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How Hierarchy Can Help Teams Scale New Heights
Do teams accomplish more when they enlist a strict hierarchy, or are they more effective when everyone is treated as an equal? A new study looking at 100 years of Himalayan mountain climbing expeditions helps shed light on this question, showing that hierarchy can be a mixed bag in high-stakes teams, both helping and hindering performance. An international team of researchers from Columbia University and INSEAD in France concluded that from the board room to the surgery suite, hierarchy within high-stakes teams can help elevate team performance -- but this boost can come at a potentially steep cost. After analyzing over 5,000 Himalayan climbing teams, psychological scientists Eric M.
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The next energy revolution won’t be in wind or solar. It will be in our brains.
The Washington Post: In the arid lands of the Mojave Desert, Marine regimental commander Jim Caley traveled alongside a 24-mile stretch of road and saw trucks, tanks and armored tracked vehicles all idling in the heat — and wasting enormous amounts of expensive fuel. Caley had already led forces in Iraq, and at the time was charged with seven battalions comprising 7,000 Marines. But this was a new and different challenge. Overseeing a major spring 2013 training exercise at the Marine Corps’ Twentynine Palms base in southern California, he was struck by how little he knew about how America’s war-fighting machine used energy.
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Parenting Advice From ‘America’s Worst Mom’
The New York Times: Lenore Skenazy, a New York City mother of two, earned the sobriquet “America’s Worst Mom” after reporting in a newspaper column that she had allowed her younger son, then 9, to ride the subway alone. The damning criticism she endured, including a threat of arrest for child endangerment, intensified her desire to encourage anxious parents to give their children the freedom they need to develop the self-confidence and resilience to cope effectively with life’s many challenges.
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“It’s the right thing to do.”
In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama urged the Congress to take action on paid sick leave for American workers. Forty-three million workers currently have no paid sick leave, the President noted, forcing many to make “the gut-wrenching choice between a paycheck and a sick kid at home.” Rectify this situation, he told the lawmakers: “It’s the right thing to do.” “It’s the right thing to do.” This is a familiar refrain by now, six years into Obama’s presidency. If not paid sick leave, it’s health care reform, or the Dream Act, or tax credits for clean energy, or tuition assistance or gay rights.
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Sounding out speech
The Harvard Gazette: Just about all parents would agree — infants undergo a nearly magical transformation from 3 to 6 months. Seemingly overnight, they can smile and laugh, and they squeal with delight when tickled. They babble, have “conversations” with those around them, and start to respond to their own names. A new Harvard study adds one more item to the list — solving the invariance problem. Among the thorniest challenges in the study of speech perception, the invariance problem was first identified in the 1950s, when scientists began using instruments to analyze spoken language.
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Cheerful tweets may mean a healthier heart
CBS News: Crowd-sourcing through social media has quickly become one of the most powerful tools for public health. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Yelp have been used to track influenza, HIV, food poisoning and other ailments. Now, a new report shows that Twitter can also help predict rates of heart disease on a hyper-local level. According to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Sciences, simply tracking the expression of negative emotions, including anger, stress and fatigue, may produce an accurate picture of which communities are most likely to have high incidences of heart disease.
