Today I will take a look at person to person resentment, specifically some ways that a leader may become resented by their people.

I am deeply saddened by the degenerating US-Canada relationship.  Some of you are my American friends that I have met along the way.  Those who may not be aware I spent about 10 years doing volunteer work at the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering at the critical utilities community of practice.  The majority of my ISPE colleagues were Americans, and it was mainly through this work that I met my American friends.  To a person they were decent, hard working, generous, smart people for whom I have a great deal of affection.

This will be the closing piece on Imposter Syndrome, focusing on how I accepted it and integrated it, and then closing the loop.

Today we will explore Imposter Syndrome.  It can be defined as: “A psychological pattern where individuals doubt their accomplishments and fear being exposed as a ‘fraud’, despite evident success and recognition”. People with Imposter Syndrome often attribute their achievements to luck or external factors rather than their own skills and effort. This can lead to chronic self-doubt, an inability to internalize success, and a persistent fear of being ‘found out’.”

A universally good habit is to be situationally aware.  This was always something I tried to drum into young engineers, especially ones that had no athletics background who tended to struggle with being present in the physical world.  A construction or commissioning site can be dangerous, especially to someone who is not aware of what is going on around them, paying attention to  their senses, the sounds, smells, vibrations, visual things that tell of some impending danger. 

A couple of years ago I dusted off my hard copy of Lord of the Rings and read the whole thing again.  I think this was my third time reading the three books again.  It is such a richer experience than the movies, and I really liked the movies.  I love the more complex grammar and vocabulary; it is not written in the way we speak today needing the reader to think differently.  There are so many passages in the books that go way deeper.  The last time I read the whole thing had to be almost twenty years ago.  There are some books that need re-reading and this is one of them.

A friend had an experience with their kid’s rep sport team that I have seen occur again and again.  The “second string” or backup players get very little playing time, even in when they are blowing out the other team.  This was on a weekend where the team had multiple games, some very competitive.

I find this revealing and a bit maddening.  Revealing in that the coach’s motivations and priorities are laid bare.  The top priority is revealed to be winning, and by as much as possible.

Ruminations on the intersection of superintelligence and leadership, the potential symbiotic human-AI superintelligence

If you get three leadership experts into a room and ask them what type of meeting should be used for the development of people you’ll probably get five different opinions.  Here is mine:

It depends.  Be pragmatic.

People who know me well, know that this is often an answer I give to many questions.  Let’s take a look at what this meeting IS:

A process.

One of the hardest things for a leader to do is to make strategy come to life, creating a sense of urgency and enlisting the voluntary efforts of people to achieve that strategy.  A strategic plan is full of details about objectives, goals, performance indicators etc.  Ugh.  Dry stuff for most people.

I’ve long been a proponent of behaviour based interviewing, not on its own but in conjunction with doing specific tests in interviews that get people to think on their feet.

Today I wanted to highlight the limitations of relying only on behavioural interviewing.

There are in fact very few places that behaviour is the result, acting being the one that comes to mind the most.

I am reading a really insightful book by Paul Jarvis, Company of One: .  It is geared towards the solopreneur, and there is some interesting advice in there for people running or leading within larger organizations as well.  There was a real gem in the book about pursuing your passion that I wanted to paraphrase and discuss.

In short the idea was that one ought not pursue with total commitment a passion before they actually get reasonably good at it; don’t even get that passionate about something you are doing until you work hard at something for a little while and get good at it and let the passion emerge.

I recently had a really interesting and wide ranging discussion with an app developer on psychometrics where I found out about the effect of anxiety reducing working memory.  Working memory is a key component to fluid intelligence, and fluid intelligence is key to being able to process complex novel problems.  Leadership, relying on fluid intelligence, is largely concerned with the navigation of complex and novel problems, especially at higher levels.  The morning after the discussion I woke up with a new perspective on the seven deadly sins, their maladaptive nature and impact on leadership that I thought might be interesting to you. 

What if it is already here and in our past? I was recently pointed at the original Turing paper that he is famous for:
Microsoft Word - TuringTest.doc (umbc.edu)

There were a couple of ideas in the paper that got me really thinking about not just AI but also about superintelligence: One is his formulation that “A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts: (i) Store. (ii) Executive unit. (iii) Control.” combined with his discussion of critical mass.