Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1386

To Fix Health Care, Leaders Need to Let Go of the Status Quo

In health care, the Hippocratic Oath — “first, do no harm” — can hold as much sway in the board room as it does in the exam room. Among health care leadership, it can have the unintended effect of promoting inaction over change and innovation. As a result, U.S. health care has become akin to a smothered child—stifled and arrested. If we actually gave it some room to breathe, if we metaphorically opened the doors to let it run around outside, take chances, and fall down occasionally, it could grow into something different, surprising and more satisfying than anything we could have imagined. It’s time, in my view, to let our little precious grow up.

So what can health care leaders do to help U.S. health care flourish in the 21st century? As a first step, I believe that administrators of the large tertiary hospitals that currently sit atop the U.S. health care food chain need to loosen their grip on the industry by focusing on what they do best. They should jettison the commodity business that other players can do just as well or better, all the tests and procedures (from throat swabs to colonoscopies) that should be done in more convenient and less expensive care settings, whether that be neighborhood clinics, at a Walgreens or Target, or even through telemedicine. There’s no need for highly-specialized, hospital-based care teams, for example, to waste their time on what is often considered basic community treatment—for which hospitals charge twice or three times as much.

Giving up any form of revenue or market share at a large health system these days would be a courageous decision, but these health systems can make up the revenue (and more) by focusing on performing highly complex, specialized procedures—which often have the biggest of all profit margins—and building a national market for those procedures. Some are already successfully applying this strategy. The Cleveland Clinic, for example, struck a deal with Loews to have their employees across the nation fly in if they require cardiac surgery. By expanding the market they serve, Cleveland Clinic is doing the services they can do best for a much broader population of patients. They’re growing their addressable market, but narrowing the scope of what they deliver. This is a trend in health care that can and should take a hold – even if it might mean creative solutions such as paying for patients and their families to travel to your hospital (by private jet, in some cases). As hospitals do more of these expensive and complicated procedures, they’ll figure out how to streamline the process and make it even more profitable.

Health care leaders can also help the industry flourish by realizing the benefits of giving more power, where appropriate, to non-physicians. Many years ago, during a brief stint as an army medic, I learned firsthand how effective the army is at teaching sophisticated procedures to enrollees, no matter their educational background. Within weeks, I could see that some were operating multi-million-dollar Stinger missile systems – some of the most sophisticated combat equipment ever devised. They could do it because the instructions were broken down into steps that just about anyone could learn. Evidence suggests the same principal can and should be applied in health care.

More generally, health care leaders should also open their doors more to outsiders—especially those people the famous Apple commercial dubbed the “crazy ones.” Entrepreneurs’ solutions are often basic and unflashy and some of them are born in makeshift offices in dingy basements. But at their best they feed off inefficiencies and make the whole system healthier as a result. Consider Beyond Lucid, a startup that provides communications for emergency response teams. Currently, ambulance crews have no means of providing advance information about emergency patients to hospitals—the primary tools today are a Sharpie pen on three-inch tape and a walkie-talkie. With a status quo like that, a basic and secure communications link can bring dramatic improvement. For the large, established med-tech companies with whom most health care leaders have relationships, that’s probably too small a market to target. But for an entrepreneurial company such as Beyond Lucid, it’s delicious, low-hanging fruit. It’s time to start taking their call.

Finally, health care leaders need to encourage a market for data so that information can flow and be easily exchanged—the lifeblood of any renaissance. And here we need the government to help out. The government has done good work protecting people’s rights to data, promoting electronic health records, and defending privacy. But it has inadvertently prevented the emergence of a functioning market for data in which parties are free to reimburse each other for information — think of landing in Paris or Singapore and accessing a U.S. bank account for a nominal fee through an ATM. In health care, the government currently forbids such payments under misaligned anti-kickback laws — something my company, athenahealth, has lobbied hard to have repealed. A data market would create incentives for caregivers at every level to invest in data management and provide prompt data-related services to patients and to other caregivers.

Access to data and information will improve health care by facilitating deductive problem solving—the mother of innovation. New ideas will emerge and will be irresistible to an often recalcitrant industry because they will be based on observable patterns. Data will help medical practices and hospitals run their businesses efficiently by showing them (often for the first time) what they’re doing – where they’re winning and where they’re losing, whether they’re delegating effectively or not, when orders are going out of network and why. This process sounds simple, but it will bring astounding efficiency gains. Data will also help with diagnoses and treatment, and with the management of patient populations, whether it’s diabetics, men of a certain age group, or children with rare diseases. Data will back up doctors’ informed gut intuitions, which are invaluable, with population-level statistics. This will lead to incredible qualitative gains. Eventually, data-sharing will allow the entire health care system to become a living laboratory for tracking and improving outcomes and interventions. Health care will become a more efficient learning system—capable of continuous and real-time improvement.

