Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1368

Give Your Organization a Work-Life Vision

More and more companies are acknowledging the importance of work-life balance, at least as far as official policy goes. The Families and Work Institute’s 2014 National Study of Employers finds that, compared to six years ago when it conducted the same survey, several numbers have moved in the right direction:

Employers have continued to increase their provision of options that allow at least some employees to better manage the times and places in which they work. These include occasional flex place (from 50% to 67%); control over breaks (from 84% to 92%); control over overtime hours (from 27% to 45%) and time off during the workday when important needs arise (from 73% to 82%).

So why doesn’t it feel like we’ve made that much progress? Because, unfortunately, policies aren’t worth much in the absence of supporting culture. Research shows that an organization’s work-life culture – all the unwritten yet well understood norms and expectations about how people are supposed to work, and what it means to be a good employee – has enormous power over behavior. Culture is what really defines how much latitude people have in terms of managing their work and non-work demands, whether or not there’s a flextime policy on the books.

For a striking example, think back a year to the sad story of Moritz Erhardt. He was the 21-year-old investment banking intern who died in London, August 15, 2013, after having worked 72 hours straight at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. (To be clear, the coroner testified that Erhardt suffered an epileptic seizure, and while exhaustion from the 72-hour work marathon might have triggered it, she could not conclude whether this was so.) When the news broke, a director at the bank commented: “We are used to working with people who are ambitious and want to over-perform.” Fellow employees were more candid about the expectations they faced at work, where it was not uncommon to stay till 3 or 4 am. “If you go home at 11 pm, it is said you are ‘giving up’,” said one. “You have no hope of a job offer.”

Investment banking industry: this is your culture speaking. There is no question that Bank of America Merrill Lynch had work-life policies in place. There is also no question that having those policies didn’t change the reality of the organization

How, then, can business leaders start cultivating a healthier work-life culture? The levers at hand are communications and, more important, personal modeling – both by executives at the top and in the management ranks. For instance, SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg, husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, believes that creating a company culture that encourages people to lead full lives is key to his edge in hiring key leaders and retaining top talent. He proves this point by leaving his office every day at 5:30 p.m. Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, makes sure employees know they can bring their children to work any time they need to. The director of a French electric utility I’ve worked with uses the top 40 managers in his organization as a key work-life pilot group, making sure that they use the work-life policies the company makes available and meet regularly to discuss how they can better support work-life integration.

But as easy and inspiring as it is to cite such examples, it’s surprisingly hard to shift the culture of an existing organization. It takes a high level of consistency in communications, rewards, and executive behaviors over time. To drive all of these in the same, positive direction, I’d suggest you need a work-life vision.

Having a work-life vision means being able to offer an overarching point of view that is compelling to people and provides guidance to their daily behaviors, decisions, and practices. Here’s a work-life vision that might serve you well: The best managers in our organization are the ones who best manage the energy of their teams. Energy is something we can all recognize as a precious resource, which is only valuable in use, yet must not be over-exploited and should not be wasted. In an organization, energy is the essential “human resource” to be channeled – every bit as important as financial resources to success, and often more so.

Share this work-life vision and it gives managers a consistent way to think about situations that require work-life judgment: what they must balance is not the conflicting desires for output (on the employer’s part) and time away from work (on the employee’s part). It’s the two sides of a coin both parties want: good work accomplished today, by burning energy, and good work accomplished tomorrow, by conserving and replenishing energy.

There is already a rich literature having to do with human energy management (including this classic HBR article) – my point here is not to reinvent that wheel. My argument is that reframing work-life balance in terms of energy management can provide the vision that allows you to change culture.  It casts the work of leaders in a new way. They are the champions and defenders of workforce energy, responsible for ensuring that employees have the physical, cognitive, and emotional resources to draw on, as well as the sense of purpose, to do the organization’s important work.

I like the energy vision especially because it empowers organizations to deal with what I call the third rail of work-life: workload. Policies from HR will never touch this – indeed, earlier this summer, at the Work and Family Researchers Network Conference, the work-life director from a global corporation spoke for many when she admitted that there were no conversations going on between her group and senior leadership about what level of workload is sustainable for employees.

Overwork is especially hard to fight when the rationale offered is “current business demands.” You know the refrain: “In this market, we’ve all got to work harder.” In other words, work-life integration and well-being are luxuries we can only afford in times of slack resources. There’s a good one-word response to the “business requires working like this” argument, and it technically refers to the waste produced by male bovines.  When leaders see work-life as fundamentally about stewardship of human energy, they no longer ask themselves whether business conditions currently favor keeping employees healthy and whole.

9 Habits That Lead to Terrible Decisions

Several years ago we came up with a great idea for a new leadership-development offering we thought would be valuable to everyone. We had research demonstrating that when people embarked on a self-development program, their success increased dramatically when they received follow-up encouragement.  We developed a software application to offer that sort of encouragement. People could enter their development goals, and the software would send them reminders every week or month asking how they were doing, to motivate them to keep on going. We invested a lot of time and money in this product.

But it turned out that people did not like receiving the e-mails and found them more annoying than motivating. Some of our users came up with a name for this type of software. They called it “nagware.” Needless to say, this product never reached the potential we had envisioned.  Thinking about the decisions we had made to create this disappointing result led us to ask the question, “What causes well-meaning people to make poor decisions?”

