Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1343

My Dentist 3D Printed My Crown

As a tech junkie and geek wannabe I’ve been paying attention to 3D printing and the exploding maker movement. When I say paying attention, I mean reading about it, watching hackers and hobbyists make stuff, and wondering if there is more to the technology than the brightly colored plastic tchotchkes cluttering my desk. 3D printing really hasn’t affected me yet. That is until I recently chipped a tooth and had no choice but to visit my family dentist. It was the dentist’s chair that more than any article or demo converted me to the potential of 3D printing. Sometimes disruption has to hit you right in the mouth before you pay attention.

Now, I was no stranger to restorative dentistry. About seven years ago I had chipped another tooth that required a crown and didn’t remember the process fondly. It required multiple drawn out — not to mention expensive — visits to my dentist. He first had to make a physical mold of my damaged tooth. The mold was sent out to a local dental lab to manufacture a permanent crown. In the meantime, I was sent home with the inconvenience of a temporary crown made of a cured composite secured with temporary cement. Weeks later when the permanent mold was back from the lab I was summoned to the dentist for another lengthy visit to secure the new crown in place.

I wasn’t a happy camper, facing the same fate seven years later.. However, this time instead of a physical mold my dentist inserted a digital camera in my mouth and the next thing I knew a digital image of my damaged tooth immediately appeared on a computer screen positioned right next to my dental chair. My dentist knows I’m a tech junkie so he went out of his way to demonstrate his new high tech capability. I watched my damaged tooth rotating in all of its 3D glory when he ran the design software to quickly and magically fit a digital crown on top of my chipped digital tooth. Voila! He even made a few manual tweaks to the digital crown using the computer aided design software, a little bit off the side here and a little smoothing there.

It’s what happened next that blew me away and convinced me that 3D printing is a big deal. My dentist pushed send on his keyboard, then took me into another room in his dental office where he proudly pointed to a piece of equipment the size of a large microwave. The digital design of my new crown had been transmitted to a CNC (computer numerical control) milling machine. There are two basic approaches to 3D printing: printers that deposit layer after layer of materials to build an object from the ground up, and CNC milling machines which takes a block of material and carve out the desired object. I watched in awe as my crown was sculpted from a block of dental composite right before my eyes.

In about ten minutes, with my new crown in hand, it was back to the dental chair where it was expertly put in place permanently. I asked my dentist if this new capability put the dental lab that used to make routine crowns out of business. He told me he had just reviewed his budget and that he had actually increased his spending at the lab. It turns out the lab is busier than ever focusing on non-routine, higher value restorative work. At the same time, my dentist is busy delivering better value to his patients, and I got a new crown in a single visit and a life lesson in innovation.

Sometimes the most compelling use for a new technology isn’t the one that gets showed off in the expo hall or makes it onto YouTube. The plastic toys that can now be printed on demand may not matter much, but for the dentist, as for any number of other professions, the chance to design and manufacture products in house with 3D printing is already revolutionizing business.

Stop Calling People Out

Pretend that you occasionally lose your temper in meetings, and my aim is to get you to change. The next time I see you lose your cool, I say one of two things:

Hey, timeout. You just did it again — you lost your temper with Mario. This is the third time I’ve seen you do this in the last two days. C’mon, this behavior HAS to stop.

or:

Hey, can we chat for a sec? I noticed you just lost your temper with Mario. Did you notice that too? You are so good at running these meetings, I can only imagine how much more effective you’re going to be as you move past this behavior. What can I do to help?

In the first, I’m calling you out. In the second, I’m calling you forth. The content is similar. The messaging and tone are quite different. Which do you think is more effective? For most people and circumstances, it’s the latter.

If you’re a straight-shooting type of person like me (or a lawyer, philosophy major, or debate club type), you might get a cheap thrill when calling people out. It’s feels like winning a game of Gotcha!, particularly when it’s uniquely insightful. How brilliant of me to notice that and how daring to state it! Calling out can also be an emotional release. You get to be angry and superior, justifiably.

That’s the thing with calling people out. It often, not always, comes from a place of ego or reaction. The intent, conscious or not, is to make the other person wrong. There’s also a public aspect to calling someone out, of making them lose face. The tone is adversarial. And ultimately, you’re putting the burden of change entirely on the other person (“Stop it!”).

