Bill Gates on Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule

Malcoln Gladwell It’s a tempting proposal: if you practice anything for 10,000 hours, then you will become world class. In 1993, scientist Anders Ericsson learned of a group of psychologists in Berlin who were researching violin players found that, by age 20, the leading performers had averaged in excess of 10,000 hours of practice each. Less able performers, in the meantime, clocked up just 4,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion further in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.

In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

Gladwell applied the concept to Bill Joy, Bill Gates, and the Beatles, who sharpened their musical know-how in performance at Hamburg’s strip clubs. Gladwell says:

The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times. Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today don’t perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is what set the Beatles apart.

'Outliers' by Malcoln Gladwell (ISBN 0316017922) Coined by Florida State psychologist Anders Ericsson and made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, the 10,000 hour rule reflects the belief that becoming a superlative athlete or performer rests on a long period of hard work rather than “innate ability” or talent. As stated by Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000-hour rule, genuine success only comes to people who are willing to put in a great many hours to become first-class at something they value. Whether it involves learning a new piece of equipment, a new language, or developing a craft, being able to cope with setbacks and stay focused on goals regardless of how far-flung they seem. And so the importance of resolve and steadiness in success.

Bill Gates did not only have an propensity for creating software, he also had just about exceptional access as a schoolboy to a mainframe computer that the parents’ association of his local school invested in, in 1968. He got to it in eighth grade before just about anyone else in the world. Correspondingly the Beatles’ genius for melody did not come ready made. They developed it while singing in Hamburg in the early Sixties, at all-night strip clubs. In those years they dedicated more time to pop music than any of their peers. The same could be said for Mozart, or Tiger Woods. They had capability, sure enough, but they also had extraordinary family circumstances that allowed them a reasonable advantage at a very early age. They put the hours in first.

Extraordinary success depends on talent, hard work, and being in the right place at the right time, among other things. In Outliers, Gladwell contends that, to truly master any skill, leaning on various pieces of research, requires about 10,000 concentrated hours. If you can get those hours in early, and be in a position to exploit them, then you are an outlier.

When asked, “What do you think of Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that the years 1953 to 1955 were the perfect ones in which to be born for the computer revolution?” by his father William H. Gates Sr., Bill Gates reponds:

His book makes a lot of great points … that is that in all success stories there are significant elements of luck and tiny … I wasn’t the only kid born between 1953 and 1955, but absolutely to be young and open-minded at a time when the microprocessor was invented … in my case have a friend Paul Allen who was more open-minded about hardware type things and literally brought me the obscure article to talk about that first microprocessor and said you know this is going to improve exponentially … what does that mean and I said well at that means it we can do anything we want and then he was … you know … bugging me the rest of the time every time there’d be a new microprocessor he said can we do something yet and when we were in high school that can happen … so he came back to possible good job there and actually the microprocessor that was finally good enough came out in early 1975 and that’s why I i dropped out … so the timing was pretty important you know why didn’t older people see it … they weren’t this open open minded … they didn’t think about software is the key ingredient … now a lot of kids started doing software and … it’s not if somebody reads the book to say that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something you’ll be super good at it I don’t think that’quite as simple as that what you do is you do about 50 hours and ninety percent drop out because they don’t like it or they’re not good … you do another 50 hours and ninety percent drop out … so there’s these constant cycles and you do have to be lucky enough but also fanatical enough to keep going and so the person makes it to 10,000 hours is not just somebody has done it for 10,000 hours there’s somebody who chosen and been chosen in many different times and so all these magical things came together including who I know and that time … and i think you know that’s very important … when you look at somebody who’s good and say could I do it like them … they’ve gone through so many cycles that it may fool you that you know yes yes you could with the with the right luck, imagination, and and some some talent.

Bill Gates responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to master a skill. Apart from acknowledging luck, timing and an open mind, Gates suggests that a successful person survives many cycles of attrition to make it to 10,000 hours of experience. “You do have to be lucky enough, but also fanatical enough to keep going,” explains Gates.

Unfortunately, a Princeton study, which analyzed 88 studies, established that practice accounted for just a 12% variation in performance.

