Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1331

Mindfulness Mitigates Biases You May Not Know You Have

Researchers can’t seem to get enough of mindfulness. Studies have linked it to heightened creativity, improved concentration, lower stress, better working memory, and increased compassion. Now, new research also shows that it helps us overcome biases we’re not even aware we have.

The study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, suggests that mindfulness meditation can reduce implicit bias—and the negative behaviors that it causes.

There are competing definitions of what mindfulness means, but it boils down to paying attention to what’s happening around you at a given moment, instead of operating on autopilot. By concentrating on the present, you’re more likely to act thoughtfully, and therefore less likely to succumb to automatic evaluations based on previously established associations.

Older studies have connected mindfulness with reduced automatic processing and less prejudicial behavior, but researchers Adam Lueke and Bryan Gibson found that mindfulness can also lessen implicit bias. Implicit attitudes are based on automatic associations, and they influence behavior more than we realize. Even as we assert egalitarian values or condemn discrimination, automatic processing often colors how we evaluate and treat others.

Lueke and Gibson explain that a group who listened to a 10-minute mindfulness exercise exhibited less bias on the race and age implicit association tests (IATs) than those who didn’t—without even focusing on the biases themselves.

The 72 participants were white college students who didn’t know what was being studied beforehand. The test group listened to a recording that made them aware of their heart rate and breathing. It told them to accept these sensations and thoughts “without restriction, resistance, or judgment.” The control group listened to a 10-minute recording about history. Then both groups completed the race and age IATs, which captured response times in pairing positive or negative words with black or white faces and then with old or young faces.

The mindful group showed less implicit racial and age bias than did the control group, and this was, in part, due to a reduction in the automatic activation of negative associations (i.e., black-bad, old-bad). This confirmed older research that mindfulness makes one less reliant on previously established associations. But the researchers were surprised to also find that the mindful group was less able to see differences between the faces than the control group, which seems to suggest that when you’re less likely to automatically associate black and old with “bad,” race and age are also less detectable.

The ability to curb implicit bias and weaken negative associations by simply being more mindful could help prevent all kinds of negative effects. Previous research has shown how implicit out-group bias can make someone more likely to shoot at a black suspect in a simulation or become more aggressive in a video game.

Implicit attitudes even predict some negative behaviors in the workplace better than explicit attitudes. For example, they are more predictive of discriminatory hiring decisions, lack of trust in out-group members, and hostile body language toward stereotyped out-group members. As Lueke explained, “People high in implicit bias will tend to maintain distance, not make as much eye contact, fidget, remain terse in their responses, and generally give non-verbal cues that are indicative of discomfort.” And this happens even if they consciously want to communicate in a non-biased way.

So how do you become more mindful? As Lueke said, “We often have other things on our mind regardless of whether we are at work or not; our to do lists, that date we went on the night before, mulling over that crazy episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ we saw, wondering what we are going to have for dinner tonight.” Silencing and focusing these thoughts is a practice. But even if you’re busy, there are really basic steps you can take—anywhere, anytime—to make you more aware of the present.

Past experiences have a way of influencing our decisions and immediate reactions in ways we don’t fully understand and may not even realize. It’s important to acknowledge this and find ways of making ourselves less reliant on them.

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A Testable Idea Is Better than a Good Idea

The most irritating innovation insight I’ve had seems paradoxical, but it’s true: good ideas are bad for innovators. Honest.

At first, I didn’t believe it either. What could be bad about good ideas? Then, in my work with organizations and executive education students, I started paying even closer attention to how successful innovation initiatives really take root and flourish. The results—in companies ranging from financial services to industrial equipment to consumer products to digital media—gradually changed my mind. Organizations that encouraged, talked up and celebrated good ideas were consistent—almost pathological—innovation underachievers. To be sure, there was serious discussion, debate and analysis around good ideas and how to make them better. But the actual outcomes typically underwhelmed and underperformed, as in “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” These firms, teams, and groups made improving good ideas central to their innovation effort.

By contrast, the successful innovators I observed spent less time on identifying and developing good ideas and more time testing their hypotheses. In fact, these teams and groups made the testable business hypothesis the center of their innovation effort.

As I define it in The Innovator’s Hypothesis, a business hypothesis is a testable belief about future value creation. It is not a search for truth or fundamental understanding; a business hypothesis suggests a possible or plausible causal relationship between a proposed action and an economically desirable outcome. If there is not an explicit and understood measure or metric for that new thing, it is not a testable business hypothesis. And if it isn’t in writing, agreed upon, and shareable, it’s not a business hypothesis. Many good ideas fail on all counts above.

A testable hypothesis may be a very good idea but even a very good idea is rarely a testable hypothesis. The difference isn’t subtle. Almost a decade ago, as I was gradually sensing this counterintuitive concept, I informally began testing this hypothesis.

I asked small innovation teams at a large IT firm to come up with either their best good ideas or simple experiments to test business hypotheses that they thought their bosses would find important. The results surprised me. Many of the good ideas were very, very good. They were definitely worth developing. But the experiments and their testable hypotheses were ready to go. They provoked a completely different kind of action-oriented discussion than the good ideas. Indeed, a couple of the experiments (as I recall) embodied some aspects of the good ideas. The difference? We could do something with them beyond talk! Testable hypotheses seemed a faster and, frankly, better gateway to innovative action and active innovation. Testable hypotheses encourage and facilitate active experimentation and learning in ways that good ideas simply cannot. Getting organizations to think and act around testable hypotheses instead of good ideas is how organizations have healthier conversation and collaboration around innovation.