We are standing on the edge of a great opportunity. The current wave of health care reform, whether effective or not, has set things in motion for change. If health care leaders can let go of the status quo the result will be a pluralistic, diverse and flourishing health care ecosystem—an American success story. Doing this requires a gamble, however: the belief that American ingenuity will prevail even in times of upheaval. How can you not like those odds?

 

When Fighting with Your Boss, Protect Yourself First

Have you ever felt like your boss is out to get you? Maybe you’re paranoid. But then again, maybe not. There are a lot of bad bosses out there, leaders who aren’t stupid but lack emotional intelligence. Their self-awareness is strikingly low, they’re clueless when it comes to reading people, they can’t control their emotions, and their values seem to be on a permanent leave of absence.

These dissonant leaders are dangerous. They derail careers and blow up teams. They destroy people — sometimes overtly, sometimes slowly and insidiously. Over time we can find ourselves in perpetual, all-consuming combat with these bosses. We think about it all the time. We relive every last painful word hurled our way. We nurse our wounds. We plot revenge. We talk about our boss and the injustice of it all with anyone who will listen, including coworkers and loved ones.

It’s tiresome, really, but we can’t help ourselves. It feels like a fight to the death. That’s because fighting with a powerful person — like a boss — sparks a deep, primal response: fear. After all, these people hold our lives in their hands — the keys to our futures, not to mention our daily bread.

Clearly, battling to the death with one’s boss does not lead to health, happiness, or success. But what can you do?

First, protect yourself. Conflict with one’s boss usually backfires. That’s because our many cultures place huge value in the official hierarchy: the higher you are, the more “right” you are assumed to be — especially by people even higher up. It is a self-perpetuating system that respects and rewards people by virtue of their level in the organization, not their behavior. This means that you can lose a battle with your boss — in his eyes and others’— even before you start. So, if you must fight, be sure you have a strategy to protect yourself from the fallout. For example, you want to be sure you’ve prepared key people to support you if things go wrong. You also probably want an “exit strategy” to get out of the conflict. You can then decide to act on this long before real damage has been done.

Second, focus on yourself. Make sure that you’re not picking a fight with your boss just to prove something, or cover up your own insecurity. You’ve got to be squeaky clean: fight only for goals that help everyone, not just you. Don’t compromise your ethics. And don’t fight dirty —exaggerating or distorting facts, for example, is a tactic we tend to use when we engage in unequal fights. Sabotaging and backstabbing are pretty common too. Stooping that low isn’t good for the soul.

Third, know that your boss’s issues — not yours — are driving this dysfunctional conflict. These bosses are unstable, insecure, power-hungry demagogues. They are often narcissists. They need help — and, frankly, compassion. Unless you truly understand that these individuals are broken, you can end up joining the fray, blaming yourself, or playing the victim. Rather, you want to focus on building healthy relationships where you can (perhaps with your colleagues or your boss’s boss), doing your job well, and finding ways to be creative. Creativity is a life force that combats the misery of a long-standing fight.

Fourth, evaluate your situation realistically. Fighting at work is nasty. Fighting with one’s boss is downright painful. It can kill your spirit and ruin your health. If you are perpetually fighting with your boss, you’ve got to ask yourself if it’s worth it to stay in your job. Sure, we all have a million reasons for staying in a job (this stance is usually fear-based too). If the relationship with your boss can’t be fixed, why not think of all the good reasons to find another job — with a better boss, in a better culture where such fights aren’t tolerated?

Finally, ask yourself: “Am I part of the problem?” Are you perpetuating a fight culture, using power as the means to quietly intimidate or get what you need at the expense of others? Many of our organizational cultures drive us to behave this way. Dysfunctional power dynamics, coupled with an overemphasis on competition, push us to fight rather than collaborate. And while you may not be able to change the entire organizational culture, you can change it on your team. Here’s how:

Start with self-awareness. Self-awareness is the foundation for emotional intelligence, which you need to manage conflict with your boss and anyone else, too. Self awareness means that you understand your issues, so they don’t blindside you—or others.
Manage your emotions. Conflict triggers powerful, mostly negative emotions. You have a choice about whether you let these emotions take over or whether you channel them toward health and wholeness.
Read people carefully. Learn to really see people for who they are, not where they sit in the hierarchy. Figure out what makes people tick and what they need, and then do something to help.
Come from a place of compassion. Love, even. Positive emotions, such as compassion and love, are just as contagious as their toxic cousins: anger and fear. And when we choose to share positive regard, enthusiasm, care, and concern, not to mention compassion and love, people will follow you anywhere.