Some possibilities came immediately to mind – people make poor decisions when under severe time pressure or when they don’t have access to all the important information (unless they’re are explaining the decision to their boss, and then it is often someone else’s fault).

But we wanted a more objective answer. In an effort to understand the root cause of poor decision making, we looked at 360-feedback data from more than 50,000 leaders and compared the behavior of those who were perceived to be making poor decisions with that of the people perceived to be making very good decisions. We did a factor analysis of the behaviors that made the most statistical difference between the best and worst decision makers. Nine factors emerged as the most common paths to poor decision making. Here they are in order from most to least significant.

Laziness. This showed up as a failure to check facts, to take the initiative, to confirm assumptions, or to gather additional input. Basically, such people were perceived to be sloppy in their work and unwilling to put themselves out. They relied on past experience and expected results simply to be an extrapolation of the past.
Not anticipating unexpected events. It is discouraging to consistently consider the possibility of negative events in our lives, and so most people assume the worst will not happen. Unfortunately, bad things happen fairly often. People die, get divorced, and have accidents. Markets crash, house prices go down, and friends are unreliable. There is excellent research demonstrating that if people just take the time to consider what might go wrong, they are actually very good at anticipating problems. But many people just get so excited about a decision they are making that they never take the time to do that simple due-diligence.
Indecisiveness. At the other end of the scale, when faced with a complex decision that will be based on constantly changing data, it’s easy to continue to study the data, ask for one more report, or perform yet one more analysis before a decision gets made. When the reports and the analysis take much longer than expected, poor decision makers delay, and the opportunity is missed. It takes courage to look at the data, consider the consequences responsibly, and then move forward. Oftentimes indecision is worse than making the wrong decision. Those most paralyzed by fear are the ones who believe that one mistake will ruin their careers and so avoid any risk at all.
Remaining locked in the past. Some people make poor decisions because they’re using the same old data or processes they always have. Such people get used to approaches that worked in the past and tend not to look for approaches that will work better. Better the devil they know. But, too often, when a decision is destined to go wrong, it’s because the old process is based on assumptions that are no longer true. Poor decision makers fail to keep those base assumptions in mind when applying the tried and true.
Having no strategic alignment. Bad decisions sometimes stem from a failure to connect the problem to the overall strategy. In the absence of a clear strategy that provides context, many solutions appear to make sense. When tightly linked to a clear strategy, the better solutions quickly begin to rise to the top.
Over-dependence. Some decisions are never made because one person is waiting for another, who in turn is waiting for someone else’s decision or input. Effective decision makers find a way to act independently when necessary.
Isolation. Some of those leaders are waiting for input because they’ve not taken steps to get it in a timely manner or have not established the relationships that would enable them to draw on other people’s expertise when they need to. All our research (and many others’) on effective decision making recognizes that involving others with the relevant knowledge, experience, and expertise improves the quality of the decision. This is not news. So the question is why. Sometimes people lack the necessary networking skills to access the right information. Other times, we’ve found, people do not involve others because they want the credit for a decision. Unfortunately they get to take the blame for the bad decisions, as well .
Lack of technical depth. Organizations today are very complex, and even the best leaders do not have enough technical depth to fully understand multifaceted issues. But when decision makers rely on others’ knowledge and expertise without any perspective of their own, they have a difficult time integrating that information to make effective decisions. And when they lack even basic knowledge and expertise, they have no way to tell if a decision is brilliant or terrible. We continue to find that the best executives have deep expertise. And when they still don’t have the technical depth to understand the implications of the decisions they face, they make it their business to find the talent they need to help them.
Failure to communicate the what, where, when, and how associated with their decisions. Some good decisions become bad decisions because people don’t understand – or even know about — them. Communicating a decision, its rational and implications, is critical to the successful implementation of a decision.

Waiting too long for others’ input. Failing to get the right input at the right time. Failing to understand that input through insufficient skills. Failing to understand when something that worked in the past will not work now. Failing to know when to make a decision without all the right information and when to wait for more advice. It’s no wonder good people make bad decisions. The path to good decision making is narrow, and it’s far from straight. But keeping in mind the pitfalls can make any leader a more effective decision maker.

When You’re Feeling Down About Your Job, You Seek Brighter Light

In an experiment, people who felt more hopeless about the economy and their employment opportunities showed a preference for brighter lighting, suggesting that those with poor job prospects may have an unfortunate predilection for spending more on electricity, says a team led by Ping Dong of the University of Toronto. The researchers calculated that it would cost participants an average of 20.6% more for electricity in order to feel 1 point less hopeful (on a 9-point scale) toward the economy. Hopelessness can darken people’s perception of brightness, increasing their desire for more light.

What Unions No Longer Do

Forty years ago, about quarter of American workers belonged to unions, and those unions were a major economic and political force. Now union membership is down to 11.2% of the U.S. workforce, and it’s increasingly concentrated in the public sector — only 6.7% of private-sector workers were union members in 2013.

This isn’t exactly news, and professors and pundits have for years been dissecting the causes of labor’s decline. What doesn’t get talked about so much, though, are the consequences. Income inequality has, for example, become a hot topic. You might think that the dwindling away of an institution that devoted much of its energy to equalizing incomes would be a big part of that discussion. It hasn’t been.

