Is Business Casual?

Is Business Casual?

Key words:  business casual attire, office attire

860 words or about two pages

                I’ve tried looking the other way and pretending it’s not important.  I’ve even tried to convince myself that there’s an improvement going on which gives people more freedom.  It doesn’t work; I just don’t see the world as either liberated or more productive with the emphasis on “business casual” – whatever that means.   I’ve  stood in the shoes of both sides of this issue, and let me tell that even though clothes may not make the man (or woman) they just might make the attitude.

                In a board dinner of my finance industry constituents—proudly one of the last great groups still sporting suits and ties, we were talking about those of us with home offices.  I related the story of my father, who at one point in his career was an innovator in the field of association management and often worked from a home office,  would put on his dress shoes, starched shirt, suit trousers and tie to go downstairs to his basement office. 

                I asked my dad why he did this when he didn’t have to.

                “First, you have to know a little bit about the history of the necktie,” he said.  I was a teenager, so I rolled my eyes and pretended not to listen (but the conversation still resonates).

                “It had its origin in the bandages military officers wore draped around their necks to use to help their wounded troops.  To me that’s a symbol of servant leadership—something good to remind myself of everyday,” my father told me. 

                He told me this during the 1970’s, when fashions were in an uproar—folks wearing such notables as leisure suits and Nehru jackets, and not wearing such notables as undergarments.   The clothes in the window at Brooks Brothers stayed the course however.  

                A few years later I became a military officer in fact, and the etiquette training to us in those days:  officers tied only the Windsor knot, and always wore Class A’s (military coat and tie) in airports and other public places.  Nowadays, soldiers of all ranks shuffle through the airports in dusty fatigues.  I do still see marines in their dress uniforms on planes.  They look proud, but of course, there are only a few of them. 

                “Secondly,” my father told me, “if I’m dressed for business, then I’m less likely to get involved in some distraction-- some fix-it errand or unrelated project.  Getting the newspaper in the rain would even be a risk in my starched shirt.  Nope I’m stuck here at the desk alright unless I go out to make a call on a customer—and then I’m already dressed and ready.”

                In my first full-time job after the military, I was a YMCA Program Director.   When not teaching or coaching actual programs, we were required to be in coat and tie, ostensibly for appearance’s sake.  But we staff knew it was really to keep us from shooting hoop, sneaking in some pick-up racquetball, or at the very least doing a few pull-ups or something.  Not a bad management strategy for productivity although I did lose some time to changing clothes several times a day.

                My question to the business casual proponents is this:  what’s to be gained by dressing for work like you’ve dropped by the office in between moving furniture and mowing the lawn?  Unless, of course, your day at the office is actually viewed as an interruption to those tasks.   And perhaps that’s it:  work for so many nowadays may not be a profession or a calling, but simply a way to finance runs to IKEA.  

                Our mothers always told us there’s nothing wrong with looking nice, and fair enough if those wearing business casual look nice and are wearing “smart casual” (and what does that compare with exactly:  stupid casual?).  But good luck trying to write some kind of office standard out of it.  There’s nothing wrong with looking nice by wearing a coat and tie either--seems easier.   

It looks to me like the big advantage for casual is comfort, and that may be true if one is unable to buy comfortable dress clothes that fit.    I’ve also got to believe that a few nice business dress combos are more economical than the equivalent amount of casual clothes needed for workable combinations.   For example, I finally quit buying the ninety dollar rubber-soled pretend dress shoes and went  to the latest generation of leather-soled “real” dress shoes.  Yes, they cost twice as much, but last three times longer, and are actually much more comfortable.

Comfort I can understand, a casual attitude toward our careers—and this may be reflected by our dress—I can’t.  I wonder too how much of the casualness is due to management’s paralysis—induced by political correctness—in setting anything but the lowest of standards.   I guess we’re all supposed to be casual and  pretend that there’s nothing we should even notice about front line employees with tattoos covering half the head and fish hooks and miscellaneous tool piercings decorating the other half—just the nuts and bolts of business, when  it’s, oh so casual. 

                ©Copyright 2013 John P. Harrison.  All rights reserved.      

Rather Testy, Aren’t We?