There was no ‘”aha!” moment. But there was a slow recognition that defining a testable hypothesis requires more rigor than coming up with good ideas to improve products, services and or user experiences. What’s more, a testable hypothesis comes with accountability built in: the hypothesis needs to be tested. It will pass or fail that test. Ideally, you’ll learn either way. But what’s the accountability for a good idea? The fact that a lot of people think it’s a good idea? That’s a popularity contest.

The harsh reality is that good ideas have to be tested. Why not insist that people undergo the rigor and discipline of crafting a testable hypothesis? That’s how good ideas get converted into real value.

If you want to quickly, cheaply and productively transform your organization’s innovation culture, forbid any and all discussion of good ideas and insist people start framing their innovation proposals in the form of a testable hypothesis. Try it.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing new about thinking in terms of testable hypotheses. That is, of course, what science has been about since Francis Bacon. There’s nothing even novel about the testable hypothesis in business innovation—look at any interview given by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos or any history of Google. Indeed, look at market-leading financial service firms such as Capital One.

But these firms had founders who intimately and intuitively appreciated the importance of both experimental design and design of experiments. They recognized that every prototype they built was also a testable hypothesis. To paraphrase one of the most famous maxims in military history, “Innovation amateurs talk good ideas; innovation experts talk testable hypotheses.” Which would you rather be?

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10 Remarkable People on Having a Career That Matters

Every year, HBR interviews 10 people who’ve had fascinating careers. Here, a few highlights from 2014.

British fashion designer Zandra Rhodes has never been afraid to stand out. Her eponymous clothing line soared in the 70s, only to shutter its doors in the 90s. But she’s moved on to other projects, and today’s hottest designers credit her influence.

We talked with her about overcoming setbacks through hard work.

“Keep going by whatever means you can. Don’t let people crush you. Have an inner belief in yourself. In the end, what you do will come through. We suffer today from people wanting fame rather than earning fame through their work. Your work is what you’re there for, and you should do it regardless. If it brings you something else, that’s a plus.”

Alain Ducasse runs a global empire of more than 20 restaurants with a collective 19 Michelin stars. We asked him about his reputation as a tough boss. “It is true that I am demanding and not always nice,” he admitted. “If a colleague opts to do poor work when he could have performed very well, that upsets me.”

Still, he says, “You shouldn’t focus on supervision….“You must allow people to evolve, help them grow, make them feel gratified.”

He also told us that, at 27, he was the sole survivor of an airplane crash. He spent a year in a hospital being treated for serious injuries. It was a defining moment.

“You spend your time lying in bed, but you are not tired, so you are able to think nearly 24 hours a day, with nothing to disrupt you. I had to keep working, even if I might never walk again. I managed my restaurant from my hospital bed, by writing the menus, for example. It really improved my ability to delegate, and I understood that I was able to lead without being physically present. My career would not have been the same had the crash not occurred.”

Ruth Reichl has been a cook, a food critic at the LA Times, Editor of Gourmet, and a novelist, among other ventures. We asked her how she knew when a dramatic career move was the right one.

“I always thought they were the wrong ones,” she explained. “When I was offered Gourmet, I told one of my adopted mothers, ‘It’s just not the right time. If it were a year down the road, I would do it.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Ruth, it’s never the right time.’ It’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten. It’s the things that scare you the most that you have to do…One of the secrets to staying young is to always do things you don’t know how to do, to keep learning.”

And she admits she “was not initially the best manager.”

“It took a while for me to understand that management is an art… I learned that you really can’t expect everyone to be just like you. The big secret of management is to find what people do best, not to fit them into a mold. Find out what everybody on the staff does well and tailor their jobs to them, instead of the other way around.”

Pele is a soccer legend, and led Brazil to three World Cup victories. He says he “never wanted to be a leader.” But it came naturally. “I just tried to pass on my best to the other players.”

Yet he never became a team captain. “Reporters at press conferences would always ask me about that, and I would tell them, ‘Listen, I don’t need to be captain. If we have another player as captain, then there are two leaders in the game.’”

Biologist J. Craig Venter made waves in 1998 when he and his for-profit company challenged the public Human Genome Project to a DNA-sequencing race. (It ended in a tie two years later.)  Fired from that firm in 2002, he now runs a nonprofit and two biotech companies. We asked him about setting audacious goals.

“The goals are only considered to be audacious by other people. I consider them to be achievable. …One of my early teachers described my method as jumping off a high diving board into an empty pool, expecting my team to have the pool filled before I hit the bottom. I think the best people like to work on multidisciplinary teams where they can bring their expertise to problems and projects much bigger than themselves.”

And as for the controversy and criticism?

“You have to believe in what you’re doing and your own processes. My military service in Vietnam taught me a lot. I was one of the lucky people to serve there and return. As a medic I dealt with thousands of young men who didn’t make it back. So I learned at an early age that the worst thing you can lose is your life and that taking risks and suffering setbacks is part of moving forward. One of the things I jokingly say is that I know so much because I’ve made so many mistakes.”

Bobbi Brown launched her cosmetics line in 1991 because she was sick of red lipstick. Four years later, she sold the natural-look brand to Estee Lauder – but retained full creative control.  We asked her how she stays ahead of the curve.

“I’ve learned that the best thing for my company is to do what I believe in… Don’t put something on the market just because everyone else is doing it. Do what you think is right.”

Norman Lear reinvented American television in the 1970s with All in the Family and a string of other true-to-life sitcoms. A producer, director, and activist, he’s relished a life behind the scenes.

We talked with him about managing his bosses:

“There were times when they raised reasonable questions and the solution made the show better, but with the questions that were just silly, I stood my ground. It didn’t make sense to me that some faceless executive would be responsible for a decision that affected my show and its relationship with the audience. They used to tell me, ‘It won’t fly in Des Moines’ or ‘There will be knee-jerk reaction in the middle of the country.’ But one thing that played well for me is that I spent months in Iowa, making the film Cold Turkey. So I was able to say, ‘Don’t tell me about Des Moines. I know Des Moines. I know the middle of the country. Don’t give me this bullshit.’”

