Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1303

Build an Organization That’s Less Busy and More Strategic

Working with the top executives at a company I’ll call Titan (which designs and makes transit concrete mixers), I noticed that they were flat-out busy doing everything except thinking about strategy. They were keeping a close watch on factory operations, tracking production targets, handling problems with staffing and equipment, and even getting involved in administrative tasks like supplying quotes and checking that all the invoicing had been done. And that set the pace for everyone else in the organization. Employees took few breaks. Many of them worked 12-hour days.

The trouble is, all this hasn’t improved performance. In fact, Titan isn’t doing very well financially, with customers slow to pay, creditors chasing their money, the bank overdraft growing, and profits in decline. When I took a look at its 13-page strategic plan, I could see why.

The company lacks focus. It has 15 “strategies,” none of which are actually related to how it achieves a competitive advantage. Rather, they’re a bunch of activities that keep the company’s managers very occupied, but to no clear end. While I could see from their disposition that in their hearts they knew something was wrong with their plan and their thinking, they were basically too busy to reflect. This has effectively taken the company’s destiny out of their hands.

Even if your organization is successful, being too busy isn’t a good thing, because you can’t sustain a frenzy of activity. But it’s much worse if the activities themselves don’t cohere strategically and your company’s performance is suffering as a result.

So, what does it take to build an organization that’s less busy and more coherent? An outsider’s perspective.

As insiders to our companies, when we look at what we do, we see only activity. When we think “improve,” we naturally focus on the world we know (Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley refers to this tendency as “the gravitational pull from the inside”). This leads to an operational mindset.

A strategic mindset is outside-in. Position yourself across the street, so to speak, and focus your attention on your firm’s competitiveness. Ask yourself questions like: “Why would I want to buy from them?” and “Why would I want to work for them?” When you look at your company this way, the world becomes one of outcomes, not activity — and it becomes much easier to establish a few key performance criteria. Then you can ask yourself “So what?” to set priorities.

When’s the best time to think about all this? Well, not at work, when you’re surrounded by all the hubbub you’ve yet to control. The work environment is designed to focus our attention on the tasks at hand. To become more strategic, you have to escape this channelling of your thoughts. Try using a simple device that leaders have relied on for eons: walking. The rhythmic effect of putting one foot after another frees the brain from itself, allowing you to take a helicopter view of what you do day-to-day.  You can reflect on relationships – which ones are most important to your competitiveness and how well you’re managing them. From this vantage point, you can better see how to reengineer your activities, saving both time and effort.

Had Titan’s CEO taken a walk and reflected, he might have identified that the company’s real source of competitiveness lay with three things that customers valued. First, it customized its products. While one of Titan’s main competitors supplied cheaper mixers, made in Malaysia, they were standardized. Titan’s mixers and other products were purpose-built, a considerable advantage to the customers that Titan ought to be targeting. Second, Titan offered a “complete package” — not just the initial mixer sale, but a suite of follow-up repairs and product servicing that rivals weren’t providing. And third, Titan could offer superior customer service — steeped in years of industry, product, and technical experience.

Sometimes these advantages can be right in front of us. But they remain underdeveloped, or we fail to capitalize on them, because everyone is consumed by tasks that don’t support them.

Focusing a company requires thought. It won’t happen if you don’t make the time.

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5 Signs It’s Time for a New Job

Regardless of your age, background, or accomplishments, you have probably fantasized about the possibility of a new career at some point in your life – those who haven’t are the exception.

LinkedIn reports that of its 313 million members, 25% are active job seekers, while 60% can be considered passive job seekers – people who are not proactively searching for a new job, but seriously willing to consider opportunities. In addition, there has been a steady increase of self-employed and temporary workers over the past two decades. This is true even in rich economies with low unemployment rates, like the U.S. and the U.K., partly because of the glamorization of entrepreneurship, the rise of the sharing economy, and the ubiquity of incompetent management, which makes the prospect of not having a boss rather alluring.

Yet at the same time, humans are naturally prewired to fear and avoid change, even when we are decidedly unhappy with our current situation. Indeed, meta-analyses show that people often stay on the job despite having negative job attitudes, low engagement, and failing to identify with the organization’s culture. And, since career changes are often driven by emotional rather than rational factors, they often end up disappointing. So at the end of the day, there is something comforting about the predictability of life: it makes us feel safe. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”

You and Your Team



Mid-Career Crisis


When you’re feeling stuck.

The inability to make a decision is in itself anxiety-provoking, because it increases uncertainty about the future. In addition, most people, even millennials, value long-term job stability, not just in themselves but also in others. Unsurprisingly, the OECD sees job security as a key component of quality of life, while academic studies report that job insecurity is a major cause of psychological stress.

All this explains why it is so hard to leave a job, no matter how uninspiring or monotonous it may be. In order to help you decide whether it may be time for a career change, here are five critical signs, based on psychological research, that you would probably benefit from a career switch:

You are not learning. Studies have shown that the happiest progression to late adulthood and old age involves work that stimulates the mind into continuous learning. This is particularly important if you are high on Openness to Experience/Inquisitiveness, a personality trait associated with curiosity, creativity, love of learning, and having a hungry mind.


You are underperforming. If you are stagnated, cruising in autopilot, and could do your job while asleep, then you’re almost certainly underperforming. Sooner or later, this will harm your resume and employability. If you want to be happy and engaged at work you are better off finding a job that entices you to perform at your highest level.


