Hasta La Gadget!

If you had two minutes with John S. Watson, the CEO of oil industry giant Chevron, what would you ask? Climate scientist and NCSE Board member Ben Santer recently got that opportunity, when he attended the company’s annual shareholder meeting in San Ramon, California.

You would be correct in assuming that Santer doesn’t own any shares in Chevron. So how did he get into the shareholders meeting? It turns out that the Union of Concerned Scientists arranged for a corporate shareholder to transfer its legal proxy to Santer, giving him the right to attend the meeting and submit a two-minute statement.

The proxy paperwork arrived only two hours before the meeting was to begin–just the first of many hurdles Santer faced. Security was extremely tight. No cell phones, computers, or other electronic devices were allowed. Santer couldn’t even bring in a cup of coffee. Just a pencil and paper. And it turns out there was no guarantee that he’d even get to make his statement and ask his questions: everyone who hoped to speak was assigned a number, and only a few numbers were chosen–lottery-style–from a large hopper. Fortunately, Santer’s number was called.

Here’s what he said:

My name is Dr. Ben Santer. I am a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. I use “climate fingerprint” methods to study the causes of climate change.

In 1995, I was Lead Author of a chapter in a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We concluded that: “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.

Since 1995, the “discernible human influence” has become far clearer. Human “fingerprints” are identifiable in warming of the oceans and land surface, in changing rainfall patterns, in declining Arctic sea ice extent, and in sea level rise. Over our lifetimes, we are witnessing large and rapid changes in climate. If these changes are unchecked, future generations will grow up in a world with a very different climate from that of today. They will inherit climate debt they did nothing to incur. I don’t want to see that happen. I’m sure you don’t either.

Chevron is one of the largest corporate emitters of CO₂. Your actions have global consequences. You should be leaders in efforts to chart a sustainable path towards a clean energy future. You have made impressive investments in STEM education. I respectfully request that you show similar corporate leadership in acknowledging the reality and seriousness of human-caused climate change, and in making the educational investments needed to prepare the next generation for the climate challenges they will face.

My specific questions are these:

1. When will Chevron commit to align its business model with the target set by world leaders in Paris–the target of limiting warming to “well below 2° Celsius?”

2. More than 150 companies have signed up to set science-based targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. When will Chevron join this group?

I’m sure you’re curious to know how Mr. Watson responded. Sadly, Santer reports that “It was more of a ‘Q session’ than a ‘Q&A session’.” All questions having to do with how Chevron planned to adjust its business model in the face of rapid climate change to which the company’s products are materially contributing were, essentially, punted–in other words, the answer Santer got was no answer at all. The company will change its business model when it is forced to by regulation or changed economic incentives (like a carbon tax). Until then, the climate change “can” will be kicked down the short-term profitability “road.”

Shareholder votes on climate change-related resolutions suggest that most of them agree with the kicking-the-can-down-the-road plan. Santer reported that a shareholder’s suggestion that “Chevron should just keep doing what it does!” got the biggest round of applause of the whole meeting. A full 81% of shareholders rejected a resolution proposed for this meeting to include a climate expert on the company’s board of directors. Even a proposal simply asking the company to report on how limiting global warming to 2℃ would affect Chevron’s business was voted for by only 38% of shareholders.

There is some good news, however. Santer was not alone in asking how Chevron plans to adjust its business plan in response to the reality of climate change. While his questions focused on the implications of the accumulating weight of scientific evidence. other shareholders, including representatives of various religious faiths, implored Chevron to consider the moral implications of continuing to rely on a product that is literally endangering future generations. Still others pointed out the potentially dire financial consequences of failing to invest in alternatives to fossil fuels, given the high likelihood that they will indeed face significant regulatory and tax disincentives as the U.S. strives to fulfill the promises it made in the Paris agreements.

Were I in attendance, I would have raised one more issue: As Santer mentioned in his remarks, Chevron invests heavily in STEM education. I think that’s great, although I find its ads pretty cloying. (Dear Marketing Team: Building a robot that throws paper cups is not, technically speaking, science. I would argue it’s even sort of a stretch to call it engineering.) But if they have such a strong interest in STEM, shouldn’t Chevron be distancing itself from groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has a dismal record of casting doubt on climate science? Wouldn’t it be a good idea to use some of that STEM investment to ensure that science (the S in STEM) teachers are adequately prepared and strongly encouraged to teach climate science? Surely a company that depends heavily on scientific and engineering talent does not want a generation miseducated about one of the greatest challenges we face as a society–or are they really only interested in funding S*TEM (* only science that does not negatively impact our bottom line)?