Marketing’s New Digital Role Is Shortchanging IT

Every revolution has its vanguard. Throughout technology’s history, that vanguard has been the part of an organization willing to invest for one or both of two reasons: it is having significant trouble with the status quo or it has a compelling vision that things could be done in a new, better way.

When computerization first became widespread decades ago, in the vanguard were accountants, who desperately needed to automate number crunching and reporting. The world was globalizing, corporations expanding, and spreadsheets and paper would no longer suffice. From those early, mainframe-led revolts, the revolution spread to engulf every industry in every part of the globe.

But if accounting once led to widespread computerization, marketing is leading today’s digital revolution. Much of the data fueling this revolution had always existed but hadn’t been captured in digital format, or been stored, or been readily available to people and places far from their source. Today, digitally recorded data describe nearly everything about our world, from highly tangible things like parts in the supply chain, inventory on the shelf, and seats on the plane to less tangible concepts like probabilities and sentiment.  And it’s the marketing department that’s become the central repository. Once a realm defined by its creative expression, trade shows, and glossy literature, marketing has instead become the place in the organization that pulls together all of the information necessary to find, sell to, and serve the customer effectively and efficiently.  This shift blurs the lines of control as supply chain, customer relationship management, and other data systems become subordinate sources for information critical to marketing success.

Marketing finds itself in the vanguard because it stands to gain the most from digitization. Digital data describes a customer’s history, preferences, and — as the proliferation of smartphones grows — immediate context. When combined with powerful analytics, digital data allow marketers to segment their audience and create propensity models that can predict how and when to influence customers to buy. Digital data also describe the amount and location of current inventory, offering merchants an opportunity to make offers based on a sophisticated knowledge of supply and demand.

As evidence of marketing’s central role, just look at which department in your firm is commanding the fastest-growing share of the technology budget and attracting the lion’s share of data analysts and data scientists. There are fewer marketing majors at the controls of marketing decisions than ever before, as the skills needed to participate in the revolution have been redefined. With data analytics as the driver and automation as the goal, marketing departments are scrambling to pull in skills that would have lived purely in IT and in the quant labs of financial service firms. These skills are now reaching beyond data analysis to encompass information architecture, application development, and technology project management.

This might be all to the good except that the rapid change in marketing roles and skills has come at the expense of the traditional IT organization. More than just a drain or overlap in skills, organizational budgets have shifted rapidly away from IT, leaving the CIO scrambling to support legacy systems that are still necessary and costly to maintain.

In every revolution, there is a shift of power from one group of players to another. However, if the marketing-led digital revolution leaves IT behind in a zero-sum funding game, that won’t ultimately serve the needs of the broader organization. Starving IT of budget takes a heavy toll on innovation. And expecting marketers to operate as a shadow IT department is both expensive and presents significant data-governance and operational risks.

For this revolution to work, organizational power can’t simply continue to devolve from IT to the marketing department. CIOs and CMOs must meet in the middle. Decades of safe, smart IT practice needs to be applied to the new ways of finding and using data. Only a partnership will allow marketing to be efficient and effective as this revolution continues to unfold.  What form that partnership might (or could) take isn’t clear. Some companies are installing chief information officers to bridge the gap, while others haven’t yet decided what action to take. One promising solution is a new role, the chief marketing technologist — a hybrid of the CIO’s tech knowledge and the CMO’s marketing savvy.

What is clear is that something will need to give as this revolution permanently changes the way organizations are structured and how all software, not just marketing tech, is purchased, deployed, and maintained.  Otherwise unaddressed problems will only become worse as the Internet of Things and other digital trends open up even greater opportunities to hone marketing effectiveness, and more and more resources flow (but from where?) into digital-marketing efforts.