You feel undervalued. Even when employees are happy with their pay and promotion prospects, they will not enjoy their work unless they feel appreciated, especially by their managers. Furthermore, people who feel undervalued at work are more likely to burnout and engage in counterproductive work behaviors, such as absenteeism, theft, and sabotage. And when the employee in question is a leader, the stakes are much higher for everyone else because of their propensity to behave in ways that could destroy the organization.


You are just doing it for the money. Although people tend to put up with unrewarding jobs mostly for financial reasons, staying on a job just for the money is unrewarding at best, and demotivating at worst. As I pointed out in a previous post, employee engagement is three times more dependent on intrinsic than extrinsic rewards, and financial rewards extinguish intrinsic goals (e.g., enjoyment, sheer curiosity, learning or personal challenge).


You hate your boss. As the saying goes, people join companies but they quit their bosses. This implies that there is a great deal of overlap between employees who dislike their jobs, and those who dislike their bosses. In our research, we find that 75% of working adults find that the most stressful part of their job is their immediate supervisor or direct line manager. Until organizations do a better job at selecting and developing leaders, employees will have to lower their expectations about management or keep searching for exceptional bosses.

Of course, these are not the only signs that you should pay attention to. There are many other valid reasons for considering a job switch, such as work-life balance conflicts, economic pressures, firm downsizing, and geographical relocation. But these reasons are more contextual than psychological, and somewhat less voluntary. They are therefore less likely to lead to decision uncertainty than the five reasons I listed.

At the end of the day, real-world problems tend to lack a clear-cut solution. Instead, the correct answer depends on its consequences and how pleased we are with the outcome, and both are hard to predict. As Abraham Lincoln said, “the best way to predict the future is to create it,” so the only way to know whether a career move is actually right for you is to make it.

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What to Do If You Feel Stuck in the Wrong Career

If you’re midway through your career and feeling stuck, you are not alone. Maybe work doesn’t feel meaningful anymore, or your industry has drastically evolved, or your values and interests have changed. No matter what, your 40-something self is a very different person from the 20-something you were when you started out. The fact that this is such a common experience doesn’t make it any easier to handle when it’s happening to you.

This crisis can be a profound one. You’ve invested a great deal of time, energy, money, and education in your career. You’ve established a solid network and credentials. You may have a certain lifestyle — and the accompanying financial obligations — to keep up with. Maybe you’re hoping to put kids through college and retire in the not-too-distant future. At the same time, you realize that if you don’t make a change now, you may never do it.

When you find yourself at this difficult juncture in your life and career, what do you do?

I reached out to Patty McCord, founder of Patty McCord Consulting and the former chief talent officer at Netflix for her advice. An edited version of our conversation follows:

HBR: You served as Chief Talent Officer of Netflix for 12 years. You must’ve come across a lot of people who were feeling stuck — maybe even some who were having a full-blown crisis. What advice did you offer people who approached you about this situation?

PM: Actually, I often initiated these conversations myself. When I saw someone who seemed unhappy, I’d confront them about it, and we’d have a deeper discussion about what was going on. I’d find out, for instance, that the person who was responsible for QA really wanted to be a novelist, and I’d say, “What’s stopping you?” One employee wanted to take a six-month sabbatical to build sod houses, and I said: “You actually want to quit, so just do that — go live your life.” I’d sit down with people and help them plan their next steps, asking questions like: “How risky is it for you financially?” I got into trouble a few times with senior management for talking talented people into leaving. But my feeling was why should they stay and be unhappy?

You and Your Team



Mid-Career Crisis


When you’re feeling stuck.

If someone wanted to leave the company to try something new, and perhaps come back later, would you have been open to it?

Of course, but the job would have to still be open, and they would have to be the best candidate at the time. But let’s face it, people who want to be gone six months or longer probably just want to quit, full stop.

Were there common threads among the people who wanted to make a major career change mid-stream?

Often it was because of some outside force — the death of a parent, a child’s graduation, or a spouse’s layoff. A major life event usually causes people to stop and rethink their own lives.

What would you say to people who’ve advanced far in their career only to find that it’s not all they imagined it would be?

Pat yourself on the back for getting there, and then figure out where you want to go next. These are just phases in our lives. It’s not linear. Rethink what you’ve always thought about employment. One of my missions is to convince people that just putting one foot in front of the other in the same career is over. There’s no such thing as job security, and there never will be again. In the future, employment is going to be more of a two-way street, where you can ask yourself what you really want from your life and career, and then talk to your employer to find a way to make it happen.

Most companies are arguably way behind you in that sort of thinking.

They are. But, companies should start telling the truth: there’s no such thing as guaranteed employment anymore. I think companies need to stop lying about that. People want more flexibility in how they think about work and their careers and companies need to get on board.

I could go on and on about how badly we run HR in this country. We have this whole culture built around the way we’ve always done it, and somehow we think it’s working. We could be having a much better, more productive, joyful career existence if companies and their employees just started talking honestly with each other.

In addition to advising people going through a mid-career shift, presumably you’ve had the opportunity to hire some. With your hiring manager hat on, what do you think of these applicants?

It’s really important as a hiring manager to understand what success in any given role looks like. If you understand the factors beyond the skills, sometimes you’re open to different candidates. For example, if the position requires managing an enormous amount of money, or a great deal of judgment, then you should look at this person’s whole life experience to see if he or she has demonstrated smart budget sense or developed good judgment over time. Often knowing that someone has a real passion for the work might make up for a lack of the required skills. I’d almost always rather have someone with deep passion about the work than someone who has the right qualifications and doesn’t love it.

