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Eric Schultz The annual review can be an uncomfortable event, but a 360-Degree Performance Review (the “360”) is one of the more harrowing proceedings that can befall a professional, business or academic. In a 360 you are asked to grade yourself against a series of attributes, everything from ethics to leadership to Gilbert Stuart's 1797 portrait of George Washington listening skills and coaching. Then, everyone in your “ecosystem” gets a crack at you, sometimes anonymously. This means your boss, often your boss’s boss or peers, your own peers and subordinates, and then some sampling of customers and vendors. Scores are averaged, and then you’re ready (or not) to talk with your boss about why you think your “collaboration with others” is an “8” while the 360 consensus shows it’s a “4.” A good 360—and there is such a thing, when done well—will reinforce your positives and give you additional incentive to fix the things you generally knew were broken anyway. A traumatic 360, however,...

[ We repost this piece by Eric Schultz, which originally appeared on November 19, 2013. ] Eric B. Schultz Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked the holidays. I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza. Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a C...

Eric Schultz As part of a recent parents weekend at a fine New England educational institution, I had the pleasure of watching Peter Norvig,  director of research at Google, demonstrate Google’s Ngram Viewer  (Ngram section starts around 9:30).  Released in December 2010, Ngram (Wikipedia tells us ) is a “phrase-usage graphing tool” that charts the yearly count of selected n-grams (letter combinations), or words and phrases.  The Google database currently includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 containing 500 billion words in American English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese Peter Norvig’s example that day illustrated the power of the Ngram database, comparing the word combinations “The United States is” and “The United States are.” The result seems logical: the singular “is” becomes the dominant verb after the American Civil War.  This was a relatively straightforward example, however, and I should warn as you r...

Eric Schultz I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation . It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful.  The 150th commemoration included a retelling of the battle and featured first-person accounts. Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town. As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history. For example, there were lots (and lots) of fo...

Eric B. Schultz Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.   Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from A Jack Delano photo of migrants heading north from Florida, 1940. World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns . There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.   Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project , scheduled for completion in 2016. In his monumental What Ha...

Eric Schultz Spring 1976. Wilson Hall, Brown University. The late, great Professor William McLoughlin has just informed his 85 students in “American Social and Intellectual History” that they are to write their first paper. All he has given us is the title: “The Age of Jefferson and Adams.” We groan. Then he adds: “Keep it to three pages or less. Double-spaced.” We smile. Three pages? How hard can that be? “If you make the margins too wide,” McLoughlin adds, “I’ll mark you down a grade.” Needless to say, nobody got an A on that paper, or so the good professor informed us. There may have been a B or two. Not me. It was all I could do to contain my flowery opening paragraph to a single page. Some of us recovered slightly in round two, wherein we committed “The Age of Lincoln and Calhoun” to three, double-spaced pages. Some retreated to organic chemistry and other more reasonable challenges. Little did I know, but I had just been introduced to Big Data —though it would take 35 years to...

Eric Schultz Brian Williams recently featured a story on the NBC Nightly News about the bureaucratic nightmare that has more than 900,000 American veterans awaiting disability benefits from the government. The Veterans Administration is promising to have the backlog cleared by the end of 2015, but for now, the average wait time is 273 days. After hearing this I had a flashback of sorts and walked downstairs into the basement, past the water softener and over by the Christmas ornaments to find the musty blue Rubbermaid tubs filled with my King Philip’s War notes from over twenty years ago.  Sure enough, there was the file marked “Veterans.”  I began leafing through it. In December 1675, 696 Massachusetts Bay soldiers mustered on Dedham Plain, thought to be the present Hyde Park section of Boston. They were to march south and meet with soldiers assembling in Plymouth and Connecticut colonies to form a thousand-man army and attack the Narragansetts in their large fort at today’...

Eric Schultz . Earlier this month, the American Psychological Association released a study called Stress in America , concluding that Millennials, 18 to 33-year-old From "Science Nation - Teens and Stress" (NSF) Americans, along with Gen Xers (34-47), are the most stressed generations in America.   On a scale of 1-10, the average American defines a healthy level of stress as 3.6 but feels a level of 4.9.   Millennials and Gen Xers are at 5.4, a level the study concludes is “far higher than Boomers’ average stress level of 4.7 and Matures’ [67 and over] of 3.7.” Thirty-nine percent of Millennials say their stress has increased in the last year, while 52 percent report having lain awake at night in the past month due to stress.   “Millennials and Gen Xers are most likely to say that they are stressed by work, money and job stability, while Boomers and Matures are more likely to be concerned with health issues affecting their families and themselves,” the study concluded . ...