Something You Should Know - How Siri and Alexa Are Changing Computing & Why So Many Managers Appear Incompetent

Episode Date: February 3, 2022

Does grilling meat increase your risk of getting cancer? Maybe. But it isn’t that simple. This episode begins with a discussion on the link between grilling meat and cancer and how you can minimize that risk. (http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/does-grilling-really-cause-cancer) If you look at episodes of the original Star Trek TV series, Scotty talks to the computer to get it to perform tasks on board the Starship Enterprise. Today we are doing something similar with Siri and Alexa and other voice computing apps. So, is voice computing the beginning of a big change in computing that will make typing on a keyboard obsolete? Or will voice computing really just be for setting a timer, finding a restaurant nearby and playing music on a speaker in the kitchen - and that's about it? Journalist James Vlahos joins me to discuss this. James is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific American, the Atlantic, GQ, and National Geographic – and he is author of the book Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work (https://amzn.to/2YinseC) What do brands such as Adidas, Ikea, Nutella, Porsche and Hermes have in common? They are all name brands that many of us mispronounce. Listen to hear if you’ve been pronouncing them correctly or not. http://www.businessinsider.com/brand-names-mispronounced-2016-5 Anyone who has worked for an incompetent boss has likely wondered - how did they get that job? There are some fascinating reasons why so many leaders in key positions seem to be totally incompetent and in over their head. And the topic has been researched by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of business psychology at University College in London and Columbia University in New York. He is also author of the book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders. (https://amzn.to/2Jxqk37). Listen as he explains how and why this happens and how to stop it. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Join the Moink Movement today! Go to https://MoinkBox.com/SYSK RIGHT NOW and get FREE filet mignon for a Year! Get a $75 CREDIT at https://Indeed.com/Something To TurboTax Live Experts an interesting life can mean an even greater refund! Visit https://TurboTax.com to lear more. Truebill is the smartest way to manage your finances. The average person saves $720 per year with Truebill. Get started today at https://Truebill.com/SYSK Take control of your finances and start saving today! To see the all new Lexus NX and to discover everything it was designed to do for you, visit https://Lexus.com/NX https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, is it true cooking food on the grill can cause cancer? I'll tell you what the science says. Then, the world of voice computing, Siri and Alexa. Is it the beginning of a revolution or it

just is what it is? The basic utilities are popular, setting timers, playing music is very popular, but beyond that there haven't been a ton of just killer apps for voice yet and that's something that people in the voice community are fretting about a bit. Plus, name brands you may be mispronouncing, like Adidas and Nutella. And a lot of bosses and leaders are really incompetent. Why is that, and how do we fix it? If we focus more on competence instead of confidence,

more on humility instead of charisma, and more on integrity instead of narcissistic tendencies, we will end up with better leaders, both male and female. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests,

but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back.

And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. Time for another episode of Something You Should Know. I know we're right in the middle

of the winter of 2022, but for some reason I was thinking the other day about outdoor cooking. And there has been, you've probably heard it too, there's been some concern about cooking meat on the grill outdoors. That somehow outdoor grilling of meat, or I guess it's just the grilling of meat, whether it's indoors or outdoors, that can make it carcinogenic somehow. Well, I looked into it, and it seems it has more to do with how you cook it than anything else. If you're incinerating your meat, you are increasing your risk of cancer. Low and slow is the way to go when cooking on the grill. Avoid the black charring of your meat, chicken, or fish. Also, marinating meat first has been shown to significantly cut down on the carcinogens,

and it usually makes the meat taste better. And here's one more piece of advice. Keep everyone upwind and keep the grill away from the table. A 2015 study found that people who were exposed to barbecue fumes for one hour a day had a higher cancer risk than those who were not. And they absorbed the fumes through their skin as well as by breathing it. And that is something you should know. You don't have to go back too many years to a time when the idea of voice computing, that is just talking to your computer rather than typing, that was just science fiction. But then along came Siri and Alexa, and this whole idea of voice computing has become a reality.

So how does it all work, and what does it all mean, and where is it going? Will we soon be just tossing out our keyboards and talking to the computer? James Vlahos is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific American, The Atlantic, GQ, and he is author of a book called Talk to Me, How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think. Hey, James. Thanks for having me on.