Calling people forth, in contrast, comes from a place of service and an open heart. The intent is to call the person to higher ground. It builds on their strengths. The tone is collaborative. And ultimately, you’re sharing the burden of getting better (“How can I help?”). It feels more like coaching than scolding.

Some would say calling forth is the same as using positive instead of negative reinforcement, or the “sandwich” approach to feedback. But I think it goes deeper than messaging. Calling forth is a mindset, a way of showing up as a leader who fights for the greatness within others. It starts with intention. It’s the key difference between transformational leadership and transactional leadership.

The point isn’t to be soft or to avoid conflict, it’s to be more effective. In the short term, calling forth is more motivational. In the longer term, it’s a better way to frame the relationship.

To be sure, there are situations when a heavier hand is needed. Calling out repeated safety violations may be an effective way to signal norms to others. Calling out sexist or illegal behavior may be more appropriate than a softer touch.

But as leaders, we want to build people up, not tear them down. We want to inspire our team members to levels of effectiveness that they never imagined. According to Gallup, only 13% of employees worldwide feel engaged with their work. Imagine what a 90% engagement rate would look like in terms of productivity, satisfaction, and turnover rates. But I don’t think we’ll get there if we keep calling each other out.

Engaging in a Vice Can Stimulate Creativity if It’s Framed as a Duty

In contrast to the belief that autonomy energizes us and heightens our well-being, researchers in Hong Kong found that people experience increased vitality and show greater creativity after being directed to do something — specifically, engage in a (very mild) vice. Participants who were assigned to buy a celebrity photo album (that’s the vice), as opposed to a computer-programming tutoring book, and then asked to write an ad for a bike were judged to show better creative performance than those who had been given free choice or assigned to buy the computer book (6.42 versus 5.54 and 5.72 on average, respectively, on an 11-point creativity scale), say doctoral student Fangyuan Chen and Jaideep Sengupta of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Framing a pleasure as a requirement reduces the guilt associated with it — thus the increased creativity and sense of well-being, the researchers say.

What It Will Take to Change the Culture of Wall Street

William C. Dudley, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, gave a speech Monday in which he used the word “culture” 45 times. Here’s how he defined it:

Culture relates to the implicit norms that guide behavior in the absence of regulations or compliance rules—and sometimes despite those explicit restraints. … Culture reflects the prevailing attitudes and behaviors within a firm.  It is how people react not only to black and white, but to all of the shades of grey. Like a gentle breeze, culture may be hard to see, but you can feel it. Culture relates to what “should” I do, and not to what “can” I do.

Dudley has a doctorate in economics, and spent a decade as chief economist at Goldman Sachs. But in his remarks he sounded more like a sociologist than an economist. His many mentions of “culture” could be significant. I’m hoping they mark the beginning of a change in how regulators think about reining in law-breaking and excessive risk-taking at banks. I’m also hoping that I had something to do with them.

I studied economics too, as an undergraduate. Then I went to work at Goldman Sachs, in mergers and acquisitions first, proprietary trading later. I spent a dozen years there — a tenure that overlapped with Dudley’s — went on to work at several other firms, and then, after the financial crisis, decided to go back to school. I now have a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and teach at Columbia Business School.

Many people find it peculiar that a former proprietary trader with a background in economics would go back to school and study sociology. As I reflected upon my career at Goldman Sachs, though, what stood out was the importance of its organizational structure. That’s something sociologists pay a lot of attention to, while economists generally don’t.

So I studied sociology, and for my doctoral dissertation focused on the organizational culture of Goldman Sachs. The dissertation became a book, titled What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences (HBR Press, 2013). One of the changes I document in the book is how Goldman drifted from a focus on ethical standards of behavior to legal ones — from what one “should” do to what one “can” do.

After the book was published, Dudley got in touch. I met with him and his people, and discussed what I had learned in my study of sociology and, in particular, my in-depth study of Goldman. I made recommendations on how to improve regulation. Also, I sent him two pieces I wrote for HBR.org, one on the importance of focusing on organizational behavior and not just individuals, the other asserting that culture had more to do with the financial crisis than leverage ratios did.

One of the key conclusions I drew from my study was that to achieve sustained success and avoid firm-endangering risks, a firm like Goldman has to cultivate financial interdependence among its top employees. I wrote:

Financial interdependence is important as a self-regulator … leaders should disproportionately and jointly share in fines, settlements, and other negative consequences out of their compensation plan or their stock … meaningful restrictions on leaders’ ability to sell or hedge shares should be imposed, which can lead to better self-regulating and longer-term thinking.

