Someone sent me a new scholarly paper on networking and career advancement. Longitudinal data, complex graphics, a rough slog. A third of the way through, the struggle ceased. This analysis was oblivious to something big -- some core truth about why networks and collaborations either produce results, or do not. More on that paper later. For now, the point is: Thanks to its blindness, I was able to see what it could not.

Collaboration as a Higher Order of Networking

In and around a network, individuals share and swap info: Listening and talking are "it." In a collaboration, a goal has been set -- the info is not only swapped and pooled, it has to be directed. So far, so par.

But try this: Many of the factors that define effective networking need to be overridden -- suspended if not inverted -- when you go beyond info-swap and move to goal-attainment. Too much "listening and talking" will block the goal. Like the headline says, PERCEIVERS versus JUDGERS.

Ever gazed into this great divide? Even the hard-core Myers-Briggs users spend less time on this fourth set of letters -- P versus J -- than they do on the other three (Thinker-Feeler, Sensor-Intuitor, Introvert-Extrovert). It's a gross simplification, but this table should keep you on the line:

That's from page 37 of Type Talk (1988) by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen. I used the Myers-Briggs "type indicator" for 15 years before being able to see the above chasm close-up. In 2002, though, this chasm began swallowing up collaboration after collaboration.

So I read what few bits of analysis I could find. Even went back to the masterwork Psychological Types -- the 600-page original -- by Carl Jung. It's a wonderful book, but later writers were the ones to define the relatively vague notions of PERCEPTION and JUDGING he sketched.

You just saw them divided by traits. Now let's bore in on the two words. From Krueger and Thuesen, here's the best boil-downer: "Perceivers have a tendency to perceive -- to keep collecting new information -- rather than draw conclusions (judgments) on any subject. Judgers...have a tendency to judge -- to make decisions -- rather than respond to new information, even (or perhaps especially) if that information might change their decision."

Time for Google? Good luck, friend. Amazingly, there is no Perceiver dot-com, dot-net, or dot-org. No Perception dot-com or dot-org, either (while www.Perception.net is a web-design firm). If you want to map the P versus J landscape, you end up back in those books, or at those consulting sites, that focus on all aspects of the "MBTI" -- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Why is that a problem? Suddenly it was for me.

Forget the Balancing Act when Self-Employed

Every one of the Myers-Briggs books has been written for, and mostly sold to, big companies. This led to a kind of "political correctness of personality types." P and J are always -- always -- set forth as natural opposites that somehow need each other. With a few good consultants, human-relations managers and division chiefs can facilitate P and J "synergy."

From www.personalitytype.com/quiz.asp, here's a bowl of the dogma: "Below are four questions, and descriptions of two different lists of personality ‘preferences.' Both lists have their own strengths and blind spots. BOTH are equally valuable -- NEITHER one is better or worse than the other." Yin and Yang. Moral Equivalence. Set up an encounter session and pass out paper and pencils. One big happy corporate family.

From where I sit, that's nonsense. No, I don't sit inside a large company. And, as a heavy-duty J, obviously I prefer my own type. But I'm not rejecting moral equivalence just to be a J. Actually, there is "news" here, and the type-casting books aimed at big business can't cover it. For those of us who work on our own, or in small (deadlined) collaborations that come and go, you will go bankrupt depending on Perceivers.

The scholarly paper referred to at the outset is called "How Top Talent Uses Networks and Where Rising Stars Get Trapped." It's a 2006 offering by two fellows from the Accenture Institute and Rob Cross from the University of Virginia. The paper offers its own "types" and claims three "dimensions" where "high performers and their networks" stand out -- the structural, the relational and the behavioral.

Never lock up academics and management-institute thinkers in the same 30-page printout. The only fun they can have there is by creating and inserting incomprehensible graphics. I was able to eject at the bottom of page 10, right where Cross and his two colleagues say this: "People tend primarily to seek out others who do what they do and see the world as they do. It's comforting, validating and easy to interact with people who ‘get it' -- who think as we do."

The three authors want their readers to rise above that. Networks can grow geometrically if you seek out allies who "think differently." In big companies, maybe that's good advice. In small enterprises and in networks of sole proprietors, "thinking as you do" or "thinking differently" just plain misses the point. Instead, look for those who operate like the Judgers the collaboration or enterprise mostly needs. Needs? Yes -- to gain ground, avoid the abyss, and make the delivery deadline.

We began with the Type Talk table from 1988. Some slightly less terse J versus P polarities are on page 29 of Do What You Are by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger: Judgers "are happiest when decisions have been made," versus Perceivers who "are happiest leaving their options open." Judgers "set goals and work toward achieving them on time," versus Perceivers who "change goals as new information becomes available." Judgers like products, Perceivers care more about process.

If any start-up has a systematic P on board, he or she should be the consultant, with zero operational duties. Once you get big enough to launch a help desk, or you need a "complaint window," or someone hands you five million bucks on condition it be used to open an R&D lab -- only then can you safely let a set of Perceivers onto the payroll.

Understanding "Perceivers" Will Sharpen Your Strategy

This essay began as a way to exploit a visceral contrarian reaction to the "findings" offered by "How Top Talent Uses Networks..." It congealed when I saw how MBTI "moral equivalence" does not work for the self-employed -- at least, not on the P versus J plane. That "plane" is likely to crash because, although "P" stands for the earnest and info-accumulating Perceiver, it can also mean:

Profusion    Pondering    Procrastination 
Pontification    Perfectionism    Paralysis    PETRIFIED

Hmmmm -- better stop now. See why this piece was not easy to write? It meant reliving relationships that had gone off the rails since 2001 -- because "we" could not produce products and revenues.

Along with that residual guilt comes a sense of pioneering. How so? Well, it appears that the Web lacks an explicit downside analysis of Perceivers in work settings that require lots of urgency and "ownership." In looking for such, I came across a link that opens up a superb menu of MBTI explainers and condensers:

www.teamtechnology.co.uk/myersbriggs.html

The Brits who sorted and sifted all that info have set a new standard. As an editor, I salute them. As a long-time MBTI user, I welcome this one-stop shopping option. As someone who is self-employed, though -- and the sponsor of a website dedicated to fellow editors and writers, and lone wolves everywhere -- I suggest adding this essay to any deadlined collaboration you carry a chunk of the responsibility for.

Reasoned rebuttals, and like-minded enhancements, are welcome -- write FrankGregorsky@aol.com.