How can a person who seems so qualified for a position fail miserably in it? How can someone who clearly lacks relevant skills and experience succeed? The answer is potential, the ability to adapt and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments.
For the past several decades, organizations have based their hiring decisions on competencies. But we have entered a new era of talent spotting. Geopolitics, business, industries, and jobs are changing so rapidly that it's impossible to predict the capabilities employees and leaders will need even a few years out. The question now is not whether people have the right skills; it's whether they have the potential to learn new ones.
Once organizations have hired true high potentials—a challenge, given the increasing scarcity of senior talent—and identified the ones they already have, it's crucial to focus on retaining them and on helping them live up to their potential by offering development opportunities that push them out of their comfort zones.
In the past few decades, organizations have emphasized "competencies" in hiring and developing talent. Jobs have been decomposed into skills and filled by candidates who have them. But 21st-century business is too volatile and complex—and the market for top talent too tight—for that model to work anymore.
Today those responsible for hiring and promotion decisions must instead focus on potential: the ability to adapt to ever-changing business environments and grow into challenging new roles.
Managers must learn to assess current and prospective employees on five key indicators: the right motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination. Then they have to help the best get better with smart retention and stretch assignments.
A few years ago, I was asked to help find a new CEO for a family-owned electronics retailer that wanted to professionalize its management and expand its operations. I worked closely with the outgoing chief executive and the board to pinpoint the relevant competencies for the job and then seek out and assess candidates. The man we hired had all the right credentials: He'd attended top professional schools and worked for some of the best organizations in the industry, and he was a successful country manager in one of the world's most admired companies. Even more important, he'd scored above the target level for each of the competencies we'd identified. But none of that mattered. Despite his impressive background and great fit, he could not adjust to the massive technological, competitive, and regulatory changes occurring in the market at the time. Following three years of lackluster performance, he was asked to leave.
Compare that story with one from the start of my executive search career. My task was to fill a project manager role at a small brewery owned by Quinsa, which then dominated the beer market in the southern cone of Latin America. In those days, I hadn't yet heard the term "competency." I was working in a new office without research support (in the pre-internet era), and Quinsa was the only serious beverage industry player in the region, so I was simply unable to identify a large pool of people with the right industry and functional background. Ultimately, I contacted Pedro Algorta, an executive I'd met in 1981, while we were both studying at Stanford University. A survivor of the infamous 1972 plane crash in the Andes, which has been chronicled in several books and the movie Alive, Algorta was certainly an interesting choice. But he had no experience in the consumer goods business; was unfamiliar with Corrientes, the province where the brewery was located; and had never worked in marketing or sales, key areas of expertise. Still, I had a feeling he would be successful, and Quinsa agreed to hire him. That decision proved to be a smart one. Algorta was rapidly promoted to general manager of the Corrientes brewery and then CEO of Quinsa's flagship Quilmes brewery. He also became a key member of the team that transformed Quinsa from a family-owned enterprise to a large, respected conglomerate with a management team considered at the time to be among the best in Latin America.
Why did the CEO of the electronics business, who seemed so right for the position, fail so miserably? And why did Algorta, so clearly unqualified, succeed so spectacularly? The answer is potential: the ability to adapt to and grow into increasingly complex roles and environments. Algorta had it; the first CEO did not.
Having spent 30 years evaluating and tracking executives and studying the factors in their performance, I now consider potential to be the most important predictor of success at all levels, from junior management to the C-suite and the board. I've learned how to identify people who have it and to help companies develop and deploy them. With this article, I share those lessons. As business becomes more volatile and complex, and the global market for top professionals gets tighter, I am convinced that organizations and their leaders must transition to what I think of as a new era of talent spotting—one in which our evaluations of one another are based not on brawn, brains, experience, or competencies, but on potential.
The first era of talent spotting lasted millennia. For thousands of years, humans made choices about one another on the basis of physical attributes. If you wanted to erect a pyramid, dig a canal, fight a war, or harvest a crop, you chose the fittest, healthiest, strongest people you could find. Those attributes were easy to assess, and, despite their growing irrelevance, we still unconsciously look for them: Fortune 500 CEOs are on average 2.5 inches taller than the average American, and the statistics on military leaders and country presidents are similar.
I was born and raised during the second era, which emphasized intelligence, experience, and past performance. Throughout much of the 20th century, IQ—verbal, analytical, mathematical, and logical cleverness—was justifiably seen as an important factor in hiring processes (particularly for white-collar roles), with educational pedigrees and tests used as proxies. Much work also became standardized and professionalized. Many kinds of workers could be certified with reliability and transparency, and since most roles were relatively similar across companies and industries, and from year to year, past performance was considered a fine indicator. If you were looking for an engineer, accountant, lawyer, designer, or CEO, you would scout out, interview, and hire the smartest, most experienced engineer, accountant, lawyer, designer, or CEO.
I joined the executive search profession in the 1980s, at the beginning of the third era of talent spotting, which was driven by the competency movement still prevalent today. David McClelland's 1973 paper "Testing for Competence Rather than for 'Intelligence'" proposed that workers, especially managers, be evaluated on specific characteristics and skills that helped predict outstanding performance in the roles for which they were being hired. The time was right for such thinking, because technological evolution and industry convergence had made jobs much more complex, often rendering experience and performance in previous positions irrelevant. So, instead, we decomposed jobs into competencies and looked for candidates with the right combination of them. For leadership roles, we also began to rely on research showing that emotional intelligence was even more important than IQ.
Now we're at the dawn of a fourth era, in which the focus must shift to potential. In a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous environment (VUCA is the military-acronym-turned-corporate-buzzword), competency-based appraisals and appointments are increasingly insufficient. What makes someone successful in a particular role today might not tomorrow if the competitive environment shifts, the company's strategy changes, or he or she must collaborate with or manage a different group of colleagues. So the question is not whether your company's employees and leaders have the right skills; it's whether they have the potential to learn new ones.