Boris Johnson was a magazine editor at 35, a shadow cabinet minister at 39, and the mayor of London at 43.

We asked him how he sees leadership: “You’ve got to understand an issue very well and be able to simplify it and make people understand it and believe in it the way you do. If you can do that, you’re at the races.”

He also cites the power of momentum. “The forces of inertia are so huge, we need to have a clear agenda, so as soon as one thing is done, we’re starting the next.”

Educator Salman Khan – who left his hedge-fund job to found the wildly successful online learning nonprofit Khan Academy – talked with us about the importance of work-life balance. “I’ve been up on stage at speaking events and said, ‘I have to go give my kids a bath now,’ and everyone is shocked. But if I can’t have dinner with my kids, give them a bath, and read them a book before bed, something is wrong in my life.”

He also challenges the notion that kids today have worse attention spans:

“We think that because this generation has Facebook, Twitter, and mobile phones, they don’t have attention spans. But it’s clear from the studies that we never really had the attention spans the classroom-based lecture model expects of students.”

Comedian John Cleese is perhaps best known for his work on Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, and the Oscar-nominated script for A Fish Called Wanda. But he does everything from corporate trainings to stand-up to memoir. We asked him about working alone versus working with a team.

“When you collaborate with someone else on something creative, you get to places that you would never get to on your own. The way an idea builds as it careens back and forth between good writers is so unpredictable. Sometimes it depends on people misunderstanding each other, and that’s why I don’t think there’s any such thing as a mistake in the creative process. You never know where it might lead.”

When he asked him about his legacy, his answer surprised us. He said he hoped his friends thought he was “reasonably kind.” Really? we pressed, Nothing about your contribution to the world of humor?

“No,” he replied. “I don’t regard any of that as anything other than an amusing way of passing the time. I love the fact that I’ve made people laugh, but the important thing, ultimately, I do believe, is a relatively small number of really close relationships.”

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What Executive Assistants Know About Managing Up

As an executive assistant, your job is to help the executive do her job better. But as an employee, this is only one aspect of your job. You’re doing lots of other things that aren’t necessarily in service of your boss. I spoke with Melba Duncan, president of The Duncan Group, a retained search and consulting firm specializing in senior management support resources, and author of The New Executive Assistant, to learn what it takes to be a successful executive assistant – and what other employees can learn from these masters of managing up. Here’s an edited version of our conversation:

What does someone who spends all of his time managing up have to teach someone who spends only some time thinking about managing up?

Managing up lands on everyone’s desk depending on your level of ambition and your willingness to expand within your role. You have to learn how to anticipate and read the moment. Executive assistants know what the executive has to do every single day, what must be completed, what’s the goal, what are the deadlines. They are willing to respect someone else’s point of view and work within that parameter. Assistants who are terrific at what they do are very, very collaborative. They understand the business that they’re in and the motivation of the executive. And they learn this from always communicating with the executive.

What sets executive assistants apart from employees or team members trying to manage up? Is it that assistants are managing someone else’s life and employees aren’t really doing that?

That’s right. And in most instances non-assistant employees are not expected to. As an assistant, you know that you are managing the life of someone else, and you are there to make a difference.. Your role is to put out fires, fill the gaps, anticipate the executive’s needs, and exercise judgment based on those needs. You are a business partner, you understand the politics of a situation, and you understand how business functions, as a whole. You’re expected to know exactly what your boss is thinking and why. This individual presents a window to the executive’s office. Executive assistants are in a strategic support role but they also play a strategic management role.

If you have not reached that level of business relationship, it’s a little different. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise the same ideas and the same intellect. It just means that the experience is perhaps more task-driven than relationship-driven.

How can the rest of us create similar partnerships with our bosses?

By focusing on their contributions and taking responsibility for results. They have to constantly demonstrate that they are indispensable, and demonstrate their relevance to the work. Employees need to be able to apply diplomacy and good judgment in responding to all circumstances, predictable and unpredictable, as they occur. You must know what your boss’s job is and how it supports the needs of the organization, so you’ll be able to assist when you can and reduce stress and setbacks.

What are the top skills that make an executive assistant successful? And do those apply to other employees?

The very best executive assistants use their intuition, judgment, business knowledge, motivational techniques, and personal leadership to become an integral element of the executive’s professional and personal life. They adapt their technological skills to create and manage time-saving solutions. They want to be constantly improving. They have to be reliable and have self-discipline. These skills apply to those who choose to pursue challenging careers at all levels.

You and Your Team





Managing Up




Best practices for interacting with your boss.

The main principle that drives the talented assistant is a commitment to continuously improve. Assistants think, act, and work with others to minimize crises, make decisions, and save executives time. This attitude and skill set applies to all employees. Employees should work together for the overall success of the group. If they really want to emulate the executive assistant, they will come early and stay late, pick up another’s slack for the benefit of the group, turn goals into an action plan, and then confirm and execute. They will state what they’re going to do and meet those expectations; they will avoid shortcuts, tell the truth, and have the courage to tell executives what they think.

If a person is trying to make the boss’s job a little easier, should she act the role of the assistant? Could that backfire or would it help an employee who is trying to manage up?

I think it can help employees. But you have to have good judgment and discretion. If you have an idea and you want to share it with your boss, make sure your timing is on point. It’s up to the employee to step up, because you can’t expect someone who is managing a team or a project to know each person’s level of competency. I say this all the time. Step into the space you want to be in. You have to tell people what you do well, whether it’s within your role or outside of it. If you see you have a talent for writing, then draft an email saying, “I can answer this email on your behalf.” Observe how your boss responds. You’ve just educated that person that you have a writing skill.