So define voice computing for me. When I think of voice computing, I think of Alexa or I think of Scotty on Star Trek talking to the computer saying, Computer, warp speed or whatever. What is it in your view? Voice computing is just being able to interact with the machine using only your voice. So no typing, no clicking, no swiping, all of these things that we've been forced to do in the past to use computers, we are now being liberated from. And just like on Star Trek, as you referenced, we can start using our voice. Popular incarnations of this right now, of course, are Siri and Alexa and the Google Assistant.

But this is something that computer scientists have been pursuing for virtually as long as there have been computers. When I would think of the term voice computing some years ago, what I would think of would be when people tried to talk to a computer and it would type what you were saying, and voice recognition, basically, that that's kind of the early stages of it, I guess. And it was horrible. It never could get it right. You're preaching to the choir on this one. I started using speech recognition in the, I guess, the early 2000s. And, you know, you'd get the software and they boast on the box, you know, that it's, you know, above 80% recognition rate or error rate. And you think,

oh, that's pretty good. And then when you realize that two out of 10 words you say are wrong and you're going to have to manually correct those, you quickly realize that's useless. So, I mean, it is funny you bring that up because of all their many, many technologies that go into making something like Alexa work, but speech recognition, that's kind of the very first part of the process. And that is the part of the process that has

actually improved the most through the help of machine learning to make these systems possible. And it's still not perfect. We've all had swearing fits at Siri, but it's gotten much, much better to a point where you can actually speak and have the computer take down those words correctly. And so how does it work? How does Alexa hear my voice from across the room and figure out not only the words I'm saying, but the meaning of that sentence as a whole, and then do something that more often than not, not always, but more often than not, is correct. Think of it as kind of a layer cake, a number of things that happen to happen in a sequence to make it all work. So the first part is the speech recognition, and that's literally just taking the sound waves that are coming from your mouth and turning those into words inside of

a computer. And it seems simple. It seems simple to us because we're used to hearing and understanding very hard for a computer, not least because of all the homophones in language. So, you know, words like to, to, or to, or T, W, O, the great variability of how people pronounce things, the fact that there's background noise, it just makes it frightfully difficult for a computer to even just get that very first step of kind of writing down the words correctly. But as I say, that's gotten much better. Then when it comes to understanding the meaning, that's even more difficult. It's easiest when you're just saying something very kind of crisp and clear, you know, like, turn on my yacht rock playlist. Alexa knows what you're trying to say. Or set

timer for 10 minutes. You know, just a clear command. But the more you get into sort of longer sentences, more complex things, you have to understand language. You really have to understand the world. You have to understand people. You have to understand objects in the world. So that's, we're still in the early stages of teaching computers all of that.

Because really to be perfect at that, you're talking about a computer that is as smart as a person is. And sort of the final step in the process after the speech recognition and the natural language understanding is producing a response, generating a response, converting that back into sound waves that a user can hear. So that's why I say if you're going to get all mad at Siri or Alexa, just pump the brakes and then think how hard it is for the computer to actually respond intelligently to you.

So it's safe to assume then that 10 years from now, it'll be a lot better than it is today. It is safe to assume that. I mean, the improvements are happening all the time. The speech recognition will continue to improve. I still don't think we're going to have, if you're just imagining that talking to a computer is going to be exactly like talking to a person, we won't be there because that's artificial general intelligence. That's the term for that. And, you know, most, even kind of the most bullish technologists are saying that's decades away

and maybe we will never get there. But I think when it comes to just being able to do stuff in your life using your voice instead of typing, there's going to be a lot of the tasks that we ask computers to do now that are just going to be handleable by speech. And so why is this important? So what? It's the next step in the evolution. I get that.