Unfortunately, potential is much harder to discern than competence (though not impossible, as I'll describe later). Moreover, your organization will be looking for it in what will soon be one of the toughest employment markets in history—for employers, not job seekers. The recent noise about high unemployment rates in the United States and Europe hides important signals: Three forces—globalization, demographics, and pipelines—will make senior talent ever scarcer in the years to come.
Back in 2006, I worked with Nitin Nohria, the current dean of Harvard Business School, and my Egon Zehnder colleagues to study this issue, gathering detailed data and interviewing CEOs from 47 companies with a combined market capitalization of $2 trillion, revenue of over $1 trillion, and more than 3 million employees. Representing all major sectors and geographies, these firms were successful, with strong reputations and solid people practices. Yet we found that all were about to face a massive talent crunch. Eight years later, the situation for companies is just as bad, if not worse.
Let's examine the three factors in turn. Globalization compels companies to reach beyond their home markets and to compete for the people who can help them do so. The major global firms in our 2006 study anticipated an 88% increase in their proportion of revenue from developing regions by 2012. Not only did that happen, but the International Monetary Fund and other groups are currently predicting that some 70% of the world's growth between now and 2016 will come from emerging markets. At the same time, firms in developing nations are themselves vying for talent, as well as customers, around the world. Take China, which now has 88 companies in the global Fortune 500, up from just eight in 2003, thanks in part to foreign growth. Huawei, the leading Chinese telecommunications company, employs more than 70,000 people, 45% of whom work in R&D centers in countries including Germany, Sweden, the U.S., France, Italy, Russia, and India. Similar examples can be found in companies based in markets such as India and Brazil.
The impact of demographics on hiring pools is also undeniable. The sweet spot for rising senior executives is the 35-to-44-year-old age bracket, but the percentage of people in that range is shrinking dramatically. In our 2006 study, we calculated that a projected 30% decline in the ranks of young leaders, combined with anticipated business growth, would cut in half the pool of senior leader candidates in that critical age group. Whereas a decade ago this demographic shift was affecting mostly the United States and Europe, by 2020 many other countries, including Russia, Canada, South Korea, and China, will have more people at retirement age than entering the workforce.
The third phenomenon is related and equally powerful, but much less well known: Companies are not properly developing their pipelines of future leaders. In PricewaterhouseCoopers's 2014 survey of CEOs in 68 countries, 63% of respondents said they were concerned about the future availability of key skills at all levels. The Boston Consulting Group cites proprietary research showing that 56% of executives see critical gaps in their ability to fill senior managerial roles in coming years. HBS professor Boris Groysberg found similar concerns in his 2013 survey of executive program participants: Respondents gave their companies' leadership pipelines an average rating of 3.2 out of 5, compared with an average score of 4 for current CEOs and 3.8 for current top teams. Equally troubling were responses to other kinds of questions in the survey: No talent management function was rated higher than 3.3, and critical employee development activities, such as job rotations, were scored as low as 2.6. In other words, few executives think their companies are doing a good job identifying and developing qualified leaders. Recent executive panel interviews conducted by my colleagues confirm that this view is widespread. Only 22% of the 823 leaders who participated consider their pipelines promising, and only 19% said they find it easy to attract the best talent.
Research on managing your future leaders.
Taken independently, globalization, demographics, and pipelines would each create unprecedented demand for talent over the next decade. The pace of globalization has never been faster; the imbalance between old and young has never been so dramatic; views on the pipelines of qualified successors have never been more negative; and the survey ratings of development practices are the lowest I've seen. Combine all those factors, and you get a war for talent that will present a huge, perhaps insurmountable, challenge for most organizations. But for those that learn how to spot potential, effectively retain people who have it, and create development programs to help the best get better, the situation will instead offer an extraordinary opportunity.
The first step is to get the right people into your organization. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the most impressive corporate value creators in recent history, put it in 1998, "Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of [our] success." So, when evaluating job candidates (and reevaluating current employees), how do you gauge potential?
A focus on potential can improve talent spotting at every level of the organization—especially the very top. When choosing a CEO or board member, as opposed to a young manager, you'll often find that several candidates have the right credentials, experience, and competencies. That's why an accurate assessment of their motivation, curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination is all the more important.
For CEO roles, succession planning must start very early, ideally when a new leader takes charge but no later than three to four years before he or she expects to leave. At Egon Zehnder, even when a much longer tenure is expected, we help companies assess potential two to four layers below the C-suite, identifying people to retain and develop so that some can become contenders for the top job.
I know one outstanding corporate director who twice orchestrated the dismissal of fully competent C-suite executives because they didn't have enough potential and she wanted to make their roles—key development opportunities—available to people who did. Board appointments require the same discipline. Our firm's UK office recently helped a highly respected retail group, the John Lewis Partnership, evaluate a long list of candidates for two nonexecutive director positions, using all the indicators of potential—curiosity, in particular—as key metrics. After all, if a company's leaders don't have the potential to learn, grow, and adapt to new environments, how can they attract up-and-coming employees and managers who do?
Many companies have well-established "high potential" programs, through which they fast-track promising managers for development and promotions. But most of these are actually "high performer" programs, full of people who have done well in the past and are therefore assumed to have the best shot of doing well in the future—but given VUCA conditions, that is no longer a safe prediction. About 80% of the participants in the executive programs I teach consistently report that their companies don't use an empirically validated model for assessing potential. I'll admit, this kind of evaluation is much more difficult than measuring IQ, past performance, and even various competencies. But it can be done—with a predictive accuracy around 85%, according to data on the careers of thousands of executives we assessed at Egon Zehnder using a model developed and refined over the past two decades.
The first indicator of potential we look for is the right kind of motivation: a fierce commitment to excel in the pursuit of unselfish goals. High potentials have great ambition and want to leave their mark, but they also aspire to big, collective goals, show deep personal humility, and invest in getting better at everything they do. We consider motivation first because it is a stable—and usually unconscious—quality. If someone is driven purely by selfish motives, that probably won't change.