People at this stage have maturity, experience, balance, wisdom — and most importantly — they don’t take work so seriously anymore. Work isn’t their whole life — it’s just not so dramatic. For them, sometimes work is just work.

Yet these might be people who are looking for something that isn’t just work — something that’s more fulfilling.

Maybe. It might be about seeking out more meaning, and it might be about just finding something more interesting. I’ve personally found that people farther in their careers get more interested in problems of complexity and scale, because you have more capacity to solve bigger problems and it’s more interesting. Take a classic job category like accounting. For so many years, you’re learning how to do the books, and then you might become more interested in financial planning and analysis or how to apply your fundamental skills to a nonprofit that you’re passionate about. I’ve seen people have their careers come alive again in a different environment or context.

Are there downsides of hiring a mid-career professional?

They can be jaded. I work with a lot of startups, and the upside of young people is that they don’t know any better, they often don’t know something can’t be done. Innovation comes from naivety. A 20-year-old won’t hear “you can’t”.

That could account for why mid-career professionals in the tech sector have a particularly tough time. Tech companies seem to prefer younger talent who have that naivety, and perhaps fresher skills, who can often be hired for much lower salaries.

If you’re going to be in the tech field, you have to keep your skills fresh or be happy in a declining technology. It’s just the way it works and always has. You have to think like an employer and if you think you bring something that a college kid doesn’t have, articulate that so the company knows what they’re getting from a more expensive candidate. We have to get over this notion that we’re owed something because of tenure, which to a company may or may not be valuable. Institutional knowledge is only valuable in an institution.

What’s your advice for people who want to network within their sector but are worried that word will get back to their current employer before they’re ready to take a leap?

Don’t be afraid. Just do it. There’s nothing ever wrong with sitting down and talking to someone about your career. You should be doing this all the time. What’s more, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the same conversation with your boss. Why can’t we be honest about this? Secrets don’t work in employment. I was always in trouble in the companies where I worked because I thought we should allow managers to head hunt within the company, and seriously, if a stranger can call us, why can’t we call each other?

What’s your best advice for someone who needs to get out of a mid-career rut?

Start talking to people who are doing something you think you might like to do. Go interview. If you think the grass is greener somewhere else, go munch some grass on the other side of the fence. Finding work that you love is a fair amount of work. So, do the work.

I fundamentally believe that you own your career; companies don’t own it for you. You should be thinking about what you love to do — what you want to do — all the time. And you should feel comfortable talking openly about it. It’s your life.

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4 Steps to Dispel a Bad Mood

You know you’re in a bad mood. You know it’s hurting your performance at work. But how do you get yourself out of it?

We investigated how 740 leaders tried to solve this problem for themselves, and we presented their best practices in a previous HBR article. But when we took a deeper look, we discovered that many of these professionals had mixed results when they used these practices separately or infrequently. As a result, more than half of them couldn’t shift their states of mind when they needed to.

It’s clear that consistency and combination are the real keys to success. After years of experimenting, we’ve discovered that one specific sequence of practices can, when performed regularly, greatly increase a leader’s ability to shift into the productive state of mind we refer to as CHE – calm, happy and energized. We call this the 4-Step Reset:

1. Engage breathing

Breathing can help you achieve a physiological condition called coherence, which leads to improved mental clarity, focus, emotional stability, and decision making. During coherence, the sympathetic (speeding up) and parasympathetic (slowing down) branches of the autonomic nervous system are working in reciprocity.  When this happens our heart rate follows the same pattern—it speeds up and then slows down. Slower, deeper breathing at a constant rate can help induce coherence because when we inhale, our heart rate increases and when we exhale it decreases, thereby helping our nervous system achieve this balance.

Lisa Kelly Croswell, vice president for human resources at the Boston Medical Center, often uses coherent breathing at work to refocus.  “It frees up my brain capacity to think clearly and make different types of decisions faster,” she explains. “It takes out all the noise and crunching of my mental gears.”

2. Activate a positive feeling

With breathing engaged, begin to quietly focus on a person, place, or thing you truly appreciate and/or are grateful for.  Make sure you reactivate the actual feelings they elicit in you so that you reexperience them. Consider using visual and tactile cues (e.g. photographs, drawings, special objects, letters) and external stimuli like nature and music and to deepen the feeling. The idea is to stimulate the release of neurochemicals, such as dopamine and serotonin, and hormones, such as oxytocin.  These can collectively improve our mood and outlook, and help us remain alert, curious and engaged.

Megan Griffault, global HR director for FMC Agricultural Solutions describes this step as “taking a moment to tap into a positive feeling or appreciation.”  When she does it, she says she’s able to approach situations and issues “from a more subjective and calm state of mind, which almost always produces better results.”

3. Reframe thinking 

Next, ask yourself one or more questions to assess your current thinking and help you decide if different thoughts might be more beneficial in your current situation. Here are a few suggestions:

What else is possible here?
What is the opportunity in this situation?
What really matters right now?
What could I learn in this moment?
What does my heart say? What does my gut say?
What is a more useful/constructive/positive approach?
What is the most desirable outcome?

Jim O’Connor, vice president of Timberland PRO describes himself as an optimistic and upbeat leader who sometimes slips into negative thinking. When that happens, he challenges himself with these and other reframing questions: “The first two steps of the reset have become automatic. But then I consciously take a look at my thinking so that I can shift it and keep my mind in a positive state.”

4. Reengage action 

With breathing engaged, a positive feeling activated, and reframed thoughts emerging, the fourth step is to re-engage with a new attitude and behaviors and perhaps a different course of action.