Consider what actually happened at JP Morgan Chase after the gigantic “London whale” trading loss. The company’s board docked the pay of CEO Jamie Dimon by more than half, to $11.5 million from $23 million. The bank also went after the bonuses of the individuals involved. That’s something, but the bulk of the loss was of course borne by shareholders. And what happened to the compensation of the typical JP Morgan managing director? According to people that I interviewed, not much (other than losses on their JP Morgan stock, which in most cases represents only a fraction of their overall net worth). The main reason, I was told, is that JP Morgan must pay competitively or lose its most talented employees. The second reason was that most managing directors had nothing directly to do with the losses.

But these people were important parts of an organization that messed up. Plus, they’d gotten big bonuses in previous years based in part on profits they had nothing to do with. One banker that I interviewed suggested that if JP Morgan’s managing directors collectively had to pay a large portion of settlements or losses related to the misbehavior out of their bonus pool, perhaps they as a group would take stronger internal actions to prevent such behavior, reward those who acted responsibly, and kick out those who did not. Maybe they would hold their leaders to higher standards and question each other’s activities.

This in fact is how things generally worked at Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms back when they were partnerships instead of publicly traded corporations. Each managing director was financially interdependent with every other. Typically, each received a fixed percentage of the overall annual bonus pool and was personally liable for other managing directors’ actions. At Goldman there was the added restriction that partners could not pull out their capital until after they retired (a far cry from the three-to-five-year vesting that bankers complain about today). The organizational regulation created by this structure was key to managing risk, and we should be thinking about ways to bring it back.

I am not suggesting the banks return to being private partnerships. But they should move away from today’s norm of discretionary annual bonuses for managing directors to, at least for a select group of top employees (at Goldman the elected “partner-managing directors” represent around 1.5 to 2% of total employees), a shared bonus pool with fixed percentages that would pay a large portion of settlements or losses related to misbehavior and have greater restrictions on selling stock. Managing directors would share in the firm’s successes, but also feel it when others incurred losses or when the firm got hit with fines. Giving bankers reason to hold each other accountable would cause them to pay much more attention to asking questions and managing risk and misbehavior. Restricting stock sales could push their thinking and actions in a more long-term direction.

In his speech Monday, New York Fed President Dudley urged some moves in this direction. Much of the compensation for high-level bank employees should be deferred for years, he said: “This would create a strong incentive for individuals to monitor the actions of their colleagues, and to call attention to any issues.” And when a bank is hit with a big fine, he argued — and this is something I don’t recall hearing before from a U.S. financial regulator — that some of the money be taken out of that deferred compensation pool:

Today, when a financial firm is assessed a large fine it is paid by the shareholders of the firm.  Although senior management may own equity in the firm, their combined ownership share is likely small, and so management bears only a small fraction of the fine. … Assume instead that a sizeable portion of the fine is now paid for out of the firm’s deferred … compensation, with only the remaining balance paid for by shareholders.  In other words, in the case of a large fine, the senior management and the material risk-takers would forfeit its performance bond.

This kind of interdependence has the potential to move the focus back to ethical standards of behavior instead of just legal ones. It might also drive away some talented employees. But if these people can’t take a longer-term approach and trust one another, should we trust them — and should they really be working at systemically important banks?

Myths About Entrepreneurship

Linda Rottenberg, author of Crazy Is a Compliment, on what it really takes to start a business.

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Why We Need to Outsmart Our Smart Devices

Most commentary about the Internet of Things assumes that we sacrifice privacy and security for huge efficiency gains. But what if the notion underlying that tradeoff — the idea that more connectivity always means greater efficiency — is flawed? What if indiscriminate information sharing has the same drawbacks with devices as it does with people?

Research shows, after all, that privacy is a source of productivity in organizations. And excessive transparency — in a totally open work environment, for example — makes us less productive and squashes creative problem solving. When we know we’re being closely monitored, we tend to stick to protocol, even when it’s inefficient.

Too much transparency between smart devices can have a similar effect. As much as we’d like to think that all the devices in our cars (and the cars around us) are talking to one another just to keep us safe, they’re also talking about us — and transmitting our data for analysis. Of course, when devices track our behavior on the job, we’re keenly aware of being watched and evaluated. It’s as if the boss is right there every second, noting every misstep. So we don’t take chances and innovate — unless we feel assured that our data won’t be used against us.