You said in your HBR article that executive assistants have to step out of their comfort zone and that executives have to be willing to delegate. Is gaining trust a challenge?

Yes, executives have to be willing to delegate, but executives don’t know what you know. So it lands on the desk of the assistant to educate that executive about what he or she is capable of managing. Your role is to reduce or manage some of the executive’s functions, in order to give that person more time.

There are some executives who will not let go. This is their nature. That gives the executive assistant a little more of a challenge. You just have to be more delicate. Maybe you say, “I just handled that call; I knew the answer you wanted to give because we discussed it. I hope that’s OK.” You educate that person in how you can respond under pressure. Some executives need complete trust before they will let go. So you have to convince them that it’s OK.

Are the boundaries different for other employees and their bosses? An assistant would be expected to pick up the phone at 10 p.m., but what about another employee?

Part of being an executive assistant or a business partner is that you are aware of everything that’s happening all the time, even if it’s three o’clock in the morning. I do believe in today’s world that shutting down and not being available is not acceptable. I would like to think that employees who really want to be successful will remain flexible and available.

I understand about work/life balance. I call it work/life integration. You have to know what you need, and then you have to communicate that. For example, if you need personal time on Sunday mornings, then you need to make the executive aware that you won’t be as accessible on Sunday mornings. Or you need to get someone to cover for you. Taking care of yourself is essential. You come first.

Do you think in general women are better at managing up than men?

I don’t believe that’s true at all. I think it’s the person. I think it’s what motivates somebody to want to help someone else.

You also wrote in your piece that finding out about the temperament of an executive prior to accepting a position is very important, as well as stating clearly while you’re interviewing how you expect to be treated. Is that particularly true for executive assistants because of the relationship?

I think it’s broader. It’s important for everyone to know who they’re going to be reporting to, what is that person’s management style, and what is the culture of the organization. The assistant, and the employer, have the right to ask about that in the interview: e.g., “When someone disappoints you, how do you let that person know? What’s your style?” I think everybody should ask that question.

Personal assistants are known for doing whatever executives ask but they have to push back on some things. How do you say “no” to requests from your boss?

It’s important to know how to say “no” when you can’t do what is being asked, or when you may have a better solution or idea. Listen to the request, and indicate that you understand what is important to the executive. Think about whether you are willing to compromise. Show respect for your boss’s point of view, and then clearly state why you can’t fulfill his/her request. Maybe it’s about priority management, or the request crosses your personal boundaries. Saying “no” respectfully becomes your competitive advantage, because it shows your social intelligence, intuition, and regard for others. But stay firm once you’ve made a decision.

You said that having an executive assistant can drastically improve the productivity of an executive and of the organization as a whole. If more employees start managing up, would that produce similar positive results?

I think that it would. There are many assistants, and many individuals, in companies who don’t realize how important they are to that company. Every time you expand in a role, you add more value to yourself, to the management, and to the company. But it’s up to you to ask for more responsibility.

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What the Insurance Industry Can Do to Fix Health Care

Health insurance companies are uniquely positioned to save the day in our ailing health system. Yes, you heard me correctly: health insurers.

Health insurers — or “payers” — are reviled nearly universally. Confused by “explanation of benefits” forms and denials of coverage and frustrated by rising deductibles, co-pays, and costs of care, consumers rank their experiences with health insurers below those with cable companies and internet service providers. Physicians and other care providers — who are constantly negotiating price of services and filling out piles of paperwork — don’t like payers much either.

All this makes insurers unlikely heroes. But we need someone to cut through the complexity of the current system, demand true value from providers, and create better options for consumers. Insurers increasingly look like the folks who can do the job and reinvent their business at the same time.

How? They can use their market power (they direct the bulk of health care dollars) and understanding of different consumer segments to create innovative products, services, and partnerships that address consumers’ needs. In the process, they can help move us all toward a low-cost, value-based health care system. Here are some specific ideas on what payers could do:

Act as true partners to value-based providers. Most payers today are piloting new economic models that pay providers not for the services they provide but for the value they create. Most, however, are neglecting a key opportunity: helping providers change their operating model. To succeed in value-based care, providers need data, analytics, smart clinical-care teams, and managerial support. Insurers are well-positioned to provide all this. They can also help providers become more efficient and assist them in navigating the tricky financial transition from fee-for-service to fee-for-value economics. Most important, insurers can help the very best provider organizations succeed by using them as the core of attractive, competitively priced insurance products.

Offer options for low-cost, convenient care. One area of waste in health care is the use of physician offices and hospital emergency departments to treat minor conditions such as sore throats, urinary infections, and allergies. Payers can make it easy for their members to get care 24/7 in more appropriate settings by partnering with retail, urgent care clinics, and telehealth providers. They can also offer the data connectivity needed to keep the consumer’s primary care provider in the loop. Oscar, the New York health insurance company launched last year, received fanfare in the press over its sleek offering, which includes unlimited phone and video calls with physicians and a “doctor on call” service that provides prescriptions by phone or e-visits. A number of retail pharmacy chains are also actively pursuing retail health and wellness clinics in stores to boost growth.  Walmart has been piloting low-cost care clinics offering a $40 office visit that could dramatically reset the cost bar if scaled broadly.

Cover new wellness- and prevention-oriented treatments. Such options can serve as effective adjuncts to traditional benefits and encourage the trend toward more self-care. Aetna, for example, has offered mindfulness and yoga training to 6,000 of its employees. Its research shows that lower employee stress improved productivity by 69 minutes per week and gave an 11:1 return on investment. Similarly, articles in The New York Times, TIME, Scientific American, JAMA, and The Huffington Post cite growing evidence of the efficacy of meditation programs.