To be fair, this process is easier explained than done. It takes time and practice to master the ability to shift your state of mind and create sustainable change in your emotions, words, and deeds. But, as Hilary Ware, senior vice president of Bristow Group, Inc. says, “The key to strong leadership is understanding that performance is linked to a clear and balanced state of mind.” The 4-Step Reset is a simple way to help break your bad habits, move toward greater calm, happiness, and energy, and become more effective as a result.

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Hiring C-Suite Executives by Algorithm

Tests and assessments are no longer an unusual part of the hiring process. But for the senior-most executives? For C-Suite roles? Executive recruiter Korn Ferry recently introduced a new system, called KF4D, to help them place better bets on talent at the top of the ladder. It’s just another way we’re all going to have to get more accustomed to collaborating with algorithms.

What follows is an edited version of my conversation with Michael Distefano, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, and Dana Landis, Vice President of Global Talent Assessment & Analytics.

HBR: Let’s just start with a quick description of how this particular tool works.

Distefano: Let’s say [a CEO] needs a new chief of staff. He’d ask people to take a quick assessment in KF4D. We’d ask the company to tell us, “What does this chief need to be competent in?” You could choose 15 skills out of 38, and we’d ask you to sort them into high, medium, or low [priority]. And then tell us about your [company] culture. Finally, what does the person need to do – e.g., are you hiring them to drive change? We take that input from the client, and combine with a deep catalogue of benchmarks. The algorithm takes that together, crunches it, and comes back to us with the profile of the person we are looking for. Our recruiters go out, find candidates, and then they take an assessment.

HBR: How do you get that catalogue of benchmarks — that big data-set – to begin with?

Distefano: Over the last number of years we’ve made numerous acquisitions in talent development and leadership development, and [that led us to] acquire more datasets and databases — almost 50 years worth of data for executive levels. So we were able to pull these together into one data warehouse [containing] over two million assessments.

Landis:We now have enough data to start answering questions like, “What’s differentiating leaders in different contexts and cultures and jobs?” When you pull all the data together, you start to see the patterns. It’s fascinating to know what doesn’t change, and what does change across regions and levels.

Insight Center



The Future of Collaboration
Sponsored by Accenture

How tools are changing the way we manage, learn, and get things done.

What are some of the things that are different for C-suite roles, as opposed to roles that are lower on the ladder?

Landis:  One example is conscientiousness. At the bottom it’s critical, but it’s a lot less so at the top.

Distefano: [Conversely] agility – lifelong learners with a high tolerance for risk – that’s kind of a universal attribute.

Is it unusual to have data on senior executives? It seems like these kinds of tools are more often used at lower levels.

Landis: Data on global and very high-level populations is rather hard to access. We usually see these [assessment] tools at mid-level and below.

Some leadership norms are very specific to a certain company culture, or country culture. How does an algorithm take that variability into account?

Distefano: Because we’ve got [a database of] over two million assessed executives, we can cut that so that we can see how a CFO at a state-owned firm in China is different from a CFO in private equity-owned firm in Silicon Valley.

I find it interesting that you focus so much on measuring culture and fit, two things that seem like they’d be really tough to quantify. Why not leave that to the interview? 

Distefano: I like to say, “You get hired for what you know, and fired for who you are.” Over time, our findings were that of, say, CFO candidates, everyone can add, everyone knows the regulations and tax code and so on, but there’s two places that go awry. One is you’re not a good cultural fit. Second, we all have things within our psyche that derail us as we go up the ladder.

Landis: What the assessment does is pick up high and low scores and develops an interview guide off of those scores. The assessment works as a guide – here is where to probe further, here’s where there might be a problem.

Is it all based on self-assessment? If so, how do you know people are answering honestly, with self-awareness?

Landis: The way it’s designed, it’s nearly impossible to do the social desirability thing. You’re not allowed to say you’re great at everything — you’re forced to prioritize. The questions are more behaviorally anchored. It’s not questions like, “Do you like to hang around with people? Are you a team player?”

Distefano: Oftentimes we’ll ask you, “Of these three things, what are you the best at?” And maybe you could choose between something like, strategic thinker, communicator, or global perspective. After you pick one, then we ask, “Of the remaining two what are you best at?” By process of elimination you’ve told us what you’re not best at. We’ll ask you again, mixing [those skills] in against other things, and see if a pattern emerges. What’s your top strength? And if you’re changing your answers, that’s telling us something else too. If you have one dominant strength, you’re a professional. If you have many, maybe you’re high potential.

Landis: You could have [a problem with] someone very un-self-aware. No assessment can account for that.

It sounds like the size of the dataset is really an asset. But is more data always better?

Landis: There tends to be this kitchen-sink approach in measurement. You find HR departments that are measuring every conceivable thing, piling tool on top of tool to not miss anything. You get this sense of exhaustion: “We’re measuring everyone and everything — we’ve got all this weird data and we don’t know what it’s telling us.” One thing we realized we could do is clarify what matters and where [our clients] are wasting their time. For example, heavy IQ testing. Anyone at that [very senior] level is already smart enough. That’s not the problem. We have to pull their attention to measuring those things that actually move the needle, that are going to help us understand fit with their culture.

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Managing the Critical Voices Inside Your Head

At 8:20 am, my twelve-year-old daughter, Isabelle, was rushing to meet her ski group. She was 20 minutes late and stressed – she takes her skiing very seriously and was training for a race in a couple of days.

Near the competition center, she ran into one of her coaches, Joey. He looked at her, then his watch. “If this were a race day,” he told her, with a disapproving scowl, “I would tell you to turn around and go home.”

