Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - new book about Chinese parenting

bovertine · February 12, 2011, 10:31am

Okay.

But in my experience when most people use this “real world” statement what they really mean is “If you lived in the real world like I do then you would see that I’m right.” It is often what parents tell their kids - “Just wait until you get out into the real world.”

This is what I was reacting to…

If you meant it in another way then I was mistaken.

So how about a truce? I actually agree with a lot of what you say. And I agree with others on here too. I see both points of view.

oldfort · February 12, 2011, 10:32am

musicprnt wrote:

This is a great generalization of Asian students.

Pizzagirl · February 12, 2011, 10:39am

I think musicprnt has indeed written a book as long as Chua’s :-)

oldfort · February 12, 2011, 10:42am

No problem, I see how my post could have been read differently. Truce.

musicprnt · February 12, 2011, 10:52am

Oldfort-

You are conflating being able to work with other people or being able to work to the good of the company with being someone working at a level of mediocrity, and that is again a simplification. The kind of person you are talking about is what used to be known as the “Good Time Charlie”, the person everyone likes, who doesn’t make waves, but that is not the definition of someone who necessarily is a team player or whatever. There is a difference between popularity and respect and in a company, respect is what it is about.

And you also can be an alpha, be a high flyer and not be competing against others (and in a second I will show you how that kind of competition often doesn’t work in ‘the real world’). Someone can take on the job with the idea it is important, that it needs to be done, can reach out and grab things that need doing no one else is an so forth, I have done that my whole career, it is because I was brought up to believe that if something needs doing and I can do it, and achieve what needs to be done, I will do it, I don’t care my job description or whatever. In one of my old jobs, I was the vp of a technical group, and a business person called me up asking for help with something. I could have easily deferred that to someone else, could have told them it wasn’t my job, and even though I had a lot on my plate, I helped them work through something, because it was important to get it done fast (had to do with a client request). I didn’t do that because I thought it would help my career, I didn’t do it because I thought it would bring me fame, I did it because it was in the best interests of the firm…and that is part of working in a team, including sacrificing things that directly help you to help others. On the other hand I often had the rap, from some idiots, that I wasn’t a team player, because I don’t pull my punches, I call things as I see them, and some people don’t like that shrug.

The problem with the ‘solo warrior’ and ‘competition’ is that the competition should be for someone to be better, improve themselves, work hard and then have that recognized. The young woman you mention as an alpha, tell me, as good as she is, does she ever go out of her way to help a colleague having problems? Did she ever notice what someone else was doing, and offer help or suggestions? Or is she the type who focuses on what she is doing, pushes others to help her, but never helps others? Is she someone focused on the good of the company, or her career? Does she give credit where credit is due, or spend a lot of time promoting herself? The problem with person to person competition is it becomes that, it becomes “Jack could get that vp slot before me, I better not help him with his stuff, he’ll take credit for it” or worse, find ways to discredit jack and boost themselves… this is not exactly old news, and quite frankly, in most businesses they are spending a lot of time trying to discourage that kind of attitude.

Why? Because in the end, it isn’t very good for the business. You working in IB should know that, Oldfort, what happens when a banker proposes an M and A that might end up bringing in a ton of fees to the firm, but isn’t in the best interests of the client? When you have the kind of competition you are talking about, often it is in the eye of personal interest over the firm. The executive who decides to cut 10,000 jobs from his division to improve his bottom line (and thus the value of his stock holdings) could very well ruin the company (want a prime example? Bob Nardini, one of the Jack Welch apprentices, did that at the Home Depot and nearly wrecked the company, all in the name of boosting the stock price and making even more money for himself). Bankers propose all kinds of wacked out deals, or do ethically questionable things, to ‘outgun’ the other bankers, and often it is not a great thing. Bankers at UBS went head over heels with CDO’s, creating and selling these beasts (for those not sure of what they are, CDO’s were the packaged instruments based on home mortgages that nearly crashed the global financial system, along with the Credit Default swaps sold to back these up), and it put UBS on the path to bankruptcy (only avoided because the Swiss Government bailed them out)…

