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Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Australian player Phil Huges ciritical after being hit on head 11-25


Phil Hughes: Australia players to be given counselling after injury


Players who witnessed batsman Phil Hughes suffering a serious head injury in Sydney will be given counselling.
Hughes was left in a critical condition after being struck by a bouncer from New South Wales fast bowler Sean Abbott whilst playing for South Australia.
Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers' Association will work together to arrange the counselling.
CA chief James Sutherland said there was concern for all the players, who would get "our utmost support."


ACA chief executive Alastair Nicholson added: "We were obviously shocked to learn of the seriousness of the incident involving Phil.
"While we have faith that he's receiving the best available treatment, the situation will impact his family, friends, and those directly involved on the field.
"The ACA is therefore working closely with CA to arrange the appropriate counselling for those affected."
Meanwhile, the cricketing world has sent messages of support to Hughes following the Australia batsman's injury in the Sheffield Shield match.
The 25-year-old was taken to nearby St Vincent's hospital where he underwent surgery.
Legendary Australia spinner Shane Warne wrote on Twitter:  "Hang in there buddy, we are all fighting with you."
Australia batsman David Warner was fielding for New South Wales when the incident occurred and rode alongside Hughes when he was taken off the field of play.
He wrote on Twitter: "Thoughts are with my little mate Hughesy and his family. He is a fighter and a champion and he will get through this. Praying for you buddy."
The sport's governing body, the International Cricket Council, wrote on Twitter: "Thoughts of the entire cricket community are with Philip Hughes now."
Former Australia fast bowler Brett Lee told reporters: "He's a terrific guy he's got his whole career ahead of him and deserves the best. The other guy that will be in shock is poor Sean Abbott, the guy that bowled the ball."
England captain Alastair Cook is in Sri Lanka for a one-day series and said: "All our thoughts and prayers are with Phillip.
"We have guys who played with him from Worcester, Middlesex, and quite a few of us have played against him.
"It's a sad incident and I hope he can show the same fight he's shown his whole career."
England bowler James Anderson said it was "sickening to hear" and his team-mate Stuart Broad urged Hughes to "fight hard", adding "everyone's thoughts are with you and your family".
Ex-England spinner Graeme Swann described Hughes as "a cracking bloke" and said he had "everything crossed for a full and speedy recovery".
Former England batsman Kevin Pietersen posted the Twitter hashtag #PrayForPhilHughes, while ex-England captain Michael Vaughan described the news as "devastating".
India batsman Virat Kohli called Hughes "a top man" and added "all the strength goes out to you".
South Africa one-day captain AB de Villiers said it was a "horrible incident" and that he was "hoping for a speedy recovery".
There was also sympathy for pace bowler Abbott with ex-Australia wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist urging him to "stay strong".
Former Australia fast bowler Glenn Magrath also tweeted "our thoughts are with Sean Abbott".

Regulating the Teenage Mind 11-26


Regulating the Teenage Mind

ACTIVITIES TO HELP TEENS SET GOALS, STAY ORGANIZED, AND KEEP THEMSELVES ON TRACK




Teenagers don’t yet possess the executive function skills of adults, but they probably need those skills just as much as adults do, or more. They have to manage the increasingly complex demands and fast-flying deadlines of school and extracurricular commitments, they have to think abstractly about moral and ethical dilemmas big and small, and they have to make decisions about personal responsibility and safety, among other daily challenges.
The good news is that the adolescent brain is exceptionally malleable, according to researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. As in the preschool years, there is a window of opportunity in adolescence when capacity spikes and parents and teachers can actively encourage the growth of self-regulation skills, which are increasingly recognized as a critical determinant of long-term success and happiness.
The Center on the Developing Child recently released a practical collection of activities and resources aimed at helping educators enhance executive function at all ages. Below, suggested strategies for encouraging teens to flex their self-regulatory muscles — excerpted from a chapter of the guide that can be downloaded individually here.

SETTING GOALS, PLANNING, AND MONITORING PROGRESS

  • Encourage teens to identify something specific, and meaningful, that they want to accomplish. Start with simpler goals, like getting a driver’s license or saving to buy a new laptop, before moving on to larger goals like applying for college.
  • Help teens develop short- and long-term plans for steps to reach their goals. Identify problems that might arise and encourage teens to plan for those.
  • Help teens root out counterproductive habits or impulsive changes by reminding them to periodically monitor their behavior to see whether they are doing what they planned and whether the plans are working.