Jake Rosenfeld, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Washington and a past and, one hopes, future contributor to HBR.org, is out to change that. His book What Unions No Longer Do, published earlier this year by Harvard University Press (only the most distant of relations to Harvard Business Review), is an account of Rosenfeld’s attempt to empirically establish (mainly through a lot of regressions of data from the Current Population Survey, the American National Election Studies, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service) the consequences of Big Labor’s decline.

I had heard good things about the book, and for the last few months it’s been sitting near the top of my to-read pile, taunting me. With Labor Day coming up, I figured I should just go ahead and read it. Now I have. It is in fact a good book — careful, wonky, and for the most part not all that hard to read — and an important one for anyone trying to understand the current state of the U.S. economy and politics. You should buy it. But in case you don’t, here, for Labor Day, are the four big things that, according to Rosenfeld, unions in the U.S. no longer do:

Unions no longer equalize incomes. Income inequality (as measured by what the 90th percentile worker makes vs. the 10th percentile worker) remains much lower among unionized workers than nonunionized workers. But remember, only 11% of U.S. workers are now unionized, and Rosenfeld shows that unions’ ability to affect wages for nonunion workers in the same region or industry sector — which used to be significant — is now negligible. Rosenfeld estimates that about a third of the rise in income inequality since the 1970s is due to unions’ decline — the same share that he attributes to economists’ favorite explanation for rising inequality, rising rewards to skilled workers due to technological change.

Unions no longer counteract racial inequality. As Rosenfeld acknowledges, labor unions in the U.S. don’t have the greatest history on race. For a long time many unions wouldn’t let African-Americans join, and some fought hard to keep employers from hiring them. But during World War II this began to change, and by the 1970s black workers were more likely to be in unions than white workers were. Unions shepherded millions of their African-American members into the middle class, and helped bring black and white wages closer together. Since unions fell into sharp decline in the private sector in the 1970s, the private-sector wage gap between blacks and whites has grown. In the much more unionized public sector, the wage gap has narrowed for black men, although black women have lost some ground to white women.

Unions no longer play a big role in assimilating immigrants. Unions also don’t exactly have a stellar history of relations with recent immigrants to the U.S. But in the first half of the 20th century immigrants still found their way in great numbers into unions and even union leadership roles. For the recent great wave of Hispanic immigrants, that hasn’t been the case. Yes, there have been a few noteworthy unionization campaigns among immigrants, like the United Farm Workers in California’s fields and the Service Employees International Union’s efforts among office janitors and hotel workers. But on the whole, Hispanics are less likely to be union members than other workers are.

Unions no longer give lower-income Americans a political voice. The higher your socioeconomic status, the more likely you are to vote and to be listened to by politicians. As political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page documented in a much-discussed recent study, the policy preferences of organized interest groups and Americans in the 90th income percentile seem to carry a lot more weight in modern political decision-making than those of the 50th percentile. Unions used to be perhaps the most important organized interest group, and Rosenfeld shows that, even now, union members with low education levels are much more likely to vote than non-members with low education levels. But public-sector union members are more educated and more affluent than the population as whole, while private-sector union members are a dwindling and in many ways privileged breed. Not only are unions a much weaker political force than they used to be, they also no longer really represent those at the bottom of the economic ladder.

The decline of unions in the U.S. has often been painted as inevitable, or at least necessary for American businesses to remain internationally competitive. There are definitely industries where this account seems accurate. Globally, though, the link between unionization and competitiveness is actually pretty tenuous. The most heavily unionized countries in the developed world — Denmark, Finland, and Sweden, where more than 65% of the population belongs to unions — also perennially score high on global competiveness rankings. The U.S. does, too. But France, where only 7.9% of workers now belong to unions (yes, France is less unionized than the U.S.), is a perennial competitiveness laggard.

And even if the decline of unions was inevitable or desirable, that still leaves those tasks unions once accomplished — which on the whole seem like things that are good for society, and good for business — unattended to. Who’s going to do them now?

Spy Novel or Start-Up?

War of the Cars This is Uber's Playbook for Sabotaging LyftThe Verge

Fans of burner phones, secret credit cards, code names, and general espionage, look no further than your friendly neighborhood car-sharing start-up. According to The Verge, Uber (the company where you sit in the back seat) is waging an outlandish war on Lyft (the company where you sit in the front seat and parade about town with a giant pink mustache in full view). The gist is this: Contractors, known as "brand ambassadors" (these Uber advocates aren't actually company employees, but that’s a whole other matter), allegedly use their burners to summon Lyft rides. Relying on a playbook (a version of which The Verge published), they then, according to The Verge, try to lure drivers to Uber. A contractor can supposedly earn $750 for turning a driver. The program, in all of its glory, is known as SLOG.



Why would a company use such drastic tactics? Good question. In a blog post, Uber says, "We never use marketing tactics that prevent a driver from making their living — and that includes never intentionally canceling rides." The Verge's Casey Newton, who broke the story, suggests it comes down to which company consumers think of when they need a ride: Uber or Lyft. And perhaps it's just an escalation of existing competition: both Uber and Lyft offer bonuses to drivers who switch companies. But burner phones? How The Wire of you, Uber.