Jack Welch himself, that supposed Buddha of the business world (as you can tell,I am not a fan), admitted as much. Welch’s mantra in the business world was that for any division, it should be 1st, second or get out of that market. Later on, when accounting fraud and other things hit the industry, including at GE, he said that maybe that wasn’t such a great thing, because it encouraged managers to lie, to find ways to game the system and so forth. On an individual level, what this leads to often is cutthroat competition, where it is every man for him/herself, and you do whatever it takes to ‘beat’ the other people, which can lead to all kinds of less them optimal behavior, like stealing the ideas of others, undercutting them in other people’s eyes, finding ways to dump work on them so you can shine on a ‘big’ project and so forth, it is one of the reasons we frankly have had so many ethics scandals in business, it is setting a path to do anything to ‘win’. There is nothing wrong with being aggressive or being focused or wanting to succeed, but that should be based in being aggressive to do the things needed to get ahead while also keeping in focus what is best for the business, rather then what is best for yourself…and someone brought up on the Chua model that you compete with everyone, everyone else is in effect your enemy, is going to be looking out for #1, themselves, in my experience. BTW this isn’t just personal experience, I have grad degrees in management, both in technical management and quality and productivity management and this is in the case studies you go through in those programs.

Bay · February 12, 2011, 10:56am

oldfort,
In post #1549, I don’t quite understand your point. It appears you are saying that the “ability to work well in a group” isn’t a necessary attribute for employees you hire, and that you have at least one “star” who fits within that description. Wouldn’t it be better for your work environment if that star was also well-liked and worked well with those around her? Or are you saying that it is good that she does not, and if so, why would that be preferable?

cross-posted w/musicprnt

musicprnt · February 12, 2011, 11:25am

Oldfort-

Let me rephrase that, it isn’t all, obviously, but it is very common, this has been written about in music magazines and also in books like the Delay book and such, it is about the focus of the students and teachers… For example, there was a long article about the problems of violin students in Asia in the Strad magazine, specifically in places like China and Korea, where the teaching tends to center around the technical aspects of playing, that kids get to an incredibly high level of playing technically, but the teacher doesn’t teach them about the music parts (perhaps because they were never taught or feel uncomfortable with it), the kids are taught exactly by the teacher how to play the piece, and the mentality is the secret is to win competitions.

Likewise, the focus is on being a soloist, with the mentality that things like Chamber and Orchestra are for ‘losers’ or those ‘that fail’ and such and it is only in the last couple of years that music programs are focusing on those. It is why kids from China and Korea and so forth make huge efforts to get into conservatories in Europe and the US, the perception is teachers at home don’t know. Ensemble playing is its own art form, orchestra or chamber, and when you focus the student on a)playing technically perfect, which can be done by heavy duty rote practice of scales, etudes and pieces and b)winning competitions as the road to being a soloist, all that is left behind a lot of the time as are things like musicality.

I’ll give you an idea of what I am talking about. The chamber music society of Lincoln center went on a master class roadtrip to Asia, and while they were amazed at the level of prowess the kids had, they were shocked at how little the kids knew musically, that kids were playing beethoven like it was haydn and so forth and how little they had been taught about the music (and decided on the next round to bring teachers from Juilliard with them to teach musicology and so forth).

The problem is the same attitude, that you can horse your way through, that you can be great player by practicing hard, playing flashy, hard pieces, win competitions and you will be great,be #1, whatever…and the proof quite frankly is in the pudding.On the violin and piano, despite the huge influx of Asian students on these instruments relatively few have made high level careers, and ironically the ones who have are in chamber music and orchestra…in solo, there are very few high level musicians on violin and piano of Asian background, and most of them are from an older generation (Sarah Chang is in her late 20’s, but has been out there a long time), most of the soloists are Russian, western European or from the US. Lang Lang on piano is a big exception, and on the violin it basically is 5 or 6, all older generations. In solo work, technical mastery is important, but it is a piece, but you also need musicality, expression and stage presence, people go to watch a soloist to hear what they do different, not to hear something played the way 10,000 others could, but with the emphasis on technical mastery of the instrument, on being flashy and playing hard pieces flawlessly, a lot of that is lost. Tell me, oldfort, you claim I am wrong, but do you go to concerts and recitals? Do you go to the concert halls or to performances at conservatories and such? We do, so I am talking from personal experience (and note, again, I have seen kids of Asian and all backgrounds that if they don’t make it, someone is on drugs).

