Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jul 27, 2012

Article of the Week
How Companies Will Googlefy Your Career (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: The best way to understand the trajectory of your high performance career tomorrow is to look at what’s happening to college undergraduates today. Judgment and personal experience will matter less. Statistical context will matter more. America is now training a next generation workforce that accepts a prominent and dominant role for predictive analytics in performance assessment.

Editor’s Choice Articles
The Key Missing Ingredient In Leadership Today (Forbes)
Big Idea: Real leadership is about transforming the system.  Leadership is not merely about success. Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King were great leaders, not because they were successful within their different worlds, or even because they were successful despite the constraints of their worlds. They were great leaders because they transformed their worlds.

Why Rating Goals Doesn’t Work (The Rypple Blog)
Big Idea: Whether you’re rating goals numerically or using qualitative ratings like “performs well” and “underperforms,” it reduces goals — whether they be hard success metrics or soft, behavior-based personal objectives — to impersonal measures you can quantify and rate. It forces equality between disparate goals, whether they be significant, long-term personal improvements or quarterly, performance-based metrics.

The X Factor That Will Determine Marissa Mayer’s Success At Yahoo (Fast Company)
Big Idea: If your success depends on how cool others think you are, and that depends on how cool you believe yourself to be, it’s worthwhile to sit down for a minute to pick apart what it takes to own your coolness. It will trigger a self-fulfilling cycle. Here are three tips to start.

Why Aren’t You Delegating? (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Delegation is a critical skill. “Your most important task as a leader is to teach people how to think and ask the right questions so that the world doesn’t go to hell if you take a day off,” says Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II. Delegation benefits managers, direct reports, and organizations. Yet it remains one of the most underutilized and underdeveloped management capabilities.

Yes, You Can Brainstorm Without Groupthink (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: We are strong advocates of collaboration in innovation, and believe that the proper use of brainstorming techniques is a powerful tool in the collaborative approach. Over our many years of experience, we have seen managers effectively use three simple techniques for avoiding “Groupthink” during brainstorming. Here’s our advice.

Keep Experts on Tap, Not on Top (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Generalists are those who have broad knowledge but lack deep domain expertise. Most generalists do not claim to be expert at anything, making them psychologically more receptive to ideas distant or different from their own. They are, it seems, more aware of what they do not know and understand that there is a large body of information that they do not know they do not know.  Why does this matter? When facing massive uncertainty, as exists in today’s highly interconnected global economy, it is essential to appreciate both what one does know as well as what one does not know.