Rather Testy, Aren’t We?

Key words:  multiple-choice examinations, Stanford-Binet

2 pages (845 words)

                I was surprised to get a call once again from the association powers-that-be to help teach a study course for the infamous Certified Association Executive (CAE) exam.  I say this because I’m a complete iconoclast when it comes to standardized multiple-guess tests.   Perhaps they are a just a necessary evil, or perhaps they are indeed some great normalizing assessment criterion.   My belief, however, is that they are constructed more for the ease of educational administrators than for predicting the ability of students to honestly apply or articulate anything actually learned.

                Now before those vested in the design of these Stanford-Binet masterpieces (a) get their distractors in a wad,  or (b), their cognitive taxonomy intertwined, or (c) their item stems incomplete, or (d) or all of the above,  let me say that the tests can be good at assessing retention of certain types of basic information.  This is why they’ve been used to assess elementary school performance—very elementary—and we know where that’s led.  

                My major gripe is rather simple.  If you have a question, why not just ask folks for the answer?   If you want someone to tell you what is the capital of Minnesota, why not just ask them, “hey, you, dude, what’s the capital of Minnesota?”   Either he tells you St. Paul (or even writes it, in which case he’ll need to know how to spell),  or he doesn’t.   But no, here’s what we ask:   The capital of Minnesota is which of the following:  (a)  Minnesota City, (b) Minneapolis, (c) Annapolis, or (d) none of the above.   Or how about a numbers one:  What is 2³?   (a) 5,  (b), 6, (c), 8, (d) 9.    As you can tell, the whole fun of constructing these questions is in presenting great wrong answers, called distractors. 

                Good distractors are a real art form for the test writer.    The answer to a multiple choice question is basically right there in front of you, so it has to be cleverly disguised.  Some of the distractors used as part of the disguise are obvious, but then some are rather sophisticated.  Here’s one of the questions I wrote for the CAE exam long ago when it first went from a 4-hour written essay/short answer exam (and thus expensive to grade) to an easy-to-grade multiple choice exam:   A budget is best described as which of the following:  (a) a plan, (b) one of the three required financial statements, (c) reported revenue vs. expenses , or (d) none of the above.  I worked hard on my distractors (b) and (c), and they fooled a lot of folks, so did (d) for that matter.   Of course the answer was the simple (a), a plan.  This is, in fact, what someone would answer if the question were asked directly:   hey, what’s a budget?   Well, it’s a plan about money.   Now that I reflect on this, I’m not sure I’m all that proud of this testing method.

                The defenders of these Stanford-Binet type exams will point out how well the tests predict some other performance metric such as grades.   Here’s what happens.  On each exam (say the SAT, or the GRE), there are a number of “experimental” questions.  These questions are not scored for the current exam, but are for future use.   The exams, as a clever aside, also ask the test taker for some demographic or other descriptive information—such information as grade point average.   Then, when the scores are compiled the test designers look to see which experimental questions correlate to good grades.   They keep the questions for future exams which the students with good grades get right, and they throw out any questions which students with good grades get wrong.   At the end of all this, they proudly announce that their tests predict grades.  Of course, they predict grades; they’ve been correlated to do so.  It’s like saying grades predict grades. 

                I would be interested to know what professional attributes are correlated to certification exam scores.  There could some; it would be something good to find out.   What I worry about are the unintended consequences of selecting and rewarding our best and brightest by their ability to discern clever distractors from the right answer.  It bodes well for CSI types and other detectives (maybe that’s why these shows are so popular), but what does it say about our ability to come up with something new out of nothing?  To create from tabula rasa when we’ve never seen a blank space before?    We’ve developed overarching examinations for important gateways in our society, which in essence select for the passive skill of recognizing camouflaged solutions, not the active skill of creating new answers.  Surely, our method of testing will have long term consequences, it will (a) save money for test graders, (b) make  multiple-choice testing more frequently seen—even on game shows,  (c) select for those with analytical skills bordering on the litigious and devious, (d) increase our reliance on bureaucratically-inspired statistics, or (e) all of the above.  I’m afraid to guess. 

©Copyright 2013 John Harrison.  All rights reserved.