explicitly rejected this, couldn't afford to waste any human talent
- p051 no standardized tests until eighth grade; written assessments but not grades
- p051 Finland not small, heterogeneous, fastest diversifying in Europe
- p052 We are such a small country, we cannot afford to lose any child
- p052 All Finn teachers must have master's degree, rated more highly than doctors, architects, and lawyers. Free to determine how they teach.
- p053 very little central government interference, schools and teachers autonomous
- p056 money only 20% of outcome, streaming and pay incentives ineffective
- p056 Finland 4th most scientific publications of the OECD countries, above average patents per capita
p058 ch03 The Morning After
- p058 Olympics: Americaarn women outperformed the rest of the world AND American men
- p059 Male scientists decided women are different, female scientists found no cognitive or developmental differences
- p059 women's competitiveness unaffected by menstrual cycle
- p060 competitive women performed as well as men. Most women preferred to not compete
- p062-63 nattering about comparing penis size
p063 "all m/f I interviewed" insisted on financial contribution
- p067 Helen Gurley Brown ... marriage is always the end game
- p070 "Beth" ... no job, no money, no baby -- what a loser!
- p071 David and Sarah bickered and kept score, he had affair at work, they separated
- p071 adultery is a form of competition
- p072 Nathaniel Blumenthal/Branden and Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum / Alice O'Connor / Ayn Rand
- p073 NB: "You can't love someone and compete with them" "Love isn't winning an argument"
- p073 "... we all benefit from the work that we all do"
- p074 "marriage shares a lot of properties of collaboration: you share the wings"
- p074 "... it must be terrifying for young men when this apparition turns up looking like nothing they have ever looked before!"
p079 ch04 Angry Birds
p080 Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe "pecking order"
p081 Kristine Bonnevie mentor
- p081 Schjelderup-Ebbe copied but unrecognized
- p082 best-liked usually not top-ranked
p083 sociologist Stanford Gregory low 0.5 kHz hum conveys social st atus
p084 Spectral Analysis of Candidates' Nonverbal Vocal Communication F₀ band <500Hz signals social dominance, won presidential election popular vote from 1960 to 2000
- p085 Pecking order: highest for smoking teenage girls
- p085 stress lowest for "middle" girls, highest afraid of losing, lowest afraid of dropping out entirely
- p086 starving/thin "feminine": heart attacks, liver failure, death
- anorexic death 5-10% in 10 years, 18-20% in 20 years, only 30-40% recover
p086 Interlochen Choate Cranbrook
- p087 dark side of win/lose empowerment "then losing must all be your fault"
p087 Unplugged Multco Offsite 2010 Ryan van Cleve 60 hr/wk video games
- p088 computer games designed to exploit hunger for rewards and status
p088 compulsion loops
p089 hedonic treadmill
- p091 Donors want recognition, naming rights, peerage in England
- p093 power distance related to health and well-being
p095 Marianne Jenningssteeper hierarchy leads to ethical collapse in organizations
- p095 game-changers go unheard
p096 Geert Hofstede et alCultures and Organizations 2010 at PSU, $2.77+3.25 used
- p097 Will Rogers invented term "trickle down"; not true, lower tax rates reduce growth and increase inequality
p097 The Spirit Level
- p098 king of Sweden unable to pay store with check but no ID, fellow citizens identify him with coins
p099 TechShop
p099 MiracleBrace
p101 crowdsourcing sharing in return for great feedback and contributions
p102 Bill Gore
p102 Gore-Tex
p103 PTFE
p104 Terri Kelly
p105 Morning Star
p108 Nucor Steel
p109 First Rand eBucks
p110 Karl Rabeder Credot
p112 ch05 Keeping Score
- sports
- p124 Single US football player 1000 blows to head per season, 75% chance of concussions
- p124 NFL linemen 52% greater heart disease risk than general population
- p124 97% overweight, 50% obese
p125 6 suicides, dementia, chronic traumatic encephalopathy
- p125 second most dangerous sport cheerleading; risky stunts, untrained coaches, hard surfaces
- p128 former NFL suicide rate six times average, divorce rate 60-70%
p129 Don Catlin developed tests for street drugs
- p130 14% of athletes use banned substances, 2% are caught
- p131 Sports 2% of GDP
p131 2004 BALCO Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative supplied performance-enhancing drugs
p131 Victor Conte
p132 Travis Tygart
p134 Steven Baddeley
p135 Travis Tygart True Sport report
p137 Mike Brearley
p138 The Apprentice
- p140 CHATTERJEE, A. et HAMBRICK, D.C. (2007). It’s All about Me: Narcissistic CEOs and their Effects on Company Strategy and Performance. Administrative Science Quarterly, (52), pp. 351-386. (PSU, OHSU)
- "prominent" CEOs, grandiose strategy, volatile stock performance
p141 Steve Rattner not the Tektronix Steve Ratther
- p142 akin to a rooster taking credit for the sunrise
- p142 worship the top, infantilize the rest
p143 fatigue -> biased judgement and rigid thinking