His words stung and she burst into tears. A few moments later, she was greeted by another one of her coaches, Vicky, who saw how stressed she was.

“Honey, don’t worry,” she said. “This isn’t a race. It’s okay that you’re running a little late. You’ll just catch up with your group on top of the mountain.”

Two vastly different coaches, two vastly different responses. Who’s right? I bet you have an opinion.

But that’s not the point.

My advice to Isabelle? You will have Joeys in your life and you will have Vickys. They will show up as teachers, bosses, colleagues, and friends.

So, I said to her, it’s a good idea to get used to the different responses without getting thrown off balance. You can’t control how people respond to you, but you can control how you take them in and how you respond to them.

But let’s go one step deeper. The truth is, we all have a Joey and a Vicky inside, and they can both be useful.  Joey might seem unkind, but his high expectations and low tolerance for failure can be helpful in driving us to be our best. On the other hand, sometimes we need empathetic support. To some, Vicky may appear soft. But her comfort and reassurance can be useful, especially during times of stress.

Here’s the key: Be strategic and intentional about who you listen to  – and when – even if the voices are inside your head. In fact, especially if the voices are inside your head. Those can be the sneakiest. It’s pretty easy to call Joey a jerk and ignore him; it’s much harder to dismiss the voice in your head because, well, it’s you.

Try this tactic: when you hear the voices, give them names and personalities. Imagine a Joey on one side, a Vicky on the other.

Notice the voices in your head as voices. A lot of the time, most of us simply believe what we hear – either from other people or from ourselves. If your inner voice calls you lazy, it’s hard not to think you’re lazy. It helps if you imagine it’s Joey calling you lazy instead.


Resist the urge to judge whether the voices in your head are right. It’s impossible to know and it doesn’t matter anyway. Are you lazy? The truth is that you probably are, in some ways. And, in other ways, you’re not. But that’s not the right question.


Instead, think about the outcome you want and ask this question: Is what this voice is saying — and how it’s saying it — useful right now? This is the same question you should be asking if you’re confronted by an actual Joey or Vicky. Is this voice helpful to me in this particular moment? If you think it’ll motivate you, listen to it. If it will demoralize you, don’t.

This is an important skill: the ability to ignore critical voices when they’re destructive, without discounting them entirely. They might be useful another time.

The goal is flexibility. Cultivate a varied group of critics and coaches, both internal and external. Be aware of who is speaking and when you should listen.

Comfort with multiple voices is particularly important if you are a manager. You need to be able to be Joey or Vicky, depending on the situation. Sometimes, people need to feel your high expectations and disapproval. Other times, they need your gentleness and empathy. Don’t default to one or the other. Pause to assess what’s needed and then make a choice.

“It’s hard,” Isabelle told me after we spoke about the different voices and messages they brought with them, “How do I stop from thinking Joey is just a jerk? Or that I’m lame for being late?”

“He might be a jerk and you may be lame,” I said, “but not because he said so. Here’s the question: Will you be more likely to be on time tomorrow because of what he said?”

“Yes,” she conceded. “But it felt terrible.”

“And, when you feel terrible, can you hear Vicky’s voice too?”

“Yes,” she said, beginning to smile.

“Then it’s a good thing you have two coaches,” I told her.

Because sometimes, both voices are the perfect combination.

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Young People Need to Know Entrepreneurship Is Hard

How’s this for an entrepreneurship-education outcome: The proportion of high school students saying they’d like to start a business declined over the course of a summer program, according to research from New York University.

But that’s not a failure — not at all. I’ll explain.

Prior to the BizCamp program, funded by the Citi Foundation, 91% of the participants indicated they would like to own a business. But then they learned how much time it takes to run one — a lot of them realized they were too busy. And then there’s the risk: “I’d rather work for a company versus become an entrepreneur and try to start from the bottom because it takes a lot of hard work and it’s also work that might not pay off, and I’m not that big of a risk taker,” one student told the researchers.

After completing the program, the proportion of students saying they’d like to start a business was down to 85%. Any decline in entrepreneurial ambitions might be seen as cause for alarm, considering the acute need for new-business starts. For the first time in 30 years, business closings are outpacing business openings in the U.S.

But reality checks are a good thing. Investors, educational institutions, and taxpayers want to see more than just a lot of new businesses. They want to see healthy new businesses. Changing what young people know about and expect from starting a business before they start can avert early miscalculations and more efficiently allocate limited resources.

The research also shows that the two-week, 9-to-5 camp changed students’ thinking about starting businesses in other ways. It made them less likely to see their youth and lack of money as serious obstacles to entrepreneurship, and it clearly fired some of them up. “By the end of the program, significantly more students indicated that they were likely to start a business in the next year,” the researchers found. “Approximately two-fifths of students (38%) reported it was likely that they would start a business in the next year, compared to one-quarter (25%) of students at the beginning of BizCamp.”

Lowering perceived barriers to business formation and spurring action are a very big deal. There are real market, economic, and social benefits to putting slightly fewer but better-prepared and more-motivated entrepreneurs into the business pipeline.

It’s also important to remember that business creation isn’t the only beneficial outcome of entrepreneurship education. Entrepreneurship is a key twenty-first-century workforce skill. It’s also linked to higher academic attainment.

Research, including this NYU report, reinforces that learning about entrepreneurship ignites an entrepreneurial mind-set in young people — they begin to think and act like entrepreneurs in all aspects of their lives. They communicate better. They persist through failure. They become flexible and adaptable when facing obstacles. They take smart risks. They turn into problem solvers and opportunity finders.

