Podcast appearances and mentions of Daniel F Chambliss

"Excellence is mundane. Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized hole". 

"Talent is indistinguishable from its affects. One cannot see talent exists until after its affects have become obvious".

"Stratification in the sport is discrete, not continuous".

"Different levels of sport are qualitatively distinct. So consider three dimensions: technique, discipline, and attitude".

"Excellence is achieved through qualitative differentiation, not through quantitative increases in activity"

Three places excellence does NOT come from: "1. Excellence is not the product of socially deviant personalities. 2. Excellence does not result from quantitative changes in behavior. 3. Excellence does not result from some special inner quality of the athlete. "Talent" is one common name for this quality; sometimes we talk of a "gift," or of "natural ability." - Robert F. Chambliss

Daniel F. Chambliss has recently retired as the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College, where he taught for forty years. He received Master's and PhD degrees from Yale University. He is the author of four books and numerous articles on organizational performance, including his book Champions: The Making of Olympic Swimmers, which was awarded the US Olympic Committee's Book of the Year Prize, and his widely-cited article “The Mundanity of Excellence,” which also focused on Olympic-level athletes. In addition to researching and writing about organizational psychology, higher education, and social science research methods, Professor Chambliss has been a consultant for Fortune 50 corporations in the US and UK.

Jofish Kaye is a computer scientist who aligns design, data, and qualitative exploration for human-centered product innovation.His superb track record as a scholar includes more than 100 publications and affiliations with MIT, Cornell, and Microsoft Research. Surprisingly, his career has been in corporations: following stints at Nokia, Yahoo, and Mozilla, he is now a director of AI and UX at Anthem.I have been a fan of his work for many years – he is a brilliant research writer whose takes are as entertaining as they are rigorous and instructive. In the longest episode of Design Disciplin to date, we had a massively wide-ranging conversation on pretty much all of our mutual interests: research, philosophy, social sciences, leadership, and more.https://designdisciplin.com/jofish-kaye# Books, Links, and Resources- Jofish Kaye on the Changing Academic Life Podcast by Geraldine Fitzpatrick: http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye- The Mundanity of Excellence: An Ethnographic Report on Stratification and Olympic Swimmers by Daniel F. Chambliss: https://academics.hamilton.edu/documents/themundanityofexcellence.pdf- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn: https://geni.us/structure-of-sci- Undisciplined disciples: everything you always wanted to know about ethnomethodology but were afraid to ask Yoda by Alan F. Blackwell, Mark Blythe, and Jofish Kaye: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-017-0999-z# Connect with Design Disciplin- Website: http://designdisciplin.com​​- Podcast: http://podcast.designdisciplin.com​​- Instagram: http://instagram.com/designdisciplin/​​- Twitter: http://twitter.com/designdisciplin/​​- YouTube: http://youtube.com/channel/UCtXM3JdnE...​- Bookstore: http://designdisciplin.com​/bookstore​# Connect with Jofish Kaye- Personal Website: http://jofish.com/- Twitter: https://twitter.com/jofish- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jofish# Episode Bookmarks00:00:00​ What does Jofish mean?00:02:00 Being a Scientist in Design00:06:05 Methods for Understanding Users00:10:17 Ethnomethodology00:13:04 Epistemology00:16:00 On Books and Papers00:18:53 On Videos, Documents, and Slide Decks00:25:52 Tactical Design00:28:13 New Job as Director of UX and AI00:33:49 Studying at MIT and Cornell00:38:00 Academia vs. Corporations, and the HCI Research Community00:43:32 Being a Scientist at a Corporation00:46:49 Productivity, Priorities, and Balance00:58:30 Publishing Research, at Corporations01:06:27 The Meaning of Design01:07:27 Places and Tools for Work01:08:33 Life Outside Work01:09:44 Closing

Usually when we pull something from the Archive and replay it, there are a couple of reasons behind it. One is that the irresistible force of an academic schedule has run into the immovable rock of podcasting. The other is that, attempting to make the resulting violent explosion into a useful propulsive force, we then replay something that not as many people listened to as we think should have done. But while this time the first reason is valid, the second is not. Dan Chambliss' conversation has been wildly popular, and is fairly recent. But it seemed good to run it again right after Tim Clydesdale's conversation. In this way newcomers to the podcast, and regular listeners, can hear two of the best contemporary observers of the college campus give helpful and nearly costless suggestions on What Could Be Done to Make Things Better. In their book How College Works, Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher Takacs subject their own school—Hamilton College in upstate New York—to a thorough sociological evaluation to find out actually makes a college community function and thrive. What they found sometimes confirms prejudice and yet baffles it; approves of common sense observations but also undermines them. All in all, How College Works is a fascinating read for anyone who works at a college, wants to go to college, or wants their child to go to college. Daniel F. Chambliss is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and he's my guest today on Historically Thinking.

Sometimes it seems that while everyone talks about college, no one really knows how it works. Certainly not parents, or professors; not administrators and not undergraduates. In fact, one would not be wrong if they thought that most of the “things we actually know about college” are things that we've been told, but haven't really found out; things we assume to be the case, but have never actually questioned. Much of what we believe about college turns out to be a collection of (to use a term popular here at Historically Thinking) engravings– things that we believe to be true, but just aren't so. In their book How College Works, Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher Takacs subject their own school—Hamilton College in upstate New York—to a thorough sociological evaluation to find out what is actually so. What they found sometimes confirms prejudice and yet baffles it; approves of common sense observations but also undermines them. All in all, How College Works is a fascinating read for anyone who works at a college, wants to go to college, or wants their child to go to college. Daniel F. Chambliss is the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and he's my guest today on Historically Thinking.