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I tried to look up the original research for the table of what the Fortune 500 are after, and there's something odd there. The paper was Cassel, R.N.; Kolstad,

I tried to look up the original research for the table of what the Fortune 500 are after, and there's something odd there. The paper was Cassel, R.N.; Kolstad, R. (1998). "The critical job-skills requirements for the 21st century: Living and working with people". Journal of Instructional Psychology 25 (3): 176–180.. JoIP is http://www.projectinnovation.biz/journal_of_instructional_psychology http://www.projectinnovation.biz/journal_of_instructional_ps..., published by 'Project Innovation, Inc'. There appear to be no archives, and patchy availability of paper abstracts online; so I checked the principal author - he's Dr Russell N Cassel - http://library.csusm.edu/about/rooms/cassel.asp http://library.csusm.edu/about/rooms/cassel.asp ... who retired in 1974 to found...Project Innovation Inc. While Dr Cassel's bona fides are not in doubt, you have to wonder about the level of peer review you get publishing in your own journal. However the reason you'd need to see the original paper is that the Stanford work and Devlin's article are predicated on the assumption that the Fortune 500's priorities have changed, but the Stanford paper shows no figures and no confidence intervals from Cassel's paper, so was this just noise? Were the 1970 and 1998 studies even comparable? Secondly, it's now 17 years since the second study - getting on for as much of a difference as there were between the two studies. If priorities are supposed to change so much over similar timescales, surely more recent evidence is required?

analog31 12y ago
One might also wonder about causality versus correlation. Do executives cite "teamwork" today because they even know what it is, or because the buzzword has been drilled into us every day for the past 30 years?
- dalke 12y ago
  Interestingly, Google's n-gram viewer says that "teamwork" was at its lowest from 1970-1980: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teamwork&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cteamwork%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teamwork&year_... It didn't regain its 1950s peak until 1990. That's also when "workplace collaboration" took off.
sanderjd 12y ago
Thanks for digging into that. Very interesting. And great point about the time since the more recent study.
ky3 12y ago
so was this just noise? Why don't we just call a spade a spade and call Devlin out for working backward from a preconceived text? You start with the conclusion and gather the evidence that supports it.

analog31 12y ago

One might also wonder about causality versus correlation. Do executives cite "teamwork" today because they even know what it is, or because the buzzword has been drilled into us every day for the past 30 years?

dalke 12y ago
Interestingly, Google's n-gram viewer says that "teamwork" was at its lowest from 1970-1980: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teamwork&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cteamwork%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=teamwork&year_... It didn't regain its 1950s peak until 1990. That's also when "workplace collaboration" took off.

sanderjd 12y ago

Thanks for digging into that. Very interesting. And great point about the time since the more recent study.

ky3 12y ago

so was this just noise? Why don't we just call a spade a spade and call Devlin out for working backward from a preconceived text? You start with the conclusion and gather the evidence that supports it.