There is a young kid, Ray Chen, of Taiwanese/Australian background, who is incredible, I think he is going to be one of the top guys in a couple of years…though he proves my point, he didn’t have tiger mom and supposedly only got serious on the violin when he was 14, and wasn’t pushed and it is apparent he loves the music, not just his instrument…has nothing to do with whether Asian kids can play well or be musicians, they can, it is that they have been taught like music is calculus or physics that can be mastered entirely by rote work, music cannot be.

There is a generation of young musicians of Asian background who are coming up that know that and are really into it, and some of them are going to be spectacular. It also takes quite frankly a passion for the music, which despite all the claims, still is not true in the Asian community here especially. When you go to concerts, or read demographics of who is buying classical music recordings or listening to classical stations and such, the amount of Asians is very small, despite the fact that in music programs kids of Asian descent are often more then 50% of the population…so the kids also have a handicap in that they haven’t been exposed to it much or learned to appreciate it for the music’s sake itself.I would love to ask Chua, with her insistance that her kid play violin or piano, if their family every listened to the music regularly, or went to concerts where the kids weren’t involved, I would bet pretty good money they don’t, I see that all the time with the families of music students, it is about extrinsic factors, and that a musician does not make.

musicprnt · February 12, 2011, 11:36am

Bay-
Not entirely defending what Oldfort wrote, but in at least one context I agree with him, based on experience, some of it personal. Often the term “team player” is not a positive thing, it often denotes yes men, people who agree with everything the boss tells them, and so forth, and being liked can mean “not making waves”.

On the other hand, there is also something known as tact, i also have met ‘stars’ who frankly simply didn’t give a crap about others, their opinions, they knew everything, and would bulldoze over people simply because they didn’t care, things like tact and diplomacy didn’t matter (and at times,I have been guilty of that), it is part of team dynamics. What a lot of that type are is arrogant, and I suspect when you are brought up to be “#1” in everything, where that is all that matters, it is common to treat others as #2 (play on words intended), and that is a problem.What if someone else has a different way of doing something, does that mean they are wrong and I am right? Sometimes the alpha types run roughshod like that, think they know everything, push everyone, and think that means success (and some managers love that, I don’t know why).

The real thing I think in a team environment is to be willing to challenge groupspeak and be willing to challenge shiboleths others cling to and not be afraid to go out on the limb. It also as I think you realize means also being able to do this in an appropriate fashion, making enemies when you don’t have to is stupid and also antagonizes people for no reason. Not sure what OF’s ‘star’ does, how she is viewed, but being pushy, nasty and antagonistic when it isn’t called for is not great, either. There are some that view an unpopular employee as being someone who actually does things, but that isn’t my experience, my take is an employee that unpopular is someone, no matter how good they are, who is a negative in the workplace. Again, it is a matter of degrees, one doesn’t have to be a yes man, and one doesn’t have to be a martinet who antagonizes others, crawls all over them to be ‘efficient’, there are contexts.Those who admire the ruthless person no one likes (probably rightfully so) remind me of the manager I read in a case study, who was proud of having a 20% turnover rate in his department, claiming it ‘brought fresh ideas in’.

oldfort · February 12, 2011, 11:41am

In my experience, it is hard to find people who are both focused/goal oriented, and have “the ability to work well in a group.” In general. someone who could work well in a group is someone who doesn’t ruffle other people’s feathers. It is best to have both, but if I have to choose one over another, I would go with someone who could get the job done.