Although Algorta's tenure as CEO bears no resemblance to what he experienced on that mountain, the same characteristics served him in his career at Quinsa. Perhaps the best example of the purity of his motives came at the end of his 10-year stint with the company, when, for sound strategic reasons, he recommended that it abandon the agribusiness project he was leading, thus voting himself out of a job. He was also a curious executive, always going out of his way to meet customers, clients, and workers at all levels, and to listen to voices that usually went unheard. As a result, he accepted and supported some revolutionary marketing initiatives, which allowed Quilmes to multiply its sales eightfold while achieving record profitability. He displayed great insight both in his hiring decisions—the future CEOs of both Quilmes and Nestlé were among his best hires—and in his strategic ones: for example, his bold move to divest all noncore assets so that the company could use the proceeds to expand the regional brewery business. His engagement transformed an ineffective and even vicious culture at Quilmes; his insistence that bosses and subordinates come together in open meetings set a precedent that was later rolled out to the whole group. Finally, Algorta showed amazing determination at Quinsa. When the project he'd been hired to lead—the construction of a new brewery—ran out of funds just after he took over, he didn't consider quitting; instead, he pushed to get the necessary financing. And when Argentina was shaken by devaluation and hyperinflation a few months later, he pressed on; the facility was up and running in 15 months.
Always ask for concrete examples, and go just as deep in your exploration of motivation, insight, engagement, and determination. Your conversations with managers, colleagues, and direct reports who know the person well should be just as detailed.
As a leader, you must also work to spread these interviewing techniques through the organization. Researchers have found that while the best interviewers' assessments have a very high positive correlation with the candidates' ultimate performance, some interviewers' opinions are worse than flipping a coin. Still, few managers learn proper assessment techniques from their business schools or their employers; in my surveys of participants in executive talent management programs, I've found that only about 30% think that their companies provide adequate training. Most organizations, it seems, are filled with people who have the power to endorse bad candidates and kill off good ones.
By contrast, companies that emphasize the right kind of hiring vastly improve their odds. Amazon has, for example, hundreds of dedicated internal recruiters, great training programs in assessment, and even a legion of certified "bar raisers": skilled evaluators who hold full-time jobs in a range of departments but are also empowered to participate in assessing—and vetoing—candidates for other areas.
The Brazilian mining group Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, known as Vale, took a similarly disciplined approach, working with Egon Zehnder, during the 2001 to 2011 tenure of CEO Roger Agnelli. On his watch, not one senior role was filled without an objective, independent, and professional assessment of all internal and external candidates. Managers were encouraged to favor motivated, curious, insightful, engaging, and determined prospects even when they had no specific experience in the field or function to which they had applied. "We would never choose someone who was not passionate and committed to our long-term strategy and demanding objectives," Agnelli explains. Some 250 executives were hired or promoted in this way, all over the world, and the strategy paid off. Vale became a global player in the mining industry, dramatically outperforming others in the country and the region.
Once you've hired true high potentials and identified the ones you already have, you'll need to focus on keeping them. After all, competitors grappling with the same tight talent market will be more than happy to tempt them away. Agnelli says his proudest achievement at Vale was not the huge revenue, profit, and share price growth over which he presided but the improved quality of the leaders rising through the company's ranks. "After five or six years, everyone appointed at the highest levels came from inside," he says, adding that the capacity to build and retain great teams is "the key" to any leader's or organization's success.
Pushing your high potentials up a straight ladder won't accelerate their growth—uncomfortable assignments will.
Indeed, when the Brazilian government used its 61% stake in Vale's controlling shares to precipitate Agnelli's departure, in 2011, prompting the voluntary resignations of seven out of eight executive committee members within a year, the company soon lost almost half its value. Growing disenchantment with Brazilian and commodity stocks played a role, to be sure. But given that Vale's closest competitors, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, saw much less dramatic declines over the same period, it seems clear that investors were also reacting to the loss of an outstanding leadership team.
How can you emulate Vale under Agnelli and avoid the company's subsequent fate? By considering what your high potentials want most from you. As Daniel H. Pink explains in Drive, most of us (especially knowledge workers) are energized by three fundamental things: autonomy—the freedom to direct our lives; mastery—our craving to excel; and purpose—the yearning for our work to serve something larger than ourselves.
Seven key steps, no matter what the future brings.
Pay does matter, of course. All employees, especially rising stars, expect their compensation to reflect their contribution or effort and to be comparable to that of others doing similar jobs. However, in my experience, while unfair pay can surely demotivate, compensation beyond a certain level is much less important than most people think. In my examination of candidates hired through our firm who were successful in their new jobs but moved on within three years, I found that 85% of them were hired away into a more senior position, confirming that they were competent people with potential. But only 4% of them cited more money as the primary reason for their departures. More common reasons were bad bosses, limited support, and lack of opportunities for growth.
So do pay your stars fairly, ideally above the average. But also give them autonomy in four "T" dimensions: task (what they do), time (when they do it), team (whom they do it with), and technique (how they do it). Help them toward mastery by setting difficult but attainable challenges and eliminating distractions. And engage them in a greater team, organizational, or societal goal. Bezos and other leaders at Amazon are expert at this. Agnelli and his team at Vale were, too. But the conditions at the company following his departure failed to motivate the remaining leaders in the same way, and many of them chose to move on.
To explain the consequences of not challenging your high potentials, I often point to Japan. In 2008 Kentaro Aramaki, from Egon Zehnder's Tokyo office, and I mapped the potential of senior Japanese executives (that is, our consultants' objective assessments of the executives' ability to take on bigger roles and responsibilities, as measured by the indicators described above) against their competence (that is, our objective assessments of the eight leadership competencies listed in the sidebar "What Else Should You Look For?"). When we compared those scores with the average scores of all executives in our worldwide database, we found a great paradox. Japanese professionals had higher potential than the global average but lower competence. In spite of great raw material, there was a poor final product. The problem was, and still is, Japan's flawed development process. Although the country's educational institutions and the strong work ethic that is part of Japanese culture give managers a jump-start in their careers, their growth is stymied when they actually start working. A leader in Japan traditionally rises through the ranks of one division, in one company, waiting respectfully for promotions that usually come only when he's the most senior person in line for the spot.
