Liberalism, atheism, male sexual exclusivity linked to IQ

From mick's leadership blog

Interesting summary on CNN about research from the Social Psychology Quartely. Written by Elizabeth Landau.

Essentially the study suggests that more intelligent people are more likely to adopt new preferences and values. But it also says that intelligence does not correlate with values that are shaped by evolution over the millennia.

“Political, religious and sexual behaviors may be reflections of intelligence, a new study finds."

http://bit.ly/b8lQXZ

via Ping.fm

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Pew Research Report on the Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Pew Research Report on the Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.

Insightful new research from the Pew Research Center on “The Millennials”.

It is a fascinating report. And, whilst the Pew research reflects the great American “melting pot”, the findings seem to me to ring true for Europe, too.

I found one item of particular note – that the young seem to be more tolerant of the status quo than their elders. If you dig into the report, it seems that there is more tolerance of the generation gap than there was in the 1960’s, for example.

... http://bit.ly/9GqiYJ

via Ping.fm

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Baby boomers versus the rest ... are you a pessimist or optimist about the future?

We had a great debate last evening about "the boomer generation", and how they compared with today's young people. We drew a few contextual differences: The boomers were the first to see such massively broad social changes affecting everyone in their generation, and not just a select few. Here's a mix from different parts of the developed world:

• equality of race and sex became a real goal
• colonialism started to die
• the contraceptive pill made sex free and easy
• tertiary education became broadly available
• mass consumerism was everywhere
• "own your own home" arrived, via cheap mortgages paid from increasingly disposable income
• the military draft ended - after centuries of being the way that armies were raised
• a "cold" not "hot" war was the military paradigm ...
• ... aided by the early forms of the European Union, which supplanted centuries of war with less harmful bureaucracy and red tape
• air travel for leisure became a normal activity, available to ever more people
• social support programs were broadly available in health and education ...
• ... yet there was still little apparent change in the "age of dying" - retirement was still expected at 65 for men ... and death by 75 or so.

This all clearly left the boomers as both a blessed and marked generation. Despite today's upheavals, and the recent financial mess, is there the same breadth and complexity of social change today - and what does it mean? We have more and more technology - and business globalization is a "done deal". But I'd argue that both had roots or parallels in the boomer generations, yet are not surrounded by the broader social changes noted above. There were telephones in every home, colour TV, cheap cars, supermarkets. Even in music, I've heard it argued that there will never be another Beatles. Musicians no longer make money on albums - they make it on concerts. The Beatles reached the entire world through albums, worked at a pace rarely seen by today's bands, yet stopped touring ages before they split. I'd suggests that many of the trends we see today have roots in that boomer generation, with three additions:

1. Today we all belong to non-geographic tribes - not just the Facebook tribe but the micro-Facebook tribes. Boomers were told what their country and therefore tribe was. Now we all chose tribes to suit the mood, it seems. Technology makes this possible, and it will only accelerate. Yet, I'd argue that the tribes are still just a natural implication of the 60's attitudes and aspirations, now made possible by technology.
2. The "I deserve it now, and then I'll move on" generation. Boomers were just crawling out of World War II, and had to be careful, and rebuild for the future. Yet, again, isn't this just the obvious next step in the consumer society? Like it or not, the boomers started this trend, even if they don't like what they see now.
3. Technology development has reached critical and sustainable mass - there's more power in my Blackberry than room sized machines had in the 60's. The boomers can't take all the credit for this, but technology in the home was one of their themes. Of course, we generate more knowledge in a year than generations did in times gone by. Research and development is so diverse and broadly democratized that virtually anything may be invented anywhere by anyone these days. I heard Bill Gates, private individual, talk about how he planned to change the way we power this planet at TED last week. He's not waiting for a State-driven Manhattan project. His buddy Nathan Myhrvold was happily shooting down mosquitoes with lasers (maybe he should run "Star Wars"?). Oh, and aren't they both boomers?

Even if you don't fully accept these contextual premises, one critical implication is clear. The boomers have a stranglehold on the world's financial resources, and that is unlikely to shift short term. It's pretty clear that today's boomers will not be handing down all this capital to their kids.

• First, we all live a lot longer - and with the crunch that now exists on pensions, the boomers will spend what they have accumulated to survive until they die (at 90? 100? 110?).
• Second, the boomers are now being forced to financially care for both their kids and their parents - who also are living longer ...

Here's an extract from today's Financial Times ... "... a third of the value of all UK pension benefits was held by those aged 55 to 64, the boomer generation that is approaching retirement. Those aged between 45 and 54 held a further quarter of the £3,500bn of pension benefits. The aggregate value of housing wealth held by those aged 50 to pension age – 60 for women and 65 for men – was £1,280bn, more than twice the housing wealth held by any other age group. The next wealthiest group were those between pension age and 75, whose housing wealth was £600bn." So, is it all doom and gloom for young people today? On the surface, yes. It is most unlikely that Government will be able to do much about this. With rare exceptions, Government "sweeps up" after the fact, rather than get ahead of the curve. And a good part of that is the boomer's fault, who are still very unlikely to accept being told what to do by the state - they will use their considerable political and financial power to exert peaceful regime change at every election. Yet there are equally clear causes for major optimism.

1. Kids are smart and will adapt - they, like all previous generations will innovate and thrive in ways that us older folks will have no inkling about.
2. Kids will be able pursue their dreams with more freedom. They have more information available, more education, more choices, more communication, more openness in society. Yes, we have domestic terrorism, and that is a relatively new and deadly threat. But we do not have the spectre of mass annihilation. If the Russian or Chinese nuked the US or Europe, all their money and markets would go with the nukes. Hardly a likely prospect - and certainly not the state of affairs in the Cold War.
3. Kids will live longer ... and the boomers will just die;-)

Thoughts?

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature.

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Presentation on "Organizational Change"

I am pleased to be making a presentation this week to the MBA program at Leeds University Business School. It starts with a brief introduction to two approaches to cultural understanding that I have always found useful - Geert Hofstede's groundbreaking work on cultural dimensions, and Gerry Johnson's "Cultural Web".

The presentation then uses the 4E's Leadership Framework to explain the 11 step process that was co-developed with members of the Change Leaders community of practice (as part of the Oxford/HEC CCC program in 2004).

You can find a link to the PowerPoint on my LinkedIn Slidespace.

Posted via web from mick's posterous

The Next 20 Years: How Customer and Workforce Attitudes Will Evolve

The Fourth Turning, from Harvard Business Online, by Neil Howe and William Strauss

"In 1969, amid all the uproar on college campuses, the sociologist Peter Harris published a 200-page monograph on changing social trends in the Harvard journal Perspectives in American History. His conclusion: Over the course of three centuries of American history, a wide variety of social indicators - birth rate, marriage age, wage growth, social mobility, political activism - have turned an abrupt corner every 22 years or so. Emerging out of reams of archival evidence, this insistent pattern compelled Harris to rethink the standard linearism of historical interpretation. Maybe, he thought, the long-term trends toward urbanization, industrialization, and education that many had traced were not the primary forces of history after all. Maybe it was "possible to see, through long periods of American history, a surprisingly regular pattern of growth and change in the social system" - in other words, "a truly cyclical system of human life."

In recent decades many distinguished scholars have joined Harris in identifying what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has called "patterns of alternation, of ebb and of flow, in human history."

They have identified cyclical trends in such diverse areas as war, religious awakening, economic activity, foreign policy, demography, immigration, substance abuse, and gender relations".

Read the rest of the article ...