TOOLS FOR SELF-MONITORING

  • Have teens talk themselves through the steps of a difficult activity or mentally narrate what is happening. Self-talk can bring thoughts and actions into consciousness and can help teens identify negative thinking or behavior patterns.
  • Help teens recognize the lessons of difficult experiences or failure. Help them consider what went wrong and what might be done differently next time.
  • Help teens become more mindful about the effects of interruptions, particularly from electronic devices. Rather than multitasking, work on ways to prioritize tasks.
  • Talk with teens about the motivations of other people, helping them to develop hypotheses about why someone acted in a certain way and what an alternative interpretation might be.
  • Encourage teens to keep a journal, which can foster self-reflection, awareness, and planning.

A TEEN’S GUIDE TO STUDY SKILLS

  • Break a project down into smaller pieces.
  • Make reasonable plans (and a timeline) for completing each piece.
  • Self-monitor while working; set a timer, and when it goes off, ask yourself whether you are understanding and completing the assignment the way you planned.
  • Set aside time for focused attention, with no distractions or devices.
  • Use memory tools — mnemonic devices or written notes.
  • Keep a calendar of deadlines.
  • After completing a project, pause to consider what went well and what didn’t.
  • Think about what you learned from assignments that weren’t completed well.

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The tallest man and the shortest man in the world meet for a day 11-23




The tallest man and the shortest man in the world meet for a day


Tallestshortest
IMAGE: EPA/FACUNDO ARRIZABALAGA


Guinness World Records Day is reaching new heights.
The tallest man and the shortest man in the world met Thursday in London to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Guinness World Records book.
According to The Telegraph, 31-year old Sultan Kösen from Turkey measures in at 8 feet, 3 inches. Chandra Bahadur Dangi, the 75-year-old man from Nepal is 1 foot, 7 inches tall.
"Even though he is short and I am tall, we have had similar struggles throughout our lives and when I look into Chandra’s eyes, I can see he’s a good man," Kösen told The Telegraph.

The two took a break to pose for photos together outside the Houses of Parliament, while hundreds of thousands of people from all around the world competed for record titles.

Major brain pathway rediscovered after century-old confusion, controversy 11-22

Major brain pathway rediscovered after century-old confusion, controversy






















A couple of years ago a scientist looking at dozens of MRI scans of human brains noticed something 
surprising. A large, fiber pathway that seemed to be part of the network of connections that process visual information showed up on the scans, but the researcher couldn’t find it mentioned in any of the modern-day anatomy textbooks he had.
“It was this massive bundle of fibers, visible in every brain I examined,” said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. “It seemed unlikely that I was the first to have noticed this structure; however, as far as I could tell, it was absent from the literature and from all major neuroanatomy textbooks.”With colleagues at Stanford University, where he was a graduate student at the time, Yeatman started some detective work to figure out the identity of that large, mysterious fiber bundle.
In the paper, to be published Nov. 17 by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the history and controversy of the elusive brain pathway, explains how modern MRI techniques rediscovered it, and gives analytical tools researchers can use to identify the brain structure – now known as the vertical occipital fasciculus.
The “aha moment” in identifying the pathway came while Yeatman and Kevin Weiner, a Stanford postdoctoral researcher, were poring over the yellowed pages of 19th-century brain atlases in the basement of the Stanford Medical Library.
“Kevin found an atlas, written by Carl Wernicke near the turn of the (20th) century, that depicted the vertical occipital fasciculus,” Yeatman said. “The last time that atlas had been checked out was 1912, meaning we were the first to view these images in the last century.”
From there, Yeatman and Weiner, who share lead authorship on the paper, did more library research revealing these possibilities for why the pathway was forgotten:
– A scientific disagreement. In an 1881 neuroanatomy atlas, Wernicke, a well-known anatomist who in 1874 discovered “Wernicke’s area,” which is essential for language, wrote about a fiber pathway in a monkey brain he was examining. He called it “senkrechte Occiptalbündel” (translated as vertical occipital bundle). But its vertical orientation contradicted the belief of one of the most renowned neuroanatomists of the era, Theodor Meynert, who asserted that brain connections could only travel in between the front and the back of the brain, not up and down.
– Haphazard naming methods. The 1880s and 1890s were a fertile time in the neuroanatomy world, but scientists lacked a shared process for naming the brain structures they found. Looking at drawings of the brain from this time period, Yeatman and coauthors saw that the fiber pathway that they were looking for appeared in brain atlases but was called different things, including “Wernicke’s perpendicular fasciculus,” “perpendicular occipital fasciculus of Wernicke,” and “stratum profundum convexitatis.”
“When we started, it was just for our own knowledge and curiosity,” said Weiner, who’s also the director of public information at the Institute for Applied Neuroscience, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, California.
“But, after a while, we realized that there was an important story to tell that contained a series of missing links that have been buried for so long within this puzzle of historical conversation among many who are considered the founders of the entire neuroscience field.”
The researchers used a type of MRI measure called diffusion-weighted imaging to measure the size of the pathway and see where in the brain it went. Across brain scans taken from 37 subjects, they found that the vertical occipital fasciculus begins in the occipital lobe – the part of the brain’s visual processing system located at the back of the head. From there, the fibers spread out like a sheet, connecting brain regions that are important for seeing objects with other brain regions that coordinate which objects to focus attention upon.
“We believe that signals carried by the VOF play a role in many perceptual processes, from recognizing a friend’s face to rapidly reading a page of text,” said Yeatman, who is now studying brain mechanisms involved in learning to read.
In the paper, the researchers also provide an algorithm that others can use on their own data to find the pathway and measure its properties.
“To support reproducible research, our lab makes a strong effort to share software and data,” said Brian Wandell, senior author of the paper and a psychology professor at Stanford. “We believe this is a powerful way to ensure that our findings can be both checked and used in labs around the world.”
The researchers also hope that the algorithm will enable other researchers to study the pathway, possibly leading to a better understanding of its role in human cognition and in patient populations.

