The Outcome of Sterile Shapes
your Saturday roundup
Professionally, I focus on creating social benefit startups. In my Saturday morning emails I share what I’m learning and thinking. Topics range from better living and parenting to business and philosophy.
The Shape of Job Performance. Human traits like height—and perhaps intelligence—are normally distributed. However, traits like wealth, athletic performance, and creating highly cited scientific papers follow a power-law distribution. So, how is employee job performance distributed? This question shapes performance management and compensation strategies. If performance is normally distributed, programs like stack ranking and managing out the bottom 10% might seem reasonable. However, if performance follows a power law, such methods are flawed. There are reasons to believe a power-law model of performance, discrediting practices like “rank and yank.” Annual reviews often backfire, raising the question: Should we focus instead on continuous feedback (as in Radical Candor), peer-driven recognition, or other tools? How might AI impact this? Some suggest AI could help less experienced employees most, while others envision a future where a single AI-assisted individual creates a unicorn startup. Will AI normalize performance distributions or increase skew? And should pay reflect individual value-added as classical economics suggests—or is trading less salary for stability and less responsibility part of the trade-off for employees?
Sterile Insects. The idea of using gene-drive technology to wipe out malaria-carrying mosquitoes seems new, but the U.S. has used a similar idea since the 1950s. The sterile insect technique involves releasing sterile male insects (often made sterile using radiation) to compete with fertile males. Females that mate with sterile males can’t produce offspring, which lowers the population. This works best with species where females mate only once. Knowing this method has been used for decades, do you feel more confident about using genetic engineering to get rid of mosquitoes without causing unexpected problems?
Consensus or Outcome? Do you know when you’re playing a consensus or outcome game? Which do you spend more time doing? Is it a mark of status to play outcome games? “In the consensus game, people want to be seen has [sic] having favored the immediate winning side. Whatever decision is made by the end of the meeting, or in the next few days afterward, they want to seem to have favored that decision, and if possible also to have substantially influenced that decision. In the outcome game, people want to be seen as having favored the decision that gave the best outcome in the long run. If the project is approved and goes well, they want to have favored its approval, but if the project goes badly, they want to be seen as having opposed approval.”
Until next time,
Miles