The Past Doesn't Seem So Far Away Women at Work Ramparts

Usually we only recommend shiny new stories here. But this Studs Terkel interview collection, originally published in 1974 and recently reprinted by the web site Longform (disclosure: I'm an editor there), is really worth looking back on because the issues women discuss are so incredibly relevant today. Terkel interviews four women — a domestic worker, a 24-year-old receptionist, a factory worker, and a poverty worker — who eloquently describe how they feel about their jobs. They worry about what we now call "work-life balance" — caring for their kids while working long hours, often at the whims of others — the fact that college didn't prepare them for work, the constant interruptions, the endless meetings, the division between management and labor, and, most of all, the desire to do meaningful work. "I don't know what I'd like to do, and that's what hurts the most," says Sharon Atkins, the receptionist, who cries every morning before going to her job. Lilith Reynolds, the poverty worker, adds: "People are intimidated and the system works to emphasize that. They get what they want out of people by threatening them economically. It makes people apple polishers and ass kissers."



"I used to hear people say, 'Work needs to be redefined.' I thought they were crazy. Now I know they're not."

All Sorts of Unfortunate Things What Happened to MotorolaChicago Magazine

Motorola, the telecom giant that introduced the world to Six Sigma, has had a rough decade. Its smart phones make up a mere 2% of the global market. It spun off its mobile phone division, largely at the hands of activist investor Carl Icahn. That division was sold to Google, which later sold it to Lenovo. Journalist Ted C. Fishman traces exactly how all of this happened, and chronicles some of the company's missteps as it went from industry leader to a company just trying to catch up.



Among them: a toxic culture that emerged as the public-safety division plugged along while the emergent handset group reveled in bonuses (my favorite anecdote here involves male models singing "We're in the Money" while painted green and wearing dollar signs); no real urgency in moving from analog to digital; creating dozens of different phones that needed to be adapted to each carrier; partnering with Apple for the Rokr phone (arguably, the experience taught Apple how to make phones, but did little for Motorola); and being late to the smart-phone game even though Motorola held patents for technologies specifically for smartphone functionality.

No Fighting, KidsDon’t Want Me to Recline My Airline Seat? You Can Pay MeThe Upshot

It was the "water-in-the-face" moment heard 'round the internet: Two United Airlines passengers were kicked off a plane over the weekend after one of them installed the Knee Defender, a device that prevents the person in front of you from reclining the seat. After a flight attendant asked him to remove it, an argument ensued that ended with the passenger affected by said Defender dousing the other with (what I hope was) a free beverage. Josh Barro, a writer for The Upshot and frequent flyer, argues that the Coase Theorem, an economic theory, could help figure out who's right here. Essentially, it states "that it doesn’t matter very much who is initially given a property right; so long as you clearly define it and transaction costs are low, people will trade the right so that it ends up in the hands of whoever values it most." In this case, the person who values the space most (Knee Defender guy) would pay the person who has the property right (water-throwing lady) to place her seat in an upright position.

Think BiggerThe Lovers, the Haters, and How They Helped Drive Innovation at Kraft Knowledge@Wharton

Sometimes a breakthrough innovation is staring you right in the face, disguised as an incremental product extension. Kraft Foods had been selling Crystal Light, a line of artificially sweetened water flavorings, in powder form for decades when it developed a liquid version. No big deal, right? At first, the company planned to market the stuff as just a new form of an existing offering. But the company was making a concerted effort to think big — really big — about innovations, so it tried launching the product as an entirely new category. It worked. “You walk into the store today, and there is a whole section of these liquid water enhancers,” says Kraft’s VP for breakthrough innovation, Barry Calpino. The business that was created by the product Mio is now an $800 million segment.



Kraft has continued to invest in the product and the category year after year, because the company’s philosophy is that once you’ve got hold of a good idea, you have to stick with it and put resources into it. “The number-one consistent cause of failure is not investing in a good idea beyond just the launch period,” Calpino says. —Andy O’Connell

BONUS BITSCommon (and Often Terrible) Traps

The Procrastination Doom Loop — and How to Break It (The Atlantic)
The Abrasiveness Trap: High-Achieving Men and Women are Described Differently in Reviews (Fortune)
Break the 'Competency Curse' (The Wall Street Journal)

America’s New Labor Movement

Flip through issues of Harvard Business Review from the 1950s or 1960s, and you’ll see a steady drumbeat of articles on labor relations. But search Google today, and our top hit on unions is from 20 years ago — John Hoerr’s still-interesting “What Should Unions Do?“

America’s public sector has also found new issues to focus on – as Roger Martin has persuasively argued, Democrats now care about the interests of shareholders and investors, and Republicans about top-tier talent.

So I called up Lowell Turner, professor of International and Comparative Labor and Director of the Worker Institute at Cornell, to ask him how labor might adapt to regain its influence. What I learned was that the labor movement in the United States is already adapting — though those changes still fly below the national radar. Through strategic alliances and city- and state-level initiatives, America’s labor movement is already being reborn.

What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

First, a clarifying question. In America, we often treat “unions” and “the labor movement” as synonymous. Are they?

