Annals of derp: Et tu, Shankar?

Image via New Schoolers.

I love the fact that NPR runs regular reports on social science research, and especially the Morning Edition appearances of Shankar Vedantam, a kind of indirect corrective to the vagaries of David Brooks, but today they ran a bit off the rails in discussing an extremely elegant study by Matthew Mendez and Christian Grose of USC.

Emperors of the hundred valleys

Updated 11/24/2013

A wonderful piece on NPR 10 days ago by the company social scientist, Shankar Vedantam, on the "public leadership" professor Ronald Heifetz and his concept of adaptive leadership as more psychiatry than surgery:

"The dominant view of leadership is that the leader has the vision and the rest is a sales problem," he says. "I think that notion of leadership is bankrupt." That approach only works for technical problems, he says, where there's a right answer and an expert knows what it is.