Although potential should be the defining measure of executives today, it would be a mistake to ignore other lessons we've learned over the years about how to evaluate people.
Although you probably won't administer an IQ test, it is important to assess a candidate's general intelligence (including analytical, verbal, mathematical, and logical reasoning) by considering educational background, early job experiences, and responses to interview questions. You don't need to look for geniuses; for most jobs anything above a certain level of intelligence has almost no impact on performance. However, you should still hire people clever enough for your requirements, because their general intelligence won't increase dramatically over time.
Values are critical, and you can't expect to impart them on the job. Use interviews and reference checks not only to weigh the essentials, such as honesty and integrity, but also to discover if the candidate shares your organization's core values.
Some competencies are relevant (though not sufficient) when evaluating senior manager candidates. While each job and organization is different, the best leaders have, in some measure, eight abilities.
You should assess these abilities through interviews and reference checks, in the same way you would evaluate potential, aiming to confirm that the candidate has displayed them in the past, under similar circumstances.
Recently a Tokyo-based global conglomerate asked our firm to assess its top dozen senior leaders, all in their mid- to late 50s. This company, which operates in multiple industries and markets, should have been an ideal training ground for executives. However, only one of the managers we evaluated had worked in more than a single business line. The time each had spent working outside Japan was just one year, on average. And their English language skills were quite limited. As a result, none were suitable candidates to succeed the CEO. The sad thing is that all had started off strong. They were engineers, with an average tenure of more than 20 years in R&D and product strategy and marketing—but that potential had been squandered.
Pushing your high potentials up a straight ladder toward bigger jobs, budgets, and staffs will continue their growth, but it won't accelerate it. Diverse, complex, challenging, uncomfortable roles will. When we recently asked 823 international executives to look back at their careers and tell us what had helped them unleash their potential, the most popular answer, cited by 71%, was stretch assignments. Job rotations and personal mentors, each mentioned by 49% of respondents, tied for second.
How do you make sure people in your organization are getting the stretch assignments and job rotations they need? Let's come back to ANZ. Following a 2007 to 2010 hiring spree as the company expanded across Asia, it decided to refine its leadership development processes. Its efforts center on what it calls business-critical roles: those that make a vital contribution to the strategic agenda; require a scarce set of skills; produce highly variable outcomes dependent on the incumbent; and, if vacant, pose a significant threat to business continuity and performance momentum.
ANZ makes a point of assessing all its managers for potential and then placing those who rate the highest in these business-critical roles. Other development initiatives include the Generalist Bankers Program, which each year offers 10 to 15 participants the opportunity to spend two years rotating through wholesale, commercial, and retail banking, risk, and operations to build broad industry and corporate knowledge. Participants then move into permanent roles with a focus on gaining geographic, cultural, product, and client-facing experience, including a mandatory posting in internal audit to ensure that they understand the bank's control frameworks. The program commitment is 15 years, with the goal of a country CEO posting at the end.
This disciplined approach already seems to be bearing fruit. Whereas three years ago 70% of ANZ's senior executive roles were filled by external candidates, outside hiring is now below 20%. Internal surveys show that staff engagement has increased from 64% to 72%, while "same-period performance excellence" (a measure of employee commitment to customer service and product quality) has jumped from 68% to 78%. And the business has benefited in other ways. In 2013 the company was judged the number four international bank in the Asia Pacific region for the second consecutive year by the highly regarded Greenwich customer survey, up from number 12 in 2008.Geopolitics, business, industries, and jobs are changing so rapidly that we can't predict the competencies needed to succeed even a few years out. It is therefore imperative to identify and develop people with the highest potential. Look for those who have a strong motivation to excel in the pursuit of challenging goals, along with the humility to put the group ahead of individual needs; an insatiable curiosity that propels them to explore new ideas and avenues; keen insight that allows them to see connections where others don't; a strong engagement with their work and the people around them; and the determination to overcome setbacks and obstacles. That doesn't mean forgetting about factors like intelligence, experience, performance, and specific competencies, particularly the ones related to leadership. But hiring for potential and effectively retaining and developing those who have it—at every level of the organization—should now be your top priority.
Claudio Fernández-Aráoz is a senior adviser at the global executive search firm Egon Zehnder, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School, and the author of It's Not the How or the What but the Who (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).