People Were More Religious Before Education Became Compulsory

Compulsory education has been shown to broaden people’s occupational choices and improve their earnings, but each additional year of schooling also leads to a 4-percentage-point increase in an individual’s likelihood of reporting no religious affiliation, according to a study of Canadian data by Daniel M. Hungerman of the University of Notre Dame. Education’s impact on earnings might be part of the reason for the decline in religiosity, as might exposure to science and other cultures, Hungerman says. The proportion of Canadians reporting no religious affiliation rose from 4% in 1971 to 16% in 2001; there was a similar increase in the U.S.

Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead

One of the most telling questions you can ask someone in any kind of leadership role is what motivates them to be a better leader. Some will say it’s to enhance their personal effectiveness, or that leading is an expected part of their professional development. Others may say that they lead because of a sense of leader identity, purpose, or personal obligation to serve their organization and the people with whom they work. Many will proffer a mix of instrumental, external motivations (like pay or career progression) and more intrinsic, internal rationales (like the obligation to serve).  The group with a combination of motives has the most reasons to lead, and so it seems intuitively reasonable to assume that they would be the most committed, high performing leaders. Right?

In a recent article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, colleagues and I examined this assumption. Our study, massive in scale, tracked more than 10,000 Army leaders from their entrance into West Point, through graduation, and well into their careers. For perspective, the sample represents approximately 20% of the living graduates of West Point. We examined the motivations driving their decision to attend the Academy and become Army leaders, and we looked at their performance and potential as leaders in the years following their graduation. A key leader performance measure was identification of early promotion potential. Army performance appraisals are designed to compare officers’ performance to the organization’s leadership framework. Each annual performance appraisal gauged the officer’s potential to lead at higher levels, as judged by immediate and higher-level supervisors serving in positions to observe officers’ demonstrated performance in leader roles.

As one might predict, we found that those with internal, intrinsic motives performed better than those with external, instrumental rationales for their service — a common finding in studies of motivation. We were surprised to find, however, that those with both internal and external rationales proved to be worse investments as leaders than those with fewer, but predominantly internal, motivations. Adding external motives didn’t make leaders perform better — additional motivations reduced the selection to top leadership by more than 20%.  Thus, external motivations, even atop strong internal motivations, were leadership poison.

Many believe that the best way to influence behavior is to incentivize it, and such external incentives certainly work with lab rats. In our study, however, adding external incentives clearly did not improve leader performance. In practice, consider leaders in the Veteran’s Health Administration, most of whom have strong, internal motivations to serve America’s veterans. Yet add hefty bonuses as motivation, and the VA finds itself with a significant leadership problem, where some administrators appear to have lost sight of the core purpose of the organization. One step in righting the ship will be a renewed focus on the internal motivation to help sick and injured veterans. Robert McDonald, awaiting confirmation as the new Secretary of Veteran’s Affairs, wrote about his own internal motive to lead while CEO of Procter & Gamble.  In a personally authored document titled “What I Believe In,” McDonald kicks off three pages of leadership principles by first describing his motivation to lead:

“Living a life driven by purpose is more meaningful and rewarding than meandering through life without direction. My life’s purpose is to improve lives. This operates on many levels. I work to improve the lives of the 6.5 billion people in the world with P&G brands, and I work every day to have a positive impact in the life of just one person.”

One of the longstanding dichotomies in the field of leader development is whether to teach leadership as skills that lead to higher performance (a competency-based model that is relatively easy to metric), or to teach leadership as a complex moral relationship between the leader and the led (a values-based model that is challenging to metric).  Our study demonstrates that those who lead primarily from values-based motivations, which are inherently internal, outperform those who lead with additional instrumental outcomes and rewards.

The implications of this study for leader development — and practice — are profound. In business, the cost of leader development programs is often measured, or at least estimated, as an instrumental consequence — an increase in performance of the organization resulting in a return on investment for the program. This is reasonable, given estimates that place the annual cost of leader development at more than $60B . It is important, though, that talent managers and executive decision makers do not allow external consequences of leader development to become external motivations among organizational leaders.  If those we seek to develop as leaders adopt external justifications for leading well — such as an increase in shareholder value, better pay or perquisites, or increased profits — they are likely to be less successful as leaders in comparison to those who seek to lead for more internal, intrinsic reasons alone.

If you aspire to lead in business or society, first ask yourself, “Why do I want to be a leader?” The answer to that question, as it turns out, will make a significant difference in how well you lead.

Reinventing the Chief Marketing Officer: An Interview with Unilever CMO Keith Weed

A marketing revolution is under way and nowhere is that more visible than in the CMO’s transforming role. Unilever CMO Keith Weed embodies this new order as an architect and leader of the firm’s plan to double revenue while halving its environmental impact. In this edited interview, Weed describes a new breed of marketing organization, and the CMO’s increasingly strategic role.