So, how much “talking” should devices do? Executives at a large gas utility wrestled with this question when HBS researcher Shelley Xin Li and I conducted a recent field experiment involving its service mechanics. The company had put in place advanced mobile technology that has become increasingly standard — for instance, laptops in every truck connected to the central dispatch and order system — to track the mechanics as they did their jobs. The goal was to provide developmental feedback and help the mechanics deliver more efficient customer service, but executives weren’t sure how to report the data they gathered.

They considered making it available to everyone, so that each individual would know how she or he ranked in performance compared with anyone else at any given time. Such real-time transparency, they thought, could increase motivation, promote a culture of fairness, provide feedback for self-improvement, and give managers better tools for developing their people.

But the executives could also imagine how unrestricted access to the data might have deleterious effects on culture and performance. It could undermine employees’ willingness to experiment, for instance, and result in missed opportunities for process improvement. Indeed, studies show that it is far easier to demotivate people (at either the top or the bottom of the performance curve) by being transparent with them about their performance than it is to motivate them with similar tactics.

So far, the company seems to have struck the right balance for its employees: sharing team performance with everyone but making individual data available only to the worker in question. Internal focus groups felt that “the culture’s focus on collaboration and productivity” would give way to competition if each person’s data were out there for all to see.

UPS is another company that’s had to sort out how visible to make its real-time performance data. Although its trucks don’t drive themselves yet, they’re loaded with sensors that record drivers’ every move and send the results to computers in New Jersey for data crunching. But in order to use the data to improve efficiency and driver safety, UPS engaged in a prolonged negotiation with the drivers and their union. Their Master Agreement acknowledges that “there have been problems with the utilization of technology in the past” — that is, it’s been used for disciplinary action rather than its intended developmental purposes.  Now, UPS has tighter restrictions about sharing the data only for driver development (unless someone intentionally defrauds the company).

As these examples show, it’s not easy to find the right interface between human beings and smart devices. Increased connectivity and transparency can cause employees to engage in unproductive behaviors to ward off retribution.  Both the gas utility and UPS have invested a lot of time and money to find the right level of privacy for them — and companies will increasingly incur those costs as the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent in the world of work.

What’s more, devices aren’t always right about us. And we waste energy (and put a drag on productivity) trying to fool them into being right. Consider what happens when the office lights automatically turn off because you haven’t moved and the sensor thinks you’re gone. You wave your arms madly in the dark, waiting for the lights to come back on. You flick the switch to no avail. You walk out of the room and back in again, maybe do a few jumping jacks. This device that’s designed to make your life easier — and does, on the plus side, prevent you from leaving the lights on all night — is also creating headaches by sharing the wrong information about you.

Just imagine what the repercussions would be if your smart office gathered inaccurate data about your performance — for instance, logging fewer hours than you’ve actually put in, because you weren’t at your desk the whole day or didn’t use your computer or phone for an extended period. What workarounds would you devise? Would you feel obliged to sit dutifully at your post, tap-tap-tapping away, rather than getting up to ask people questions and put actual heads together? I know I would.

Maybe the answer is to make devices even smarter, and version 2.0 will solve everything. But more likely, we’ll have to come up with better and better ways to outsmart them.

A Military Leader’s Approach to Dealing with Complexity

The most effective leaders I’ve known or studied all share a common trait: they were unwilling to settle for the existing state of affairs. They believed with all their heart that what we focus on can become reality.

In my quarter-century of military service, I’ve been afforded the rare privilege of leading in a broad array of environments: commanding a 500-person special operations expeditionary air refueling group in the Middle East after 9/11; guiding a 7,000-person military community through a dramatic mission transformation in North Dakota; and leading men and women from 14 NATO nations in building a sustainable, independent Afghan Air Force in an active war zone—something that had never previously been attempted.

I know how daunting it can be to lead dedicated professionals to undertake complex endeavors, and I’ve lived the reality of trying to bring positive change to large, bureaucratic organizations. Here are four principles I’ve learned that can help you enhance your leadership while concurrently bringing out the best in those around you.

Principle 1: Craft your vision in pencil, not ink.