text:
package org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.impl;

import static org.junit.Assert.assertEquals;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.Reader;
import java.io.StringWriter;
import java.io.Writer;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.util.Arrays;

import org.junit.Test;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.Column;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.DataType;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.Database;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.DefaultValueColumnConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.ForeignKeyColumnConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.ForeignKeyTableConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.IndexedColumn;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.NotNullColumnConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.OrderDirection;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.PrimaryKeyColumnConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.PrimaryKeyTableConstraint;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.Table;
import org.yatech.sqlitedb.codegen.model.UniqueColumnConstraint;

public class JsonModelWriterTest {

	@Test
	public void testToStringDatabase() throws IOException {
		Database database = createTestDatabase();
		String json = JsonModelWriter.toString(database);
		String expectedJson = readResourceAsString("/JsonModelWriterTest_expectedJson.json");
		assertEquals(expectedJson, json);
	}

	private Database createTestDatabase() {
		Database database = new Database("MY_DB");
		database.getGenerationSettings().put("foo1", "bar");
		database.getGenerationSettings().put("foo2", 17);
		database.getGenerationSettings().put("foo3", 1.618);
		database.setTables(Arrays.asList(createTable1(), createTable2()));
		return database;
	}

	private Table createTable1() {
		Table table = new Table("MY_TABLE1");
		// Column1
		Column column1 = new Column("MY_COL1", DataType.INTEGER);
		column1.getConstraints().add(new PrimaryKeyColumnConstraint(OrderDirection.ASC, true));
		column1.getGenerationSettings().put("hello","world!");
		// Column2
		Column column2 = new Column("MY_COL2", DataType.TEXT);

		table.setColumns(Arrays.asList(column1, column2));
		// No table constraints
		return table;
	}

	private Table createTable2() {
		Table table = new Table("MY_TABLE2");
		// Column1
		Column column1 = new Column("MY_COL11", DataType.NONE);
		column1.getConstraints().add(new NotNullColumnConstraint());
		column1.getConstraints().add(new UniqueColumnConstraint());
		// Column2
		Column column2 = new Column("MY_COL12", DataType.REAL);
		column2.getConstraints().add(new DefaultValueColumnConstraint(3.1415));
		column2.getGenerationSettings().put("hello","world!");
		// Column3
		Column column3 = new Column("MY_COL13", DataType.BLOB);
		// Column4
		Column column4 = new Column("MY_COL14");
		column4.getConstraints().add(new ForeignKeyColumnConstraint("MY_TABLE1", "MY_COL1"));
		// No data type
		table.setColumns(Arrays.asList(column1, column2, column3, column4));
		table.getConstraints().add(
				new PrimaryKeyTableConstraint(Arrays.asList(
						new IndexedColumn("MY_COL11"),
						new IndexedColumn("MY_COL12", OrderDirection.DESC))));
		table.getConstraints().add(
				new ForeignKeyTableConstraint(
						Arrays.asList("MY_COL11"),
						"MY_TABLE1",
						Arrays.asList("MY_COL1")));
		return table;
	}

	private String readResourceAsString(String resourcePath) throws IOException {
		InputStream inputStream = JsonModelWriterTest.class.getResourceAsStream(resourcePath);
		try {
			Writer writer = new StringWriter();
			Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(inputStream, Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
			char[] cbuf = new char[4096];
			int len, off = 0;
			while ((len = reader.read(cbuf)) > 0) {
				writer.write(cbuf, off, len);
				off += len;
			}
			writer.flush();
			return writer.toString();
		} finally {
			if (inputStream != null) {
				inputStream.close();
			}
		}
	}

}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


text:
Version for Visually Impaired People
State Committee on Science and Technology of the Republic of Belarus
Management Structure Status, Tasks, Functions Lower Organization Board of SCST Historical Background
Visiting Hours Applications
Adress: 1 Akademitcheskaya str., Minsk Postcode: 220072
8 017 2529244 (tel)
8 017 3537279 (fax)
gknt@gknt.gov.by
The Senior Government Body:
The Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus, 220010, 11 Sovietskaya str., (the Government House), Minsk, Republic of Belarus
Tel/fax: (017) 222-66-65
E-mail: contact@government.by
Website: http://www.government.by
13:00-14:00 - Lunch Break
Postcode: 220072, Minsk, Republic of Belarus,
1 Akademitcheskaya str.
Portal's Map Visiting Hours Applications Administrative Procedures Photo Video Commission on Combating Corruption Technical regulations of the Republic of Belarus
SCST in Social Networks:
Official Portal of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Republic of Belarus © 2017 SCS&T State Committee for Science and Technology of the Republic of Belarus. All Rightts Reserved

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Ealing film studios are synonymous with the heyday of British post-War filmmaking. The studio became such a well-recognised player in the 1940s and 1950s that the 'Ealing film' became a genre in its own right. For audiences, the geographical location represented films with ensemble casts, community spirit and celebrations of the plucky British spirit. Hue and Cry (1947), Passport to Pimlico (1949), Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Blue Lamp (1950), The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955) were all produced by Ealing in the space of ten years and remain beloved classics.
Associated Talking Pictures/Ealing Studios films from the interwar period include Look Up and Laugh (1935) and Laburnum Grove (1936). As is evident from the posters for these films, Ealing Studios also cultivated its brand of 'cozy old England' in its film advertising.
The very British pedigree of the films are the focus of the posters. Not only do the British stars receive ample attention, both posters also highlight that the films' stories are written by J.B. Priestley, a quintessentially British writer. The posters have the feel of a collage, with different fonts and images laid over one another. These are not posters that stress modernity, like other types of posters of the same era such as posters for ocean liners or railways. Instead, they almost have a home-made feel.
Or, more correctly, they are made to look like what a corporate entity thinks a 2018 audience thinks an interwar film poster resembled. The sharp lines and minimalist designs of the Filmworks posters stand in contrast to what film posters in the 1930s actually looked like. The Filmworks advertising alludes to a vague idea of transnational modernism that cannot be found in British interwar cinema posters. The films that used similar poster designs were German cinema posters such as for Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Spione.
Ironically, these German films were produced by the UFA studios, a massive company that produced the majority of Germany's films in the interwar period. UFA was the polar opposite to Ealing in its vision and approach to film production. Yet today, years of re-appropriation and re-hashing of historical illustration and design styles means that a minimalist illustration of a woman with short bobbed hair wearing a tuxedo is believed to represent interwar London. The historically imprecise style of the posters represents the opposite of the Ealing Studios' ethos – they employ a false nostalgia to sell luxury goods.
Wes Anderson's latest feature, Isle of Dogs, was released in cinemas in March 2018. The stop-motion animation is made using puppets, and is set in Japan in the near future. In the film's fictional city of Megasaki, a dog-hating mayor has banned all dogs to a nearby 'trash island'. The film's hero, 12-year-old Japanese boy Atari, goes to the island to find his dog Spot. He is helped in his quest by a pack of file male 'alpha-dogs', whilst on the mainland an American exchange student leads the protests against the mayor's anti-dog decrees.
Since the film has come out, much attention has rightly been given to the problematic depiction and appropriation of Japanese culture (and critics' subsequent calling out of that appropriation) – for example in articles here, here and here. For the purposes of this blog, concerned as it is with ephemerality in urban environments, I instead want to explore the landscape of Trash Island.
