The “Growth Mindset” and Secondary Research
Super interesting post by Ed Zitron about Microsoft’s company culture, outlining how an innocent-sounding vaguely-defined concept such as the “growth mindset” can lead to a toxic company culture.
This article is a great motivation for replications and secondary research. As Ed puts it:
“The problem, it seems, is that Dweck’s work falls apart the second that Dweck isn’t involved in the study itself”
Carol Dweck conducted studies on how mindsets can influence outcomes starting in the late 1980s. In summary:
“The Growth Mindset is a poorly-defined and unscientific concept that Microsoft has adopted as gospel, sold through Satya Nadella’s book and reams of internal training material, and it’s a disgraceful thing to build an entire company upon, let alone one as important as Microsoft.”
PS: The article also outlines how Microsoft employees and managers use GenAI tools as part of their performance reviews, and what role hallucinations might play.
PPS: Via the Acquired podcast and a blog post I recently learned that some of Steve Ballmer’s decisions as a CEO - contrary to common wisdom - played an important role in Microsoft’s success over the past years.
Edit: The article is also discussed on Hacker News. Comments go into two directions: “every argument they make could be applied to any arbitrary aspirational cultural values for any other large corporation” vs. “while the idea feels like it ‘makes sense’, it actually doesn’t, and the research appears to confirm that it is just junk science” I wanted to make clear that my motivation for this post was the second aspect. Regardless of how common this kind of pseudoscientific approach is at large corporations, I as an academic am in a position where I can openly criticize such practices.
Image created using DALL-E.