That’s important to the job-skills conversation, for example, because skills such as communication, flexibility, and persistence are in high demand by employers.

Bill J. Bonnstetter, chairman of Target Training International, conducted research on more than 17,000 working adults, as well as “serial” entrepreneurs, and drew similar conclusions. In writing about his research, Bonnstetter noted, “in contrast to ephemeral notions (of) entrepreneurial success…this research indicates entrepreneurially successful people are successful for a reason — that many of them highly display certain personal skills. And…it should be pointed out these…attributes are not inherent. They can be learned and developed, especially early in life, and further honed throughout an entrepreneur’s career.”

Entrepreneurial thinkers, in other words, can be great employees even if they don’t start businesses. They can be so-called intrapreneurs (those who innovate and create change inside organizations) or social entrepreneurs who improve social and government institutions.

Maybe the most important take-away from the current research on entrepreneurship is the need to invest in and scale entrepreneurial education. If it’s possible to change the way young people think about starting businesses and spark the entrepreneurship mind-set through just one brief summer program, imagine what a real school-based commitment to entrepreneurship education would do.

Europe has figured it out. One of the European Union’s eight key competencies for lifelong learning is a “sense of initiative and entrepreneurship.” Similar efforts are in place in other parts of the world. But in the United States, teaching entrepreneurship has been largely left to colleges and nonprofits like mine, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

While we think we’ve done an amazing job by teaching entrepreneurship to more than 600,000 young people around the world since 1987, it’s time to make teaching entrepreneurship part of our national education and economic strategy.

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Why Do We Publicly Shame People Out of Their Jobs?

Company Praised for Firing Woman Who Took Disrespectful Photo Next to Soldier’s Grave

So reads a New York Daily News headline reprinted in Jon Ronson’s new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. According to the paper, more than 4,000 people “liked” the announcement of her termination on Facebook, while a thriving group of commenters went as far as to say that she should be shot or exiled from the United States.

The woman in question, you see, had a running gag with a friend that involved doing the opposite of what public sign stated and taking a photo. And one of these photos happened to be at Arlington National Cemetery.

Public shaming is nothing new – it was a fairly common form of punishment in 18th and 19th century New England – but after a decades-long lull it’s taken on a bit of a resurgence. When Ronson set out to better understand why, his investigation involved, among many other examples: disgraced author Jonah Lehrer (he was fired), a woman whose ill-conceived tweet went viral while she was on an airplane (she was fired), and a woman who was attacked after she posted a photo of a man who made a sexually-suggestive joke at a tech conference (both were fired, though he eventually found a new job).

It’s worth reading the whole book to better understand both Ronson’s journey and his conclusions. But I spoke to him recently about one specific topic: why all of this shaming inevitably leads back to what someone does for a living. An edited version of our conversation is below. 

A common thread in your book is that people who are publicly shamed online often lose their jobs as a result. Why do the companies give in?

If you’re a small business and you realize that one of your employees has been publicly shamed on the Internet, even if you support that person and understand that that person’s been misconstrued, the default seems to be to fire them because of the terror that social media will turn on you next. And they shouldn’t be so scared. In fact, a number of people who’ve read my book said the people who come over the worst are employers.

Have you ever run across a company that stood up for their shamed employee?

I did have a couple of emails from people after my book was excerpted in The New York Times where people said to me, I had a very similar shaming. One guy said, “My employers stuck up for me.”

Why do these online mobs form, and get so caught up in calling for someone to be fired?

On social media, we still like to see ourselves as a kind of silenced underdog. We like to see ourselves as powerless people punching up, you know, fighting the good fight. I think that’s the reason why we’re so ferocious. But the power balance has shifted and we haven’t quite caught up with that reality. To an extent I think we on social media are so powerful now that we put the fear of God into everybody.

There’s a line in your book about gender that goes something like this: Women are punished online when they’re shamed with violent, sexual threats. For men, it’s based on their employment, getting them fired. It’s basically based around what society has determined as sort of most threatening.

I found that incredibly interesting actually. I used to have a line in the book, “I can’t think of anything worse than being fired.” And the reason I took it out was because a few early readers said to me, “You know, I understand what you’re trying to say here but it sounds like you’re saying that being fired is as bad as being raped,” which obviously I wasn’t.

I can certainly say that, for me, being fired is the worst thing I can imagine. You know, it actually happened to me when I was in my early 20s. I was a DJ on a radio station in the North of England and was blissfully happy and then I was fired because they wanted to make it more “commercial.” And I really fell apart. I mean, I got depressed for a few months and ever since then, one of my main goals has been to protect against anything like that ever happening again. So I always do four or five different types of work at once. Books and magazines. A huge amount of my life is making sure nobody has the power to fire me and determine the course of my life again.

Is public shaming just a risk people who are gainfully employed run, with trying to be “authentic” online while also having your job title right there in your Twitter profile?

I don’t think it should be. When Twitter first started, it really was this kind of unselfconscious place where people would admit shameful things, and everybody would go, “Oh my God, I’m exactly the same.” And that reminds me of when children with intrusive thoughts like, Oh my God, I could throw that baby out the window, I must be a monster. And they go to psychiatrists because they think that they’re evil and the psychiatrists would say, No, no, no, everybody has those feelings and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. It’s just human that the brain sometimes works that way.