- Heffernan, Margaret . Willful Blindness . Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril . Central 153.7 H4613w 2011
p144 Companies do not have a legal obligation to prioritize stock price
- p144 Air Products Inc. v. Airgas Inc., directors can ignore current stock price in favor of long-term interests
- p145 # of publicly listed companies declines 40, life expectancy of Fortune 500 companies down from 75 years a century ago to 15 years today
p145 Lynn Stout The Shareholder Value Myth . Multco Central 658.155 S8895s 2012
- p145 performance-related pay does not deliver superior performance
p145 Marianne JenningsThe Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse Multco Offsite
p146 CMGI
p147 Good to Great book 2001 of 60 companies, at least 11 have gone from bad to worse
p150 Arup structural engineering
Part II . The Case of the Purdue Chickens
p157 ch06 Only the Impresarios Survive
p160 Carl Djerassi oral contraceptive, science-in-fiction novels
- p161 science stalled by rivalry rather than cooperation
- p165 chicken flocks more productive than breeding for super-hens
p166 every principal investigator produces 10 PhDs, who must find a postdoc position ... "Ponzi scheme"
specious argument. Almost all PhDs should disperse into non-collegiate jobs - teaching, engineering, lab work, leading teams serving the other 8 billion of us, so we can generate the wealth that pays for colleges and universities and research institutes
p167 sharing at conferences -> plagiarism
p168 Matthew effect cumulative advantage
p168 "coined by Keith Stanovich" (1950)
- wikipedia says Robert K. Merton (1910) and Harriet Anne Zuckerman (1937)
p169 Kary Mullis PCR 1993 Nobel
p170-2 Jan Hendrik Schön fraudulent papers
p173 Scott S. Reuben fraudulent pain research
p173 Hwang Woo-Suk fake stem cell research
- p174 fraudsters almost always pleasers, delivering what's wanted, pre-defined success
- p174 retracted research still cited 24 years later
p175 Ferric Fang "the more important the journal, the higher the number of retractions"
p176 Fang: The US spends twice as much on beer compared to R&D, lowest since the 1960s
- p178 scoreboards, winning at all costs, ethical shortcuts
- p179 HBOS - Halifax Bank of Scotland (email from author Heffernan)
p179 Juliet Schor The Overworked American PSU
- Americans work longer, sleep less, perform badly
p180 B-of-A intern Moritz Erhardt worked extreme long hours and died. He was also hyper-ambitious and by some accounts epileptic. In the US, perhaps 2600 21-year-olds die violently (including vehicle accidents) per year; motor vehicle keys are 1000 times as lethal as keyboard keys.
p181 McKinsey touted forced rankings
p182 McKinsey’s Dirty War
- p182 Jackie Witt (?) former Intel, forced rankings focus on now, not the future
p185 Uri Alon improv theater How to Build a Motivated Research Group
p186 Cathy O’Neil mathbabe
p188 David Ring safer hospitals where errors are openly acknowledged and swiftly fixed
- p190 ref 39 John Abele "Bringing Minds Together", Harvard Business Review (July-August 2011).
- p198 Groups with members better at reading faces are more productive, teams with more women did better too.
Part III . The Business of Winning
p209 ch07 Clone Wars
p209 Andy Hildebrand Auto-Tune
- p210 considered a form of cheating by many music lovers
- p212 audio Botox
p212 Robert McKeeStory
p212 Charlie Kaufman film Adaption
- p213 studio head of production average tenure 18 months
p213 Epagogix algorithm estimates film financial success
p217 Hedonic Analysis of Arthritis Drugs more expensive clones more dangerous and less effective
- p217 pharmaceutical industry reluctance to share data ... with patients, doctors, and funders
p220 author's analogy: Chalara dieback European ash tree fungal disease, lack of biodiversity
p225 Medicines for Malaria Venture 300 scientists at 40 institutions
p226 method home care
p231 Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven borrows from Taurus by Spirit
p231 Kirby Ferguson "Everything is Remix"
p233 ch08 Supersize Everything
- p233 1928 tallest NYC building: Bank of Manhattan vs 1048 foot Chrysler Building (with hidden art deco spire hidden in fire shaft, added after BoM building complete)
p233 1250 foot Empire State Building commenced three months later, finished in one year and 45 days, record tallest for forty years
p235 American Pritzker Prize "Nobel Prize of architecture"
p235 $1B Getty museum in LA
p243 Doing well -> feel better, but not vice versa
- p243 Boosting self-esteem develops narcisists, narcissism and obesity rising since the 1980s
- p244 boosting self-esteem leads to drop in grades
p244 Houston's Lakewood Church number one podcaster
- p246 mergers intended for impunity and respect, 50% to 80% fail
p247 2005 BP explosion
p247 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudhoe_Bay_oil_spill| 2006 5054 barrel Prudhoe Bay Alaska oil spill
- p249 Bigger drug companies have higher failure rates, traumatized workforce
p256 Frank Partnoy 1997 F.I.A.S.C.O.: Blood ion the Water on Wall Street . @PSU Lib.