Maybe I should show up at next year’s shareholders meeting and see what Mr. Watson has to say about that.

Kick the can photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/levanahpix/3828240291

Can-can photo credit: By Toulouse-Lautrec, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109479

Warhol’s Campbell’s soup photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/profzucker/3754015966

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The purple squirrel is a mythical creature.

Similar to unicorns, purple squirrels exist only in the imagination.

However, the term purple squirrel is often used in reference to describing those hard-to-find, rockstar employees that we’ve referred to in this series as ‘difference makers.’

This blog is part of a series that is dedicated to finding a greater understanding of the contribution of human capital assets (people) to the overall valuation of a business enterprise. If you’re just joining us, welcome to The New ROI: Return on Individuals.

If you’d like to learn the “why” behind this series, you can click here and if you’d like to join a community of people who believe that people are a company’s most valuable asset, you can click here.

The last chapter of this series was featured in Inc. Magazine as “How Great Leaders Keep Top Performers Happy and Productive”, which discussed ways to keep your difference makers happy and retain them. Remember, the difference-makers are the rockstar employees that drive the value of an organization.

In this chapter of The New ROI: Return On Individuals, we discuss how to find and attract those difference-makers in the first place.

To gain some insight on how to go about doing this, I visited with Dave Nast of FocalPoint Coaching. According to Dave, things like best-in-class products and services or leading brands can attract top tier candidates initially. Great benefits, flexible hours, stock options, equity, swag, and a lifestyle that speaks to work-life balance are all expected as the bare-minimum requirements if you truly want to attract the cream of the crop.

But, he says, “savvy difference-makers know how to research and network any potential employer. In this age of transparency, they will find current and former employees on LinkedIn and network with industry insiders to get the scoop on what it’s really like to work there.”

So, what actually attracts a difference-maker is… other difference-makers. The one’s that evangelize throughout the market and their networks.

As we discussed previously, difference-makers desire organizations that will invest in their professional development through training, coaching, tuition reimbursement, and other benefits. Top performers also tend to get bored easily, so they are attracted to opportunities that will keep them challenged, learning, and on the cutting edge of their industry and function. They are drawn to corporate cultures where they will be regularly recognized, whether it is through unexpected/discretionary bonuses and awards, and/or announcements and credit/acknowledgment.

As a former headhunter, Dave views the selection of best-fit candidates as a mad alchemy of art and science. The ‘art’ of selection is the skill acquired over years of experience, so let’s talk about the science.

The Science of Selection

When it comes to identifying the difference makers from the rest of the crowd, Dave says that behavioral interviews have fallen out of fashion and proven not to be predictive of performance. Candidates who are skilled at improvisation tend to ace these types of interviews that have questions that begin with, “What would you do if…?”

Competency-based interviews are in vogue and focus on the background, experience, skills and knowledge of the candidate. These types of interviews have questions that begin with, “Tell me about a time when…?” which begs for real stories and experiences. The competency-based interview gets at what is in the candidate’s ‘briefcase,’ so to speak. This is better, but it’s only predictive of performance 6% of the time.

When you add a behavioral assessment (which gets at what is in the candidate’s heart) to the interview, it becomes 23% predictive of performance. And when you add a cognitive assessment (what’s in the candidate’s head) in addition to the behavioral assessment, it becomes 51% predictive of performance.

So, the key to hiring difference-makers is to gain access to their head, heart, and briefcase during the selection process. The use of Psychometric Analytics in hiring has been in fashion for awhile now. But, like fashion, what’s old is new again.

According to Dave, the leading solution, and the only one validated to be used for hiring and selection, is The Predictive Index (PI). PI is 60 years old but there’s a lot that’s new; as millions of dollars have been injected into the solution. With over 500 validation studies, 8,000 customers, and more than 2.5 million people taking PI each year, it is one the most scientifically valid and reliable solutions for hiring. Dave adds:

Data is good, but as a guy who’s placed over 500 CEOs in my day, I think about the candidate experience. Top performers and difference-makers that are in high demand don’t want to spend hours taking a bunch of assessments.

PI only takes about 5 minutes to complete and provides more than just best-fit selection statistics. What differentiates PI is that the user can create something called Performance Requirement Options (“PRO”). This is essentially a Job Profile for the candidate.