Explode the PPO model. Today the gold standard for health insurance is a preferred provider organization, a huge collection of doctors assembled to provide something for everyone but no special benefit to anyone. Insurers can do a better job for consumers and create real value by developing hassle-free mass customization. In this new model, consumers can choose from lifestyle-based curated options that offer trade-offs across risk level, health-savings options, primary-care models, alternative networks, network breadth, coaching and navigation programs, rewards programs, contract length, and incentive structures. Transparency tools and crowd-sourced reviews will spotlight value and multi-modal coordinated care delivery (think care teams that seamlessly work with telehealth providers, health coaches, and retail clinics) will help cut costs considerably. Consumers will be able to trade their own health engagement into benefit dollars and rewards that they can use seamlessly. While true à la carte insurance customization is not yet a reality, private exchange platforms are starting to provide a stepping stone to get there. For example, Maxwell Health, a new private exchange platform, presents a beautiful interface with lifestyle-focused packages that make product selection simple and tailored for you.

Sell convenience and personalized service. Most health care could hardly be less convenient. Now that consumers have unprecedented purchasing power (rise of public and private exchanges) and bear unprecedented costs (mounting high deductibles and premiums), they expect iPhone-like service. There is tremendous opportunity for payers to make the health care experience simpler and more supportive with online appointment scheduling, clear data and reviews, personalized suggestions, navigation apps with predictive decision support, reward programs, peer-to-peer support, and many other tools. Making the consumer experience better is smart for payers too. They can build stickier consumer relationships and generate new opportunities to address consumers’ growing health and lifestyle needs.

Power healthy behavior change. Some 50% of the determinants of health are driven by lifestyle and personal behaviors. Changing people’s behavior is a tall order but is necessary to improve health care. There are already examples of innovators that are succeeding, such as Omada Health with weight loss for pre-diabetics and Zipongo with healthy eating. We’ve only begun to deploy behavioral science, advanced wearable/monitoring technologies, and machine learning to understand the behaviors and motivations of different groups to predict and prevent acute events and connect people with the solutions that work best for them.

Serve as the bridge between new tools and consumers. In the first half of 2014, venture capital investment in digital health grew by 176%, spawning new consumer-centric companies with interesting approaches to consumer health. But there’s a chasm between these unscaled point solutions and the consumers who could use them. Payers can bridge the gap, using Amazon-style analytics and personalization to better understand consumer types and then connect them at the right place and time to the best-suited offerings. Better yet, payers don’t need to build the bridge themselves: A growing set of powerful consumer-engagement platforms (e.g., WellTok and Optum’s Rally) are moving along this path.

Payers have economic incentives to do everything I’ve described. The Affordable Care Act puts limits on the margins they can earn from their traditional business (Oliver Wyman estimates payer margins may shrink by a third), and an evolving marketplace means that they will face significantly more competition — from each other, health care providers, and new entrants that see an opportunity to capture growth in a $3 trillion market. The options I’ve described would let payers move into non-regulated markets and potentially generate revenue from discretionary consumer spending — a growing pot of money they have not accessed much.

Can they win consumers over? One advantage of being in an industry people don’t like is that there are many opportunities to pleasantly surprise the consumer. The good news is that the things that will make consumers happy — more convenience, customization, support for doctors, coordination of care — can all contribute to attractive new business opportunities while making the health care system more efficient, effective, humane, and sustainable.

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Companies Should Be Required to Disclose Their Gender Stats

The push for board quotas in the EU has been relatively successful. Ten countries have signed on, and the gender balance on these countries’ boards has improved significantly. However, much of the improvement has come from the addition of women as non-executive board members, the trickle down effect on executive teams has not been obvious, and the benefits remain hotly debated. Key countries, like the US and the UK, are unlikely to adopt similar measures. Still other countries have adopted voluntary targets, with mixed results. (Here’s a complete overview of the board situation.)

The challenge is that adding a few non-execs to your board is proving a lot easier than balancing your leadership teams. Recently Google has led Silicon Valley companies in a collective and public recognition that their gender balance is not satisfactory, and published some aggregate statistics. The corporate world is gradually responding to the pressure for greater transparency on their internal reality, which up to now has been jealously guarded. It would help to come clean, so that we can really compare companies and countries.

Rather than legislating quotas, why not require the publication of companies’ gender statistics beyond their highly visible boards? Such transparency would allow everyone from talented graduates to savvy investors to see which companies are truly – and sustainably – balancing their senior leadership ranks. And it would allow men and women who want to work for or invest in balanced companies to be able to identify them. What company will be credibly able to argue against transparency?

Google said it best: “It is hard to address these kinds of challenges if you’re not prepared to discuss them openly, and with the facts.” We need better, more specific data – not just aggregate statistics on whether companies have any women in management, or a certain percentage of female employees. Such broad datasets obscure the important question of how many companies manage to balance their senior leadership teams, and by how much.

Let’s keep things simple. For our initial purpose, let’s focus on the top. To keep it easily comparable and implementable across companies, let’s stick to the top: publish, in the annual report, gender balance statistics for the top three levels: the CEO, the CEO’s team, and that team’s direct reports.

While some may argue that this is a limited view, we’d suggest it is far more representative than the board, and represents the reality of decades of corporate efforts (or lack thereof) to improve the balance of the sexes. Let’s also measure whether the leaders in question are in support functions or operational roles. And while we’re at it, why not make it a global metric? Why not get a few key names and institutions to align behind the idea and push it?

This would be enough to raise the pressure and the visibility of what companies have achieved with their efforts and initiatives. It would reward the best companies and employers with enhanced visibility and encourage the rest to balance. It would enable researchers everywhere to analyze what really works – and what doesn’t. It would allow the world’s best talent to choose to work in more progressive and balanced environments.