Study Investigates How Men and Women Adapt Differently to Spaceflight 11-22


Study Investigates How Men and Women Adapt Differently to Spaceflight

In 2011, a report from a National Academy of Sciences’ decadal survey emphasized the need to examine and understand the influences that sex and gender have on physiological and psychological or behavioral changes that occur during spaceflight. In response, NASA and NSBRI assembled six workgroups to investigate and summarize the current body of published and unpublished human and animal spaceflight research data. 

This diagram shows key differences between men and women in cardiovascular, immunologic, sensorimotor, musculoskeletal, and behavioral adaptations to human spaceflight.
Image Credit: 
NASA/NSBRI

The groups focused on cardiovascular, immunological, sensorimotor, musculoskeletal, reproductive and behavioral implications on spaceflight adaptation for men and women. In June 2013, NASA and NSBRI hosted a virtual workshop to present the groups’ findings. The Journal of Women's Health published the manuscripts in the Nov. 2014 issue, available here. 

spaceflight deeper into the solar system, the health and safety considerations for its astronauts grow increasingly complex. The agency, in partnership with the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), is researching risk-reducing countermeasures and developing technologies to advance human health and ensure operational performance in deep space. Together they are investigating personalized medicine for astronauts who may spend years living and working autonomously away from planet Earth.
A key consideration in personalized medicine is the crewmember’s sex and gender. Although in recent years the definitions have become more nuanced in the clinical community, “sex” is defined here as the classification of male or female according to an individual's genetics and "gender" refers to a person's self-representation as male or female based upon social interactions. We know that on Earth, major components of the human body are influenced by sex and gender factors. Taking gravity away from the equation imposes an entirely new element on our understanding of the health implications of sex and gender differences.
“Fortunately, we have the International Space Station,” said Dr. Marshall Porterfield, Director of Space Life and Physical Sciences Research at NASA Headquarters. “Station provides us with years of biological data on male and female astronauts, and many of them continue to participate in ground-based studies to evaluate the lasting effects of spaceflight.”
the Life Sciences Data Archive (LSDA) and the Lifetime Surveillance of Astronaut Health (LSAH), but there is an imbalance of data available for men and women, primarily due to fewer women who have flown in space. 
The “Impact of Sex and Gender on Adaptation to Space” is a compendium of the work groups’ six individual manuscripts, an executive summary, and a commentary.  It is the most current, comprehensive report on sex and gender differences related to human physiology and psychology in spaceflight and on Earth.
The full compendium is available at http://online.liebertpub.com/toc/jwh/23/11.
Each workgroup included scientists and clinicians from academia, NASA or NSBRI, and other federal agencies and was co-chaired by one representative from NASA or NSBRI and one from the external scientific community. The groups identified certain sex- and gender-related differences that impact the risks and the optimal medical care required by space-faring women and men. It represents innovative research in sex- and gender-based biology that impacts those individuals that are at the forefront of space exploration. 
“Harnessing the power of 21st century personalized medicine, as practiced at leading medical schools and hospitals, will further mitigate the human health risks inherent to long duration deep space missions,” said Jeffrey P. Sutton, M.D., Ph.D., NSBRI’s President, CEO, and Institute Director. 
data available for men and women who have flown in space – 477 men vs. 57 women as of June 2013 – makes it difficult to derive concrete conclusions based on sex and gender alone.In the latest crew selection, NASA selected eight astronauts, comprising four women and four men. This is a positive step toward increasing the participation of female astronauts in spaceflight and experimentation.
“This is the first major integrated examination of the issues of sex and gender in relationship to space exploration,” said Dr. Mark Shelhamer Chief Scientist for NASA’s Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center. “There are, in many cases, sex-based differences in the response to the stressors of space flight.” He believes that is important to recognize—not ignore—such differences, and to provide countermeasures that are appropriate for each subpopulation or even to each individual. 
The Sex & Gender work groups released five recommendations: 