But why is this one in particular worth stopping and discussing and writing books about? Well, I'll give you two takes on that. The first is whenever you have a new paradigm, and when we go from mainframe computers to desktop ones or desktop ones to mobile ones, whenever that happens, there's a huge multi-billion dollar, even trillion dollar set of new business opportunities that arise. So what we're seeing between Apple, Amazon, and Google in particular is, you know, they're having a fierce, fierce war because they want to dominate this new paradigm. If people are suddenly going to computers in a different way, you know, that can kind of spell the death of your company, or if not the death of it, at least make you, you know, you can wind it being Microsoft, you know, not to throw sharp elbows,

but, you know, a company that is seen as being less cool or technologically relevant than it once was. So that's one big reason that everybody's ears should be perking up and eyes popping out of their heads as they think about this is imagine the most powerful companies in the world now battling in a way that might reshuffle the pecking order between them. That's one way. And then the other reason that it's important is you just you start to think about daily life and think about issues like privacy and surveillance. We're all getting pretty hot under the collar about that already. And now we've got these new devices in our homes that have microphones connected to the Internet. And what are they recording and when are they recording it? And that's a big issue for people to wonder about. And another area, voice lets us create the equivalent of virtual beings.

You know, these kind of AIs that we've seen in science fiction for so long, where there are friends and our advisors and our therapists and maybe even our lovers. Like, this is, it's happening. Like, it is happening now. And it happens because when a computer talks and has a personality, and it's not just some keys and a mouse, we have a whole different set of relationships with that technology. And so let's talk about some of the things you just said. And certainly one of them is that, you know, Alexa, turn on a timer for 10 minutes means Alexa's always got her ears perked up in case I say her name. But when I don't say her name, I assume that somebody could, if they wanted to, listen to everything going on in my house. You know, they certainly could in theory, and people are very worked up about this,

but just remember you've also, you've probably got a computer if you're in your office that's connected to the Internet. It's got a microphone. You've got a phone that's always connected to a network. It's got a microphone. So, you know, if you're worried about these new voice computing devices, you should be equally worried or paranoid about these other computers. I mean, what we're talking about is the illicit use of these connections. Like if Google or Amazon is lying to you, or if hackers have gained access to these portals, that the potential is there. Even beyond that, like what happens, what about when you do authorize uh siri or assistant or

elected to talk to you you've initiated a reaction it's just a whole big new data stream where they can they can listen to you and it's a little bit different than just typing a search into google you're a little more personal maybe you share a little bit more when you're talking versus when you're typing. And I've always wondered, because I've heard kids like talk to Suri and talk to Alexa and ask her, you know, inappropriate questions. And I'm always wondering, well, is Google like logging this and saying, well, these people are a little weird? Do they have a file on my son or your kids or whatever? I don't think so.

There's too many of them. I mean, what you actually, any person I've ever spoken with who works on the back end of these dialogue systems will tell you there's a lot of profanity, sexist remarks, racist remarks, just of inappropriate uh exchanges that are happening so they're getting sort of this you know they're listening in on kind of a dark side of humanity well but you said they're not listening but then you also said hey there's a lot of profanity going on well how would they know that if they're not listening? The computer can have a list of phrases and words that have been identified as being inappropriate. And then it's just it's automatically kind of scanning the all of the conversational data that's coming in. What percentage of the time are we hearing this phrase? So I guess maybe it comes down to how you define listening,

but on sort of a higher level, listening for statistical patterns, but not like one person with a live connection to your home listening in being like, whoa, how about that? We are talking about the fascinating world of voice computing, what it is and where it's going. And my guest is James Vlahos. He is a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific American, and he's author of the book, Talk to Me, How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator.

Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So James, are these technologies the kind of technologies

that we've heard about that theoretically learn as they go and get better? Does Alexa get to know me better and what I say and how I speak and the words I use? Or it's just a static algorithm and she either gets it or she doesn't? She's always improving. She is always improving. So she's listening for different types of dialects. Maybe you have a Southern accent. Maybe you're speaking English as a second language, whatever it is. So there's a lot of work in just improving, specializing for different types of speakers to be able to understand them better. And then, you know, for Google Assistant this way, it kind of depends on the platform, but they do like to have, you know, if they know your location and they know some of your

favorite restaurants, this already happens with the internet search. You know, you get some customization of results based on all of your past searches and all of your past click through what you've gone through. So there is some kind of a level of profiling that's happening. What's the downside other than the privacy thing, which we've talked about already? But what else? What are the other potential downsides that people are seeing and your sense of whether they really are or not.