Although I’ve tried to keep this simple, I know how difficult it will be.

We have carried out research on executive teams for the past five years with our Global Gender Balance Scorecard. We know just how hard it is to come up with comparable results, even with our limited focus on the top two levels. So many companies hide the reality of their unbalanced top teams behind impossibly large “leadership teams.”

The UK and Australia have both been pushing for clearer reporting. The UK’s Think, Act, Report initiative is a good model, which some 200 companies have signed up to. The issue seems to be that they may not all be reporting exactly the same thing, or the key levels that we will be interested in: the top teams.

Australia has focused on analyzing just the top three levels of management (Key Management Positions or KMPs) in their newly introduced Gender Equality Scorecard and the results are very clear. “Women comprise 26.2% of the top three layers of management. Employers are failing to take a strategic whole of enterprise approach to gender equality; only 7.1% have a standalone overall gender equality strategy. And a third of companies have no female KMPs at all.”

The US has a variety of initiatives, like The Chicago Network’s survey of the city’s 50 listed companies. Since 1998, this analysis has tracked the gender balance on the board and among “top earners.” This year’s study reveals that more than 25% of top earners are female at only four companies. At two-thirds of the companies in the study, no top earners were female.

But none of these studies are sufficient to help women easily see which companies value them – and which don’t.

The simple metric I’ve proposed here could be a precursor to the spread of more detailed national reporting requirements. Such reporting should be voluntary at first. Start by inviting all the big publicly listed companies (Fortune 100, FTSE 100, CAC 40, DAX 30, and so on) in each key market to submit their data (we already report on their data on the level reporting in to the global CEO). Also publish the list of companies that have not provided their data. Once the survey gets established, propose it to governments as a legislative requirement in annual reporting. The objective is to create a very simple global index that will get CEOs competing on their gender ranking. That’s when CEOs will start getting serious about sex.

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A Better Way to Think About Risk

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Few people would question the value of risk assessment. Without it, we would plunge thoughtlessly into situations that could lead to considerable harm. But upon closer inspection, risk assessment is itself a dangerous double-edged sword.

There are numerous counterexamples where, at least in hindsight, even a simple assessment of risk would have killed a business idea that turned out later to be a huge success. The launch of Facebook, for example, might not have been justified when MySpace and Friendster were industry leaders.

So is there a better way to think about risk, especially in fast-changing environments? I suggest three: 1) understand how the brain processes risk; 2) remember that risk-taking can be a good thing; 3) learn to become an expert at bouncing back from failure, thus taking some of the sting out of risk-taking.

1. Understand how the brain processes risk. Recent evidence from brain science suggests that we need to reframe how we think about risk and that we need better tools for assessing it. While we all have biases that make us underestimate risk, and we need to take those into account, new research suggests that there is even more going on than we thought.

Risk-taking may be conscious or unconscious. When it is unconscious, you may not be aware of the risk or how you are framing it. In this case, doing a risk assessment limits your conclusions to conscious factors, thereby excluding the potential impact of unconscious biases.

Risk assessment may also be driven by feelings. Feelings can obscure important rational thinking or they can promote it. Even if we’re conscious of our feelings, how are we to know which effect they will have when we’re facing a big decision?

Furthermore, whether you take a risk or not may be entirely based on your personality. Research has shown that people who are sociable, impulsive sensation-seekers or aggressive may be especially likely to take risks. So assessing a situation and its risks are not enough. You also have to assess the final decision on your propensity to take risks based on your personality.

When I work with decision-making teams, I have used tools to uncover some of these biases. One is this checklist of the psychological traps and unconscious biases in decision making, and another is Gearshift, an app for dealing with obstructive emotions. MoodKit is a mobile app that also helps users understand cognitive distortions.

2. Remember that risk-taking can be a good thing. “Risk” often has inherently negative connotations, which may bias you against taking smart risks. So make a conscious effort to remember that risk-taking may be adaptive and may even lead to positive outcomes. In adolescence, for example, it may confer certain advantages because this is when we learn how to adapt to a rapidly changing world. If we consider the “college kids lacking business sense” who started Facebook versus the professional managers at NewsCorp who ran MySpace like a business, it is clear whose risk tolerance paid off. While this does not give high-risk strategies carte blanche, it does point out how risk mitigation can make you fall into a blinding prudence trap and how taking risks can lead to a big payoff. Steve Jobs taking a big risk to open up Apple retail stores despite physical storefronts being a risky business for computer manufacturers illustrates that a sober risk assessment is far from the be-all and end-all of decision making.

Here, I recommend the opportunity model of change, a tool helps leaders find opportunities in adversity. This HBR article also details some of the hidden dangers of being too risk-averse.

3. Learn to become an expert at bouncing back from failure. Many people who have failed due to taking risks have subsequently succeeded. The brain is rigged for error-based learning, so why shouldn’t we become better at experimenting rather than trying to avoid failure through risk assessment? Steve Blank, whose company Rocket Science Games was supposedly going to revolutionize the video games industry, lost $35 million in funding. Instead of quitting, he went on to start another company, E.piphany, which resulted in each of its investors making $1 billion.

Even though failure is a badge of honor in Silicon Valley, there are plenty of people who fail in launching new businesses and fade from the scene completely. What makes one person different from another? In large part, it’s resilience and openness.

Here, I have used a tool called Burnout Buster that measures how early- or mid-stage burnout can hurt resilience and recovery, and a tool called BEND, which helps leaders develop 16 resilience competencies. HBR has also published several seminal articles on improving your own resilience: “Building Resilience,” by Martin Seligman, “How Resilience Works” by Diane Coutu, and “How to Bounce Back from Adversity,” by Joshua Margolis and Paul Stoltz.