  • Select more female astronauts for spaceflight missions.

  • Encourage and facilitate the participation of more female and male subjects in both ground and flight research studies.

  • Focus on the responses of individual astronauts to spaceflight and return to Earth.

  • Include sex and gender factors in the design of the experiments.

  • Incorporate sex and gender and other individual risk factors into NASA-funded research programs
A summary of the Sex & Gender work groups' major findings is listed below:

  • Orthostatic Intolerance, or the inability to stand without fainting for protracted periods, is more prevalent upon landing in female astronauts than in their male counterparts. One possible reason for this observed difference in orthostatic intolerance between the sexes is reduced leg vascular compliance, which was demonstrated in bed-rest studies – which is a ground analog for spaceflight.

  • Women have greater loss of blood plasma volume than men during spaceflight, and women’s stress response characteristically includes a heart rate increase while men respond with an increase in vascular resistance. Still, these Earth observations require further study in space.

  • The VIIP syndrome (visual impairment / intracranial pressure) manifests with anatomical ocular changes, ranging from mild to clinically significant, with a range of corresponding changes in visual function. Currently 82% of male astronauts vs. 62% of women astronauts (who have flown in space) are affected. However, all clinically significant cases so far have occurred in male astronauts.

  • Changes in function and concentration of key constituents of the immune system related to spaceflight have been reported. However, differences between male and female immune responses have not been observed in space.  On the ground, women mount a more potent immune response than men, which makes them more resistant to viral and bacterial infections; once infected, women mount an even more potent response. This response, however, makes women more susceptible to autoimmune diseases. It is not clear if these changes on the ground will occur during longer space missions, or missions that involve planetary exploration (exposure to gravity).

  • Radiation presents a major hazard for space travel. It has been reported that female subjects are more susceptible to radiation-induced cancer than their male counterparts; hence radiation permissible exposure levels are lower for women than men astronauts.

  • Upon transition to microgravity after arriving at the International Space Station (ISS), female astronauts reported a slightly higher incidence of space motion sickness (SMS) compared with men. Conversely, more men experience motion-sickness symptoms upon return to Earth. These data were however not statistically significant, due both to the relatively small sample sizes and small differences in the incidence of SMS reported by the men and women astronauts.

  • Hearing sensitivity, when measured at several frequencies, declines with age much more rapidly in male astronauts than it does in female astronauts. No evidence suggests that the sex-based hearing differences in the astronaut population are related to microgravity exposure.

  • The human musculoskeletal response to gravity unloading is highly variable among individuals and a sex-based difference was not observed.

  • Urinary tract infections in space are more common in women and have been successfully treated with antibiotics.

  • There is no evidence of sex differences in terms of behavioral or psychological responses to spaceflight. Analysis of ISS astronauts’ neurobehavioral performance and sleep measures showed no sex or gender differences using the Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT) of alertness and Visual Analog Scales of workload, stress, and sleep quality. Since all all astronaut candidates undergo a robust process of psychological screening and selection,  the likelihood of an adverse behavioral health condition or psychiatric disorder is greatly diminished.