Consequences of Organizational Commitment Level for Individual Employees and an Organization

Consequences of Organizational Commitment Level

Like various social groups at different times throughout history, organizations and corporations developed distinctive cultures.

Organizational culture is the entirety of socially transmitted behavior patterns that are typical of a particular organization or a company. Organizational culture encompasses the structure of the organization and the roles within it, the leadership style, the prevailing values, norms, sanctions, and support mechanisms, and the past traditions and folklore, methods of enculturation, and characteristic ways of interacting with people and institutions outside of the culture (such as customers, suppliers, the competition, government agencies, and the general public).

Consequences of Organizational Commitment Level for Individual Employees

  • Low Organizational Commitment: Potentially positive consequences for opportunity for expression of originality and innovation, but an overall negative effect on career advancement opportunities
  • Moderate Organizational Commitment: Enhanced feeling of belongingness and security, along with doubts about the opportunity for advancement
  • High Organizational Commitment: Greater opportunity for advancement and compensation for efforts, along with less opportunity for personal growth and potential for stress in family relationships

Consequences of Organizational Commitment Level for the Organization

  • Low Organizational Commitment: Absenteeism, tardiness, workforce turnover, and poor quality of work
  • Moderate Organizational Commitment: As compared with low commitment, less absenteeism, tardiness, turnover, and better quality of work, as well as increased level of job satisfaction
  • High Organizational Commitment: Potential for high productivity, but sometimes accompanied by lack of critical/ethical review of employee behavior and by reduced organizational flexibility

Companies need to engage their employees to capitalize on emotional energy and consistently achieve higher levels of performance than their competition. It’s critical for leaders to do their best to gain effective commitment, and reduce their teams’ reliance on continuance and normative commitment, so that they lead teams of employees who feel passionate for their roles in the organization.

Conducting Behavioral Assessments: Advantages

Conducting Behavioral Assessments

Behavioral assessments ask specific questions focused on target behaviors. Behavioral assessments are interested in samples of behavior and not behavior as a sign of internal processes. The responses collected from behavioral assessments can be interpreted as samples of a person behavior that are thought to generalize to other situations that the person might be subject to.

Overall, data and information resulting from behavioral assessments may have numerous advantages over data and information derived by traditional assessments or other methods of assessments. Data derived from behavioral assessments can be used:

  • to present behavioral baseline data with which other behavioral data (gathered after the passage of time, after a particular intervention, or after some other event) can be compared
  • to make available a record of the subject’s behavioral strengths and weaknesses across a assortment of situations, circumstances, and settings that the subject can be exposed to
  • to identify and pin down environmental circumstances that act to trigger, maintain, or extinguish certain behaviors in the subject
  • to identify and target precise behavioral patterns in a subject for modification through clinical or psychological interventions
  • to produce graphic displays that can be used to encourage inventive methods of treatment or more effective clinical or psychological therapy methods

The level of training and the experience of assessors influence the validity and reliability of behavioral assessments. Also affecting the soundness of the behavioral interviews is the ability to generalize the observations to other subjects, settings, and situations.

Guy Kawasaki’s “Shopping Center Test” for Recruiting

Guy Kawasaki, Silicon Valley investor, business advisor, and author

Recruiting is the hardest part of a manager’s job. Many managers do not hire people who are better than they themselves are. It might be subconscious—managers do not want to be disgraced by one of their direct reports—or perhaps managers do not know how to identify talent.

How is a manager or recruiter to know in his/her gut that a particular candidate is an excellent person for a role, after an interview? Silicon Valley investor, business advisor, and author of twelve excellent books on business and entrepreneurship, Guy Kawasaki proposes the “Shopping Center Test.”

As the last step in the recruiting process, apply the Shopping Center Test.

It works like this: Suppose you’re at a shopping center, and you see the candidate. He is fifty feet away and has not seen you. You have three choices:

  1. beeline it over to him and say hello;
  2. say to yourself, “This shopping center isn’t that big; if I bump into him, then I’ll say hello, if not, that’s okay too;”
  3. get in your car and go to another shopping center.