The message here is that in our rapidly changing world, our traditional way of thinking about risk assessment is inadequate for business strategy and decision-making. More than ever, learning new techniques and tools will help us achieve better outcomes in this era of dramatic and disorienting change.

Risk assessment can be a valuable way of collecting data and structuring reflection. But we need to expand our skills if we want to rise to the challenges and capture the opportunities in front of us.

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Retiring Boomers Should Consider Selling Their Companies to Millennials

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Four million privately-held businesses stand to change hands over the next two decades as baby boomers, the largest group of owners of these companies, continue to retire. For a reported 75% of these owners, an exit plan is not in place.

There’s one ownership transition few of these companies have thought about: finding a talented millennial, fresh out of business school, and putting him or her in charge. But believe it or not, this is an increasingly appealing option.

In truth, most millennials have never thought about it either. Those who aspire to run companies are more likely to found one than try to buy. But that may change, thanks to the success of ”search funds“.

First popularized amongst the Ivy League community, particularly Harvard and Stanford, search funds are propelling entrepreneurially spirited post-MBA and other young professionals into the helms of small and mid-sized private companies. Backed by institutional investors and “friends and family” capital, these young would-be managers (a.k.a searchers) conduct a one-time search to find, acquire, and then run a business. After spending months homing in on an industry and business they believe in to identify the right fit (“the search”), they make the acquisition, relocate to headquarters, and become the new owner-operator.

For sellers without an effective succession plan — perhaps they do not have a natural heir or want to avoid corporate or institutional buyout — selling to a search fund can offer the continuation of a business’s operations in a fairly uninterrupted manner. The incoming CEO steps right into the shoes of the departing one, supported by the existing management team. Searchers are also in it for the long haul — they typically remain in the company well beyond the typical five to seven year window of a private equity buyer. For investors, average returns of the search fund “asset class” have been north of 30%, mitigating early skepticism. And of course, for the searchers, the process offers a middle path between joining a large corporation and starting something from scratch.

More broadly, the search fund model seems uniquely fitted to our demographic moment. As the population ages and more and more owner-operators retire, search funds offer young professionals a chance to grow into the CEOs and corporate leaders of tomorrow.

What does this mean for the businesses these professionals acquire? Selling to a search fund doesn’t mean bowing to the whims of a millennial. Searchers come to the table equipped with mentors, either business school professors or investors from the private equity firms backing them. So businesses are getting the best of both worlds: the vigor of millennial leadership with the security and structure of mature backers.

While the companies that end up selling to search funds are typically ones characterized by strong financial profiles, loyal customer bases, and steady, consistent growth, that profile could expand. We are on the cusp of a major generational transition in leadership. One way or another, as boomers retire, more millennials will end up in charge.

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What to Do If Your Boss Is a Control Freak

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It may have seemed well-intended at first — your boss kept close tabs on your work and made sure you presented yourself well throughout the company. But now that you’re no longer learning your role, the tight leash feels downright oppressive and embarrassing. Your boss is not only micromanaging you, he’s smothering you. What’s going on?

Despite what you may think, the root of his micromanaging is probably not that your boss is a jerk or that he feels threatened by you. Rather, his actions might be explained by factors that have little to do with you, such as a poor understanding of his role as manager, micromanaging bosses of his own, a lack of motivation to question how he’s always done things, or personal insecurity.

That said, it can be hard to cut your boss some slack when he isn’t cutting you any. His harping about every small misstep you take can feel overwhelmingly personal. The good news is that you don’t have to resign yourself to being nit-picked to death. You may not be able to change your boss, says Carol Walker, a principal at Prepared to Lead, a leadership development consulting firm. But you do have some control. “You have more power to improve the situation than you probably realize,’” Walker says. You aren’t likely to turn things around with one great conversation or one burst of high performance. But you can, little by little, own and direct a process that will enable your boss to start trusting you more and monitoring you less. Here’s how.

1. Manage his insecurity

Form an educated guess about where your boss’s sensitivities lie. If you believe, for example, that he’s intimidated by his boss, think of ways you can alleviate that pressure, such as running reports to better prepare him for meetings with his manager. Or perhaps he’s afraid that people don’t perceive him as essential, and he’s on a tear to prove how much you and others need him. Dispel his fears, advises Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Show him that you value his guidance. Bring him any news you hear, and take your ideas to him before sharing them with others. As your boss begins to trust that you’ll come to him without prompting, he may loosen his grip.

Once you get to know your boss better, you’ll gain more insight into the areas he’s touchy about. Looking at what’s set him off historically — budget surprises? schedule changes? — will help you find ways of putting him at ease now, says Clark. Then you can assemble a dashboard to keep your boss as informed as he wants to be. Agree on your key priorities and the metrics that will demonstrate progress, and ask him how often he’d like to receive updates. Then stick to that agreement.

Further Reading




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HBR Guide to Office Politics

Communication Book
Karen Dillon


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Your proactive, tailored-to-him system will reassure him. That’s important, since micromanaging often stems from a boss’s insecurity. “I call it ‘snoopervising,’” says Stu Tubbs, former Dean of the College of Business at Eastern Michigan University. Turn the behavior around by pre-empting it: Tell your boss you want him to feel he can count on you and your work. And use language that signals active listening. Tubbs recalls one young man who said “Consider it done” at the end of every meeting with his boss.

2. Don’t fight it

If you openly rebel against micromanagement, Clark cautions, your boss may clamp down even more. Leadership consultant Ron Ashkenas agrees. Instead of viewing it as a blow to your ego, he suggests, think about how you might actually benefit from it. Your boss may have your best interests in mind. Perhaps he wants to ensure you have a sound understanding of the company’s protocol or the most effective ways to work the system to get things done.