The New Wave of Scalable Innovation: Dealing With Distortion in the Digital Era 11-22

The New Wave of Scalable Innovation: Dealing With Distortion in the Digital Era




The Digitized Economy is shifting value away from established players unable to evolve quickly enough. The speed and size of this shift is tremendous, fueled by yet another wave of new technology powerhouses — the young “unicorn” companies wielding billion-dollar valuations to shape entirely new markets, with a glut of private capital lubricating their engines. Such exponential super-startups are even taking the Internet giants by surprise. The disruptors are now facing their own disruption.
Today, startups don’t need to buy infrastructure when it’s available to rent ‘as a service’. They can focus on operations. This capacity enables change to happen much more quickly – and lets 60 employees at WhatsApp deploy services to half a billion people.
This is a shock for policymakers, incumbents, and regulators who hoped the last wave of tech-enabled transformations would settle into stability. Instead, we see fast-moving disruption multiplying itself, brought on by a new wave of scalable innovation.
The accelerating pace of change, the blur of commentary, and the glut of private capital further distort our view of the shifting landscape. For most, there’s too much noise and not enough information. This information asymmetry between the establishment, the Giants, and the new class of unicorns is driving the distortion factor.
The level of distortion is rising so quickly that many are unable to discern between cyclical bubbles and tectonic shifts. The trend away from public IPO’s makes it even harder to effectively evaluate innovations when the books are closed to most. It has become a contest of competing visions for the future, seen imperfectly by many, and brutally clearly by a few.
For regulators who struggle to react to large market transformations caused by fast-moving technologies before they become overly-disruptive, distortion is especially challenging. Many older businesses that have been regulated for decades now face a looming risk of job and revenue losses from new, unregulated competitors. The attacks on Google buses in San Francisco and the taxi protests against Uber across Europe are less about technology and more about uneven regulatory environments.
Tech unicorns often reduce the core business of older incumbents into commodities by reconfiguring their value into lightweight, scalable digital services. They then focus on emerging adjacencies that are not even seen by incumbents or regulators until it’s too late. Uber has leveraged mobile technologies to attack glaring inefficiencies in the cab and livery industries, shedding burdensome capex and grabbing a $17 billion valuation from private capital.
Cabbies and medallion owners struggle with the burdens of regulatory bodies unable to clearly see the threat. Their hard-won socio-economic protections are shredded by fast-moving innovations. By the time regulators understand the impact, Uber has already become big enough to leverage its base in support of its broader objectives.
So, how can stakeholders caught in this shift gain some clarity and conquer the distortion factor? With a sort of digital laissez-faire, fear-based distortion and emotional rhetoric must be overcome by pragmatic analysis and rational experimentation. We don’t yet know, for example, whether unicorns like Uber create jobs or commodify them. Regulators must make a proactive effort to understand shifts in technology and to allow time for these experiments to be fairly evaluated; otherwise we risk further constraining the culture of innovation.
Regulatory actors must also collaborate and iterate with the private sector to better understand the balance between disruption and economic benefit to the social commons. In many cases, problems have arisen simply due to lack of cooperation.
Business leaders must accept that the innovation that will matter most to your company is likely coming from outside. Many companies are now learning how to work with startups as collaborators rather than threats. To collaborate with potential disruptors while they’re young, corporate-sponsored startups and incubators in companies like Orange are mushrooming everywhere. Policymakers should join this conversation to help align strategic disruption with economic growth and prosperity. This is, after all, the value of good regulatory oversight.
No one knows where the next giants will emerge from. But we all know disruption will continue, so we should hop on the wave before it becomes a tsunami, and leverage the momentum towards opportunity, hope, and optimism.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