Trash, garbage, rubbish – it is an inevitable part of modern human existence. The challenge of getting rid of ever-increasing mounds of refuse, in particular in cities, is a common challenge for city planners. As citizens, we expect that rubbish is collected regularly and then 'disposed of', preferably in a way that is invisible and unobtrusive. When this does not happen, as during the infamous 'Naples waste crisis' in 2008, it leads to health and environmental risks as well as unsightly streets.
But after trash is collected from individual households, it still needs to go somewhere – in particular given that only a small percentage of all waste can currently be truly recycled. In most cases, it gets heaped into enormous landfill sites, which are either left out in the open or buried. For now, this seems to be the best solution that we have to manage our waste, and this is also how it is managed in Anderson's fictional city of Megasaki.
Wes Anderson is known for the aesthetic coherency he brings to his films, a visual style that is instantly recognisable by its symmetry and use of colour. It has spawned a subreddit and Instagram account on which people share real-life images that look like they are from an Anderson film. It appears that in Isle of Dogs, Anderson tried to find a compromise between using a landfill site as a primary location, and his natural inclination for order and harmony. Rubbish by its definition is messy, but Anderson manages to turn it into something that is (almost) beautiful. In this he was reportedly inspired by environmental photographers who have turned images of real trash collection sites into art. The difference is that whilst these photographers use their art to make people think about the impact of consumer culture on the environment, Isle of Dogs does not explicitly ask such questions of its audience.
Anderson can partly represent garbage as beautiful because of the permanence of Trash Island. Isle of Dogs does not give much information about how Trash Island came into existence, but it does become clear that the island has been used as a landfill site for some time. In the second half of the film, Atari and his five dog companions find a group of dogs at the other end of the island, who have been there for several years. This group of dogs has managed to build a real home out of the waste that surrounds them. Objects that have been thrown away by humans are given a new lease of life by the dogs, who build permanent structures and communities out of them.
Inevitably, Anderson's aesthetics romanticise the landfill site. The location serves as an easy way to communicate how the mayor thinks dogs are trash, and then provides visual pleasures in the heaping together and repeating of textures and colours. But there is no discussion as to why Trash Island exists, or whether the citizens of Megasaki should consider better ways of disposing of their waste. When all dogs return to Megasaki at the end of the film, Trash Island presumably continues to exist as it did before. And there a parallel can be drawn between Anderson's treatment of Japanese culture and his use of a landfill site setting: both give him great visuals to work with, but Isle of Dogs fails to engage meaningfully with either cultural appropriation or environmental issues.
The British Film Institute's online streaming service, BFI Player, gives anyone with an internet connection an opportunity to go through British archival film and TV footage. I stumbled upon the 14-minute film Working Women, made in 1975 by feminist activists in Newcastle. The film was originally part of a regional television programme, and was made to highlight local support for the Working Women's Charter, a trade union charter launched in 1974 to achieve equal pay and equal rights for both genders.
The film is a delight to watch as a historical document, but what I am interested in here is the formal tactics the film uses to visualise the city as a space inhabited by women. Although the film is on the face of it not particularly sophisticated, it utilises various techniques to ensure that the visual aspects of the film support the arguments made by voice-over narration. In this way it shows that it can be rewarding to analyse a piece of locally produced reportage in the same way as one would analyse a high-end production.
The first part of Working Women discusses the difficulties women run in to when they try to find employment, and it includes several 'vox-pops' with women looking for work. The film opens with several shots of women pushing prams along the streets of Newcastle (see figures 1 and 2).
These shots establish that when the film talks about 'working women', it is primarily interested in the plight of working mothers – a division that was arguably less distinct in 1975 than it is today. The start of the film includes a brief historical overview in which the voice-over explains that gender roles and responsibilities only became entrenched in the industrial revolution. The film thus makes a direct link between urbanisation and women becoming responsible for all domestic duties and child rearing. By extension the city is designed to suit the public lives of men and not the domestic existences of women.
Throughout the film, the streets of Newcastle are shown to be almost exclusively populated by women (see figures 3-5).
Figure 3 shows only one man walking down a fairly busy street, that is otherwise full of women. In figure 4, there is a woman in the foreground of the shot, as well as four women walking abreast in the middle of the shot. They take centre-stage, and their formation can be read as a united front. They are, indeed, blocking the path of the man behind them. The framing of these four women serves as a visual metaphor for the film's argument that women should unite in trade unions to achieve parity with working men. Although the four women in this shot are not characters in the film, and there is no explicit comment made on this framing, the staging of the shot underwrites the message of the film.
These shots show that Newcastle by day is a city almost wholly inhabited by women. This serves as evidence to the film's argument that whilst men are normally in full-time, permanent work, women struggle to get employment as they are primarily responsible for childcare and housework. Naturally, therefore, men are in their places of work during the day and women are out on the streets. But the absence of men also serves to ensure that the viewer's attention is not detracted from the stories told by the women that are interviewed for the film. Women are allowed to take centre stage in this film both literally and figuratively.
Working Women only allows men in a role of significance in its final section, when the camera is present at a trade union meeting. This is the only part of the film where men are shown in close-up (figures 6 and 7). As trade union representatives these men are necessary allies in the fight for pay parity and other equal gender rights. The film therefore gives them a voice and visual prominence. The camera privileges those inhabitants of the city that support the film's argument. However, by allowing these male trade union reps a voice, the women in this final section of the film are immediately in danger of being drowned out. The male voices dominate during the meeting, as the men apparently struggle to understand the women's viewpoint. Again, this mirrors the political argument that the film is making: although women need male allies to advocate on their behalf within existing power structures, there is a risk that the female perspective is side-lined as a result.
Working Women is a piece made for regional television and probably not produced with the intention to preserve it for posterity. This brief analysis shows that despite the film's modest budget and aspirations, the formal aspects of the film serve to underscore its arguments. It shows the city to be a space that women must use and navigate, even if it is not built with them in mind.
