priorities – Pertinent Observations

The Law Of Comparative Advantage and Priorities

Over a decade ago I had written about two kinds of employees – those who offer “competitive advantage” and those who offer “comparative advantage”.

Quoting myself:

So in a “comparative advantage” job, you keep the job only because you make it easier for one or more colleagues to do more. You are clearly inferior to these colleagues in all the “components” of your job, but you don’t get fired only because you increase their productivity. You become the Friday to their Crusoe.

On the other hand, you can keep a job for “competitive advantage“. You are paid because there are one or more skills that the job demands in which you are better than your colleagues

Now, one issue with “comparative advantage” jobs is that sometimes it can lead to people being played out of position. And that can reduce the overall productivity of the team, especially when priorities change.

Let’s say you have 2 employees A and B, and 2 high-priority tasks X and Y. A dominates B – she is better and faster than B in both X and Y. In fact, B cannot do X at all, and is inferior to A when it comes to Y. Given these tasks and employees, the theory of comparative advantage says that A should do X and B should do Y. And that’s how you split it.

In this real world problem though, there can be a few issues – A might be better at X than B, but she just doesn’t want to do X. Secondly, by putting the slower B on Y, there is a floor on how soon Y can be delivered.

And if for some reason Y becomes high priority for the team, with the current work allocation there is no option than to just wait for B to finish Y, or get A to work on Y as well (thus leaving X in the lurch, and the otherwise good A unhappy). A sort of no win situation.

The whole team ends up depending on the otherwise weak B, a sort of version of this:

A corollary is that if you have been given what seems like a major responsibility it need not be because you are good at the task you’ve been given responsibility for. It could also be because you are “less worse” than your colleagues at this particular thing than you are at other things.

Priorities are a zero sum game

This came out of a WhatsApp group flame war, but it’s true – priorities are a zero sum game. Whenever you prioritise something, it comes at the cost of something that you have deprioritised.

If you say that “A is a priority in addition to B”, you are being dishonest, for in your book you can either prioritise A, or you can prioritise B. If you want to increase the priority of B, it necessarily comes at the cost of A.

It doesn’t matter what you are talking about here. It could be national economic policy. It could be your company’s vision statement. It could be about how you choose to spend your time. It could be how a computer operating system works. Priorities are necessarily an ordered list, and there is always something that is of the highest priority.

This, however, doesn’t mean that priorities cannot change. A good system is one in which priorities are dynamic, and change according to the needs of the situation. A good example of changing priorities is the “shortest remaining time job first” paradigm that operating systems use.

Reasons for voting

A vote is fundamentally a blunt instrument. Each voter has exactly one vote, and this one vote needs to express the voter’s opinion on a large range of issues.

Since you are extremely unlikely to have a unique candidate for every combination of issues, a voter can’t have it all. He must be prepared to compromise on certain issues, in order to get his way on certain other issues.

This is where the voter’s preferences and objectives matter. In the longlist of issues, certain issues matter more to certain people than certain other issues. And voters usually put a “don’t care condition” on their less important issues, so that they can get their way on the more important ones.

So some voters might be okay voting in a racist if he promises to bring them jobs. Other voters might be okay to “sacrifice” cow protection because they believe the reduction in corruption is more important. Some others might be willing to throw minority citizens under the bus if that implies stronger labour protection. And so forth.

If a racist has won the election, it doesn’t mean that all those who voted for him are racist – there are surely racists among his supporter base, but many others voted for him simply because racism is not something they care that deeply about. Similarly, if a religious bigot has won, it doesn’t mean everyone who voted for him was a bigot – all it means is that bigotry was a less important issue for many of these voters.

The problem with a lot of the mainstream media and “commentariat” (in different countries) is that they somehow assume that all voters need to have the same set of preferences and priorities as them. And when that doesn’t happen, and results go against them, they start questioning the morals of their voters. An appreciation of diversity (that different people have different priorities) can help in this matter – assuming that everyone ought to have the same priorities is illiberal.

In this regard, an understanding of what voters’ priorities are is an important tool to frame campaign strategy, which can help politicians determine what areas of their manifestoes to lay more focus on. I had done this kind of an analysis prior to the Maharashtra elections two years ago, for example (based on a painstakingly elaborate survey by Daksh and the Association for Democratic Reforms).

I had taken pairs of communities, and compared them in terms of the order in which they ranked different key issues. The survey I based this on hadn’t asked for the respondents’ views on who they were voting for (that wasn’t the purpose of the survey), if we were to do this kind of preference ranking of voters of different parties, it will soon become evident why the election turned in a certain way.

Finally, the result of an election is usually a result of the issues that were on top of most voters’ priorities. The same parties with the same manifestoes across elections can lead to widely different results, only because the voters’ preferences have changed! It’s time for politicians and the media to chew on that.

Opening up, yet again

I go through these introverted and extroverted phases. I started off as a loner, and then something happened during a class picnic to Coorg in 1997 that changed me, for what I thought was forever. I suddenly started opening up, made new friends, talked more to my existing friends, gave up all my inhibitions and basically had a good time. That phase continued maybe for a year and half, or maybe more, and then I shut down again. In IIT, I started oscillating wildly. At times I’d be aloof and keep to myself, at other times I’d walk across to the coffee shop in front of my hostel, buy myself a cup of cheap Nescafe and sit down, with random people, and talk and talk and talk.

