July 2011 - Diane Hamilton

Are Women Making Teams Smarter?

Harvard Business Review recently published an article about how having women on a team makes the team smarter. Although they didn’t find a correlation between the collective intelligence of the group and the IQ of individuals within that group, they did find that if women were in the group, the collective intelligence was higher.

The Female Factor: The chart plots the collective intelligence scores of the 192 teams in the study against the percentage of women those teams contained. The red bars indicate the range of scores in the group of teams at each level, and the blue circles, the average. Teams with more women tended to fall above the average; teams with more men tended to fall below it.

via hbr.org

Professors Anita Wooley (Carnegie Mellon) and Thomas Malone (MIT) gave “subjects aged 18 to 60 standard intelligence tests and assigned them randomly to teams. Each team was asked to complete several tasks—including brainstorming, decision making, and visual puzzles—and to solve one complex problem. Teams were given intelligence scores based on their performance. Though the teams that had members with higher IQs didn’t earn much higher scores, those that had more women did.”

Finding the right mix of people on a team has been a consideration many organizations have dealt with in the past. These researchers hope to see how this information can help teams perform better in the future through changing members or incentives.

In the past, I taught teams how to get along better through the use of the Myers Briggs MBTI personality assessment instrument. Through understanding personalities, team members could learn about each other’s preferences for how they like to obtain information. This became more useful to the team as a whole. In my training experience, I found that even if a team had members with high IQ’s, they needed to understand why other members of the teams did the things they did and required the information they required in the format that fit their needs. It was important to understand the collective needs of the team in order for the team to be successful.

With the study by Wooley and Malone, they bring up the use of their findings in understanding collective intelligence. According to Malone, “Families, companies, and cities all have collective intelligence. But as face-to-face groups get bigger, they’re less able to take advantage of their members. That suggests size could diminish group intelligence. But we suspect that technology may allow a group to get smarter as it goes from 10 people to 50 to 500 or even 5,000. Google’s harvesting of knowledge, Wikipedia’s high-quality product with almost no centralized control—these are just the beginning. What we’re starting to ask is, How can you increase the collective intelligence of companies, or countries, or the whole world?”

11 Momentous Female Firsts in Academia
Most Inspiring Women Entrepreneurs
Can’t Affored the Myers Briggs MBTI? A Free Way to Determine Your Personality Type and Job Preferences
It’s Not You It’s Your Personality: Skills to Survive and Thrive in the Modern Workplace

Top 100 Vocabulary Words That Adults Should Know

Educators often use words with meanings that students may not fully understand. Rather than looking foolish and asking for an explanation, students may go through years of schooling and not truly grasp the meaning of important terminology.

After consulting with a past English teacher, my sister, Lesley Hamilton, and a future English teacher, my daughter, Terra Rothpletz, we came up with a list of 100 words that are dispersed by educators but not necessarily understood by students. Rather than list the definitions here, I thought it might be better to just include the link so that you could test yourself. Look at the following words and see how well you do. To find out the definitions, just click on the word.

Boomers Worry More about Their Brain than Their Body

Baby Boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, have long been associated with having rejected traditional values. Their notions about what they value in terms of their mind and body may not fit the traditional outlook as well. Although they fear cancer and heart disease, it may be a surprise to note that they list “fear of memory loss” as their second biggest concern. Cancer is their first and heart disease their third. This information was obtained from a Strong.com poll by Knowledge Networks of Menlo Park, conducted through interviewing 1078 Baby Boomers.

As boomers age, they aren’t taking care of their health as well as they could. In the article Boomers Losing the Battle of the Bulge, the Arizona Republic reported, “Boomers are more obese than other generations, a new poll says, setting them up for unhealthy senior years. Only half of the obese Boomers say they are regularly exercising.”

Rather than focusing on having a healthy weight, Boomers are working on avoiding dementia. In this same article it was noted, “More than half of Boomers polled say they regularly do mental exercises such as crossword puzzles.”

Marilynn Mobley from Baby Boomer Insights reported, “We boomers live in fear of being diagnosed with Alzheimers. Too many of us have watched our grandparents die with it and some of us are already dealing with parents who are showing signs of dementia or Alzheimer’s. Now, there’s evidence that our fear is not unfounded. We boomers are actually now regarded as “Generation Alzheimers.” One out of every eight of us will die with or from the disease. And unlike other common boomer diseases like diabetes, arthritis, and heart conditions, there’s really nothing we can do about it. There’s no cure; in fact, there’s not even a known way to significantly slow the progression of the disease.”

