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HR Metrics: You Have a 2% Chance of Dying in the Next 10 Years

I had to go to the doctor this week, for my annual physical. High cholesterol runs in my family, and my grandfather and father both passed away at an early age from heart related illness. So I go. I don’t like it, but I go.

So I’m at the doctor’s office with Dr. Vahameki, who is a really smart guy but a little crass even though he’s much younger than I am. This annoys me… that he is younger than I am yet he is my Doctor.

So we are doing our thing together, and out of the blue, he says with a slyly disguised snicker, “Would you like to know how long you’ll live?”

And I say, “Um, sure.”

And then he launches into this description of how medicine used to be all about diagnosing a problem, and then prescribing treatment, but that we have finally, because of data and analytics, begun moving into the Age of Predictive Medicine, which is much more useful. I agree on the usefulness piece, but remain annoyed.

So it turns out there’s study called the Framingham Heart Study, in which they took thousands of participants, and ran their LDL, HDL, age, weight and other factors through statistical analysis to create a predictive model of how likely you are to die from cardiovascular disease given ‘your numbers’.

So he takes me to this site, and plugs in my numbers from last year’s bloodwork, and it turns out I have a 2% chance of dying in the next 10 years from cardiovascular disease if my cholesterol levels remain where they are today.

And he says, “See, it’s not very likely…”

I try and hide my annoyance at him.

I reply, “But what if I were healthy and had lower “bad cholesterol” and greater “good cholesterol?” I can never remember which is which between all the Ls and Ds and Hs.

“You’d be at about 1 in out of a thousand, or 0.1%. But I have people in here all the time at 20-30% risk factor and those are the people that I’m really worried about.”

I am not thrilled at this good news. 2% seems high. A 1 in 50 chance of not making it to 2018. Now I am really annoyed.

I quickly get dressed and get out of there.

So for the last week, I’ve started eating healthy again and am back in the gym. But it got me thinking about the power of predictive modeling, and how far behind HR is in this space, generally speaking. This is why I love blogging. It makes you think differently about the world. One minute, I’m thinking about death and my annoying doctor, the next minute, HR analytics. Maybe I really do need a doctor.

I’m not a statistician, but for large sample sizes at large companies, there is a LOT of information that is just waiting to be discovered by progressive HR organizations who can pull the data and turn it into meaningful information. We had talked about doing this at Starbucks right before I left; running multivariate regression analysis against the thousands of store level staff to better predict attrition and the demographic trends that play out when you have large sample sizes of people.

But HR is rarely predictive. It tends to be more like ‘old medicine’, identifying what is wrong and then prescribing a fix. “You see, your attrition spiked so now we need to recruit more…..” Exit interviews. Employee relations. Compensation reviews. Most all of it analyzes post data.

It is admittedly difficult to be predictive, but it is also because we don’t ask enough smart questions. We ought to be significantly better as an HR function at predicting things. Because predictive HR is a lot more helpful that diagnostic HR.

For example, we can reasonably predict what range the US unemployment level is likely to be in the next 2 years, by comparing the delta in unemployment from the top of the boom in 1999/2000 to the peak in unemployment in 2003 (50 basis points, or 2% points overall) and fudge a little for the gravity of the economic issues that we face. It’s probably going to jump to about 8% (we can now wait and see if I’m right). And from that, HR should be able to extrapolate candidate flow and inform a recruiting strategy and resourcing plan. But the vast majority of groups won’t ever do this.

I expect in the next decade (provided I make it that far), that we’ll see much more predictive HR at the best companies.

More Aggregation, Less Aggravation

I struggled with the title for this post. I wanted to call it “Facebook is a Seine Net for People” but that is the worst title for a blog post ever. I figured nobody would know what the Hell I was trying to say. Which I suppose might still be true.

Anyhow.

I started writing this post a few months ago, after spending way too much time being completely wrecked by jetlag and not being able to sleep in Dublin, Ireland and also trying to decide if I was going to attend my 20 year high school reunion after receiving the invite that week. I ended up not making the reunion (too much travel) but want to finish my thoughts on the experience related to the reunion.

It struck me after getting the invite to the High School Reunion (Evergreen High School, Vancouver, Washington, class of 1988) that this is likely the last time my friends from High School won’t be aggregated and assembled for me for a 10-year reunion. It’s the last time I won’t easily be able to keep in touch with them, from now until the end of my life. Never again will we accidentally lose touch with people; unless we want to (we all have some of those, er, friends). It’s a great example of the evolution of technology.

Because Facebook is a Seine Net for people. Which as I’ve said I am certain is the worst analogy you could use in a blog post, but that’s the image that I am stuck with in my mind. One big net, scooping up all the people and putting them in order…

10 years ago, in 1998, on of my best friends, Greg Boesel and I had to organize the 10 year reunion for Evergreen High School. Way back in 1988, he was President of the Class of 1988, and I was Vice President. Our other friend Tom Miller was Treasurer, and we ran as The Three Amigos as a ticket, and threw burritos to the crowd of constituents.