The young woman mentioned is sharp and no nonsense. She has upset some people when she had to push to get certain information from other people, even though she was polite (I have seen her emails), and I have those people complain about her. What we need to watch out for is she doesn’t succeed at other people’s expense.

The example musicprnt gave about doing something out of ordinary for a business person when he was a vp in a tech group, is something we try very hard not to have our IT people do. We have a long list of deliverables, with costs and resource allocated. Every year, we make decisions on which project would generate more revenue for the firm and only work on those. When individual IT person makes a decision to work on a pet project for some front office person, it sometimes could have negative impact to planned projects.

I am not saying team work is not important, but in my view it is everyone pulling their weight to make sure a project can be delivered on time. Someone is a team player if he is able to pull his own weight, and not be a weak link.

In my girls’ case with ballet. They are committed to their team by showing up on time for every rehearsal, even when they are not needed. It is very hard to run a dance piece when someone is missing. They practice their parts, so they wouldn’t slow down other people’s progress. When their instructors ask them to run their piece over and over again, they don’t complain. Yes, like every ballerina, they want that solo, and they want that lead. But they want to get it fair and square, and they have no problem working for it.

QuantMech · February 12, 2011, 2:30pm

Just wanted to observe, re post #1567: I agree with musicprnt in general, but not with the idea that calculus and physics can be mastered by rote work–calculus, maybe, if you confine that designation to the material taught in single and multi-variable calculus (old years 1 and 2 of university math), but not if you are laying the foundations for later work in analysis. The art of proof really cannot be mastered by rote.

Physics cannot be mastered by rote either–the complexity of the real world keeps intruding into the constricted sphere where rote problem-solving might work. Really good mathematicians and physicists generally have great depth of feeling for their fields, in my observation.

Pizzagirl · February 12, 2011, 3:04pm

“In my experience, it is hard to find people who are both focused/goal oriented, and have “the ability to work well in a group.” In general. someone who could work well in a group is someone who doesn’t ruffle other people’s feathers. It is best to have both, but if I have to choose one over another, I would go with someone who could get the job done.”

Maybe this is the crux of it. I disagree with the premise that being focused/goal oriented/productive is inconsistent with working well in a group. Working well in a group has nothing to do with being a pushover – it may involve strongly advocating for one’s own point of view – but having the emotional acumen to understand how to influence other people, how to motivate other people, and how to get them all on the same page.
Indeed, the person who works well with others will be able to be far more productive than the person who either ignores others or barks orders at them.

The Chua model assumes that all employers want are technical smarts, as evidenced by A grades, perfect SAT scores, etc.

musicprnt · February 12, 2011, 3:34pm

QuantMech-

I wasn’t talking about physics or math as a career, that was not my intent. If you are going to work in physics or math, it is a different world, I was referring to, for example, the student getting great grades in HS in physics or calc, getting a 5 on the AP, etc…I have too much respect for mathematicians or physicists to say they can get by on rote, they cannot:). You can get through the basic courses by grunting your way through it was my point, like you can achieve technical mastery by gutting through it.

musicprnt · February 12, 2011, 3:45pm

“The example musicprnt gave about doing something out of ordinary for a business person when he was a vp in a tech group, is something we try very hard not to have our IT people do. We have a long list of deliverables, with costs and resource allocated. Every year, we make decisions on which project would generate more revenue for the firm and only work on those. When individual IT person makes a decision to work on a pet project for some front office person, it sometimes could have negative impact to planned projects.”

