http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html?pagewanted=2

In an interview in the New York Times today,  a senior HR person at Google says two very interesting things.

Firstly:

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

Some of us Metapsychology therapists have known for a while that if you concentrate on exploring with Tell me a condition you have had to face, how have you handled it?, powerful stuff is unleashed, and it's a good candidate technique for handling a personality disorder. 

Secondly - and before you read this, you need to know that GPA stands for "Grade Point Average" and is how every American's college career is statistically assessed - to a fetishistic degree:

One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.
After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.
Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Lion Taming

Lion Taming is a metaphor for the activity of trying to handle CEOs, leaders, Type A personalities, major politicians, aid donors and people of influence in order to bend them to one's will.
The name comes from an interesting book called Lion Taming by Steven Katz.
IMHO the most ignored and most important part of psychology is the psychology of how to handle these people.  Let's say you come up with a brilliant idea for fixing the economy, curing mental health problems, solving the Arab-Israeli conflict - whatever, the hard work starts AFTER you have come up with the solution, because most people don't want problems solving, they want to hold on to their problems and they don't want someone else pissing on their territory.

We have just come back from a literacy conference in Nepal, where the good news is that they recognise that they have a serious literacy problem, and the bad news is that when we offered a solution, the audience was (mostly) stupefied into silence.  In fact, we are probably the only people who know how to handle Nepal's literacy problem (after all, our Indian activities are proof), but I haven't had a single phone call from the Nepalese Min of Ed begging me to sort his problem out. 

The ONLY way I know how to handle these people is to tell them that they are absolutely right, no matter what they say.  I may be the only time it is morally defensible to flagrantly lie.
I am embarassed to say I have several friends in the USA who are staunch Republicans and are pro-guns and anti-welfare.  I have found that telling them that they are absolutely right has a wonderful effect  - they forget what they were arguing about and change the subject.

Sub-Personalities: Who's Calling The Shots? by Natasha Dern

Those of us who have been delivering extremely effective therapy using Metapsychology for many years have a secret.  There's a technique we use which we don't tell anyone about because it sounds bonkers, but is stupendously effective.

Today I read an article in Huffington Post which is a very good description of the phenomenon (but not the technique - we don't give away all our secrets).

Here is the article in full.  I apologise for lack of Randomized Control Trials supporting the content.  Regrettably the sort of person who writes this type of article tends not to believe in RCTs, which is probably holding back human evolution by many years.  I will try and organise one on the subject at the earliest opportunity.  Really!  

Here's the full link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/natasha-dern/sub-personalities-whos-ca_b_447845.html

Sub-personalities are like children - they need and demand a lot and often insist on getting their way. They keep nagging at you, screaming or throwing a tantrum when things do not materialize. Are your sub-personalities demanding that you act in inappropriate ways, say and do things that you might later regret? Forcing you to throw caution to the wind, act on their whims in the moment, and later declare that it just happened. In other words, who's calling the shots?
When you over identify with a particular wound it creates an emotional blueprint within your emotional body referred to as a sub-personality. Without realizing, you begin to build your whole identity and life around this blueprint, thus believing it is who you really are. Your sub-personality is not the real YOU, it is a part of you but it is not you. To make this distinction is crucial. You need to realize that a sub-personality suffering from lack of self esteem or low self worth is only a part of you, an extension of your emotional body. Rather than identifying yourself as 'I am insecure' you need to state 'A part of me is insecure'. This kind of discernment is truly empowering. It removes this insecure sub-personality from the position of power and puts you in the driver's seat.
Sub-personalities, in transpersonal psychology, are personas or pieces of the whole of the overall personality, which have a life of their own, beliefs, thoughts, feelings, intentions and agendas. There's the rebel and the martyr, the seducer and the saboteur, the judge and the critic and a host of others, each with its own mythology, all co-existing within a person. Issues and conflict arise when the polarity of a sub-personality becomes imbalanced. When opposing tensions sets in, the mind is clouded with conflicting views, which hinders its ability to make decisions that are appropriate. How can you figure out which sub-personality/personalities are calling the shots?
Start by taking stock of your outlook on life, by reviewing your behavior in various situations, and all the ways you express yourself in any given moment. When you recognize a sub-personality, you will be able to step outside it and observe its complex nature. By doing this, you will no longer completely identify with this or that sub-personality. Instead, you will begin to see the many faces of your soul and appreciate the value of each one.
We have many sub-personalities within us, each one of them has a story to tell. Each one views the world differently. Each one interprets the events of life differently. You need to acquaint yourself with the ones that are controlling your behavior, your thinking or your choices. Some sub-personalities are not harmful; they exist to support your well-being. Your attention needs to focus on the one/ones that constantly provoke and invoke, react and attack. These sub-personalities are hurt and angry, wounded and are in need of healing. To work with these energies requires patience and certain level of detachment in order to relate to them objectively. As mentioned above, the way you start is by identifying which sub-personality you have given power to, which one you have enabled to rule your life. You need to shift your thinking, and begin to perceive these sub-personalities as parts of you rather than 'It' being you.
Furthermore, to assess the validity of the demands and needs of a sub-personality before you take any form of action is essential. Pay special attention to the sub-personalities that are persistent, almost desperate. These sub-personalities are not guided by wisdom or insight, like children they have no boundaries and lack any form of discipline, and will be quite forceful in their attempt to make you act and carry out their intentions. You have to be strong and step back and evaluate if acting on their counsel will be good for the long term.
The difficult part when working with sub-personalities is the gaining of co-operation, and not just from the dominant ones, but the suppressed ones too. The dominant one needs to make room or allow the suppressed sub-personality to come through for transformation to take place and re-integrate back into the Self. This journey may take a while but it will be accompanied by breakthroughs and insights, freedom and healing, and above all, harmony of the inner life.