You have a very unusual job description for a CMO – you oversee marketing and communications and sustainable business. What’s the rationale for that?

The construct came from our CEO Paul Polman. When Paul arrived at Unilever in 2009, I was running the global laundry and home care business and also the water business around the world. And one of the big drives there for me was to find more sustainable solutions, particularly to clothes washing. It’s the greatest use of domestic water and we have a big business in emerging markets where people have to work hard to fetch water or pay a lot for it. So, I was already quite focused on sustainability issues.

When Paul arrived at Unilever he immediately started creating a new vision and business model with both growth and sustainability at its core. The rationale for combining marketing and sustainability is, to grow our business we need to do great marketing. Sustainable growth is consumer-demand led growth, and that’s the day job of marketers. But in a resource-constrained world, that definition of sustainable growth is too narrow. Yes, growth needs to be sustainable economically, but it must be sustainable environmentally and socially as well. Paul said let’s put these roles together, and your job is to figure out how to deliver on the vision and model.

How did you do this?

I set off to do two things initially: First, develop a plan that would define the strategy for doubling our business while increasing our positive social impact and reducing our environmental footprint. This ultimately became known as the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. Second, I developed a new marketing strategy called Crafting Brands for Life. This included, for example, refreshing our brand positioning statement – not something a consumer goods business does lightly. This requires each brand to define its social purpose and articulate what the brand does to support the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.

Seems like there would be a lot of tension in the combined roles.

Well, the real tension you have in companies is when marketing is in one silo, identifying what consumers need and driving demand, while sustainability is in another trying to reduce environmental impact, while Corporate Social Responsibility is in another working on the company’s social contribution while communications is telling its own, possibly different, story. In a connected world, this kind of internal disconnection is a hindrance not a help. One of the first things I did was to move away from the old-style CSR mentality by effectively closing down the CSR department. Instead, we wanted CSR to be an integral part of our business, embedded in everything we do, and so activities formerly isolated within CSR became strategic initiatives directed toward nutrition, water, hygiene, health and self-esteem. Also, before the consolidation, Unilever.com was led by the communications team while the Unilever brand was led by the CMO. You can’t have two different groups of people pulling a brand in two different directions. I now oversee global marketing, internal and external communications, external affairs, and the Unilever Foundation, but I also have the Chief Sustainability Office and sustainable business development reporting into me as well. This means I can drive clarity and alignment of message for Unilever, for what we’re doing in sustainability both internally and externally. Internally my message is very much one of join up and join in, so we can all work together as one team to deliver the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan and our purpose: to make sustainable living commonplace.

Marketers’ central job is to increase demand. Isn’t this at odds with the goal of reducing environmental impact?

Don’t get me wrong! We very much want consumers to buy and use our products. We just want to make sure our products are a better, more sustainable alternative to what they would use otherwise. That means innovating products to reduce their impact and changing consumer behavior about how to use products. Some people argue that in the future everyone will just consume less. I see no evidence for that in consumer behavior. The two billion people estimated to arrive on the planet by 2050 won’t say “we arrived late on the planet so we’ll accept a different lifestyle.” They’ll want your lifestyle, my lifestyle.

I don’t want anyone to think that focusing on sustainability means that we’re not building great brands, and there isn’t a huge emphasis on excellent marketing and growing our business. Quite the opposite. We’re growing ahead of our markets. We’re growing ahead of our competitors. This is very much a growth strategy.

What is marketing’s role in driving the firm’s social and environmental sustainability impact?

In a consumer goods business, marketing has a leading role in identifying future business direction. One of the pillars of our overall marketing strategy, Crafting Brands for Life, is ’putting people first’. That means thinking about people as people, as individuals, not as consumers — not as a head of hair looking for hair benefits, or a pair of armpits in search of deodorant, but instead understanding people’s lives and deeper needs.

This company was started on this thought. Back in the late 1800s, one of our founders William Lever was looking at the slums in London which were every bit as bad as the slums in Mumbai or the favelas of Sao Paulo today. He had a mission statement back then – making cleanliness commonplace. He believed that the humble bar of soap could have a major social impact by being a force for good and, by the way, build a massive business at the same time. He launched Lifebuoy, the world’s first disinfectant soap. And Lifebuoy the brand is in developing economies in Asia and Africa today teaching people how to hand wash – reducing infectious disease and simultaneously building the business. We’ve taught more than 300 million people how to wash their hands properly.