It is a well-accepted role of leaders to focus on the future and pursue the possibility it holds. In other words, leading entails being a visionary—confidently looking ahead and ascertaining how best to transform your current reality into your desired future. One of the most significant errors I see leaders make is developing their vision in isolation and then expecting people to accept it at face value. When leaders do this, they violate one of the most important truths of promoting change: our words create our worlds. How we choose to describe and discuss what we are doing and where we are going is important, but what moves people to sustainable, self-motivated action is understanding the why behind the vision. That vision can only be fully realized if leaders involve others in the process of creating it.

Ultimately, what makes a vision come to life isn’t people understanding it, but people choosing to own it. Making inclusivity a priority will increase ownership, enhance motivation, improve information sharing, and result in leaders making wiser, more informed choices.

Principle 2: Believe no job is too small or insignificant for anyone, especially you.

For those of us who have served in uniform, getting dirty, sleeping in tents, leading marches in the mud, or spending hours rehearsing a mission comes with the territory. As a commander, you don’t get a pass because you have the highest rank. In fact, you should be ready to be the first to face hardship and the last to benefit from success. If your team is cold, wet, hungry, and sleepless, you should be, too. You should be prepared to eat last, own failure, and generously share triumphs. This others-centered approach to leading will build deep trust and enduring respect, and reinforce that you don’t expect anyone on your team to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself.

Ego tempts many leaders toward self-aggrandizement—the higher their rank, the more pronounced the pull. Choose to direct your effort and attention toward what you can give rather than what you can receive. Demonstrate humility, not superiority. Model for others the selfless attitudes and behaviors you desire to see in them.

Principle 3: Remember that l eaders should be generalists, not specialists.

Nobody can be an expert in everything, but the greater your scope of responsibility as a leader, the more you need to learn about what you are demanding of your people. Just like the best sports coaches, who invest countless hours in understanding every position on the field, effective leaders develop a keen sense of how the organization’s various roles, functions, systems, people, and processes contribute to achieving its desired goals. You may be a specialist at one thing, but knowing what others around you do—and how and why they do it—is vital not only to attaining your desired outcomes, but also to realizing your individual and collective potential.

Don’t allow yourself to become stale or small-minded. Make it a personal priority to know more about what is going on around you. If you spent the bulk of your career working in sales, accept a stretch assignment in business development or talent management. You will likely be pleasantly surprised at how this broader, richer view of what’s happening in your organization will enlarge your perspective, enhance your appreciation, and elevate your sense of personal satisfaction.

Principle 4: Recognize that every interaction is an opportunity to equip, engage, empower, and inspire those around you.

The world of physics has a principle: “Every contact leaves a trace.” What this means for leaders is that every interaction with someone—verbal, written, or even through non-verbal mannerisms—makes an impression. Effective leaders understand that every interaction is a potentially powerful means of nurturing a relationship, eliminating an obstruction to progress, or reinforcing trust. Determine to leave a trace that leaves those around you better for knowing you.

Do your part to seed an environment where everyone is compelled by your example. Adopt a walk-the-floor policy instead of an open-door policy. Visit with people in their space. Don’t make them come to yours.

Military work is risky, pressured, and ever-changing. Yet the principles military leaders use to lead effectively are the same skills companies need today to prevail in a climate of increasing uncertainty and accelerating complexity. It is up to each individual leader to choose to put these lessons to work.

Predictive Medicine Depends on Analytics

Regression models, Monte Carlo simulations, and other methods for predicting what’s around the corner have been in use for decades. It’s only recently, though, that advances in information technology have made it possible for predictive tools to access and manipulate big data, and to do so continuously — accelerating the generation of insights, and opening up opportunities to anticipate issues with unprecedented precision. Think of the colleges that are increasingly able to identify students at risk of dropping out and intervene before they do. Or lenders’ enhanced abilities to gauge credit risk. Energy, agriculture, insurance, retail, human resources — no industry is unaffected. But nowhere is the potential of this new era of opportunity more apparent and exciting than it is in health care.

Predictive analytics is fueling a transformation from a focus on the volume of procedures to the value of outcomes. Predictive tools are helping providers — both doctors’ groups and hospitals — assess patients’ risk of contracting a whole host of diseases and conditions. They can come up with individualized regimens by tapping into electronic medical records to identify the types of patients who are most likely to respond to a particular type of therapy. They can pinpoint treatments that sustain health in a more precise way than ever before. And they can identify individuals who are likely to stop benefiting from a specific regimen at a given time. For the volume-to-value paradigm shift in health care, predictive analytics, though rarely visible, is the essential enabler.

