— hiring process, mental complexity, reporting relationships

Speaker: John Berg, Senior Member IEEE
Meeting Date: Thursday, September 6, 2012
Time: 6:00 pm Networking; 6:30 pm Management Forum/Guided Networking; 7:00 pm dinner; 7:30 pm Presentation
Location: RAMADA Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale, CA

 
Summary:
Management Forum / Guided Networking: Bring Your Management Challenge; Arrive by 6:30 PM to join this exciting Management Forum. Following informal networking is a guided discussion typically related to the topic of the evening’s after dinner talk, or of general Technology Management interest.
Light Dinner: This month we’re continuing with our light dinner format — typically sandwiches, salad, drinks, and cookie or similar light dinner.

Presentation: Management Myths and Time Span Inconsistencies
In the hopes of filling a position in the corporate organization chart, we diligently interview, do personality testing and check references. We hire the person with the best of intentions only to find them failing after a few short weeks. We select our top performer and promote them to the next level, introduce them to the team as their new leader, only to find them floundering and earning no respect. You just promoted Sally — she is now in your office complaining that her new boss has his head in the clouds and is completely out of touch with the real problems facing the department. Ten minutes later, Sally’s boss, Joe, is in your office complaining about Sally, his new direct report, saying that she is totally incompetent and cannot see the big picture. What did we miss?

John Berg will discuss a set of statistically significant scientific findings of a little-known psychologist who discovered a correlation between workers across industries and their ability to handle different levels of mental complexity. Particular areas that will be discussed are:

• The flat organization is a misguided management fad — organizational hierarchy is important and exists for very specific reasons
• A hiring manager will not willingly hire anyone at or above his or her level of mental complexity
• Personality conflicts in an organization are usually smokescreens for a deeper reason why we should not have Sally report to Joe
• Most CEOs have difficulty understanding the true nature of executive work and often, are drawn into activity that pulls them away from higher-level responsibilities.

The take-away to this talk are the understanding of the missing link in:

• most hiring processes
• reporting relationships
• defining appropriate levels (complexities) of work

Bio:
John Berg is Chair at Vistage International, the world’s leading Chief Executive Organization, with over 15,000 CEO’s and business owners in 16 different countries. He is the CEO of BA Industries, Inc., which does hardware intellectual property development and monetization. Mr. Berg is the Chief Technologist at American Semiconductor, where he is developing and producing radiation-hard CMOS and memory products. Before joining ASI, Mr. Berg was a Managing Director at Cypress Semiconductor, where he grew the Programmable Logic Business Unit from $35MM to $72MM through the introduction of new programmable product families. Prior to Cypress, Mr. Berg was Vice President of Technology Development at Zilog, where he built the company’s 200mm wafer fabrication facility, directed Z8 product design, and managed the scaling of CMOS and non-volatile memory technologies.

Mr. Berg did engineering and business graduate work at Stanford University, where he was a Sloan Fellow, and earned a Master’s of Science degree in Management from the Graduate School of Business. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Berg is on the Board of several privately held businesses in Silicon Valley.