Boomers are not the only ones that fear Alzheimer’s. They may have good reason for this. The Examiner.com recently reported statistics from: The Metlife Foundation survey, What America Thinks. “Recent estimates show more than 26 million people worldwide have Alzheimer’s. The number of Americans aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s disease is estimated to reach 7.7 million in 2030 – a greater than 50 percent increase from today because of the aging Baby Boomer population.”

Value of Top Companies

The following is a list of the estimated value of some of the top companies in 2011. They are listed in order of highest to lowest value.

Apple – TechCrunch recently reported that Apple’s value is now worth as much as Microsoft, HP and Dell combined. Valued at over $300 billion, Apple continues to grow. For more specifics, click here: Apple Value

Microsoft – Recent estimates put Microsoft’s value at about $200 billion. Skype – Microsoft’s recent purchase assessed Skype’s value at $8.5 billion.

Google – Google’s value has been estimated to be $192 billion as of January, 2011. For more specifics on this income including Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s net income, click here: Google Value. Youtube – Recent estimates put Youtube’s value around $1.3 billion. Google paid $1.6 billion for Youtube in 2006.

Facebook – Facebook was valued at $82.9 billion in January and that number continues to grow.

Amazon – In January, it was reported that Facebook passed Amazon’s value. Amazon still showed a $75.2 billion worth. For more specifics, click here: Amazon Value

HP – Recent estimates put HP’s value at about $72.8 billion.

Dell – Recent estimates put Dell’s value at about $29.3 billion.

Groupon – Recent estimates put Groupon’s Value at as much as $25 billion.

Twitter – It is suggested that Twitter’s value is around $7.7 billion.

Linkedin – Recent estimates put LinkedIn’s value at over $4 billion.

The Most Useful Articles about How to Use Twitter

via google.com

As Twitter grows and develops, so does the need to understand how to use Twitter as an effective marketing tool. Companies and individuals that still have confusion with understanding hashtags, obtaining followers or how to remove annoying followers, should check out this list of the top Twitter articles:

Best Twitter Articles of 2010 – Bloggodown.com gives an exhaustive list of everything you want to know about Twitter.
How to Find Hashtags on Twitter – This article explain hashtags and joining conversations on Twitter. Hashtags are a popular way to start up a conversation about a specific topic within Twitter. By putting the # sign before a subject, it creates a conversation that others can join.
The Ultimate Guide to Getting Twitter Followers – Dave Larson from Tweetsmarter.com explains the 6 ways to get Twitter followers including how to build a reputation, self-promotion, becoming a reciprocator, understanding automation, joining following groups, and avoiding spamming.
Deciphering Twitter: Twictionary Terms can be Very Intwesting – As Twitter grows in popularity, so does the number of terms that are associated with the site. Check out some of the most popularly used Twitter terms.
How to Block People on Twitter – One big difference between being on Twitter as compared to being on Facebook is that people can follow you without your consent. That may lead to some situations that you find to be bothersome, including unsolicited contact or having to sift through a bombardment of tweets on your homepage.

According to AssociatedContent.com you can block people on Twitter by:

“Log into your Twitter account using your unique username and password. If you use a public computer, do not forget to mark the ‘Do not remember me on this computer option’ to protect your personal info.
If the user you wish to block is already following you, go to your ‘Followers’ list. Browse among your connections and click on the personal profile of the unwanted contact. Alternatively, just type the person’s Twitter name on the search box and click on enter.
While on the person’s profile, you will see a gear icon on the top center of the screen (next to the ‘Message’ box). Once you click on it, a drop-down menu will reveal the options ‘Mention,’ ‘Block,’ or ‘Report for spam.’
Click on ‘Block’ and you have successfully blocked the spammer. Moreover, a box ‘Blocked’ with a red line will appear on the user’s profile replacing the ‘Following’ box.

What happens later if you decide you blocked someone that you would rather not block? Check out how to unblock Twitter followers.

The Top 100 Most Followed on Twitter – Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber and President Obama are usually pretty high on this list.
Quality vs. Quantity on Twitter – LameTwitterMarketing.com explains why it is important to have quality over quantity when marketing on Twitter.

Are Women Making Teams Smarter?

Are Women Making Teams Smarter?

Related articles

Top 100 Vocabulary Words That Adults Should Know

Related articles

Boomers Worry More about Their Brain than Their Body

Related articles

Value of Top Companies

Related articles

The Most Useful Articles about How to Use Twitter

Related articles