A downside of this technology that is high on my personal list of concerns is access to information and control of information. So think first of a conventional internet search. You're at the computer, you type in your search terms. You see that long list of results. You kind of, you know, browse. You look. You click to one. Oh, I didn't like that. You come back to the main page. You go to another. Sort of you are the captain of your own informational destiny, if you will. Now compare that to you're just asking a voice computing device. You're asking Siri. You're asking Alexa, you know, what's the best Japanese restaurant near me? Or, you know, when, how many feet will climate change make the oceans rise? Whatever it is, you just ask a

question and Google or Amazon chooses the answer for you and gives it to you. So they're suddenly in, I mean, they're already sort of borderline monopolist in their control of the business of information. This strengthens their hand even further and puts them a lot more in charge. And the profits from this dissemination of information also even go, flow more downhill towards those companies. But I would think, too, that if you're doing an internet search for the best Japanese restaurant near you on your phone and you're doing it just with voice commands and you're not looking at your screen, which Google might fill up the perimeter of that screen with ads that they can sell.

But now you're not seeing that, that there's a potential loss of revenue because they're just going to voice back to you, the nearest Japanese restaurant is, you know, whatever it is, and it's two miles away. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And this is a headache for Google, which is an ad supported, you know, they have made their fortune through advertising. Voice search really screws up the prevailing paradigm of screens have lots of real estate, lots of room for sponsored results, ads. It works. It really works. That's why there's Google. With voice, we don't have sponsored results yet. We don't have sort of embedded ads. It's my belief and the belief of some marketing experts that we will someday, but we're just not there yet. Like Google and Amazon are treading cautiously. Amazon's kind of in a better position because though they do actually have ad revenue,

they're in the business of selling stuff and capturing people in their ecosystem. So you can do a product search through Alexa and she says like, here's the product and why don't I add it to your list? And Amazon will sell it to you. So they've got kind of the whole experience encapsulated in one bubble. Right, yeah. You can ask for it and they can say, yeah, we can have it at your door tomorrow

or in an hour. Yeah, they're in the Catbird seat. We actually have three smart speakers in our house and I think a year or two ago we didn't have any. And I sometimes forget to use it for things like we were talking about, like Alexa set the timer. One of them's in the kitchen. And, you know, I'm not even, like, trained to think in that way yet, and so I don't often use it. I use the timer on the oven, and then I think, why could it just set Alexis at a timer for 10 minutes?

Yeah, I think we're at a curious place in terms of adoption. You look at the stats and, you know, I think we're over in the U.S., for instance, more than 100 million homes have some type of smart speaker. So there's a lot of adoption. They're very popular. People are buying them. But when it comes to actual use of them, I mean, the basic utilities are popular, setting timers, reminders, make a calendar entry, all that kind of stuff. That's getting pretty popular. Playing music is very popular. Answering basic questions is popular. But beyond

that, there haven't been a ton of just killer apps, essentially, for voice yet. And that's something that people in the voice community are fretting about a bit is when are we going to get these huge new success stories of, because setting timers and playing music, like we've been doing that for several years now with voice technology. So what's the new thing? What's the next thing that's really going to like push this forward to even more people? What do you think? Well, I think it lies in, not in applications where efficiency is so important, but rather in applications where kind of a human touch is important.

So that's things like health care, counseling, virtual companionship. You know, a lot of people come home, they live alone, and you just want to hear a voice in your environment and traditionally we'd turn on the radio turn on the TV just have it in the background well as companies like Amazon explore sociable conversation through Alexa you need come in you're fixing dinner by yourself hey Alexa you know tell me a joke what's what's a good? Like a little, yeah, small talk it on, and it's really loud, and you want to tell her to turn it down, and you say, Alexa, turn it down, how can she hear me when the music is so loud? Part of the solution involves this technology of beamforming, which is you have these microphones that are arrayed in a ring around something like an echo. They're pointing outward and it's almost like stereo vision or something, knowing that the sound is loudest coming into microphone one. It's almost as loud from microphone two. It's starting to get much less loud from microphone three. Tell us the

computer, all right, microphones one and two, like those are the ones ones and then once you can apply you know kind of directional listening like a very focused cone of listening that at least is screens out some of the background noise but then there are also many complicated algorithms for just and i've heard sort of these before and afters and they'll play the version of you know someone trying to talk to alexa before the processing has happened and you hear all the background noise and other people talking and music and the rest, and then you hear it with what they have modeled and identified as like, nope, that's all the background, we're going to strip it away, and it suddenly becomes much softer, and you hear the person's voice talking to Alexa.