The labor movement is broader. Once upon a time, the labor movement was basically just unions, but today in addition to traditional unions – like the member unions of the AFL-CIO – there’s what people call the alt labor movement, which is things like the National Guestworker Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Domestic Workers United, the fast food worker strikes, the Wal-mart workers groups, and hundreds of worker-centers around the country. Today, these parts of the labor movement are increasingly working together.

So is it fair to say, to paraphrase Mark Twain, that the death of the labor movement has been greatly exaggerated?  

Yeah, if you’re using a word like “death.” But it has been a long decline for unions over the last thirty years. Unions have declined seriously in both membership and influence.

The primary reasons for the decline are weak labor laws and employer opposition. But I’m not trying to absolve unions from responsibility. Unions did not adapt as well as they could. They were afraid to innovate, and they got away from being a real labor movement to being business unions administering contracts. They held on to their ways too long. But increasingly unions today understand that and are innovating.

That said, there are still 15 million union members out there, and traditional unions are still influential in certain locations. So the labor movement might be weaker in a southern, right-to-work state, but it’s still very much alive in the state of New York, in California, and in some other big states that really matter to the economy.

A lot of the conversation about the decline of unions portrays it as inevitable: the result of globalization, digitization, and so on. If that were true, you’d think they would be on the decline throughout the world. Are they?

It is true that unions are under pressure everywhere. It is also true that employers are going global faster than unions can – although unions are increasingly global, too. But even in that context, Sweden still has 80 percent union density. Almost everyone joins one — it’s essentially automatic. And Sweden’s unions are powerful forces both in the economy and in society.

There are also larger countries where unions are still strong. Germany is an example. Their unions have declined in membership, but they are still a major influence. And Germany is even more integrated into the global economy than the U.S. is – they have higher exports per capita. So Germany also kills the argument that unions and high wages wreck competitiveness.

What is it about German unions that make them more powerful than American unions?

There are a number of factors. There are strong institutional supports in government that protect unions; unions use comprehensive collective bargaining – in other words, they negotiate for whole sectors, not at the firm level; and most importantly there is a system of codetermination anchored in law, which means that workers are represented on company boards and through works-councils. It’s an entrenched, legally supported partnership model.

Now, they do slug it out sometimes. There are occasionally strikes. It’s not a love-in. But when there is adversarial bargaining, they work it out fairly quickly.

It seems like part of the reason we don’t have that sort of system in America, though, is because relatively speaking, we are a center-right country. Is some sort of social change needed before the labor movement can really regain traction?

Think of it this way: who is going to push for that social change? We aren’t going to get fundamental social change without a revitalization of an innovative labor movement. Look at the minimum wage campaigns happening now at the state and city level. That’s not happening out of the blue. That’s being driven by an alliance of traditional unions and the alt labor movement and their community allies. And that’s what generates social change.

And realizing they need to be part of a broader push for social change, labor is looking for alliances with other groups. For example, on September 21 there will be a climate march in New York City to demand better policies, and 60 state and local unions have signed on to that. This is new. It’s become a main priority to build alliances with worker centers, immigrant rights groups, environmental groups, and so on. They’re taking a labor movement and turning it into a broader social movement.

Now it’s just beginning, and I can’t predict the future. But there are possibilities here.

It seems like part of the problem for labor is getting more working people to see themselves as potentially involved. You mentioned that Sweden’s workforce is 80% union – so obviously, it’s easy for workers there to see themselves as potential union members. Does America’s labor movement need to broaden its base of potential customers, essentially — convince people like me to join, say, a magazine editors’ union? Is it partly about broadening the focus to include higher skill, or higher wage workers?

Well, a lot of it is focused on lower wage, lower skill jobs because that’s so much of America’s work force. I mean, Wal-mart is our biggest employer. So a lot of the focus has to be pushing up the low end. But the other part of the focus has to be expanding the middle.

Would that help, do you think, with the resentment we so often see when there’s, say, a teachers’ strike, and the reaction is, “Why are they complaining? Their benefits are better than mine! They have job security! They’re better paid and they get more vacation!”

So many workers get less than they should – it’s unfortunately easy to play them off each other. But that’s where the labor movement has a responsibility to bring people together and say, “It’s not that teachers are getting too much – it’s that you’re not getting enough. So let’s get you more.”

Are there any historical parallels that might indicate what would really jumpstart a stronger labor movement? I think a lot of people were surprised that the 2008 financial crisis really didn’t seem to have much of an impact, the way the Great Depression did.

No one could have predicted what would happen in the 1930s – the rise of mass production and the spread of unionism to the point where we we had 35% of workers belonging to unions by the 1950s.

The circumstances are ripe for change right now. But [organizing] is more difficult than it was then. It’s a more fragmented labor market. You don’t have the big factories where organizers could come in and unionize the whole shop in one go. We’re not going to have another New Deal, and American employers have many tactics today to keep their workforces nonunion.

Then, after the crash of 2008, instead of galvanizing people, what it really did was scare people. So many people were thrown out of work or lost their houses, and even the people who didn’t felt insecure. A Wal-mart employee mentions the word “union” and he’s at risk of getting fired. So really the challenge is about mobilizing enough broad collective interest that it breaks down that fear, so that people can stand up and be counted.

Whatever Happened to Corporate Stewardship?

In November 1956, Time magazine explored a phenomenon that went by various names: “capitalism with a conscience,” “enlightened conservatism,” “people’s capitalism,” and, most popularly, “The New Conservatism.”