Regardless of the cause, says Ashkenas, accept that your boss may have something important to teach you. Just try to learn as much as you can, as quickly as you can — in case he doesn’t eventually let up and you decide you can’t take it anymore.

3. Scrutinize yourself

If your boss doesn’t appear to have faith in your ability to do your job, consider whether you’ve given him a reason to feel this way. Have you missed important deadlines? Delivered presentations that fell flat? Take a hard look at yourself — and look around. If your boss isn’t micromanaging other colleagues, his behavior could be a clue that you’re underperforming.

If you suspect that’s the case, have the courage to ask your boss about it, says Clark. Tell him you feel he’s monitoring you extra closely and you want to understand what’s behind it. In reality, some bosses are actually reluctant to be straight with employees about their short-comings because it’s hard to be critical of someone who might react badly. If an employee has the courage to come to the boss and say that he is genuinely interested in feedback on his weaknesses so he can improve them, that’s a great first step. Reassure your boss that you do genuinely want honest feedback, even if it’s hard to hear.

You might need to soothe your ego for a day or two, but the sooner you return to your boss with a proposed plan of action, the more likely he’ll be to trust that you genuinely do want to improve.

4. Look ahead

Focusing on your future may help you and your boss interact more productively in the present. So initiate a discussion about long-term goals. Set up a one-on-one meeting, or ask if you can use one of your scheduled check-ins to talk about your role. Explain that you want to start communicating more regularly — and explicitly — about your growth and about how else you could support the department. Give him some examples of the types of projects you’d like to work on and the future role you envision for yourself. And then ask if he’ll work with you to create a plan for acquiring the skills you’ll need to realize your vision.

Keep the conversation constructive and forward-looking. Complaining about the past won’t open your boss’s mind or make him want to support you, Walker says. Being positive and taking ownership will. Let him know that you appreciate his guidance, but you’re eager to spread your wings a little, too.

 

This post is adapted from The HBR Guide to Office Politics.

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How to Promote Yourself Without Looking Like a Jerk

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Self-promotion can be uncomfortable for many people. That’s certainly true for foreign professionals in America, who have to navigate different cultural mores in the most bullish nation on earth when it comes to personal branding. But even for many Americans, it’s a tricky prospect: how can you ensure that your talent is recognized without alienating your colleagues and looking like a jerk?

The first step is understanding the true value of self-promotion. Of course, you can get better job offers or assignments if you’re viewed as a star performer. But it’s not all about you – a helpful reminder for people who are turned off by the caricature of personal branding (like networking) as baldly transactional. Instead, when you promote yourself in the right way, it’s a win-win. Your colleagues and managers probably don’t have the time to fully understand your interests, talents, and skill set. If you can make it clear to them where you can contribute the most, you’re making their lives easier and helping the company overall.

The next step is to focus on facts, not interpretation. No one can argue if you say that you’re passionate about social media, or that you’ve been blogging for more than a decade, or that you have X number of Twitter followers. But they can argue plenty if you call yourself a “social media expert” (or, heaven help us, a “guru” or “ninja”). Whatever your field, it’s fine if other people want to christen you an expert – and in my own bio, I gladly cite several magazines that have given me the appellation. But it’s presumptuous to do it yourself, and you risk a great deal of blowback. (Well-known author Gary Vaynerchuk famously told TechCrunch, “99.5 percent of social media experts are clowns.”)

It’s important to demonstrate your expertise with stories, not words. Saying “I’m great at pitching investors” sounds pretty egotistical. But sharing a compelling tale of how you rounded up seed funding allows others to deduce your skill without having to make it explicit. Also, research has shown that when listeners are exposed to stories, many more sections of their brains light up; they’re literally immersed in the moment with you, making a far deeper impression. They may hear your words if you say you’re awesome, but telling them a story allows them to feel it for themselves.

You’ll also want to ensure that those stories are relevant. If you’re at a cocktail party and the talk turns to startups, it’s perfectly appropriate to mention that you’ve launched one and share the story of your successful pitch. But if you’re visibly straining to steer the conversation in your direction (“Speaking of basketball, have I told you about my new cloud computing venture?”), people will be turned off by the ham-handedness of the approach. Self-promotion works best when it’s natural and unforced; you want to contribute to the conversation organically, not hog the spotlight. (As I discuss in my book Reinventing You, it’s even better if you can recruit a like-minded wingman to interject on your behalf and mention your relevant accomplishments.)

Further Reading




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HBR Guide to Office Politics

Communication Book
Karen Dillon


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Finally, even when you’re promoting yourself, it’s essential to express humility. That doesn’t in any way mean hiding your abilities. However, it does require being sensitive to the fact that some accomplishments may make others feel jealous or inadequate, and you don’t want to appear glib or self-congratulatory. It’s also a great opportunity to give credit to others when it’s due. If you’ve been working in China, someone might ask about your language skills. You could certainly say, “I’m fluent in Mandarin” and leave it at that. But it’s a lot more gracious to provide context. “I’m really fortunate my high school offered classes in Mandarin,” you could say, “so I studied it for a number of years and was able to become fluent.” Your accomplishment is still impressive, but you’ve highlighted your skills without making the other person feel bad about themselves. It’s also important to remember that humility isn’t the same as self-deprecation. Downplaying your skills may be a good self-promotion strategy in a number of countries, especially in Asia. But in the U.S., you risk looking either incompetent (“if he says he’s not good at Mandarin, he’s probably not”) or disingenuous and patronizing. Instead, be humble, but be real.

Often, people shy away from self-promotion for fear that they’ll alienate their colleagues and develop a reputation as a braggart. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, personal branding can benefit you and your company by helping others understand where you excel, and ensuring that your talents are put to use in the best way possible.

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