I’m a sort of social media utopian, I suppose, because I remember times when that’s what social media was like. So for me, if somebody going on to Twitter partly for business reasons and partly just for human reasons and the two things have blurred, that’s great. It’s great when everybody’s human and forgiving and kind and compassionate. But then it just turned into this sort of bullying.

How would you like to see things change?

I would say, the more employees who are blaring on about their human foibles, the better. If you say to people, “Be bland because you might be misconstrued,” that’s not a good world. That’s a kind of cold, frightening, conformist world.

It’s completely naïve, but I think companies should be encouraging everybody to go onto Twitter and be themselves. I think that’s a better world.

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Calculating the Market Value of Leadership

In recent years, investors have learned that defining the market value of a firm cannot just be based on finances. GAAP and FASB standards require financial reporting of earnings, cash flow, and profitability – all measures that investors have traditionally examined. But recently, these financial outcomes have been found to predict only about 50% of a firm’s market value. Another challenge is that this financial information has become widely known and shared, meaning that the investor insights it affords are hardly unique.

To gain more insights into a specific firm, investors have shown more interest in intangibles like strategy, brand, innovation, systems integration, collaboration, and so on. Investors have also worked to track and measure these intangibles, even if more subjective. We believe that a next step for investors is to analyze the predictors and drivers of these intangible factors, which means focusing on leadership.

Wise, long term investors recognize that leadership affects firm performance. But too often, assessments of leadership are haphazard and narrow. For instance, in our research, we found that investors allocate about 30% of their decision making based on quality of leadership, and they have much less confidence in their ability to assess leadership than in their assessments of financial or intangible performance. Investors may say “this leader is charismatic, has a vision, or treats people well” but there is little analysis behind what has often become a “gut feel” approach. Investor assessments of leadership should go beyond isolated observations to more rigorous evaluation. Numerous studies have shed light on what good leadership is; synthesizing this research into useful insights for investors would help counteract intuitive leadership assessments.

What we need is a leadership capital index, similar to a financial confidence index (such as Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s). It would move beyond casual and piecemeal observations of leaders to more thorough assessment of leadership.

It’s important to note that a leadership index differs from a leadership standard. Standards define what is expected; indices rate how well an activity performs. For example, consider the Economist’s Big Mac index, which measures the cost of a Big Mac in various countries in terms of its difference from the average Big Mac price in the United States. It doesn’t try to tell you how much a Big Mac should cost — instead, it is a crude, but useful, assessment of the cost of living around the world.

An index guides investors to make more informed choices. When a rating agency like Moody’s or S&P downgrades a company, it is not saying the company did or did not meet financial reporting requirements, but offering an opinion about the ability to repay loans in the future. Likewise, a leadership capital index would inform investors about the readiness of the firm’s leadership to meet business challenges.

We’ve created a leadership capital index by interviewing and surveying investors and by synthesizing at dozens of studies of the impact of leadership. In general, these studies offered deep insights on one piece of an overall leadership puzzle. Some focused on personal leadership style of the CEO, others on compensation or training practices, and still others on organization governance and design. Few attempted to prepare a comprehensive approach to leadership as a whole that could be accessed by investors.

The leadership ratings index we have developed has two dimensions, or domains: individual and organizational. Individual refers to the personal qualities (competencies, traits, characteristics) of both the top leader and the key leadership team in the organization. Organizational refers to the systems these leaders create to manage leadership throughout the organization and the application of organization systems to specific business conditions. Using these two domains, previous leadership and human capital work may be synthesized into a leadership capital index that investors can use to inform their valuation decisions. Each domain consists of five factors:

Individual:

Personal proficiency: To what extent do leaders demonstrate the personal qualities to be an effective leader (e.g. intellectual, emotional, social, physical, and ethical behaviors)?
Strategist: To what extent do leaders articulate a point of view about the future and accordingly adjust the firm’s strategic positioning?
Executor: To what extent do leaders make things happen and deliver as promised?
People manager: To what extent do leaders build competence, commitment, and contribution of their people today and tomorrow?
Leadership differentiator: To what extent do leaders behave consistent with customer expectations?

Organizational:

Culture capability: To what extent do leaders create a customer-focused culture throughout the organization?
Talent management: To what extent do leaders manage the flow of talent into, through, and out of the organization?
Performance accountability: to what extent do leaders create performance management practices that reinforce the right behaviors?
Information: To what extent do leaders manage information flow throughout the organization (e.g., from top to bottom, bottom to top, and side to side)?
Work practices: To what extent do leaders establish organization and governance that deal with the increasing pace of change in today’s business setting?

While it may not be easy to precisely track each of these 10 elements, when investors include them in interviews, observations, surveys, and reports, they will dramatically increase their ability to realize full firm value. Equity investors (venture capitalists, private equity, portfolio managers, mutual/hedge fund managers) will use this index to complement existing financial and intangible analysis and gain a more thorough and rigorous understanding of firm’s full market value. Debt holders will have more confidence in a firm’s ability to repay its debt. With this index, rating agencies (ISS, government groups, Moody’s) can offer a more refined assessment of the firm’s full value by including leadership in their ratings process. Boards of directors can have a more thorough process for evaluating the quality of leadership within their organization. C-suite executives who have primary responsibility for firm value can include leadership as part of this discussion. Leadership development specialists charged with developing leaders can focus less on personal characteristics of leaders and more how investors might view them.

Realizing the market value of leadership could also have a significant impact on many organization processes: risk management, governance, social responsibility, reputation, and leadership development. Each of these processes could be upgraded with a disciplined and through approach to assessing leadership.