The ideal game plan would be to administer this to your difference-makers to determine the optimal candidate profile of what it takes to be a top performer in a given role. The more difference-makers that take the PRO, the more accurate it will be.

The software then synthesizes the results of the individual PROs from the various difference makers, and creates a unified PRO for what is required to be a difference-maker. Then when the PI is administered to all new candidates, it will match the candidate’s PI against the “difference maker PRO” that was created to scientifically validate whether or not the particular candidate possesses the characteristics of a difference maker.

The system will also generate the appropriate competency-based interview questions to ask, taking the guesswork out of which competencies to delve into during the interview. But it doesn’t end there.

It will also generate coaching questions based on their PI’s match to the PRO so it can predict where the candidate might excel and where they might struggle. So, after hiring the new difference-maker, their manager will know which questions to ask in order to help them succeed and how best to keep them engaged in the future.

According to Dave, “if you can improve the communication and understanding of the individual drivers between the employee and manager, you can increase the likelihood of hiring success and ultimately, retention.”

And ultimately improve the likelihood of building a team of purple squirrels.

In the meantime…

If you believe that people are a company’s most valuable asset and you’d like to be a contributor to the conversation, Click Here to join a LinkedIn Group where you’ll have the opportunity to interact with the collaborators of this series and with others who also believe that people are a company’s most valuable asset.

If you’ve just discovered this series and want to get caught up, you can visit these chapters:

The WHY Behind the Series
The Value of the Workforce
5 Things Leaders Look For in a Difference Maker
Want To Be Successful? Here’s The One Thing You’ll Need
As Seen in Inc. Magazine: How Great Leaders Keep Top Performers Happy and Productive

Thanks for reading – If you enjoyed this article, please click the Like button above and let me know! (and if you like it, why not share it?)

You might enjoy these other insights from Dave.

About the Author:

Dave Bookbinder is a Director of Valuation Services at GBQ Consulting where he helps his clients with the valuation of businesses, intellectual property, and complex financial instruments. More than a valuation expert, Dave is a proactive problem solver who consults with companies of all sizes, both privately held and publicly-traded. Dave strives to lend his business experiences to help people with a variety of matters. For more about Dave, visit his LinkedIn profile.

Connect with Dave on LinkedIn and follow Dave on Twitter @dbookbinder

About the Collaborators:

David Nast owns FocalPoint Business Coaching & Corporate Training based in Cherry Hill, NJ. David is an Award-Winning Certified Business Leadership Coach with over 20 years of experience in Executive Coaching, Leadership Development, Corporate Training, Career Coaching, Executive Search, and Human Resources. He has coached over 500 CEOs and Business Owners, as well as thousands of Executives. You can follow David on Twitter @DavidBNast and read David’s insights here. You can also subscribe to his blog at Huffington Post.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

In these Xenophobic times, we should recognize that Razing Babel was a blessing not a curse. The punishment of imprisonment within a single, narrow tongue proves much, much worse than the inconvenience of dealing with others who don’t speak our native language. Here’s why:

We understand ourselves and the world through our language. Thus, we can’t understand how we wrestle with anything (including ourselves) if we can’t understand our language, too. To have a good understanding of our language (like anything else) we must be able to step outside it and view it from the outside, too. For example, we can’t have a good understanding of our house if we can’t step outside to survey how it’s built and how it’s holding up. This also applies to the language in which we live. Other languages let us step outside our own language house–I learned much more about English by studying French than I ever learned by studying English alone.

Beyond that pretty obvious point, experience has countless facets and we need the freedom of different tongues to capture as many facets as we can. If our language lacks useful words, phrases, or other ways of speaking, we need to pluck these things from other languages as and where we can find them. (And if our sublanguages are similarly lacking, we need to pluck from other sublanguages. For example, if some conservative English speakers lack sensible terms for the transgendered, they need to pluck such terms from richer sublanguages of English that more accurately reflect the world.)

And then, of course, there is the aesthetics of it all. I love English but I couldn’t imagine a world without the beauty of French or of the different chords of other languages I’ve encountered (and no doubt, too, of those I’ve yet to hear).

Since language is our tool and not the reverse, such blessings in diversity of words a fortiori apply to diversity in us. (Allow me the Latin here for its beauty as well.) That beauty in our own diversity is also part of the lesson of Razing Babel.