10 years later, when we then had to organize the 10 year reunion, the Internet was barely adopted (circa 1998), and we had to manually send out postcards and started the process with a 10-year old hardcopy list of everyone’s contact information, that I think we had leftover from high school that was printed out on one long sheet of dot matrix printer paper. Those were The Days. The reunion went off without a hitch as I recall, but we really didn’t keep in any better touch with the people over the last 10 years then we did in the 10 immediately years after high school. Of course we said we would, and then we didn’t. Or at least I didn’t. And they didn’t with me.

This year, the same company that did our 10 year reunion recreated the list from the data they had 10 years before, and they are leveraging some very rudimentary web technology to do it. But since this year’s event, nearly everyone is on Facebook (or will be) and we’ll now always be aggregated so that at the 30 year reunion, we’ll have kept in touch more and also be assembled and organized for future events. I’ve already connected with at least 20 people from my class in 1988, that found me on Facebook after one of the attendees got things started by patching the social graph back together. And they’ll see a newsfeed of this post on Facebook.

People talk a lot about the interconnectedness of the social graph, but I haven’t heard many people talk about its sustainability. This sustainability will be important, because it will create significant efficiencies in the world. For example, I just helped one of my classmates from High School get connected with some job opportunities at Microsoft. Because of the recent connections we made on Facebook. This created efficiency for him, but also for Microsoft because I delivered a viable, executive level candidate right to them.

Now here’s the big idea in this post: think about how efficient business and the world would be if all the people were perpetually better organized and all their related data and those interconnections were constantly organized by a (very much larger) Facebook. Everything goes faster and is more efficient when it’s tagged and organized. People. Business. Dating. The Talent Marketplace. High School Reunions.

Really think about that for a moment:

Right now, there’s estimated to be something like 6.7B people in the world. If we exclude third world countries that are not as active in the world economy, that leaves about 3.5 or 4B people that are really participating and engaged in the world economy. Facebook currently has 120M users (probably more), so they’ve already indexed 3 to 4% of all the economic participants. This to me sounds like a lot for a company that’s only been around a few years.

So maybe it’s not a seine net for people, but Facebook, or something like it, will be around for a very long time, helping all the world’s people do things faster, cheaper, and more efficiently, by scooping up all the people, and getting them organized.

On Paying Attention

This week I was the Conference Chairman for the fall ERE Expo conference, and I it was great to connect with so many people I hadn’t seen in awhile. I also met some truly incredible people.

It also turned out to be a period of discovery and clarity for me, as being back at an industry conference like this (I haven’t been to one since I joined Google, which was nearly 2 years ago) really brings a lot of perspective. We often get lost in the tracks of our lives and it’s so beneficial to step off the track that you are on every day and step onto another track for a change, and to really pay attention. Like when you ride a fast motorcycle, if you do that, you are really paying attention.

So in no particular order, here is what I discovered at ERE this year as I stopped to really pay attention:

Some of us experience the world radically differently than the rest.
Case in point: I met this intriguing woman named Melissa Sconyers that frankly, made me feel like I have been completely left behind.

We had an in depth discussion about Digital Natives (the Gen Yers who have grown up being digitally connected by cellular phones, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media) and the Digital Immigrants (I guess that’s me… those who are moving into understanding this other, more connected world that the younger generation takes as de facto.) It was really interesting to hear her perspective and realize that although she’s “young” (I think in her early twenties) she has lived a rich life that in large part is due to her passion for social and digital media. She is one of those ‘special people’ that are going to do amazing things in her life (she was one of the ‘Smart Kids’ featured on Oprah a few years ago), but what struck me most is that she really pays attention – to what’s going on in the world, to what makes her happy, to what her values are… Melissa chronicles the discussion on her blog.

In part because I met Melissa, I realize that I absolutely have to start blogging again on a regular basis. As someone who sees clearly that a lot of my success has come from the relationships I have in my life and career, not having a digital presence that is up to date is a huge liability and is a faulty career and life strategy. In fact, when I met Melissa, one of the first things she said was, “I read your blog. It’s really good, but all the stuff is too old…” Literally I think that was her first sentence when I sat down with her. I was embarrassed.

And then we had this great discussion about how social media creates precursory bonds that allow in-person interactions to be that much closer and stronger because people have connected in advance over the web. So social media serves as an accelerant for regular, in-person relationships which creates more meaning in our lives. And I knew this, but I had stopped paying attention. This is something that is important to understand in today’s world.

I bet Melissa will always be paying attention.

I need to go to Dubai.
Just last week I finished this book by Ben Mizrich (I like his writing because he seems to find the smart true stories in the world) called Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai. He's the same guy that chronicled the real life adventures of the MIT students who starting beating Vegas at the blackjack tables by being smarter at playing the game (they never cheated). They made a terrible movie out of the story called "21" that doesn't even begin to do the story justice.

And then I’m having a Cuban dinner (how are plantains different than a banana?) with Dr. John Sulivan, Master Burnett, and John’s wife Addie. John believes that you don’t really experience the world when you travel unless you eat the local food. Dr. Sullivan has paid attention to this.

