Better To Be Likeable Than Competent...

At least according to the Boston Globe article titled Don't underestimate the value of social skills, in which Penelope Trunk quotes an HBS faculty member as follows:

'In fact, across the board, in a wide variety of businesses, people would rather work with someone who is likable and incompetent than with someone who is skilled and obnoxious, said Tiziana Casciaro, a professor at Harvard Business School. "How we value competence changes depending on whether we like someone or not," she says.'

I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President...

local tags: culture, identity, organizations, quality, social_systems

On The (Phone) Line

Some startling numbers about call center employment, from the newsletter Knowledge@Wharton:

"an estimated 3% of the U.S. workforce [is] employed in call centers"

That's a greater share of the total than for all farm payrolls and agricultural production across the U.S.

"Call centers... typically experience a 30% annual turnover in employees."

Not as high as some meat processing facilities, but getting there...

"In some cases the mean duration of employment is 17 days."

Which I believe at one point was the expected lifetime of a freshly deployed infantryman for the Soviet Army on the Eastern Front during WWII...

local tags: call_centers, career, economy, globalization