Well, it is interesting, and it also makes you wonder where it's going to take us. You know, when we're freed from the keyboard and we can just use our voice to do all sorts of things, where does that take us next? James Vlahos has been my guest. The name of his book is Talk to Me, How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think. And you will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, James. Yeah, thanks so much.

Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me,

But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover.

We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. If you've had at least a couple of jobs in your career, there's a good chance that somewhere along the way you've worked for a boss that you might describe as incompetent. I know I have. And if you're like me, you may have wondered at the time,

and you may still be scratching your head, as to how incompetent people so often end up running the show. It's also something Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has looked into. Tomas is a professor of business psychology at the University College in London and at Columbia University in New York. He is the chief talent scientist at Manpower Group, and he's author of the book Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders and How to Fix It. Hi, Tomas. Thank you for having me. So if there's a quick,

condensate, in a nutshell answer, why do so many incompetent people end up in leadership positions? A lot of the practices that organizations have in place fail to measure how leaders perform. Typically, they focus on what their bosses think or subjective supervisory ratings of leaders' performance. I think in the data-driven world or data-rich world that we live in today, there's just no excuse for playing it by ear, and organizations need to be more evidence-based when they measure the performance of leaders. I think everybody has worked for or worked in an organization where we have seen people, mostly men, I suspect, rise to levels in the organization where they clearly are in over their head. They don't know what they're doing. They were good at getting the job, but they're not necessarily very good at doing the job.

Absolutely. And you are right that they are more likely to be male than female. So this happens for three reasons. The first is that those who elect leaders focus more on confidence than competence. And why, you might wonder. Well, confidence is a lot easier to observe. And in a world that is increasingly complex and where you need a lot of technical expertise and knowledge to actually realize whether other people are experts or knowledge, it's the quick and lazy, efficient option to say, oh, you know,

this person seems confident, assertive, so they must be good. The second is that we pay a lot of attention to whether people are charismatic and charming. This is especially true because we rely a lot on face-to-face interviews, short interactions with others that may or not tell you something about how good that person actually is. And the third is that we actually encourage people to lean in or put themselves forward to leadership roles. And when they do, we assume that they actually have potential. But actually, the research on this is very clear. A lot of the times the people who lean in are overconfident, they're not narcissistic, and they often don't actually have much potential or talent for leadership. So if we focus more on competence instead of confidence, more on humility instead of charisma, and more on integrity instead of narcissistic tendencies, we will end up with better leaders, both male and female. It also seems that things are set up in a way that if you perform well at

your job, if you're a good salesman, it's hard not to get promoted to sales manager, but that's a different job altogether. Correct. And it's one of the big paradoxes or irrationalities even of the workplace that, you know, well, as the Peter Principle noted a few years ago, everybody eventually gets promoted to their own level of incompetence. But it's absurd, if you think about it, that the reward for somebody who is really good at their job as an individual contributor is to move them out of that role and force them to manage people, which they may not even be interested in doing when they're able. But a lot of the times, they're not even able to do that. In reality, we should look at leadership potential as something

that is unrelated or independent of one's potential to function well as an employee. You see this in sports, for example, in professional sports. A lot of the best coaches or managers were mediocre individual players, and many star individual athletes are very bad as coaches or managers when they get there. But in an organization, using that same example of salesman to sales manager, if you don't pull from the pool of salesmen to manage the department, where in the world are you going to get people who understand the business? I think you're absolutely right that you need to have a minimum level of track record, subject matter expertise, credibility,

so that people look up to you and respect you, right? At the same time, if we focus too much on what people have achieved before, at the expense of neglecting the soft skills that are actually needed to turn a group of individuals into a high-performing team, things like EQ, integrity, good judgment, vision, self-awareness, and even specific leadership styles like transformational leadership that will help you do this, you won't get very far. And typically what organizations do is they invest or even waste a lot of money trying to coach or develop people who have limited potential for leadership with far worse results

than if they selected people who have these competencies to begin with, and then they try to make them better. I mean, it's just like everybody might be able to play the piano or sing, but it will be a lot quicker, cheaper, and easier to train people if they actually have some musical talent to begin with. You sometimes see leaders jump industries. You know, someone in the food and beverage industry becomes the new CEO of a telecommunications business. I'm just making this up, but you see that happen. Does that work, or is leadership such a unique skill that you can transfer it around or not?