No matter which label one preferred, the basic concept was clear: Business leaders were demonstrating an ever increasing willingness, in the words of the story, to “shoulder a host of new responsibilities” and “judge their actions, not only from the standpoint of profit and loss” in their financial results “but of profit and loss to the community.”

I decided to dig out this piece and reread it after news broke this week that Burger King is buying the Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain Tim Hortons for about $11 billion. Once the acquisition is complete, Burger King plans to move its headquarters north of the border, where the statutory tax rate is lower than in the United States, in a maneuver known as an inversion.

The company has denied that it would get much, if any, tax relief from the deal and insists that it is acquiring Tim Hortons for a legitimate strategic reason—namely, to accelerate expansion in a super-competitive industry.

In this case, the Home of the Whopper may well be telling the truth. Yet whatever Burger King’s actual motivation, it’s not surprising that some people have reacted strongly, condemning the company as a “traitor” and urging a boycott of its restaurants. What they’re really responding to, deep down, is a growing sense that most American corporations care (to use Time’s phrasing from 1956) only about the profit and loss on their income statement, but not about profit and loss to the community.

Back when Time published that essay, big companies prided themselves on taking care of a full range of constituents: their shareholders, yes, but also their customers, their suppliers and their workers. Indeed, most large employers, as well as many smaller ones, began in the 1950s to forge a social contract with their employees that would solidify over the next decade or two: rising wages, guaranteed pensions, good healthcare benefits and stable jobs.

Like their 21st century successors, top executives of the ’50s weren’t typically fans of Washington playing too large a role in the economy. Implicit in the corporate social contract, in fact, was the view that most working people would find the security they were looking for as participants in the private sector, not as wards of the public sector. Companies practicing what was once called “welfare capitalism”—not the welfare state—would meet the bulk of their needs.

Nevertheless, Time asserted, “the majority” of businessmen in the Eisenhower era had come to realize that government “welfare programs help store up purchasing power in the hands of the consumer.”

“Unemployment compensation is desirable,” the magazine quoted Gaylord A. Freeman Jr., vice president of the First National Bank of Chicago, as saying. “Social legislation can add to the totality of freedom, increase the dignity of the individual.”

Few if any businesses—then or now—would willingly shell out more to Uncle Sam. General Electric, for instance, crusaded 60 years ago against what its president, Ralph Cordiner, termed “excessively high taxes.” But the company, which famously touted trying to serve the “balanced best interests” of all its stakeholders, also made a point of paying what it owed “with no bargains asked,” as GE vice president Lemuel Boulware put it. This, he said, was part of being “a good corporate citizen.”

Make no mistake: GE, where Ronald Reagan shaped much of his Washington-is-the-problem ideology as a corporate pitchman for eight years beginning in 1954, wanted smaller government. Still, it wouldn’t have dreamed of not paying its share.

Today, by contrast, GE does all it can to escape taxation, in large part through “innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore,” as the New York Times characterized it. And it is hardly alone. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has exposed how Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Caterpillar, among others, have all used various tax-avoidance strategies.

Of course, the social contract between employer and employee began to fray in the 1970s, and it has since been totally ripped apart. Myriad culprits are to blame, including rapidly advancing technology, heightened global competition, the weakening of unions and, perhaps more than anything, a horribly misplaced mindset that has elevated stockowners above all other groups.

“For some time now,” says David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, “the ‘shareholder uber alles’ mantra has been crowding out the old-fashioned stakeholder notion.”

What sometimes gets lost in the discussion, though, is that this shift hits employees and communities not only directly but indirectly. The very same forces that have shredded the corporate social contract—once a robust private safety net—have also driven companies to deploy every possible tax shelter, thereby cutting their contributions to the public safety net. In all, the Tax Policy Center cites estimates that “nearly $1 trillion is held by U.S. corporations abroad, accumulated over time from booking income in low-tax countries.”

It is easy to overly romanticize 1950s corporate America. People of color faced terrible workplace discrimination at that time, as did women. Late in the decade, many big companies hardened their stance against organized labor, hastening its steep decline. Business culture could be rigid and stifling—the world of The Organization Man. Fear of communism and socialism, as much as altruism, was often at the root of corporate generosity.

But for all the faults of that period, an ethos has been lost. The University of Michigan’s Mark Mizruchi, in his book The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite, describes it as “concern for the well-being of the broader society.” Notably, Mizruchi points to the 1956 Time article as a good representative of the ideas that then “dominated in the corporate discourse.”

“The majority of Americans support private enterprise, not as a God-given right but as the best practical means of conducting business in a free society,” pulp and paper executive J. D. Zellerbach told the magazine. “They regard business management as a stewardship, and they expect it to operate the economy as a public trust for the benefit of all the people.”

I think Zellerbach’s observation about what the American people expect of business remains essentially true in 2014. What has changed is the way that so many companies have turned so far away from this philosophy. That change makes Time’s portrayal seem like it’s not just from another age but from another planet.

Let Your Employees Bring Their Interests to Work

Research repeatedly suggests that levels of employee engagement in the workplace are low and worsening. But what really perplexes executives when we talk to them is that their employees are often fully engaged in a host of other activities.

