research

“All About Work” Is Taking a Holiday Break

All About Work will be taking time off over the holidays – which I hope all its readers will be able to do as well. I’ll be posting again starting in mid-January.

I began this blog in March 2012, and the response has been extremely gratifying – more than 6,000 hits so far. I’m very appreciative of all the visits and all the reader comments – and I’m looking forward to continuing the interaction.

It's been a whirlwind year. (credit: my own photo)

It’s been a busy year. (credit: my own photo)

To summarize the year’s activity at All About Work, here’s a list of the most popular posts from 2012.

  1. Imagine: How Did This Happen? (Special thanks to the kind folks at WordPress who selected this post to be featured on the Freshly Pressed page.)
  2. Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000-Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up
  3. One Year and Counting: Rocky Mountaineer Lockout Keeps Chugging Along
  4. Best Author Acknowledgement Ever
  5. Things that Make You Go…Wow

Thanks, everyone, for your support. See you in 2013!

Vancouver Province Story Has Similarities to Another Online Article

In the past few months a couple of high-profile incidents in the Canadian media have demonstrated the problems that result when newspaper articles don’t include acknowledgements of material from other sources. (Problems with source attributions have also recently drawn negative attention to writing in other kinds of media, as I’ve discussed here.)

Sadly, these kinds of problems don’t seem to be going away. In the December 11 edition of the Province, a daily newspaper in Vancouver, a story in the travel section has wording bearing a close resemblance to wording in this article on about.com. (more…)

Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule” Doesn’t Add Up

As regular readers of this blog know, it bugs me when writers get things wrong or can’t be bothered to justify their facts. Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of references to the “10,000 hour rule” – the idea that you need to spend 10,000 hours on an activity to be successful at it.  I knew that this idea was popularized by writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, but I didn’t know where he got the idea from or what it was based on.

So imagine my surprise when I Googled “10,000 hour rule” and found a letter by K. Anders Ericsson, the lead author of the study that Gladwell cites as “Exhibit A”  in support of the “rule”. (ETA: The full text of the letter is no longer available online, but its contents are described here.) Not only does Ericsson say that Gladwell “invented” the 10,000 hour rule, but he also describes Gladwell  as making a “provocative generalization to a magical number”. (more…)

Statistics Canada Issues Warning about Quality of Its Own Data

This past week, Statistics Canada released some findings from its 2011 Canadian census data, showing that Canadians are speaking a greater variety of languages at home.  Justifiably, this news got a lot of attention, because of the political and societal implications of linguistic diversity in a country with two official languages. However, what was almost completely unreported that Statistics Canada also issued a warning about the quality of its own information. (more…)

Best Author Acknowledgement Ever

I just finished reading Guy Walters‘ excellent book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. I’ve done research on some of the Canadian groups that organized  resistance to the 1936 Olympics, and so I appreciate Walters’ efforts in preserving some more of the very important history around this event. What happened in and around the 1936 Berlin Games has more influence than we’d like to think on the ceremonies and structures of the Olympics we see now.

The book is extremely well researched and engagingly written, and I very much enjoyed reading it. But what I want to share from the book is one of the best author acknowledgements I’ve ever seen. (more…)

Jonah Lehrer’s ‘Imagine’: How Did This Happen?

This past week, I had the opportunity to read Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine –  the book that’s part of the controversy about plagiarism and fabrication in Lehrer’s writing. Imagine has been pulled by its publisher as a result of that controversy, so pointing out additional problems with it may now be somewhat redundant. (The copy I read came from my public library.) Nevertheless, after reading it, I want to outline the problems I found with the referencing in the book – an area which other commentators have also raised concerns about. (more…)

Update: Twitter at Conferences

In a previous post, I mentioned the initiative by the Academy of Management at the 2012 Academy of Management (AoM)  meeting to promote live Twittering during conference sessions. The listing for each session in the conference program included a hashtag for the session, assigned by the conference organizers, to encourage attendees to send Tweets about the session and the presentations.

The conference ended this past Tuesday (August 7), so I thought I’d look on Twitter to see whether or how the AoM hashtags were used. (more…)

Update: “Self-Plagiarising” Writer Admits to Fabricating Quotes

Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker columnist I wrote about here in relation to the issue of “self-plagiarism” in writing, has resigned from his position at The New Yorker. According to this story, he was accused of, and has admitted to, fabricating quotes from Bob Dylan – ironically (or maybe not) in Imagine, his book on creativity. Here’s the story with the details of the fabricated quotes.

It will be very interesting to see how this plays out, and whether this discovery is just the tip of the iceberg as to what else might be unreliable in Lehrer’s work. As I discussed in my previous post, I have more of a problem with his inaccurate reporting than with his self-plagiarism. But there’s no question that making stuff up is wrong – and with Lehrer’s high profile and prodigious output, his past work will now be much more closely and critically scrutinized. It looks like Imagine has already been pulled from some sales outlets. I have a feeling that the story isn’t going to end here.

Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? I Don’t Think So

As you might imagine, when I saw the headline Do Business Schools Incubate Criminals? floating around the Internet, I got more than a tad nervous. Given what I do for a living, I started to wonder if the RCMP would soon be dropping by to arrest me for aiding and abetting. However, once I started reading the articles in question, I relaxed a little bit. Both make very broad and questionable claims, and I found neither to be completely convincing. However, they both raise points that are worth considering for business degree programs, and, I would contend, for degree programs in general. (more…)

My Guest Post at MARC’s “Ask A Woman”

Following up on my earlier post about the new website MARC (Men Advocating Real Change), the MARC administrators were kind enough to ask me to participate in MARC’s “Ask A Woman” question-and-answer forum. The question I answered was about the impact of pregnancy or motherhood on a woman’s ability to succeed in an executive job. You can read my answer here.

Thanks to MARC for the invitation to join the discussion, and for paying attention to these important and timely issues.