We all know that living in a city can be a dirty affair, even in cities where extensive regulation and legislation prevents too much litter from floating the streets. Singapore famously penalises littering of public space with fines of up to 300 dollars – but this does not prevent the city state from having to grapple with air pollution caused by exhaust fumes. Indeed, no city is exempt from subjecting its inhabitants to soot and dirt. London, of course, seems continuously unable to curb its pollution levels and its air quality is getting worse rather than better.
(…) The formula acts like a magnet on skin to capture & get rid of dirt (impurities, excess sebum and pollution) and helps fight 5 problems that can be caused by daily city grime: SHINE; BLACKHEADS; STICKINESS; DULLNESS; ENLARGED PORES.
Is PureActive Anti-blackhead deep pore wash right for me? Yes, if your skin is prone to blackheads, blemishes and imperfections, if it is combination to oily and if you are looking for a deep cleansing wash. (…) Enriched with Zinc and Salicylic Acid, selected for its purifying power, it helps to control shine and helps protect against the appearance of blemishes, blackheads and imperfections.
Here, it is not an external factor that causes the skin to break out, but it is the skin's innate failure and 'imperfection' that is the culprit. Women are told they probably have skin that is 'prone' to blackheads and they can buy products to 'control' this natural urge of their skin. Men, on the contrary, are implied to have 'perfect' skin as their natural state, and this is only disrupted by their environment.
Of course, in either case, it is limiting and worrying that these products imply that the only skin worth having is one that is completely free of 'blemishes', which are in any case naturally occurring and completely harmless phenomena. I also personally quite enjoy the feeling of having freshly washed skin, and I presume my male housemate does, too, and that is the reason we use these products. But these brief marketing texts show that the gendered advertising of 'care and beauty' products goes beyond using black packaging for 'male' products and pastel-coloured packaging for 'female' products. The narrative used in the marketing copy reinforces the notion that women are somehow faulty and can only hope to one day be worthy, whereas men are sufficient in their own right and only need to use products to scrub off external tarnish.
The L'Oréal product presents the city as the source of all pollution, the cause of imperfections, without challenging one's choice to live in the city if it is such a source of dirt. You can imagine the kind of man this product is aimed at: someone with a successful professional job, who is go-getting and does not want his impure skin to stand in the way of his success. Lewis Hamilton, who is currently the 'face' of the L'Oréal Men Expert line, embodies this ideal. The wash even claims to have an 'Active Defence System', to further the connotations with masculinity and the military. Living in the city is a battle which the Man is going to win – never mind that the city is wholly man-made. The 'defence' is against man's own creation, the city like a Frankenstein's monster that has gone out of control.
Finally, in a curious twist, the RRP for the Men Expert face wash is £6.35, whereas my own facewash sells at £3.69. I was expecting the 'male' product to be cheaper – after all, the Internet routinely reports on examples of 'female' products having an inexplicable mark-up. Not in this case; I wonder if it is because the Men Expert wash has that Active Defence System and is apparently veritable piece of engineering. The price increases the status of the wash developed by 'experts'. All my own soap does is try to assist my own body's apparent inability to control itself.
I have recently moved to south London, so now I frequently pass Battersea Power Station on my way into the city centre. This old coal-fired power station was partly built in the 1930s, and partly in the 1950s, in the 'brick cathedral' style. Although it was aesthetically pleasing, its main purpose was to supply one-fifth of the total electricity needed in London. It stopped its core activities in 1983 and stood empty for decades, during which the four tall chimneys remained a London landmark, complete with its own 'heritage' memorabilia. In 2012 private investors bought the site and started refurbishment works which are due to be completed in the next year. The new development comprises not only the original power station but also a large number of new apartment blocks and a new Tube station. The website designated to the project promises it to be 'London's newest neighbourhood – a truly mixed-use destination' which will include spaces to 'live, work, play, shop, eat, and stay'. Last week it was announced that Apple Inc will move its London headquarters to the site in 2021.
The chimneys are the most recognisable element of the Power Station, and an important guarantee the private investors had to give in 2012 was that the chimneys will be retained. However, during the refurbishment works each of the chimneys has been taken down and built back up, temporarily depriving London of an 'iconic' part of its skyline. Although the refurbished Power Station will ostensibly look exactly the same as the original building, it will in fact be made up from new materials. The insides of the building will also be completely transformed as its industrial function is replaced by third sector work spaces. So, while the Power Station will rejoin the skyline, it will never be the same again.
A big selling point of the new corporate branding of the Power Station (which includes a new logo) is the heritage of the building. But although the building will look the same, its old identity will be gone and be replaced by the uniformity of luxury flats, copies of which are springing up all around the area. The London Mayor has recently called for an inquiry into foreign ownership of such flats, an action triggered by the revelation that more than 60% of residences in the St George's Wharf Tower are owned by foreign buyers who do not actually live in the apartments. St George's Wharf Tower is only 0.8 mile east from Battersea Power Station, so it is not inconceivable that many of the Power Station's new flats will suffer the same fate – especially as 2 bedroom flats start at £1.16 million. Rather than a thriving 'new neighbourhood', the Power Station site seems set to become a ghost town for the super-rich.
Battersea Power Station has been a much-loved London building since its opening in 1939. But by attaching such importance to the Power Station keeping the same outward appearance, attention is diverted from the implications of the building's radically altered function. From having an industrial function it becomes 'industrial' purely in its aesthetic.
It used to be a marker of modernity and functionality, providing electricity to a large part of south London. Now it will be one in many property investment opportunities for the 1%, contribute to London's ever-escalating housing prices and erode local communities in favour of bland globalisation.
In Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) the ailment that has struck humanity is infertility. For eighteen years, no babies have been born on the planet, which has led to the breakdown of societies across the world. Britain has reverted back to using World War 2-style propaganda to stress its superior ability to deal with the crisis over the rest of the world. But it deals with it by interning all immigrants in camps and by offering legal suicide pills to the elderly. In the midst of this journalist Theo is approached by his ex-partner Jules, now leader of the rebellious 'Fishes', and asked to smuggle something very valuable to the coast: the girl Kee, who is pregnant.