Among the growing perplexed population is Mark Barnes (not his real name), vice president of a marketing company. When we spoke with Mark he was becoming increasingly frustrated at the behavior of Jennifer Moline (also not her real name), his most talented employee. “She is intelligent, great at her job, and highly creative,” said Mark. But he was troubled by the feeling that Jennifer was not 100% engaged and, perhaps more so, by the fact that he didn’t understand why and didn’t know what he could do.

Like any manager keen to maximize the potential of a great employee, Mark went out of his way to learn more about Jennifer. He talked to her and her colleagues. He saw that she and her fellow workers merged their private and professional lives. Jennifer, he learned, was passionate about the role of women in the workplace and was active in one of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean-in circles. If he had taken his research out of the office, Mark would have found that Jennifer felt very strongly about her local identity and bought her vegetables from a local organic cooperative; at the same time, she was concerned about global issues and invested her savings in Indiegogo, a global crowdfunding platform. Mark might also have noticed that Jennifer continuously received messages from numerous global and local LinkedIn groups, was a member of a local choir, and had recently started a book club with like-minded friends.

Mark and Jennifer are not alone. Executives and their employees have raised these issues with us in classes and on consulting assignments throughout the world. We live in tribal times. What matters for people like Jennifer is peer recognition of one’s contribution to a common goal in a small community.

The choice for people like Mark is simple: think about tribes in your organization to engage your employees and maximize their potential – or risk losing your best talent as they continue to engage elsewhere.

How we identify with others

Tribes are defined as a group of people who feel emotionally connected, share a mutual interest, and organize different aspects of their personal and professional lives jointly, with the goal of fulfilling a common objective that is good for the community. Tribes used to be formed on sameness, whereas today’s tribes are more often based on common interest or a shared purpose. New tribes do not provide us a permanent shelter to guarantee our survival, only a temporary space in which to act with other individuals who share a common goal. Thanks to technology, people can now belong simultaneously to multiple tribes. The high interconnectivity makes it difficult to identify who belongs to what group, but it makes collaboration between tribes a more likely strategy than competition.

Adherence to tribes is highly individualized. Some strongly associate with their identities of origin, those given at birth – for example, being a woman or a Latino. Others feel weak ties to their identities of origin, but have very strong identities that can be labeled aspirational – being ecological activists, for example. Some, like Jennifer, feel equally strong ties to their identities of origin and those of aspiration – she feels very happy working in a women’s group as well as contributing to a new global community of LinkedIn. And while Jennifer would be pleased with any women’s initiative her company organizes, some of her female colleagues may not be as engaged, or might even reject them.

Faced with such challenges, what can companies do to tap into employees’ tribal senses of identity? And how can they use that to improve engagement? In the work on diversity and innovation we have conducted over recent years, we came to understand some of the keys of tribal thinking, and how some companies are successfully leveraging it.

Tribal thinking inside an organization

Thinking tribal means embracing community without renouncing universality. For executives like Mark Barnes and their organizations, successful engagement of employees in this new tribal reality will be defined by their capacity to understand the tribes emerging inside and outside their organizations. It will mean offering a flexible structure and blurring the line between the two – in other words, allowing employees to bring the external tribes, which they’re engaged in, into the company. Giving employees this freedom to explore and apply their multiple identities and interests at work can result in innovative ideas and profitable new initiatives or business opportunities. Our research suggests there are critical elements of the new tribal paradigm that organizations need to understand: primarily, allowing employee tribes to come together and accommodating a multiplicity of them within your company.

Allowing tribes to form and act on a shared purpose

An interesting example of a tribe coming together and demonstrating high engagement is the case of Dana, the women’s division of the Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank in the United Arab Emirates. Its female employees shared a purpose – wanting to help others. They became aware of a specific need among their clients, and it brought them together to build a product that could be used for their community – Banun. These women employees realized the need of their divorced clients to open accounts in the name of their children without the signature of their husbands as required by the law. Once the need was detected, the managers consulted with the Shari‘a division that also asked for advice to Shari‘a Board, and after some discussions, they agreed to create the Banun account.

The core elements in the cases of Dana are straightforward – being Muslim and women. However, core elements around a tribe are not always equally explicit. Sometimes the common thread is a passion. In these cases of “identities of aspiration,” companies can create the context of possibility, within which tribes can emerge, and then monitor the emergent tribes and react quickly to their needs.

Accommodating a multiplicity of tribes and their ideas

If organizations want to use the tribal force, new forms of management styles are required as the example of Everis illustrates. Everis, a multinational consultant company that offers consulting, IT, and professional services, shows how companies can use employee engagement as a constant fuel for company innovation. In the tribal era, employees’ ideas represent their passions, needs, desires, and even their identities. The company’s “Everis Initiatives,” lets employees come together to develop business ideas without having to leave the organization.

First, an initiative is presented to a team, consisting of 8 partners and 8 managers, for evaluation. If the idea is approved, the group behind it will be granted the necessary time to develop their business plan. The company will  offer coaching sessions to help them in the development process and facilitate the capital needed to launch the project and sustain its financial needs for a period of five years.

In 2010, Everis Initiatives received the seventh annual Expansion and Employment Award for Innovation in Human Resources. Eight of its ideas have become stand-alone companies – among them Exerelia, a company specialized in the design, implementation, and management of integral and technological solutions in the field of energy efficiency.