On the environmental sustainability side, an example is our Comfort fabric softener. In much of the developing world, people have to walk long distances and pay a lot of money for water, so there’s a premium on conserving water. We developed Comfort One Rinse which requires much less water to rinse, with the goal of reducing a typical wash from four buckets of water to two. Interestingly, when we tried marketing it by emphasizing the sustainability angle, people weren’t so interested. But when we emphasized that it reduced the work of fetching water and rinsing, and saved money, interest increased.

So the role of marketing as I see it is identifying those deeper human needs and providing solutions. Done right, that can address social, environmental, and business-growth goals all at once.

What advice do you have for other firms about combining marketing and sustainability?

Ultimately the decision to go this way needs to be based on what you’re trying to do as a company. You have to have a point of view. What’s your strategy? For us, this started with asking the question: what are the forces that are going to impact the world, and impact Unilever as well. We identified four: the digital revolution, sustainability in a resource-constrained world, the global shift to the east and south in growth and economic opportunity for companies like Unilever, and changing lifestyles, for example the population shift from rural areas into cities. So, those four big things led us to articulate what we had to do. I would argue that these forces will be important for most companies. In a joined-up, social, digital world, I don’t think you can separate communications from marketing. If you do, you’re talking out of two sides of your mouth as a company. You need to communicate a single, consistent view. And in a resource-constrained world, I don’t think you can have separate marketing and sustainability strategies, one about creating demand and an unrelated one about reducing the negative impacts of demand. A CSR project is not going to balance out some of the negative impact of your business.

So, if you really want to grow the company, and do so sustainably, you need to put marketing and sustainability under one leader, and enable that person to identify the levers that can help solve the management challenge. We don’t have all the answers. We’re learning as we go along. But for our company, and I think it’s safe to say for most if not all companies, sustainability isn’t a choice. People often say to me – what is the business case for sustainability? And I always answer, “I’d love to see the business case for the alternative.”

The New Marketing Organization

An HBR Insight Center




How Big Data Brings Marketing and Finance Together
The Future of Marketing, as Seen at Cannes Lions
Why Marketing Needs to Hire a Corporate Folklorist
What Makes a CMO Powerful

The Right Way to Present Your Business Case

You’ve already put a great deal of work into preparing a solid business case for your project or idea. But when it comes to the critical presentation phase, how do you earn the support of decision makers in the room? How do you present your case so that it’s clear and straightforward while also persuasive?

What the Experts Say

Without a winning delivery, even the best-laid business plans are at a disadvantage. “The idea may be great, but if it’s not communicated well, it won’t get any traction,” says Nancy Duarte, the author of the HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations and CEO of Duarte, Inc., a company specializing in presentations and corporate messaging workshops. A memorable presentation transforms “numbers on a page” into something more tangible, says Raymond Sheen, author of the HBR Guide to Building Your Business Case. “It becomes a business opportunity that we’re grasping, a problem we’re resolving, a step forward for the company.” Here’s how to create a persuasive pitch.

Craft an emotional story

You may be tempted to stick to facts and figures to do the persuading for you, but great presenters know that the best way to hook an audience is through a story. This ‘story’ can be as simple as outlining the need, impact, and solution; the key is to present what’s at stake through a clear arc. But the more you can inject an emotional appeal or human connection into your narrative, the stronger and more memorable your case will be. That could mean illustrating the effects of a proposed customer management system with testimonials from actual customers, or describing how the data-sharing project you want to expand helped keep employees connected during a major outage. “With a business case, odds are that you’re trying to insert change,” says Duarte. “The first reaction to that change is typically fear,” and the only real way to get your audience to overcome their reluctance is to “appeal to the heart and not the mind.”

Lead with the need

In order to grab the attention of your audience from the outset, immediately identify the business need you are trying to address. Begin by asking yourself, “What is the message that I’m trying to get across?” says Sheen. Is there a market opportunity the company is overlooking? Does the firm need a new IT system? Clearly articulate this need as soon as you begin, because no matter how well researched or innovative your solution, you won’t get support if the need isn’t apparent or convincing. “Make sure you also show how that the need aligns with corporate goals and strategies,” Sheen says. “Just because you see an opportunity doesn’t mean that the business will want to pursue it.”