My contention is that unless the candidate elicits the first response, you shouldn’t hire him.

For more on entrepreneurship, see ‘The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything’ by Guy Kawasaki. Also see this YouTube video of Guy talking about recruiting.

List of Books Authored by Guy Kawasaki

Microsoft Ends its “Stack Ranking” Forced Ranking System

Microsoft

Per the following memo from Lisa Brummel, the head of human resources, Microsoft is ending the “stack rank system,” Microsoft’s adaptation of the forced ranking performance management system.

To Global Employees,

I am pleased to announce that we are changing our performance review program to better align with the goals of our One Microsoft strategy. The changes we are making are important and necessary as we work to deliver innovation and value to customers through more connected engagement across the company.

Lisa Brummel, Head of Human Resources, Microsoft This is a fundamentally new approach to performance and development designed to promote new levels of teamwork and agility for breakthrough business impact. We have taken feedback from thousands of employees over the past few years, we have reviewed numerous external programs and practices, and have sought to determine the best way to make sure our feedback mechanisms support our company goals and objectives. This change is an important step in continuing to create the best possible environment for our world-class talent to take on the toughest challenges and do world-changing work.

To learn more about the new approach to performance and development, please join me for a Town Hall today at 2:00pm PT, either in person in building 92 or via webcast (see details below).

Here are the key elements:

  • More emphasis on teamwork and collaboration. We’re getting more specific about how we think about successful performance and are focusing on three elements — not just the work you do on your own, but also how you leverage input and ideas from others, and what you contribute to others’ success — and how they add up to greater business impact.
  • More emphasis on employee growth and development. Through a process called “Connects” we are optimizing for more timely feedback and meaningful discussions to help employees learn in the moment, grow and drive great results. These will be timed based on the rhythm of each part of our business, introducing more flexibility in how and when we discuss performance and development rather than following one timeline for the whole company. Our business cycles have accelerated and our teams operate on different schedules, and the new approach will accommodate that.
  • No more curve. We will continue to invest in a generous rewards budget, but there will no longer be a pre-determined targeted distribution. Managers and leaders will have flexibility to allocate rewards in the manner that best reflects the performance of their teams and individuals, as long as they stay within their compensation budget.
  • No more ratings. This will let us focus on what matters — having a deeper understanding of the impact we’ve made and our opportunities to grow and improve.

We will continue to align our rewards to the fiscal year, so there will be no change in timing for your rewards conversation with your manager, or when rewards are paid. And we will continue to ensure that our employees who make the most impact to the business will receive truly great compensation.

Just like any other company with a defined budget for compensation, we will continue to need to make decisions about how to allocate annual rewards. Our new approach will make it easier for managers and leaders to allocate rewards in a manner that reflects the unique contributions of their employees and teams.

I look forward to sharing more detail with you at the Town Hall, and to bringing the new approach to life with leaders across the company. We will transition starting today, and you will hear from your leadership in the coming days about next steps for how the transition will look in your business. We are also briefing managers and will continue to provide them with resources to answer questions and support you as we transition to this approach.

I’m excited about this new approach that’s supported by the Senior Leadership Team and my HR Leadership Team, and I hope you are too. Coming together in this way will reaffirm Microsoft as one of the greatest places to work in the world.

There is nothing we cannot accomplish when we work together as One Microsoft.

Lisa

The forced ranking system has always been controversial. In theory, there isn’t anything wrong with concept of ranking the performance of people along a bell-curve and using this distribution to decide merit awards and promotions. What’s wrong is that employees learn to game the system and turn it into a political exercise. Brownnosing, politicking, favoritism, bias, and discrimination trump authentic performance and consistent teamwork. The system fosters a competitive environment in a way that counters to team work and business goals.

Yet another upshot of the forced ranking system is that the system acts as deterrence to making drastic career moves and risk-taking on their job by incentivizing employees to settle into their current functions in their current group and take no significant risks in how they go about their work. The forced ranking system informally guarantees that the longer an employee’s tenure in a particular group, the higher the employee shall be ranked because the incoming employee knows the ropes. Employees moving into a group or function are often ranked lower until they warm up.