A very short but excellent lesson in Economics

A very clever reader in the New York Times has summed up the fundamental essence of economics as follows:

Income Inequality May Take Toll on Growth

Brookhawk Maryland
In the end, the economy is about passing money around, from hundreds to millions of people to hundreds of millions of other people. The more people the money passes to and from, the more vibrant the economy. When the money begins to move largely into one group and fewer people have it to pass around, they pass it only to each other or don't pass it at all, and the economy withers and dies.
Why is this so hard to understand?

Adult literacy in the UK

I recently contacted the administrators of adult literacy departments of two London boroughs - Lambeth and Hammersmith & Fulham.  I offered my services as a literacy expert free, together with our program, ReadingWise English, to help them in their efforts to make adults literate in their boroughs.  I was terribly polite.  Both persons did not take up my offer.  I don't understand what's wrong with these people.

Outline plan for anti-petty-corruption projects

This is a tentative series of actions to take in a corrupt area.
The purpose is to begin to show actions that work, and actions that don't work.
We're starting from scratch here.
We can hopefully piggy-back on other development projects so there is minimal cost.

The theory is that by observing something, you change its behaviour.
This is a well known principle in quantum physics, but we are now trying to apply it to ethics.
We are going to perform a series of steps on a gradient, starting off with something very simple.

These steps involve the suspected person, and an observer.  The observer is employed by us for the purpose of this project.  They will have a "cover story".  Something like they are doing an independent monitoring project on behalf of a prestigious UK/US university.  

Note that the suspected person will often be the bottom of a corrupt pile, and not our main target.  But we use them as a  conduit to their superiors.

Step A1a
Principle: Notice something is wrong, and be seen to be observing it.
Action: The observer with a clipboard wanders around silently. Preferably the observer is foreign.  A recent study in Bangalore found that Bangaloreans are 2.4 times more likely to learn something if the person imparting it is a foreigner.

Step A1b
As per #1a, but in addition to the clipboard, the observer wanders around with a recording device.  Note that most smartphones and tablets have recording apps.

Step A2
Principle: Notice something is wrong, and point it out to the person concerned.
Action:  The observer tells the suspected person that they will receive a copy of the report, but no one else will.

Step 3
As per step 2, but let the suspected person know that their superiors will be informed.

Step 4
As per step 3, but let the suspected person know that findings will be published widely.

In all the above, the suspected person is NOT informed beforehand about the presence of the observer.

Steps B1-B4
The above steps can and should be repeated where the suspected person and his seniors ARE informed beforehand that an independent observer will be present.

UK Domestic Violence / Sexual Assault statistics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jul/22/domestic-violence-conviction-rate-high 

The latest statistics from the British Crime Survey show that every year in the UK more than 1 million women suffer domestic abuse, more than 300,000 are sexually assaulted and 60,000 are raped. But fewer than one in four people who suffer abuse by their partner and fewer than one in 10 women who experience serious sexual assault report it to the police.