Address your audience’s concerns

Addressing the individuals concerns of stakeholders in the room will go a long way toward winning you allies. “If the finance person frets about keeping expenses under control, discuss expense numbers,” says Sheen. “If you have someone who is interested in growth in Asia, show how your project helps the company grow in the region.” Research past presentations and the outcomes to make sure you have your bases covered. If there are “issues that other projects have had, you should have an answer for those,” says Sheen. You might also consider giving decision makers a preview of your presentation ahead of time, and asking for their input. You can then salt their recommendations into your presentation, which will increase their investment in your success. “When you let people feel like they co-created your content, then they’ll not only support you but then they’ll feel empowered as ambassadors,” says Duarte. “They’ll feel like they’re representing their own idea.”

Find the right medium for your message

Well-presented data can do wonders for persuading an audience. But overwhelming slides with needless detail or trotting out tired visuals will also quickly lose you favor. Think carefully about the message you want to convey. Does a bar graph, table, or pie chart more effectively present your position? Are you able to circulate documents ahead of time, which might affect the data you want to emphasize in the actual presentation? Or will a unique, more entertaining route be more persuasive? “You have to know the best medium for the information,” says Duarte.

Don’t forget to connect

But above all, make sure you avoid “relying so much on your slides that you forget to make that human connection,” says Duarte. It might also be worthwhile to use colorful metaphors, videos, or other multimedia to make your point stand out. But sometimes simpler can be better, says Duarte. One of her clients convinced his CEO to fund a multimillion project by relying on basic graphics he drew on a whiteboard. The real power of his presentation, she says, was in the strength of his narrative.

Have an elevator pitch ready

No matter how much time you’re allotted to present, you won’t know until you walk into the room whether you’ll actually have 5 minutes — or 50. It’s critical to have a short elevator pitch ready in the event your time is short. “Know which one or two slides you’re going to pull out, the ones that can tell the story,” says Sheen. By the same token, you may be asked to do a deeper dive into one facet of your case in the middle of the presentation. That’s when having some appendix slides can be helpful, so that you can expand on certain elements of your case. You don’t need to have every data point memorized, Sheen says, but if someone asks, ‘What happens if we expand into Eastern Europe?’ you need to know what the general effect might be. It’s critical to “plan for short,” says Sheen, “and be prepared to go long.”

Principles to Remember

Do:

• Tell a story — it will make your case more persuasive and memorable

• Spell out the business need — it gives the audience a reason to listen

• Have both a short and long version ready — you never know how much time you will have

Don’t:



• Overlook stakeholders’ pet concerns — address them directly to win allies in the room

• Overwhelm your audience with needless detail

• Read directly from your slides — no one wants to attend a boring read-along

Case study #1: Build buy-in ahead of time

Erik Mason, the marketing communications manager for an aesthetic skin laser company in the Northeast, felt the firm needed a new image. “Other companies with slicker marketing were gaining market share even though they had inferior technology,” Mason says.

Mason decided to pitch a total rebranding — a new logo, new tagline, and new copy and photography for ads and communications — to the new executive team brought in to prep the company for an IPO. The price tag? An 8-fold increase in the marketing budget. “Marketing was a bit of a nebulous concept for the executive team,” he says. “They knew they needed to do it,” but they weren’t sure why or what tangible effect a new marketing strategy might have.

To build support for his case, Mason approached executive team members individually to ask them what they thought competitors were doing right, and how that compared with their own company’s strategy. Those conversations “gave me a roadmap of sorts for how I needed to present the recommendations to them,” Mason says, “so it felt tailored to them based on their input.”

He crafted the presentation as a story of each of the company’s primary competitors, showcasing their branding and visuals side-by-side with their marketing spending and earnings. That analysis not only showed those with the most compelling brands and integrated marketing support had impressive revenues, but also the most positive performances on Wall Street, a helpful fact given the company’s IPO aspirations. “The cases showed how a marketing investment pays ahead, especially when it comes to shareholder value,” says Mason, now the head of his own marketing firm.

Not long after, the executive team approved a full funding of Mason’s initiative. And in short order, the company achieved consistent double-digit sales growth — and a successful IPO.

Case study #2: Impress with unique visuals

When the 2008 financial crisis necessitated painful cuts at a Silicon Valley insurance company, chief information officer Jag Randhawa knew he needed a creative solution to boost morale and keep employees engaged. He decided to try to launch a bottom-up innovation program, which would allow IT employees to submit ideas to improve customer service, business processes, and products. But first, he needed the approval of management.