I love this question. I think there are a lot of reasons to expect the answer to be yes. This rotation, taking people from one industry and moving them to another can be very advantageous and absolutely at the very least the core foundational leadership competencies that are needed to motivate and and engage a team are quite universal and leaving aside technical expertise you know you need to have EQ IQ you need to be curious you need to be self-aware coachable humble and have integrity that's that's true whether you're a military leader soccer team manager a business corporate leader or run a non-profit but then I think on top of that there

are advantages of importing expertise from another industry. The classic example that is happening more and more today is you have Silicon Valley tech giants importing leadership talent from Wall Street or Big Pharma because they want to become more corporate and maintain the rapid growth that they've had for the past 10 years. Or sometimes organizations that want to be more consumer-centric and more B2C or customer-centric. So they would import leadership talent from retail or consumer brands into what traditionally has been a B2B market. So I think we're going to see it happen more and more, and I think it definitely is very advantageous. Since you ask the question in the title of your book, why do so many incompetent men become leaders, is it a lot?

Is it percentage-wise? Are we all being managed by incompetent people? Not all of us, but I do make the point straight away in my book that leadership is far more negative in the real world, at least in the sense of how people experience it, how employees experience it, than we typically think. And it's certainly not as glamorous, positive, inspirational as business school books and management schools have historically suggested. I give you three or four data points that back this up. First, we know that leadership is a major driver of engagement and motivation. And yet, after 10 or 15 years of annual surveys reviewing how people feel about their jobs and how enthusiastic and engaged they

are, we see that only 30% of people like their job and that most of those who don't mostly object their manager, their boss. We also know that most people leave not just their jobs, but also traditional employment because they are traumatized or they experience negative things with their managers, with their direct supervisor or leader. And if you don't want to look at all the statistics and all the data that are reported out there, just Google my boss is or my manager is to see what most people think of their bosses. I mean, things like crazy, unbearable, toxic, and some other things that are kind of, you know, too rude to discuss here will come up. So I think the average experience that people have of their leaders, of managers, is pretty

dismal. And there is a disconnect between that reality and all the money that is invested in either identifying, hiring, or developing leaders. It seems like we have a long way to go to make progress here. And one of the things that I've wondered when I've worked in organizations that had incompetent leaders, toxic leaders, whatever. And I think anybody else who wonders this, they look at this person and see a fool, an incompetent leader. Why doesn't somebody higher up in the organization see it as well? This is interesting, and there are several possibilities, but I think one of them, of course, is the paradoxical fact that although leadership should be evaluated in terms of how the leader or manager impacts his or her team, subordinates, followers, we actually assess it or evaluate it based on how they manage up, right? So unfortunately, this means that

managers and leaders, much like employees, are rewarded for focusing their efforts on impressing their superiors. Secondly, I'd say that incompetence trickles down. So, you know, I remember the story of David Ogilvie, the advertising tycoon who once said that his only onboarding strategy when he hired new people at Ogilvie was to gift them a matryoshka doll, one of these babushka kind of dolls. And he said, well, if you hire people who are smaller than you, we will eventually become a company of dwarves. If you hire people who are bigger than you, we will eventually become a company of giants. And I think that happens with incompetence. It starts at the top and trickles down because every incompetent hiring decision that somebody makes is then tried to mask or hide or, you know, it's just tough for people to justify that they have made mistakes.

So even in the presence of evidence for the fact that leaders are not functioning or not working effectively, people will rather hide the truth and bend the facts and, you know, find fake news or alternative realities. I mean, the simplest example of this is the manager who interviews a candidate for a leadership role. And then just because they like that candidate, that person gets the job. Six months later or 12 months later, despite overwhelming evidence that they're not performing well, they would only pay attention to what they're doing well and say, ah, you know, this was a very strong recruit, because that's a way of saying, look how smart my hiring was, which is much better than saying, oh, I'm dumb because I made a mistake. Yeah, well, right. Who wants to admit they made the mistake and hired the wrong guy?

