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256 pages, Hardcover
First published March 4, 2014
“Flow's two defining characteristics are its feel-good nature (flow is always a positive experience) and its function as a performance-enhancer. The [neuro]chemicals described herein are among the strongest . . . the body can produce.”
“A ten-year study done by McKinsey found top executives reported being up to five times more productive when in flow. Creativity and cooperation are so amplified by the state that [a] Greylock Partners venture capitalist . . . called 'flow state percentage'—defined as the amount of time employees spend in flow—the 'most important management metric for building great innovation teams.'”
[T]he No. 1 thing we look for is general cognitive ability, and it’s not I.Q. It’s learning ability. It’s the ability to process on the fly. It’s the ability to pull together disparate bits of information.
“Flow is the secret to learning faster. A lot faster.”
What happens when Big Data meets human resources? The emerging practice of "people analytics" is already transforming how employers hire, fire, and promote.
. . . Perhaps the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers,
across all companies, all the time.
. . . Gild [is] a company that uses people analytics to help other companies find software engineers.
. . . The way Gild arrives at . . . scores [for ranking coders] is not simple. The company's algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any
and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it's been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder's advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.
The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.
Here's the part that’s most interesting: having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They're not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga [i.e., comics] site.
. . . Gild's CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company's approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects.
. . . Google's understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else's, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses.(Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.)
“Call it talent-biased technical change. In many industries, the difference in payout between number one and second-best has widened into a canyon.”
“The advancements we've seen in the past few years are not the crowning achievements of the computer era. They're warm-up acts.”
[O]ver the past decade, we've learned a great deal about how [creative insights] . . . happen—including how flow may make them happen more frequently. Not surprisingly, our creativity lies deeply rooted in the right side of the brain: the side dominated by the implicit system. The reason has to do with the structure of neural networks. When the explicit system (mostly on the left side of the brain) handles a problem, the neurons involved are very close to one another. This much proximity leads to linear connections, logical deductions, and all the other keystones of standard reasoning. When the implicit system is at work, its reach is much broader—far-flung corners of the brain are talking to one another. This is known to experts as "lateral thinking" . . . It means that novel stimuli can combine with . . . thoughts and obscure memories and the result is something utterly new.
Creativity has a brainwave signature as well: alpha waves pulsing out of the brain's right hemisphere. This is considered the readiness state for sudden insight—meaning not the revelation itself, rather its precursor condition. Interestingly . . . it now seems that without a calm, relaxed frame of mind the brain is incapable of switching from a beta-dominated localized networks to alpha-driven widespread webs.
But this isn't where the process ends. . . . [T]hat moment of sudden insight comes with a different brainwave signature. Exactly thirty milliseconds before the breakthrough intuition arrives, EEG shows a burst of gamma waves. These ultrafast brainwaves appear when a bunch of widely distributed cells—i.e., novel stimuli, random thoughts, obscure memories—bind themselves together into a brand new network. It is the brainwave signature of the "Aha!" moment.
"But the interesting thing about a gamma spike," explains Leslie Sherlin, "is that it always happens inside of theta oscillations. The two waves are coupled. It makes sense. Theta processes novel incoming stimuli; gamma is what happens when those stimuli snap together into new ideas. But it's hard to do any of this on command. It takes meditators a long time to get that kind of control. This is where the athletes in flow have a huge edge—their brain is already in alpha/theta. They're holding themselves in the only state that can produce that gamma spike."
When you add these elements together it's easy to see why flow is such an effective decision-making strategy.
Frank [Ruscica, author of this review], I just spent about an hour surfing around your [business plan for a provider of customized lifelong learning and career services (CLLCS)] with a bit of amazement. I run a little company...We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company's personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. Eventually, we came up with the idea behind 43 Things.
...I guess I'm mostly just fascinated that we've been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it 'the age of the amateur' or 'networks of shared experiences' instead of CLLCS, but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have -- its fascinating stuff.
[T]here are extraordinarily powerful social bonding neurochemicals at the heart of both flow and group flow: dopamine and norepinephrine, that underpin romantic love.
. . . The neurochemicals that underpin the [flow] state are among the most addictive drugs on earth. Equally powerful is the psychological draw. Scientists who study human motivation have lately learned that after basic survival needs have been met, the combination of autonomy (the desire to direct your own life), mastery (the desire to learn, explore and be creative), and purpose (the desire to matter, to contribute to the world) are our most powerful intrinsic drivers—the three things that motivate us most. All three are deeply woven through the fabric of flow.
. . . “No question about it,” says Flow Genome Project Executive Director Jamie Wheal, “there's a dark night of the flow. In Christian mystical traditions, once you've experienced the grace of God, the 'dark night of the soul' describes the incredible pain of its absence. The same is true for flow. . . . If you've glimpsed this state, but can't get back there—that lack can become unbearable.”