And we get talking about Dubai and the experiences they have had there recently. They told me some of their stories. It’s an incredible place that rarely gets talked about in your daily routine, but there’s an economic boom happening that is changing the way the world views economic booms. And the culture implications strike at the heart of many of the reasons the world is in so much conflict.

So I am going to figure out a way to go to Dubai next year, just to see What is Really Going On Over There. Dr. Sullivan is speaking over there in May, so there might be a win-win and a connection for me to go.

It became clear over dinner: I need to start paying attention to Dubai.

Penelope Trunk loses cellular phones like most people lose pocket change.
I met and became great friends with Penelope long before I ever met her in person. Like 2 years before we ever met we were blogging together and talking on the phone and we really got to know each other well. So well that we talked about going into business together in some way. But we had never met until about 3 months ago when she came out to Palo Alto. For the longest time I had this funny pipe dream that we would start and run a company together, but never actually meet in person (ever). And then we would write a book about it. Or something like that.

Penelope and I had the opportunity to host an impromptu, Brainstorming Breakout session at the conference (one of the other conference speakers had to cancel at the last minute, so we pinch-hitted without a lot of advance notice).

Given that she’s often on an airplane, interviewing people, etc, it’s a little funny that she loses her cellular phone or hasn’t figured out a solution for tethering. She lost it at the conference (she can swear like a trucker incidentally), and she shared that she actually has two cellular phones ready to go at any one time (already set up with the cellular service provider), as a preemptive counter-measure because she loses them so frequently. I think it would be easier to get a belt clip, despite the fashion faux pas associated with doing so. Another lesson in paying attention.

An October night in South Florida can stay with you forever…
So I was at the conference and couldn’t sleep. This happens to me pretty much every time I travel. In fact, when I know I am traveling for business, I pretty much resign myself that it’s a slow road to complete physical disaster, because I simply don’t sleep. I try to sleep. It's just that I can't.

On my recent to trip to Asia, I got Ambien, which seems to help if I have an 8 hour window that I can use for sleep, but if I don’t have that much time, I just get ready for The Long Slow Meltdown. And I rarely have a full 8 hours of sleeptime when I’m on the road, given the pressures of work and meetings and after hours dinners et cetera. So I melt down a lot. Which is not so good when you are speaking in front of 500 people.

So anyway, I couldn’t sleep and so I went outside and created the most amazing memory on the patio with the pool and the beach right behind it. It was one of those perfect nights. The doors opened and the perfection of the blue of the pool in the darkness with the clouds and the wind (so much wind) and the crash of the waves…the memory is burned and seared into my brain in the most indelible way. Even if I had taken a picture it wouldn’t have been the same as the memory in my head. It’s one of those rare memories in life when Everything Is Just Right that you end up carrying it with you forever and smiling back on it.

So on that night, even though I should have been sleeping, I was really paying attention.

And I am so glad I did.

Going just a little bit farther can achieve a whole lot more.
I had the pleasure of meeting and introducing at the ERE conference, Steve Lavin the famous UCLA basketball coach and now ESPN sportscaster. If you watch college basketball you’ll recognize him and his voice, he commentates with Brent Musberger. He is a really genuine, honest guy when you meet him in person. It’s impossible not to like him. One of those types of people. As head coach at UCLA, Lavin and his staff recruited and signed the No. 1 rated recruiting class in the country in 1998 and 2001. Hence, he is speaking at a recruiting conference.

One of the things he spoke at length about was what he called ‘incrementalism’ or doing just a little bit more over time, and how that can create dramatic life results. He used it in relation to sports, but I think the same is true in one’s career.

I’ve been assessing and observing talent in my career for something like 15 years. I’ve observed that most successful people practice incrementalism in some form or another, and sometimes in only very small ways, and it dramatically changes their trajectory in both life and career. This is a life strategy that everyone should adopt. Most people have lofty goals that usually can’t be achieved unless they step off the track of their formal career and practice incrementalism in other things.

It’s one of the reasons I speak at conferences, even though doing so is something I find to be pretty difficult and speaking in front of 700 people is something that always makes me nervous (I get physically nauseous actually…but then come to think of it maybe that’s from the lack of sleep…) and it takes a lot out of me mentally. The most successful people do things that are hard or scary or risky in order to increase the average returns they get out of life. By doing so, they increase the chance that more value will to come to them.

I don’t know exactly what value attending a conference, or continuing my blogging, or speaking in public even when it’s inconvenient or difficult to do so, or doing the other entrepreneurial things that I do outside of Google will ultimately net for me, but I know that as a strategy of incrementalism it has the potential to provide great returns. And I’ve observed that the most successful people all seem to do it.

Blogging and participating in social media is largely an act of incrementalism, a relatively small investment, but one that everyone I know who does it claims has tremendous value to their lives and career. The people I know that practice this form of incrementalism all swear by it.

And so I discovered a lot at the ERE conference this year. More than any other event I’ve attended actually, and I met a lot of amazing people and created some really great relationships, and one really great memory from a night I couldn’t sleep because I was really paying attention.

And it got me started blogging again. And thinking more.

And most importantly, it got me paying attention again.

And all of that is a very good thing.