Since the need and beauty of all such diversity is sadly lost on many today, I’ll take diversity even further here and speak in sonnets of diverse, competing form (4/4/3/3 vs. 4/4/4/2). Verse in lieu of prose (and prose in lieu of verse) and fun with puns in both further underscore the glory of Babel’s fall.

Razing Babel I

Before the tower, we were garroted
By one chord twisted fast around our necks
That kept us on its single cord until
God’s razor cut the not. We raise new sounds,

Explore new knowledge, claim new liberties
We hear in novel syllables that, too,
Improve our poetry through vaster stocks
Of words and rhymes than ever heard before.

Translation tunes new sounds and teaches, too,
Not merely of things said but of ourselves
Now singable in sounds unknown before

As languages compete in novel sports
Of wrestling one another for the pen
That none should keep lest Babel rise again.

Razing Babel II

In simpler times a single tongue served as
A single handle on a broader world,
A single inventory of the means
To praise a multifaceted Divine.

In simpler times a single king sat throned,
A single hunter wearing Adam’s skins
That claimed one sovereignty unchallenged of
Both man and beast without conflict of laws.

In simpler times a single way rose up
Unto the Heavens, a single tower men
Devised with one geometry and built
With proper symmetry of form until

God’s thunderbolts, O Nimrods now and then,
Roared God will have diversity in men.

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Don’t let vacation, travel or long weekends be a reason to forget your fitness! Top five ways to stay on track.

In life, more often than not, attaining something you truly desire or need can be very difficult, but maintaining or keeping it, is the “easy” part. This can apply to jobs, material possessions, lifestyles, even relationships, and certainly, to fitness.

However, there remains confusion, because for their job, people easily sacrifice time with family and friends for a deadline at the office. People will be frugal, miss out on experiences and save to purchase something they have always wanted. People will put themselves through physical and emotional stress to make a relationship work, yet, when it comes to staying in shape, small obstacles, temptations and loose footholds are exaggerated into eventual fitness landslides.

Why is this?

I think most people would agree that attaining your fitness goals can be one of the most difficult things to accomplish, yet in principle, staying in shape, is the easiest. So why do so many people use vacation, weddings, summer, a weekend trip, a friend visiting from out of town or you visiting a friend out of town, to be a valid reason to completely forget about your body and health. If you compare the time and effort it takes to maintain a positive relationship, work environment and lifestyle compared to the 15-90 minutes it can take to maintain a healthy lifestyle, it seems like a no brainer, yet it all comes down to priorities.

Something you will notice with people who are in great shape, is that they find time to exercise, because its a priority. Something you will notice about people who are not in shape, is that they find excuses. Both of these types of people have 24 hours in a day.

So how do you stay in shape? Well the easy answer is obviously exercise, so let’s reshape the question. How does one hold themselves accountable to stay in shape?

1) Find Time, Not Excuses: Wake up 30 minutes earlier, use your lunch break, PVR your favorite show, whatever it is, there is something in your day you do not need to do as much as you need to sweat.

2) Have a Support Group, not a Pity Partner: Find a friend who you can work with towards your goals, not someone who you can count on to skip the gym with you.

3) Educate Yourself: Learn how you can workout anywhere. A few pieces of equipment, a flight of stairs, the beach, you can make anywhere your gym!

4) Set a Goal Plan: Set a proper plan of how you will achieve your goals. Put pen to paper, make it realistic, and chart it out just like a road map, with landmarks along the way to keep you on the right road. Ask yourself, how bad do you want it?

5) Be Strong: I am not talking about physical strength, I am talking mental strength. Be strict with your goals, diet, exercise schedule, and do not let things deter you.

Implement these principles into your day to day schedule, take them seriously, and you will start to see results. The main goal here, is to adapt fitness as a lifestyle. To create something like a workout, a gym class, a run, 100 burpees, swim, long walk, whatever it is, as a staple in your day, something you look forward to, something you integrate into your day so it becomes as natural as waking up at your alarm. The same alarm you set for your morning workout.

Check out Will’s Fitness & Travel YouTube Channel, No Regrets Lifestyle

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The most popular artificial material on Earth isn’t steel, plastic, or aluminum — it’s concrete. Thousands of years ago, we used it to build civilizations, but then our knowledge of how to make it was lost. Here’s how we discovered concrete, forgot it, and then finally cracked the mystery of what makes it so strong.

Read more…