Transitioning from a “gut feel” or narrow assessment of leadership to an index that can start to predict the impact leaders have on intangible value creation changes the game of leadership assessment and development. The leadership capital index will help investors and others improve their approach to firm valuation. When leadership capital becomes a factor in investor judgments, it will naturally receive more emphasis in day-to-day corporate life, to the benefit of many. It is now time for investors and others to use a leadership capital index.

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Stop Trying to Find Your True Self at Work

Clarity often visits unexpectedly, and it seldom stays for long. Especially when it concerns who we really are.

One morning last winter I was holding on to a ski lift absentmindedly, half enjoying watching Jen and our children being dragged up the mountain ahead of me, and half worrying about a sentence that I kept reshuffling in my mind.

I had gotten up early after a late night writing to meet a looming deadline, and neither hot coffee nor cold sunshine had yet managed to wake me up entirely.

The realization aptly found me there. Attached to my family, to my work, and to a cable pulled slowly upwards by a tired engine. It hit me with absolute certainty. The feeling that this restless, quiet, groggy, loving, worried, sporty bag of being was me.

My true self, I mean. Who I really am.

I felt relief and resignation, a liberating sense of closure. There was no need to find my self any longer. (At least for a moment or two.)

Then it all dissipated and I went about the rest of a gloriously uneventful day.

Three millennia have passed since “Know Thyself” was carved above the entrance of Apollo’s temple at Delphi. Five centuries since Shakespeare gave Polonius the line “To thine own self be true.” But these days, in many quarters, it’s not religion or literature that we turn to for help. The quest for self-awareness and authenticity takes us elsewhere. We are meant to find and express our true self at work.

I spend my life with people—executives, students, acquaintances, friends, and colleagues—preoccupied with their true self. Sometimes, obsessed by it. Many can only feel its absence, and long for it. A few are skeptical that any such true self exists.

“I came here to find myself,” I have heard many managers explain when asked why they’re attending an MBA or executive course, or taking a new job. It is an ambition people now cite as frequently as that of becoming a founder, partner, MD or CEO.

You and Your Team



Mid-Career Crisis


When you’re feeling stuck.

That is especially true of managers at mid-career, who often feel that their material comforts, titles and accomplishments have come at the price of neglecting their true selves. But once they resolve to stop neglecting it, efforts at introspection and attempts to loosen up yield few results. Their true self is nowhere to be found.

Theirs is not simply a longing for lost time. It is a longing of our times. The question is why it feels so compelling and elusive.

The fluidity of the business world—where we are meant to find, shape and fulfill, rather than be born into, who we are—creates more opportunities, for more people, to craft their career and life trajectories than we ever had in the past.

The same fluidity, however, leaves us with few moorings and little direction. It makes the search for a true self more necessary, a quest to find a point of orientation that might stop us from getting lost in the effort to adapt to ever shifting demands.

In an age of loose commitments, constant change, and nomadic professionalism the true self provides a mirage of certainty, commitment, and direction. Self-discovery is the new duty, only turned inwards.

This is far from what the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott intended when he first introduced the idea that we have a “true self.” And it might be the reason that we can never find it.

As Winnicott had it, the true self is both a gift and a surprise. It is a state made possible by caring others who leave us in peace long enough for us to notice and express our needs and wishes of the moment, and who respond kindly when we do.

Children who experienced such unobtrusive yet responsive care often enough, Winnicott noticed, felt freer to express themselves and explore their environment. Those who did not hovered anxiously instead, waiting for others’ cues.

The former, he contended, were more likely to grow into adults trusting of themselves and others, and able to be spontaneous when circumstances allow—an insight now confirmed by decades of research on attachment styles.

In the journey from nursery to workplace, however, the concept of the true self has become both more popular and dramatically different. We have not just taken it to a different context. We have taken context out of it. The true self has turned from a gift into an accomplishment, from a fleeting experience of possibility into an enduring image of who we are.

Self-awareness has become a synonym of conformity, another word for being mindful of what others think of us. Authenticity has become a synonym of consistency, a term understood to mean acting uniformly in different domains. And we have come to regard the true self less like a seed and more like a diamond. Less like something to be nurtured over time, and more like a gem hidden within, that once dug out, polished and displayed promises to become a precious status symbol and source of market value—as long as we can hold on to it.

Reduced to an image, however, the true self becomes little more than a good selfie, an image crafted with the not-so-secret aim of flattering ourselves and impressing others. Such images seldom feel true, and if they do the feeling does not last for long.

Because the truth of our selves is not defined by how accurate, enduring or pleasing their contours are, but by the freedom to draw them. It does not rest in consistently conforming to a reflected image, but in having the possibility of being spontaneous and surprised, in not knowing ourselves and having room to find our selves out.

Seen this way, the true self is neither enduring nor consistent. It is ever changing. It is not an end. It is a beginning. It can be found but cannot be held on to. It does not always feel good. And it is neither found nor made. It is freed up. We don’t know it when we see it. We feel it when we can forget it.

Work that gives us joy, or that others applaud, may well be an expression of our true selves. But that work is not our true self. The moment we think it is we become captive by, rather than makers of, it.

This is why I often advise those who long to be true to themselves at work to stop asking themselves who they really are, and ponder where they might be freer. And who would help them manage the mixed feelings that freedom entails.

Because ultimately, we need firm attachments to stay true to ourselves. Without loving others (in both senses of the words) freedom quickly becomes confusing, unbearable, or both—and anxiety takes its place.

While feedback may affirm our authenticity, it is love that frees it up. The kind of love that helps us to stop obsessing about, yet does not let us give up on, our selves.

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