I'm Just Not Geeky Enough

I am a geek. I've pretty much always been a geek, and I've never really been ashamed of that. I spend an inordinate amount of time with my Playstation. I own Optimus Prime and Blaster transformer toys. There is a barrel of monkeys on my desk at work, nestled amongst my four monitors. My kids have Star Trek, FFA, and Metallica onesies. I can name the pilots and colors of the five Voltron lions (I miss Sven). I have Jim Henson's autograph, and I'm staring at a statue of Kermit the Frog right now. I have a large collection of Alice in Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes memorabilia. I listen to gothic rock. I often say things like, "Why am I still talking while there's science to do."

Yes, I'm a geek... but this weekend, I learned that I'm just not geeky enough. What taught me this? Why... Dragon*Con, of course. (note the asterisk - some people seem to get a little snippy if you leave it out or replace it with a hypen. I'm not sure how you pronounce the asterisk, though...).

Some Things I Learned at the Academy of Management

Worth mentioning: the title above originally was missing the word, "Some," until I realized that would make for a blog post even more ridiculously long than usual.

The Academy of Management, admittedly grandiosely named, is the world's preeminent association for those interested in management and its study. Although the majority of the organization's membership is academics - professors, deans, students, and the like - a healthy chunk of the membership is made up of actual managers. You know, people who run businesses and have management positions in what we laughingly call "the real world." Go figure.

This weekend the Academy had its annual meeting, (or rather, Meeting, as they frame it) and I had the honor of both attending and presenting my paper on authentic leadership (for a bit of the logic behind the paper I presented, check this old post). Here are a few things I learned this weekend, in bullet-point format as you guys seem to like that format...

I Forgot What I Was Blogging About

So let me tell you about Dr. Roberts. He is the professor of my quantitative statistics class at Georgia Tech (translated, that breaks down to 'really hard math stuff'), and he is one heck of a pleasure to learn from. He shares with me both his first name (James) and an unfortunate habit of digression at the slightest provocation... conversational-shiny-object syndrome, as it were. In a lecture about, say, multinomials and they hypergeometric distribution (which he specifically said to mention to our friends and family, because "it'll make you sound really smart"), it's not uncommon for Dr. Roberts to branch off into stories about deer hunting, drunken job interviews, Agent Scully, and his grandmother. Odder yet, in the end, he always seems able to tie it all back into whatever statistics we were discussing. He even taught us a dance that illustrates the concept of the sampling distribution (and which, coincidentally, is very fun to do to the tune of the Beach Boys. Not so much fun with Kenny Chesney).

However, the mere fact that he's personally a fun character doesn't make the subject matter all that much easier (which can be intimidating, given this is just the first statistics class of about four to eleven total). On Thursday, during the fifth week of my doctoral education, I finally had my first lecture that I didn't understand at all. He stood there and talked, and it was undoubtedly brilliant stuff, and it definitely went in my ears because I did hear him... but then it all just slipped right back out again, so that the floor was piled high with brilliant concepts that had leaked out of my poor empty head. I think I almost slipped on a few on my way out the door. I suppose intelligent concepts are slick, kind of like oil.

Doctoral Orientation is Go!

Just jumped out of the pool, which was a surreal experience.  I'm not used to having a swimming pool, unless you count some of the larger puddles that develop on a disturbingly regular basis in the back yard of every faithful Louisiana resident (in fact, some of us save time and just call them "ponds").  It's also surreal going swimming with an amazingly pregnant woman (unborn babies do not, in fact, float), and having the old guy with the stinky cigar reading Kenny Chesney news on the pool chair next to you.

However, the joys of submersion are not the topic for today's exciting installment: the beginning of the doctoral experience is.  This week is Orientation Week for the twenty or so of us who were picked from thousands to join the PhD program in Georgia Tech's business college.  It has been an excellent opportunity to learn more about the school, walk around in the sweltering heat, enjoy several free lunches, hear high-ranking government employees define "STOO-PID" to graduate students in great detail, meet interesting people from other countries (did you know that 'Jim' is a very popular name in Turkey, only it's spelled 'Cem' there?), and watch the health center lose your immunization records two or three times.  It has been... insightful.

Does intellect stifle creativity?

One of the absolute, hands-down, best seminars I do is also one of the few I didn't come up with myself. Instead, I learned it seventeen years ago from a chief executive at the Coca-Cola Company. Just in case anybody reading this blog ever ends up in this seminar, I won't offer too many sundry details on it. But at its core, this is a workshop that examines and measures creativity in individuals and small groups. Although this is not the session's only point, the session is outstanding at showing not only how individuals and groups think creatively, but also when they don't.  It showcases the way many creative individuals don't put forth new ideas for fear of rejection, and how so many groups avoid and ignore creative ideas, even when they're the right ones.

Like I said, it's a great workshop. I wish I could take credit for it.


I led this seminar twice today for two groups of high-school students; one, an advanced group studying Java programming (yes, a high-school group studying advanced logic and programming concepts!), and the other, a slightly more basic group from a class on Microsoft Office. (in case you're wondering, neither group seemed to be big fans of Kenny Chesney)

Guess which group did better and proved to be more creative: the advanced group, or the basic group?

Before you answer that, consider that over the past seventeen years I've done this particular seminar with eight-year-old elementary students. I've done it with junior high school kids. I've done it with high school groups. I've done it with university groups. I've done it with groups of teachers. I've done it with Masters students. I've done it with executives. I've done it with millionaires. And once, I did it at a retirement community in a rather beautiful part of Oklahoma.

Guess which age-group came across as the most creative.

Hands-down, my reigning champions have been the elementary students. They didn't have any trouble with the exercise at all, using an astonishing amount of creativity to solve my presented problem almost immediately. In fact, they thought it was overly simple, and seemed surprised when I told them about how much trouble other groups had with it.

On the other hand, my all-time losers have been... the millionaires.  They exhibited a startling lack of ability to think of a process or problem outside of their established comfort zones. They imagined and assumed rules where there were none, limited their behavior based on those nonexistent rules, attempted to repeat the exact same process ad nauseum continually hoping for better results, and failed the activity utterly.

The difference between these two groups, I believe, is in how they see the world. The executives saw rules everywhere and conformance as a necessity, as well as a need for decorum and a minimization of failure potential. The eight-year-old's acknowledged no rules, assumed none, and probably wouldn't have cared even if there were any.  The older, successful mind did not want to risk failure or embarrassment by trying something startlingly different from what had gone before, while the fresh young mind relished the opportunity to do something strange and new. The young students didn't mind trying something different, even if they might fail and be embarrassed by it. The successful executives didn't see any need to do anything other than what they'd always done, even if what they'd always done obviously wasn't working.  Hmmm... there's a business lesson there, I think.

I presented the seminar today to two groups: a basic class, and an advanced class. And the basic class was more creative.

This got me thinking: can intellect be a barrier to creative thought? Are the smarter among us so caught up in our own intelligence and ideas that we may forget to come up with new ideas?  Like the executives, were the more advanced students hindered by an over-reliance on experience and logic, and an unwillingness to explore the unknown and attempt something untried? Or am I missing the point entirely?

I'm going to have to think on this some more.