But it seems to happen all the time. And given that it happens in the rather dismal picture you've painted here, what, if any, advice to people who work for these people? So it's tricky because you can't obviously change your boss. If you have an incompetent leader, you can't just do something to make them competent overnight. That doesn't exist. You also can't decide to leave and assume that you're going to have a really good boss because you know the norm i'd say is in 70 of the cases you won't be lucky and in 30 you will but it's tough to find these people um so i think there are two or three simple uh pieces of advice or suggestions or tips that I usually give. The first is, you know, of course,

try to play the game, make yourself useful, and at least try to be in their good books while you think about other options and perhaps even try to move within the organization and work for somebody that you have identified as more competent, more inspiring, and a better mentor. Secondly, I think it is important to, within reason, try to give that boss or manager some indication of how you perform best and what you need to do your job better. At the end of the day, a lot of leaders who might not naturally be competent at managing others can still negotiate and think aboard some suggestions to be more effective in their

job. And I think the third one is, you know, most people today, regardless of whether they have a good or a bad boss, need to be thinking beyond their current job and think of their careers and not focus so much on their current employment, but more on their long-term employability. So even if you are suffering from having a bad or incompetent leader, well, try to use the time you have to keep building up your skills, your knowledge, your expertise, improving your CV, your resume, and then keep your options open for alternatives.

There is a reason why 70% of employees today are considered passive job seekers, which means that they're not actively looking for alternatives, but they're passively hoping or waiting for a better job offer. But in order to get that better job offer, which will hopefully include a better leader, you need to boost your CV and boost your employability. Do you think that people who are lousy managers have at least some inkling of it, or do you think people pretty much think, yeah, I'm doing a pretty good job here? And so I think you have managers of both varieties or both types.

This is about self-awareness, ultimately. And self-awareness, much like height, weight, sense of humor, or singing talent, is normally distributed. And it's a matter of degrees or a quantitative trait. Some have a lot of it, so they get all the feedback they need, even with minimal signals. Some are beyond hope, and they're totally uncoachable and almost deluded or self-deceived. Most people are in the middle. When I originally proposed to Harvard Business Review to do this book, they said, you know, even though I had written an article in their

online portal that did very well, they said, we don't, this, the title and the theme is a little bit too offensive for our readers, most of whom are male, male executives. And I did tell them, look, a lot of them won't even notice that it's about them. They will read it and say, oh, yeah, I know somebody who is like that. And then for those who actually might feel that some of the behaviors described there are actually referring to what they do, well, they need this type of feedback in order to identify flaws and get better. So in a way, having a minimum level of awareness as to what you're doing wrong and where the gaps are between what you're doing

and what you would like to do is totally indispensable if you want to get better. You might be aware of it and self-aware and still don't get better, but if you're not aware, you will only improve by luck. Are you optimistic that things will get better or are you not? I am optimistic because I think we are moving in the right direction. And the big advantage we have is that the science is so solid, so strong, the body of knowledge on what makes a good leader, how do we evaluate these qualities, and how can we predict leadership effectiveness and leadership performance is so

established. All we need is the willingness to apply it. And of course, some organizations are applying this science and they are outperforming their competitors because they are more meritocratic and science-driven in their practices. So the ROI, the business case, has been made already. Well, your explanation certainly makes sense and really does explain why so many of us find ourselves working for people who don't seem particularly good at their job, but nevertheless, there they are. Tomas Chamorro-Pramusic has been my guest. The name of the book is Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders and How to Fix It?

You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Tomas. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. I know it's not polite to correct someone's grammar or pronunciation, but we're going to do it anyway. And we're going to talk about some of the brand names that a lot of people mispronounce, me included. For example, I've always thought it was Nutella,

that chocolate hazelnut stuff. It's actually pronounced Nutella. Ikea. Who doesn't say Ikea? But the correct pronunciation is Ikea. Adidas. Everybody says Adidas, the sportswear line, but it's actually pronounced Adidas. The car is a Porsche. It is not a Porsche. It is a Porsche. The drink, Stella Artois. A lot of people pronounce that last S as Stella Artois. But it's Stella Artois. The last S is silent.

And Hermes. A lot of people say Hermes. I've always said Hermes. It's actually Hermes, as in Pez. I didn't know that. That's why that is something you should know. Please share this podcast with a friend. Just send them the link and let them listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro,

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