Companies Have Always Struggled to Engage Young People 11-20

Companies    Have    Always    Struggled    to    Engage   Young    People

























A capable young manager in a financial services company returns from a month’s vacation. Formerly clean cut and conservatively dressed, he’s now sporting a beard and long sideburns. He also begins appearing at work in bright-colored sport-shirts and bell-bottom trousers. He resumes working with his accustomed vigor and sincerity.
Would this matter to you?  Do you think it would matter to anyone else?
In an effort to explore executives’ views of the benefits and drawbacks of encouraging managers’ individuality, HBR presented this scenario to 3,453 readers and asked them which of four responses would most closely describe their reaction.
Two, or maybe three, of them (0.1% at any rate) thought the young man should be summarily fired. Only 18% thought “What the kid wears and how he looks is his own business.”  The rest chose one of two passive-aggressive options, as you can see.
Beards have recently come back into fashion, but it probably won’t surprise anyone that this survey dates from 1971. That Baby Boomer hippie dresser, if he stayed, is likely now a top manager contemplating the t-shirts, flip flops, and leggings that his Millennial staffers wear to work. I’ll wager he’s probably less passive-aggressive (or at least more politically correct) in his views about how individuality should be expressed in the workplace than his bosses were.
But the truly surprising thing about the survey, published in the November–December issue of that year in an article entitled “Who Wants Employee Rights?”, was how strongly those conservatively-dressed HBR readers favored rights like the freedom to express your individuality, to object to transfers, to push your own political agenda, and to advocate against the primacy of shareholder value.
In an era in which it was joked that the initials “IBM” stood for “I’ve Been Moved,” for instance, fully 54% of the survey respondents from 1971 believed that a company transferring a young executive to a job that didn’t fit his interests had made a mistake and should reassign him to one he likes better. A whopping three-quarters believed that a CEO should allow a group of managers and engineers who fervently believed their company should pledge never to sell arms to aid any conflict not endorsed by Congress should be allowed to argue their case before the company’s board. Only a small minority felt a corporation’s duty is only to its stockholders, and more than 60% believed the interests of owners must be balanced with the interest of employees, customers, and the public.
But perhaps this liberalism is less surprising when you take into account that companies were making a real effort to woo Baby Boomers into business.  Enrollment at HBS hit a historic low in 1969 as the best and the brightest of the Boomers (the generation that didn’t trust anyone over 30) were seeking fulfillment elsewhere. Some accommodation had to be made.
In particular, argues former HBS admissions director Anthony Athos, in another 1971 article, melodramatically entitled “Is the Corporation Next to Fall?” accommodation had to be made for this new generation’s emphasis on personal fulfillment over corporate efficiency.  Athos cites noted MIT professor Kenneth Keniston (who first defined the concept of “the youth movement”) to explain what made the baby boomers different from the generation preceding them into the workplace. He describes a distrust in authority that had reached the level of revulsion — revulsion against the notion of economic quantity and a turn toward concepts of quality, a revolt against uniformity and a struggle against psychological or institutional rigidity in any form, a revolt against centralized power and a complementary demand for populist participation, and a new ethic of “meaningful human relationships in which individuals confront each other without masks, pretenses, and games.”
Alarmingly for HBR’s readers at the time, to get beyond the pretense, Athos says top business school grads were judging potential employers by how many of those hippie dressers were walking the halls. In fact the easiest way to test an employer’s sincerity was “to let facial hair grow and, in the job interview, watch for discomfort or an outright complaint.” Rejection of what’s on one’s head, the theory went, is likely to accompany a low appreciation for what’s in it on the job. “And like many simple tests,” Athos concludes, “this one worked pretty well.”
So what happened to all those would-be hippie dressers? In the 1971 survey, as might be expected, the younger employees were the most liberal. And the cohort coming after them, represented in the survey by students at HBS and one unnamed public mid-Western business school, were more liberal still, leading senior associate editor David Ewing to confidently assume that as these fractious Boomers rose through the ranks, attitudes would become even more tolerant of the exercise of individual conscience and wider forms of individual expression at work.
But that view did not take into account the looming Arab Oil Embargo, which raised the price of heating oil in 1974 higher than many Boomers’ monthly rent, nor the near decade of stagflation. The combination of higher prices and slow job growth sent droves of the best and the brightest back to business school. The hippies of the late 1960s became the dress-for-success yuppies of the 1980s. And offices probably looked much as Athos described his class of graduate business students in the late 1950s—“a colony of penguins indistinguishable to the casual eye.”
I’d be surprised if today’s entrepreneurial Millennials who eye Amazon and Google suspiciously as the new establishment are ranking potential employers by how diverse the clothing is that people wear to work. In fact, one Forbes’s article suggests that GenXers who used to don suits to be taken seriously by their Boomer bosses are now contemplating wearing jeans and t-shirts to emulate the hip, creative, fast-thinking Millennials gunning for their jobs. Whether you wear a uniform or a suit, or jeans and t-shirt, what you wear has never really been an expression of who you are as an individual; it’s always been an expression of which tribe you belong (or aspire to belong) to.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if high-potential Millennials are sizing up potential bosses in the way Athos said his students judged him as a professor back in the 1960s, by coming up with what he calls a “discomforting set of questions”: “Who are you? Can I trust you? Do you care? Are you aware? Are you mature as a man? Are you knowledgeable and still learning? Are you skillful enough to help me, where I am, to see more options? Where are you going? How will I get there? Why is going there important and worthwhile to me?”