Used to its full potential, this is predictive medicine — the ability to integrate and analyze known disease characteristics with a specific patient’s history and health status, and use the resulting insights to change outcomes and inform new directions for life sciences research and development. And in this new arena, the once-clear lines between companies that make drugs and medical devices, providers who diagnosis illnesses and treat patients, and payers who provide the financial support for care are blurring. Actors in this ecosystem are increasingly working together rather than handing off information or tasks to the next entity in a linear process. They are establishing more iterative and interactive connections with each other and with patients. They are collaborating with (sometimes highly unlikely) partners. They’re also sharing risk.

The new business model has yet to solidify, and the leaders have yet to emerge. The positions are there for the taking. But not for long. That’s why pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies need to define their relevance in this new health care ecosystem, and soon.

Life sciences companies, for example, might consider staking a claim in the quest to lower hospital admissions and readmissions by working with providers on tailored plans for hospital patients being discharged, based on each individual patient’s propensity to comply with treatment and respond to it.

Consider: Carolinas HealthCare System (CHS), a network of hospitals with more than 900 care locations in North and South Carolina, recently lowered readmission rates by a third by using software from Predixion, a California-based software company. In this particular application, CHS gave its nurses point-of-care information on their patients so that when they were about to be discharged, the nurses could customize clinical interventions based on an individual patient’s predicted risk of readmission. This was a notable success — but what if we combined the insights and resources of a life science company and health provider that were both focused on, say, acute cardiovascular diseases? How much greater would the potential for lowering readmission rates be then?

The options are tangible. Imagine a scenario where a pharmaceutical company marketing a heart failure medication approaches its institutional customers — health systems, hospitals, urgent care centers, and other providers — with a risk-shared value proposition. The contract calls for the provider to use certain evidence-driven predictive analytics tools to define treatment options and possible responses. When predefined treatment goals are attained, both parties contractually benefit. Risk and outcomes, as the scenario plays out, will be managed by predictive models, which are powered by machine learning algorithms that will improve their accuracy rates over time.

Consider another scenario focused on compelling patients to stay the course with treatment. One estimate of the annual cost of medication noncompliance in the United States pegs it at a hefty $289 billion. What if a pharmaceutical company took the lead in conceptualizing and executing a collaborative solution, using predictive analytics to assemble and deliver a package of product and service offerings to motivate patients to stay on track? Think of it as a 360-degree/24-7 support system. It’s not hard to envision; we’re seeing just these sorts of systems popping up — informally, and disconnected from health care providers — with wearable fitness devices that share information among groups of users. With a focus on adhering to treatment, patients, providers, risk bearers, and life science companies would all be beneficiaries.

Medical device companies have begun using predictive analytics and other big data technologies in certain areas of their businesses. For example, consider Minneapolis-based medical device company, Medtronic, which develops diagnostic and intervention devices for cardiac and vascular diseases, diabetes, and neurological and musculoskeletal conditions. Medtronic is using big data and advanced analytics to drive their approach to patient and physician support and manage supply chains.

We’re also seeing some leading pharmaceutical companies — Merck Global Health Innovation, for one — investing and establishing operations to capitalize on new investments in advanced analytics. But this shift shouldn’t just be about capabilities. Life science company executives need to be thinking about what business they want to be in. They need to be thinking about how — and how much — they will develop and integrate predictive analytics capabilities into their services. They need to consider offering services enabled by advanced predictive analytics. And they need to consider business models where partnering to integrate the care that patients receive outside of the walls of provider entities is central to their value proposition.

The variety, velocity, and volume of health care data are allowing predictive analytics solutions to emerge quickly. And while the most visible immediate benefit is cost reduction, the real motivation is a patient-centric business model — one that recognizes that health and care management needs to occur wherever the patient is, not just in hospitals or physician offices. The goal (and it’s within our grasp) is threefold: improve clinical outcomes, enhance patient satisfaction, and drive more value to the entire health care system.

Australia Tries to Keep Older Workers in the Workforce

When Australia introduced its age pension in 1909, only 4% of the population was living long enough to claim it. Today, with life expectancies growing, 9% of Australians draw a full or partial government-funded age pension, often for more than 20 years, according to the Academy of Management Journal. Australia plans to incrementally increase the official retirement age to 70 by 2035, making its retirement age the highest in the world, and the government has a plan to offer cash incentives for companies that hire unemployed people over 50.