Between five and two years back, I went through an “online extrovert” phase. I’d forever be online. When available, I’d have an average of four GTalk windows open, chatting with different people about random things. The first thing I’d do when I switched on my home computer would be to find people who were online and message them. It was a lot of fun, though the person who ended up being my wife found it weird that I spent most of my time online, chatting (it did help, though, that she would often be one of the people I was chatting with).

Certain “life changes” and redefinition of priorities and some unexplainable stuff meant that I shut down once again around two years back. Ironically this came only a couple of months after I thought I’d truly opened up and gotten rid of my inhibitions. I suddenly had less time to just “be online”. I’d hardly talk to people. GTalk being blocked in office meant that I disappeared off so many radars which were tuned in my direction. I had less time for “frivolous chatting” after work, and one by one I got “out of touch” with all those people I would chat with regularly. Things were quite good otherwise in life so I didn’t exactly bother, I must mention. Among the side effects of this, I think, was that my writing quality suffered. As did my network, of course.

To illustrate, I spent three weeks in New York City in January 2010. Then, I made every attempt to contact friends and acquaintances who lived in that area. And met them for lunches and dinners fairly regularly. I tried counting the number of people I met during that trip, but it was easy to lose count. I had a good time, I must say. In February 2011, I was in New York City yet again. This time, though, I didn’t make any effort to meet anyone, didn’t inform anyone I was in town. I had most of my dinners alone, in a list of restaurants I’d gathered from a few friends. I met one relative, and one friend (this was by chance), and that was it.

Over the last few days I’ve started making a conscious effort to open up again. Once again, whenever someone suggests we meet, I make it a point to go. I’m making an effort to not bail out of social engagements citing “NED”. I met a friend for tea on Friday, another for tea on Saturday, had a long phone chat with yet another on Friday night and met a whole bunch of people I don’t often meet for dinner on Saturday. And I had a lot of fun in all of them! I do hope I can continue with this streak for a while, and also need to figure out how to expand my network. Anyway, the more perceptive of you would have noticed by now that I’m blogging a lot more nowadays.

A View From the Other Side

For the first time ever, a few days bck, I was involved in looking at resumes for campus recruitment, and helping people in coming up with a shortlist. These were resumes from IIMB and we were looking to recruit for the summer internship. Feeling slightly jobless, I ended up taking more than my fair share of CVs to evaluate. Some pertinent observations

There was simply way too much information on peoples’ CVs. I found it stressful trying to hunt down pieces of information that would be relevant for the job that I was recruiting for. IIMB restricts CVs to one page, but even that, I felt, was too much. Considering I was doing some 30 CVs at a page a minute, I suppose you know how tough things can be!
The CVs were too boring. The standard format certainly didn’t help. And the same order that people followed -undergrad scores followed by workex followed by “positions of responsibility” etc. Gave me a headache!
People simply didn’t put in enough effort to make things stand out. IIMB people overdo the bolding thing (I’m also guilty of that), thus devaluing it. And these guys used no other methods to make things stand out. Even if they’d done something outstanding in their lives, one had to dig through the CV to find it..
There was way too much irrelevant info. In their effort to fill a page and fill some standard columns, people ended up writing really lame stuff. Like how they had led their wing football team in the intra-hostel tournament. Immense wtfness. Most times this ended up devaluing the CV
Most CVs were “standard”. It was clear that people didn’t make an effort to apply to us! Most people had sent us their “finance CV” but would you send the same CV for an accounting job as you will for a quant job? Ok yeah I understand this is summers, but if I see a CV with priorities elsewhere, I won’t shortlist them!
By putting in several rounds of resume checking and resume workshops, IIMB is doing a major disservice to recruiters. What we see are some average potential corporate whores, not the idiosyncracies of the candidates. Recruiting was so much more fun when I’d gone to IITM three years back. Such free-spirited CVs and all that! This one is too sanitised for comfort. Give me naughtyboy123@yahoo.com any day
People should realize that campus recruitment is different from applying laterally. In the latter, yours is one of the few CVs that the recruiter is looking at and can hence devote much more time going through the details. Unfortunately this luxury is not there when one has to shortlist 20 out of 180 or so, so you need to tailor your CVs better. You need to be more crisp and to the point, and really highlight your best stuff. And if possible, to try and break out of standard formatI admit my CV doesn’t look drastically different from the time it did when I was in campus (apart from half a page of workex that got added), but I think even there I would make sure I put a couple of strongly differentiating points right on top, and hopefully save the recruiter the trouble of going through the whole thing.
I think I’m repeating myself on this but people need to realize that recruiters don’t care at all about your extra-currics unless you’ve done something absolutely spectacular, or if there is some really strong thread running through that section. So you don’t need to write about all the certificates that you have in your file

The bottom line is that recruitment is a hard job, especially when you have to bring down a list of 200 to 20 in very quick time. So do what you can to make the recruiter’s job easy. Else he’ll just end up putting NED and pack you.