The dystopian background is established in the opening scenes of the film. Theo enters a London coffee shop to get a take-away coffee. On the TV in the shop the news announces that the youngest person on the planet, 18-year-old 'Baby' Diego, has been killed. The crowd in the shop are crying. Theo walks out and puts his coffee on a nearby electricity box to stir in his sugar. Then the coffee shop he has just exited explodes. Although this explosion is referenced later in the film (it was orchestrated by the Fishes), it is not treated as the extraordinary event that it would be in the 'normal' world. (Re-watching Children of Men in 2016, after recent terrorist attacks, makes it resonate in new and different ways.) When Theo asks his boss for permission to work from home later that day, he uses Baby Diego's death as a pretext, and not his near-death experience. Equally, later on in the film Theo gets kidnapped off a London street by the Fishes, and later dropped back again. Neither instance appears to even raise an eyebrow of passers-by.
In this sense, Children of Men follows a well-established dystopian trope of equating the city with degeneration. This cliché is in the first instance strengthened when Theo visits his friend Jasper, an old political activist and hippy who lives out in the woods in a ramshackle building where he grows his own weed. Jasper's house is a sanctuary where Theo can speak freely. The countryside appears relatively untouched by the ravages that have hit the city, and Theo's cynicism is juxtaposed with Jasper's optimism. But this division gets blurred as the film progresses, when Theo's attempts to save Kee lead the Fishes (who turn out to be 'baddies' after all) to Jasper's house, where they execute the old activist.
And of course the infertility exists in the countryside as much as it does in the city. Choosing infertility as the 'disease' inflicted on mankind, rather than a bacteria or viruses, allows the characters and audiences to speculate what humans have done to bring this upon themselves. The disease is a ceasing of bodily functions, not an external invasion that humankind has to fight. Although it is not revealed what the cause of the infertility is, characters drop some clues throughout the film that allow for a reconstruction of events. The film is set in 2027. Baby Diego dies at 18 years old, so the last babies were born in 2009. Miriam, Kee's midwife, tells Theo that the infertility started by pregnant women having miscarriages, which occurred earlier and earlier in the pregnancy, until it became apparent that no new pregnancies were registered. Theo and Jules haven't seen each other for twenty years. Jasper reveals that the couple had a baby, Dylan, who died in the 2007 flu pandemic. From these facts we can gather that the infertility was preceded by at least one pandemic of a viral disease, and that when the infertility set in it was a gradual process. It was not a divine judgement meted out to the masses (although there are plenty of religious groups in the periphery that take the infertility to be God's punishment), but rather a halting development that took time to really take hold.
But what caused it? And why is Kee able to get pregnant? The story wisely does not answer these questions. It is self-aware in its positioning of Kee, who jokes about being the virgin immaculate. In fact, she slept around and does not know who the father is. This leaves open the possibility that the issue is with the male half of the population, echoing noughties fears about mobile phones in tight trouser pockets. The end of the film cannot help but echo religious sentiments, with the baby being hailed as a source of purity and goodness, and with the saving ship 'Tomorrow' advancing through the fog. But is Kee's baby the Salvation of humankind and the start of a new generation, or is it just a one-off medical incident?
Channel 4 has just finished airing the first season of French political drama Spin (Original title: Les Hommes De l'Ombre, 2012). The plot of the first season hinges on the killing of the French president by a suicide bomber, and the subsequent frantic presidential election. Although the presidential candidates are significant characters, the real protagonists are the two spin doctors working on either side of the political divide. Simon Kapita, who got the murdered president in power, comes back to France to help Centrist candidate Anne Visage. Simon's former business partner but now rival, Ludo Desmeuze, works for the right-wing Prime Minister Phillipe Deleuvre.
Although Spin has been compared to West Wing, a series which consciously draws attention to its use of space, the French drama has none of the 'walk and talk' scenes that make the Aaron Sorkin vehicle so instantly recognisable. Indeed, on the face of it, Spin does not use the spaces it is set in very imaginatively. Most of the action is set in Paris, and when a location is used that the viewer may recognise it is signposted with text on screen. However, the series does make interesting use of one particular space: the HQ of Anne Visage's campaign.
At the start of the season, Anne is not intending to run for president. However, Kapita manages to convince her that she should give it a try. The urgency of the election means that a campaign has to be started very quickly. As part of a swift montage in episode 2, in which Kapita, Anne, and her advisor find financial backing, they also visit an empty space in a 'working class district' which will act as the physical centre of their campaign (Fig 1). Political ideals are mirrored in the buildings in which their candidates work: Anne is in a dynamic, popular district whereas her rival Deleuvre exclusively resides in Hôtel Matignon, the official residence of the French Prime Minister. Anne's building is run down and full of rubbish, but when we see it again later in the same episode, people are busily cleaning, painting, and putting up large photographs of Anne (Fig 2).
It is never specified who these people are or where they come from – as soon as the space is found, the volunteer team appears seemingly automatically. The course of the entire campaign is said to only take a few weeks, yet near the end of it, in episode 5, the HQ is transformed almost beyond recognition (Fig 3), with confetti to boot. Here, Anne greets a mass of volunteers who are all emotionally invested in her success.
The key members of staff, such as Anne's speech writer Valentine and Kapita's daughter Juliette who is in charge of the internet campaign, are never shown to be either working on doing up the HQ building, or even talking to the volunteers. The show gives the viewer a sense that as soon as the physical space is found to launch the campaign, it automatically attracts people that can also assist in the refurbishment. Spin in this way subtly uses the space of Anne's HQ to create shortcuts in the narrative. By showing space = volunteers = success, it is able to cut out any thorough explanation of how Anne's campaign builds momentum, and can instead focus on the intrigue of the spin doctors.