You are working for a very different environment, the IT in an IB or bank is very different then it was in the firms I work for. Actually, the thing I was referring to was more business, it was figuring out a way to use our existing framework plus some tweaks to achieve a goal, which was for some high profile clients, and it worked, one of the reasons being that in many companies they encourage IT to have the business skills and such to help solve problems. Plus that kind of attitude doesn’t surprise me, in IB firms IT is a cost center and isn’t seen as the ‘core’ of the company, they do everything they can to make it the equivalent of janitorial services. In trading firms and in innovative financial companies IT is part of the business itself, in many ways it is the business, and that kind of approach is crucial, as is quite frankly the kind of team approach in the sense of problem solving, it is a very different environment. IB’s and more traditional banks are also a lot more hierarchical and process driven, where as you point out everything is charted and planned to the last iota, it is truly the land of the beancounters (at one bank, they have a planning system to plan costs for future projects, they allocate out all the resources, costs, to the dime, but then when the scope of the project changes, when priorities change, and so forth, the beancounters go nuts because the project goes over cost, when the morons never bothered to refactor the costs and such when scopes changed, pretty typical). Especially roles in such companies are very rigid and defined…in more entrepeneurial firms roles aren’t so rigid, and it is beneficial to have people who know multiple facets of a company, can often get things done when in a more traditional firm they are still writing a proposal to have a meeting to decide when to discuss the requirements. Not really meaning to knock how those companies operate, only saying they work very differently, and many companies are trying to get away from that mentality. In the job in question, we were growing at an astronomical rate and were literally creating an entirely new industry…so being able to do those things was de rigeur, and I am working at a company now doing much the same thing.

QuantMech · February 12, 2011, 4:47pm

No problem, musicprnt. I think the feasibility of handling even high-school physics by rote depends to some extent on the talents of the physics teacher, however.

oldfort · February 12, 2011, 5:10pm

We pay premium for developers with business knowledge, some of them know more about business logic (hedging, risk and financial calculations) than some front office people. They need to be able to enhance trading system and structuring system very quickly, any mistake could mean millions to the firm. Due to the need of quick time to market, often we don’t have the luxury of double checking their work. We depend on them to be as close to 100% accurate as possible. The pressure of those developers are under is not be believed.

Many of those systems are global now, used from UK, HKG and NY. We used to have 12+ hours to to do maintenance or do a new release. Now we only have few hours at most. Unlike retail systems, business is not lost if online banking is down, if those trading systems do not work when the market is open, it could be disastrous for the firm.
Our biggest concern is when something goes into production, if it would blow, and how many minutes would we have to fail back.

Of what I know, the IT department at IBs are not bean counters. They are one of IBs’ biggest expense. A lot of fastest database with largest capacity are developed by some in house IT developers within IB, and they are proprietary. Some of those hot shot developers command as high of salary as some front office people, and hence we can’t afford to have them work on projects which wouldn’t help generate revenue.

musicprnt - I don’t think your understanding of IB IT is really correct.

calmom · February 12, 2011, 5:24pm

If that’s the case, then that is a particularly valuable set of skills to be nurtured when raising a kid - to encourage the kid to work for excellence, but at the same time to keep in mind and attend to the needs of peers. After all, that’s part of what makes a good workplace manager – a good manager is not merely giving orders and bossing others around, but rather is both setting an agenda and working to cultivate, encourage and motivate employees.

Another extremely important ability to have is simply the ability to accurately gauge one’s own talents and abilities in comparison with others – that is, the ability to know when “I” will be the best person to do a very task, and when that task can be better accomplished by someone else. That is particularly important in achieving group or team goals – it is a decision that is made on the fly in many ball sports, where for example one player on a team has the ball in hand, and needs to decide whether to toss it to another who is better positioned to get the ball into the basket.

That’s why I would see the focus on getting the lead part to be a misplaced goal for a child – if a kid is the best dancer at her studio, that might be a sign that it is time to consider moving to a different, more challenging studio. For a child, the goal should be improvement, and part of that process is exposure to others who have achieved a higher level of proficiency – this is especially true in dance, which is mostly a learn by doing & watching process.

MarinMom · February 12, 2011, 6:30pm

A significant invention of the last 20 years developed without the support and participation of a group. I can’t think of one. Those days are long past, if they ever existed. Getting an idea from paper to market is incredibly complicated, much too complicated for one person to do alone.

Websites - it’s one thing to develop it, it’s another thing to keep it going. Keeping it going involves starting a company, a group effort if there ever was one.

