• WITH ‘VIRTUAL WORK’ HERE TO STAY, the importance of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is becoming as important as Intelligence Quotient (IQ). EQ is about awareness of emotions – personal and those of others – with an “ability to apply & manage this awareness to tasks like thinking and problem solving.”  Research suggests that nine-in-ten high performers have high EQ, exhibiting behaviors like “observing & reading the room, reacting to non-verbal communication, knowing when to pause/stop/double-down with empathy to drive outcomes.” Tips for evaluating EQ through video interviews include positioning questions to obtain examples of: (1) Key inflection points or moments where new skills were developed or influential in relationships with customers or coworkers; (2) Ability to use technical/professional skills via Zooming; (3) Also, just observing the degree to which a candidate maintains eye contact and uses the screen share to show work… Creativity in recruitment are musts today.”  [FAST COMPANY – 11/30/20]
  • SENIORS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN EASIER TARGETS FOR SCAMMERS but the Covid pandemic has made it easier still, as many essential services – particularly banking & healthcare – necessarily became digital. Over a quarter million cases related to stimulus payments alone, combined with phony ‘telehealth’ phishing attacks, fake ads offering adorable animal companions, and ‘holiday’ donation requests or gift sale pitches have resulted in seniors being “defrauded almost daily,” tricking individuals into giving up personal info for scammers to tap retirement savings and in some cases life savings. Pathetic, but reality. [THE HILL – 12/2/20]
  • “NO LIBERAL DEMOCRACY IS CONTENT TO ENTRUST CONCENTRATED POLITICAL POWER to individuals based on assumptions about their good intentions… but the emergence of gigantic internet platforms that wield so much control over political communication, by disseminating info and coordinating mobilization, pose unique threats & harms to democracy… Info about peoples’ lives that prior monopolists never had (friends, family, incomes, possessions, intimate details) which could be used to exploit a public official or in conjunction with a government agency (imagine teaming up with a politicized justice department?)…The First Amendment envisioned a marketplace of ideas where competition, rather than regulation, protected public discourse & decision-making, but in a world where large platforms amplify, suppress and target political messaging, that marketplace breaks down.” The impact of internet control is also economic damage from market distortion, since “once a company has amassed data on hundreds of million users, it can move into completely new markets and beat established firms lacking similar knowledge to dominate, swallow up potential rivals, and/or make further competition impossible.” The challenge of remedy is formidable.  [FOREIGN AFFAIRS – Jan/Feb 2021]
  • “WHAT IS ‘WOKE’ CULTURE if not the howl of a generation of underemployed humanities graduates? If postmodern theories vanished from campus, would this surplus of frustrated grads really just go about their lives as room-temperature liberals?… Most MBAs never shine on Wall Street, just as most Washington lifers never land a West Wing desk. Not quite elite, yet too successful for sympathy… And, as graduates have multiplied faster than room at the top, their relationship with their own class sours from peripheral membership to vicious resentment…stemming beyond the precise flavor of their indoctrination as much as the raw number of students – given only so many jobs in publishing, news media, and seats in congress.” The absence of growth in glamour jobs to correlate with future graduates (and their student debt), has created potential for “a movement uniting the not-quite-elite with the Hillbilly Elegy class of populists which no governing program can both serve, and ‘politics of the street’ are likely to increase.”  [FINANCIAL TIMES – 12/1/20]
  • THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK:

“People who master the art of living are guided by an internal compass. They might not always stay on track, but have a way of always returning to the proper course…  The exception are politicians, whose creed is: ‘I have never behaved improperly.’ (But I reserve the right to decide what is proper.)”