We were struck by the survey of 2,000 executives in BusinessWeek’s latest double edition featuring a 55-page spread (including ads) about the future of work.
The survey yielded some intriguing insights into the human condition while chained to the cubicle:
- Men and women, when answering what scares them most, picked China (46%). That’s right. The whole country. Runners-up for both genders were “Wall Street”(35%), “My spouse”(5%), “My boss”(7%) and “My computer”(7%). At least they know their ways around computers.
- 90 percent of managers think they’re among the top 10 percent of performers in their workplace.
- The places where people want to work, in descending order, are “The place I’m working now,” “Google,” “the government” and “Goldman Sachs.” In other words, the survey revealed that the least popular option was the one with the quickest path toward becoming a millionaire.
- More than 25 percent of workers aged 55 and up said they expect never to retire. We know the feeling.
- And our favorite: 6 percent of respondents under age 30 said they’ve accidentally called their boss “Mom” or “Dad.”
We also know that feeling.
(Graphic courtesy of BusinessWeek)
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6 comments so far
Dear Grandpa,
Thanks for the lovely statistics.
Just a commment about the 90% who think they’re the top 10%. This is a common statistical confusion. If you took a footballer, a soccer player, a baseball player and a tennis player and asked them “are you in the top 25% at your job”, would it be wrong for them to all reply yes? I’m assuming that the footballer is better than the soccer, baseball and tennis players respectively at playing football, and the others vice versa…
A feature of statistics…
- Posted by Nic FultonAs an alternative to Nic’s interpretation of “top performers” above, could we assume that I’m a higher performer if I do my job better than you do your job?
If that’s the case the office cleaner or the canteen burger flipper would get my vote over the managers any time. No missed deadlines or overspent budgets, just the required solution delivered every day.
- Posted by MartynNic Fulton,
As for the lovely stastics, it was a survey of 2,000 executives, not 2,000 professional athletes.
- Posted by Mary ZapalovaOK - it’s not simple to use athletes as an example. However, my point was that we don’t know the wording of the question put to the managers (or at least, I don’t).
If you asked me “are you better, than average, at writing English” I’d say “sure thing” (given that English is spoken by a subset of the world’s population). If you asked me “are you better, than average, at writing”, I’d have to think a bit more…
The thing is that when asked about averages, we tend to choose the attributes for which we want the average calculated. We are self-interested marketing machines.
- Posted by Nic FultonHahaha! So why doesn’t my boss ever mistake me for his daughter??
- Posted by Mary SpechtInteresting! Also many people never retire as they usually being sacked very earlier before attaining the retirement age.
- Posted by micfo.com