Individual sports - I can speak from experience here. My D excels at her individual sport. While it’s her name at the top of the standings, it could never have happened without the support of her coaches and teammates from the time she was 5 until now. The group is what supported her when she failed and celebrated with her when she succeeded. She wouldn’t be able to get better without all those pairs of eyes telling her what she did right and what she needs to do to improve. That’s why there are golf teams, tennis teams, swim teams, etc.

You can learn how to stand out while working with a group, but you have to figure out how to make the group successful as well, or you’re not going to get far.

MarinMom · February 12, 2011, 6:42pm

Besides, what about happiness? There’s a great joy in being part of a group effort and seeing how your contribution has enhanced the whole. The motivation to be excellent comes in part from wanting to be a contributor to something bigger than yourself. I used to produce my kids’ school plays, and I felt sorry for the kids who couldn’t be happy unless they were the stars. It’s fine to want the lead, or the solo, or whatever, but if you can’t be happy unless you’re the top dog you won’t be happy very often.

musicprnt · February 13, 2011, 5:07am

Oldfort-

Believe me, I do know, besides everything else I worked at one of the big IB firms for a while, hence my knowledge of how things work. The irony of your last post is that most of my career has been with trading systems that are pretty much 24/5 with high volumes on them (one of them was roughly 40% of market volume of the two major US exchanges at the time) so I know all about the risks and so forth. The kind of developers you are talking about sound like Quants, and they are a special breed among developers, but they represent only a small fraction of IT and development. Trading itself is a specialized branch within an IB firm, and generally works a bit differently.

That said, IB houses for the most part don’t look at IT as core to the business, it is a support aspect, along with accounting (my spouse was a support accountant at a bank) and so forth, and it is obvious the way they work. Among other things, most banks (yours might be an exception, though I doubt it) have heavily outsourced their development work to India and other low cost countries, and the basic mentality was and has been “that isn’t core business”, they usually leave some high level staff close to the business, and the rest is outsourced, and the rest of IT is done to severely curtail cost. Yes, it depends on the firm and the area (they generally would never outsource developing Quant stuff, might open a branch in India as part of the company, that is too proprietary) but much of their IT is outsourced, which has its own headaches that generally the beancounters leave to the few staff people to deal with.

I could go into a variety of ways that in the IB firms I am familiar with, IT people are treated as a cost center, not key to the business (whereas things like trading systems and quant engines/pricing models/algo systems can be, but those are small parts of the whole). The centralized IT they use for systems and pc work and everything also is to a large extent cost, even though it is also pretty inefficient when you centralize those things, with bureaucratic red tape and especially when it has to be filtered through numerous people to get something done. One thing I have heard from contacts at a number of the top banks is, for example, that they will pay for masters degrees for bankers, but for IT people, in either things like management or business, they won’t pay for tech people, direct quote “only the bankers need that kind of thing”, and this is about 4 or 5 big international IB outfits. If it had only been 1 firm, it could be a local quirk, but this was directly from people I knew working there, and from what I can tell anecdotally this is pretty common.

Put it this way, IB firms don’t have the reputation for being entrepeneurial or being leaders in change, and there is a reason for that, their methodology for the most part is very traditional and thinks like IT are considered support (your statement is very indicative, when you said IT was important to the business, you mentioned that IT costs were pretty high as a percentage of spending or the largest percentage of costs by group, not “it is core to the business”… meanwhile I would bet on cost/person basis, that bankers and analysts cost a lot more. The very small number of people who build quant and algo trading systems notwithstanding, almost everything else is done on a low cost basis these days and the mentality is that IT is a cost center, not a profit center, and I suspect even things like those building algo systems and such are looked at as ‘ridiculously high cost’, a direct quote from a managing director of a well known IB firm (meanwhile, they would never say that about what they pay bankers or some of their analysts and executives).

oldfort · February 13, 2011, 8:35am

These posts are irreverent to this discussion. Some posters on CC know quite well of my job description. I will just say that I stand by what I posted earlier concerning capital markets IT.

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