- p256 Complexity breeds arrogance, Goldman Sachs retail customers are "plankton" and investment bank customers are "muppets"
- p257 financial bigness creates scale, but not client value
p258 Robert W. Baird & Co. CEO Paul Purcell until 2015, died 2020 age 73 cancer
- p258 10% of largest institutions 75% of assets, "too big too fail", unmanageable and opaque
- p259 We don't want to be big, we want to be good. Scale alone does not work.
- p261 Baird temp; 2 years later interview "Where you been? We've been looking for you! We remember you, and you were a good worker. When can yous start?"
- p262 peer-to-peer networks Zopa, Funding Circle, Airbnb etc
p262 Robin Dunbar human cognitive limit of 150 coherent personal relationships, Dunbar's number
p264 automated flight controls three modules with identical functions but designed differently, independent technological approaches, robust and fail-safe
p265 Sobhi A. Batterjee philanthopist, mistakenly labelled as terrorist for 10 years by UN Security Council
p267 ch09 How Low Can We Go?
p269 warehouses staffed entirely with day-to-day temp workers, 1954 movie On the Waterfront
p270 Chicago Tribune Houston Chronicle outsourced "local" content to Journatic in Phillipines and Journtent in Mexico
p271 Leveson Inquiry
p272 Rich Peppiatt about Fake News journalism ... "If you won't write it, we'll get someone who will"
- p275 North Carolina hog population created as much waste as the human population of Canada
- p276 3 million US hog farms in 1950, 65,640 in 2007
p276 Smithfield Foods 75% of pork market
p277 low levels of arsenic fed to factory farm chickens to prevent infections, make meat pink
- p277 untreated animal manure (75x human concentration) sprayed on soybean crops to fertilize them
p278 David Kessler: in 2012, 80% of all antibiotics used for livestock
p278 LA-MRSA, factory pig farmers 760x more likely to be infected than general population
- p279 antibiotic resistance spreads into environment, affects everyone including vegans
- p282 Smithfield Farms Dennis Leary sustainability must be pursued as part of "value creation"
- author's perjorative rephrasing: "it must never interfere with making money"
- p285 "Sustainability is all about coming up with ways to meet our needs (not wants -- needs) without undermining the ability of other folks to meet their needs tomorrow" "Take nothing. Do no harm"
Confessions of a radical industrialist Multco Central 658.4083 A549c 2009
- p286 Anderson proved that harm is not inevitable
- p286 2003 Interface "Cool Carpet" zero net global warming
p287 American Apparel L.A., sweatshop free, twice minimum wage
- false statements, owner ousted, bankruptcy, acquired by Gildan Activeware in 2017
- p291 Henry Ford doubled factory wages to reduce wasteful staff turnover
- p291 higher wages enabled workers to buy Ford cars.
p293 ch10 Top of the World
p292 Salam Shabab
- teach collaboration through competition
- p294 regional teams switch partners, by third season kids look forward to new friends
- p296 Gross National Product kvetch: doesn't include externalities
p297 Simon Kuznets designed GDP in 1944 to plan wartime production
- p299 Obama argued against education competition with China; educated Chinese do not hurt American students
- no, educated Chinese outcompete miseducated Americans for global trade
- NOT "they should do worse" but "we can do better, benefiting both"
- p300 Heffernan: "In addressing labor market efficiency, for example, the top management leaders are asked how easy or hard it is to hire and fire employees ..." CITATION NEEDED
- p301 Heffernan: "no evidence that performance related pay works or generates higher levels of productivity ..." CITATION NEEDED
p301 Harald Bergsteiner "Global Competitiveness Report is ideology masquerading as data." Pot. Kettle.
- p306 Human Genome project was global ... and proved to be tough
p309 Celera and Craig Venter
- Venter raced to win ... goading the rest of the world to race faster
p315 Elinor Ostrom demonstrated value of commons
- p316 police forces of 25 to 50 outperformed 100 or more
p320 ch11 A Bigger Prize