Dana and Everis, represent very different cases of tribal understanding that can provide some useful insights for Mark Barnes in the initial example. First of all, we recommend Mark should see in Jennifer the potential of her individuality but also of her multiple identities. Mark should talk with her to learn about her multiple identities. Then he can explore how her multiple groups can be brought inside the company, or how the company can collaborate with some of her outside affiliations. These could take many forms. He could ask her womens groups how the company’s services can be more adapted to women’s needs. Perhaps he could have her local ecological groups collaborate in some aspects of the company’s services. Through an open continuous dialogue, Jennifer would be more inclined to bring her rich outside world into her work – and this would keep her engaged in the office.

An employee who feels engaged and integrated in a company is not only a brain; she or he represents multiple groups that can help design new products and services, distribute them, and consume them at the end of the day. Moreover, some of the employees’ tribes can collaborate in different aspects of the business and offer ways for the company to collaborate in other businesses. In the emerging collaborative economy, thinking tribal is mandatory.

To Feel Greater Power, Add Some Decibels to the Bass

Research participants who listened to a generic piece of music with the bass turned up 15 decibels reported greater feelings of power than those who heard the same music but with the bass turned down 15 decibels (an average of 6.06 versus 5.15 on a 7-point dominant-feelings scale), says a team led by Dennis Y. Hsu of Northwestern University. Moreover, the feelings lasted after the music had stopped. Listening to heavy bass tones and other kinds of powerful music may be an effective and convenient way for people to activate their personal sense of power, the researchers say.

5 Tips for Off-the-Cuff Speaking

If it’s true that many people fear public speaking more than death, it’s equally true that businesspeople are condemned to a thousand small deaths in client pitches, in boardrooms, and on stage. And that death can turn slow and torturous when you are asked to speak unexpectedly with little or no time to prepare. One of the key demands of business is the ability to speak extemporaneously. Whether giving an unexpected “elevator pitch” to a potential investor or being asked at the last minute to offer remarks to a sales team over dinner, the demands for a business person to speak with limited preparation are diverse, endless, and — to many — terrifying.

I became more comfortable with these situations through one of my primary activities in college, competitive public speaking called “forensics” (from the Latin “forensis,” which means “in an open court, public”). In forensics, one of my favorite categories was “limited preparation” in which we were given between 1 and 30 minutes to prepare a 5–7 minute speech. The lessons learned in those limited preparation events have paid huge dividends to my work in business. They carried me through my first consulting case interviews right out of college. They’ve helped me address complex questions from bosses and board members. And they’ve helped me when I’ve been put on the spot to address college classes and new analyst training sessions.

No matter their position, they can also be useful to you. Here are a few of the tips I picked up along the way:

Define a structure: The pressure of extemporaneous remarks comes from their ambiguity. What do I say? What do I not say? The worst and most stressful business speeches are those that ramble without purpose. In forensics we’d tackle this issue by quickly drafting a structure on a notecard to support our main point — often an introduction, two or three supporting points, and a conclusion. With these on paper, it was easy to fill in the details with stories, examples, and statistics. Now, when I’m asked to offer unexpected remarks over dinner or at a board meeting, I grab a napkin, notebook, or the back of a PowerPoint deck and jot down my main argument and some key supporting points. Then I fill out the examples and data I need to make those points — usually in 20 words or less. Any ambiguity or tendency to ramble evaporates.


Put the punchline first: When I worked in consulting, one of the cardinal rules of communication was “punchline first.” Any presentation should have a clear thesis stated up front so that listeners can easily follow and interpret the comments that follow. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen business presenters ramble through a speech with the audience wondering to the very end about the point of the comments. Giving a good business speech is not like telling a good joke. Don’t save the punchline for the end.


Remember your audience: All it takes is a few lines to make an audience feel acknowledged and a speech feel fresh. Tie the city in which you are speaking into your introduction. Draw parallels between the organization you’re addressing and one of the stories you tell. Mention someone by name, connecting them to the comments you’re offering. These are small gestures, but they make your remarks more tailored and relevant.


Memorize what to say, not how to say it: How many times have you practiced exactly how to say something in your head then frozen up or completely forgotten in the moment? In forensics speeches, we’d often have 5–10 citations to remember, 3–4 examples with names and places, and 3–4 supporting statistics. That’s a lot to research and remember in 30 minutes or less. The trick was this: We’d focus on memorizing key stories and statistics, rather than practicing our delivery. If you spend your time on how to say something perfectly, you’ll stumble through those phrasings, and you’ll forget all the details that can make them come alive. Or worse, you’ll slavishly read from a PowerPoint or vertical document rather than hitting the high points fluidly with your audience. If you know your topic, the words will come.


Keep it short: Blaise Pascal once famously commented, “I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter.” While it seems like the challenge of speaking with limited preparation would be finding enough to say, the opposite is often true. When at a loss for words, many of us underestimate the time we need — cramming in so many stories and points that we run well over our time and dilute our message. No one will appreciate your economy of words more than your listeners, so when in doubt, say less.

There’s no substitute for practice in offering impromptu remarks, and there are many things to consider when preparing for a great talk. But mastering a few basics, like those above, can make these public comments less stressful to prepare and easier for audiences to hear.