Help Your Team Spend Time on the Right Things

What is the most common resource that’s always in short supply? The answer, of course, is time. This applies not only to your time, but to your team’s. It’s the one organizational resource that is neither expandable nor renewable. Therefore, making sure that time is spent in ways that will have the biggest impact is a critical determinant of organizational success.

Unfortunately, many managers don’t think about time as a finite resource in the same way that they consider the limitations of headcount and budget. Therefore they don’t hesitate to give their teams more assignments without taking any away. The consequence of this is that their people work longer hours – and it’s often not clear what’s actually important and what can wait. This cascades through the ranks so that almost everyone feels overstressed and overworked. As one senior executive sadly said to me, “There is no time in the year anymore when things quiet down.”

But steps can be taken by managers to overcome this dynamic and better leverage organizational time. The first is to sharpen their vision of what their unit needs to do better in the next year or two, so that the priorities are clear. The second step is to free up time to move towards that vision by consolidating, eliminating, or streamlining current activities. The third step is to reallocate the newly liberated capacity to short-term experiments that will help them learn how to get to the vision quicker and with greater impact.

Let’s look at the Americas Field Marketing organization for Cisco Systems, as an example of this three-step process. For two years, this nearly 130-person unit had worked hard to drive customer relevance, generate demand, and increase loyalty in partnership with its sales teams across North, South and Central America. They had organized tradeshows, delivered direct marketing, generated leads, and provided useful customer insights – the basics of a successful marketing organization.

During this time, however, Cisco’s customers were beginning to purchase and use technology in new ways. Increasingly, tech-savvy business managers, instead of just IT professionals, were making buying decisions; user-generated applications were being added on top of the basic technology; cloud computing was becoming prominent; and digital media was becoming a key influence in deciding which technologies to purchase. Customers were self-educating and researching buying decisions in new ways – not just with a sales person.

In the face of this new reality, the marketing leadership team realized that many of their traditional face-to-face activities were no longer sufficient. So at an offsite, they began to develop a vision for Marketing 2.0 – with a focus on data analytics, cloud marketing, more targeted use of Cisco.com, 3rd party websites, and social media, and better identification of organizational buyers – all in support of generating better leads (and better tools to build customer relationships) for the Cisco sales teams.

While all of this was very exciting, the reality was that there were no new resources to dedicate to this work. Sales was still dependent on them to do the traditional marketing activities. As a result, the Americas Field Marketing leadership team shaped “capacity creation” projects to get the current work done with fewer resources or less time. This allowed them to redeploy time to new initiatives.

For example, one project was to consolidate similar types of marketing support across several sales groups. Another was to identify low payoff events and stop supporting them. In addition, the marketing team was encouraged to avoid low priority requests from sales. For activities with no demonstrable impact, they were told to answer with a polite “no,” followed by suggestions for more impactful options.

With extra time available, the leadership team commissioned several new pilots that would move the marketing organization towards vision 2.0. To make sure that the pilots wouldn’t become time sinks and would actually get finished, each one was designed to be narrowly focused on a particular aspect of the new vision, involve a limited number of people, and to be completed in 100 days or less. One of these “rapid results” projects was aimed at learning how to take advantage of data analytics. It achieved its goal of integrating digital behavioral data about customers in one country in order to increase their engagement by 20% in 60 days. Another successful project focused on increasing the collaboration between sales and marketing in one market to improve lead conversion rates by 16% in 100 days.

Naturally, this kind of transformation is not a one-time effort, but rather an ongoing process that needs to be continually refreshed and refocused. In the case of the marketing group, the leadership team now considers the portfolio of capacity creation and rapid results projects every quarter, as they move toward their Vision 2.0, so that they can continue to learn, build on what works and what does not, and make adjustments.

There also are skill challenges involved in pulling this off. At Cisco, for example, it became clear that some people did not necessarily have the skills needed for the new kinds of marketing work. So the marketing leadership team had to figure out how to create a more dynamic staffing model for their work through a combination of training, new hires, temporary assignments, and natural attrition.

New initiatives are necessary to move an organization forward. But without a conscious ongoing strategy for managing the time involved, the chances of success may be limited and short-lived.