The Cult of the Puzzle

How would you move Mt. Fuji?

How do you react when someone asks you a ridiculous question? Raise your eyebrows, laugh out loud, call for the men in white coats? What if the person asking the question happens to be an interviewer for Microsoft and you are a prospective candidate for a job there?

Ask your student(s) "How would you move Mt Fuji?" and await their reaction. Ask them to speculate on who might ask such a question and why?

The purpose of such puzzle questions according to William Poundstone, author of the book: How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle - How the World's Smartest Company Selects the Most Creative Thinkers (Litte Brown & Company) is to see how people respond to problems that can't be solved, a fundamental challenge in AI.

Here's a link to the book itself with 2 chapters online.

Here's a short film that shows an innovative solution to the problem.

Here's the actual interview tip page on the Microsoft site.

Here are some more riddles.

Discussion question

In Up To Speed, Module 1C we have an interview with a recruitment specialist who might well use such puzzle questions in his screening process. How effective are such puzzle questions in an interview? Are they more or less effective than the usual interview questions?

Here's an extract from slashdot that offers some food for thought.

This makes the effectiveness of these (puzzle) questions an important issue. Poundstone first presents evidence that "Where do you see yourself in five years" and "What are you most proud of" are fairly pointless questions. In one experiment he describes, two trained interviewers conducted interviews with a group of volunteers. Their evaluations were compared to those of another group who saw a fifteen second video of the interview: the candidate entering the room, shaking hands, and sitting down. The opinions correlated strongly; in other words, when you are sitting in an interview telling the interviewer what you do on your day off and what the last book you read was, the interviewer has already made up his or her mind, based on who knows what subjective criteria. As Poundstone laments, "This would be funny if it weren't tragic."

Blazers with bottle!

One of the case studies in Up to Speed deals with the ethical branding. Here's an activity that gets people thinking about ethics, technology and clothing. Write the following slogan on the board - Ecosmart - Blazers with bottle!
Get the student(s) speculate on what kind of business is being advertised. Then show them this website (it has nice animations):
http://www.schoolcolours.co.uk/ecosmart.php
Ecosmart is a company that makes school uniforms out of recyled plastic bottles. A single blazer can be made with 30 1.5 litre bottles. The polymer ( polymers are made up of many many molecules all strung together to form really long chains ) found in bottles and transformed into blazers is caled PET
For more on polymers see:
http://pslc.ws/macrog/kidsmac/basics.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer

Explain the pun in the slogan (with bottle) Leo gives the following translation: to show some bottle -etwas Mumm zeigen.(Interesting coincidence - Mumm is a famous sparkling winebrand in Germany - thaz makes a good Eselsbrücke!)

This Guardian article gives more background information:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/recycling.ethicalliving

Discussion questions
In Britain schools have to meet sustainability targets. This is what makes the ecosmart blazers attractive, as schools can cut their carbon footprint by sourcing these 'green' blazers. What is your company doing to reduce its carbon footprint?
Ecosmart tailors the uniforms in the U.K. so avoiding the possibility of sub-sub-contractors engaging child labour. How interested are consumers in ethical issues such as child labour when they shop for garments at discount prices?

The 60 second business lesson

The kids have gone to school, my dog Chrissie is blissfully asleep on the carpet and so I have time to write my first posting. My co-author Louise Kennedy and I have written a new business resource book for B2/C1 students called Up To Speed. It's due to be published some time in the late summer to early autumn. The focus of the book is on real world business and I have started this blog to give people a flavour of the approach we take to one-to-one teaching. Many of the 60 second business lessons I publish here can be adapted for group work too. I've called them 60 second lessons because that's how long they take to set up. (Just the right thing for a Monday morning!)Once you set them up they can provide discussion for as long as you want. Or they can just be a springboard into your main lesson. You decide. I do the research and you do the experimenting. Have fun.