Randhawa didn’t yet have data to illustrate how the program might work, only anecdotal evidence from companies in other industries. He knew that if he wanted to persuade management, he would have to make an emotional appeal.

When it came time to present, Randhawa began by asking his audience to do a selective attention exercise, also known as the “invisible gorilla” exercise. The task involves watching a video and counting how many basketball passes are made between players wearing white jerseys. Most viewers are so focused on counting the passes that they completely overlook the man dressed as a gorilla who walks through the frame. Randhawa’s audience was no different.

Not only did the video lighten the mood, “it was also very relevant to my core message,” says Randhawa. “It demonstrated the need to have extra sets of eyes on a problem and the importance of diverse perspectives that employees can offer.” As the management team asked questions about how the program might work, it was clear that Randhawa’s hook had worked. There was already a “clear sense of collective ownership,” he says. In the end, he received an overwhelming “yes” to implement the program.

For more on how to build a business case from scratch, see the HBR Guide to Building a Business Case Ebook + Tools.

A Better Way to Bridge the Skills Gap

For a long time now, business leaders have been saying that the American workforce lacks sufficient skills to fill 21st century jobs. Those of us at the frontlines of social services — doing the work of preparing low-income young people — share these concerns and hear you loud and clear. The education gap is holding back not just workers but businesses and our whole economy.

That’s why I was quite interested to hear about the innovative new educational credential called the “nanodegree,” announced last month with great heraldry by AT&T and Udacity, an online education company founded by a Stanford professor and former Google executive. For $200 a month and in less than a year, students can receive online training that prepares them for immediate entry into technology jobs.

Making it cheaper and simpler to become qualified to get a well-paying job is, of course, a good idea. But for students in poverty, it is not good enough. As Eduardo Porter noted  in The New York Times, students most likely to pursue the nanodegree (and other degrees like it) are the ones who are already well educated, simply looking to switch their specialties.

Like Mr. Porter, I believe that education needs to be tied to real-life work experiences — especially if it is going to give low-income students a leg up. And companies, not colleges, are better at that. This itself is not news: Experts have been calling for more apprenticeships, more on-the-job learning, for some time. (See this Harvard Business Review article. The latest plea comes from the Hamilton Project’s new report on ending poverty, which notes that the U.S. offers about one-tenth the apprenticeships of other industrialized nations.)  Despite these repeated affirmations, the teen and young adult employment rate has plummeted over the last dozen years.

But if businesses are really serious about securing a stable pool of future employees, they are going to have to invest in young people more comprehensively and earlier. Research shows that successful employment programs provide not just technical training and job opportunities but also mentoring and real-life skills. Young people do best when they receive behavioral coaching, training in workplace communication and time management, and counseling and stipends to reward good performance. Corporations and schools are not terribly good at this kind of holistic training.

But we in the social services and youth development fields are experts at it.

What I propose is this: a new partnership, between industry and organizations like ours, The Child Center of NY. If you give our kids a chance by offering them meaningful internships and apprenticeships, we in the nonprofit sector can, in return, give these interns and apprentices the support they need to succeed. In effect, we can help to insure your investment in them.

Each day The Child Center of NY and other nonprofits like us work with thousands of low-income young people who have talent and ambition but face enormous barriers to success. Poverty is a barrier, yes, but so too is access to opportunities. Many have never even met anyone who has gone to college.

At our afterschool programs, counseling sites, and community centers, we provide tutoring, academic enrichment, and opportunities to learn the teamwork, good work habits, and problem-solving skills that are so essential to the workplace. Our mentors help youth discover what they are good at and want to do, and then help them build the confidence, discipline, and social-emotional skills they need to do it. As early as middle school, we take students on college trips and to visit companies where they can dream of working one day.

But what we cannot do is offer our young people high tech jobs. For this, we need businesses. Most companies invest their training dollars in management or specialized workers, but some new research is showing that ROI for investing in entry-level workers is more than respectable. A report by Corporate Voices for Working Families, “Why Companies Invest in ‘Grow Your Own’ Talent Development Models” found a range from first-year loss of 10 percent to a net gain of at least 179 percent.

Online learning schemes such as the nanodegree, with its pocket-sized appeal, may indeed funnel more qualified workers into the economy. But millions of at-risk young people will be unable to take advantage of such opportunities. Can we really afford to overlook this enormous untapped pool of human capital? Our future workforce needs a way to connect to that world. They need experience, training, and a chance to get, and keep, a job. For these kids, for the big picture, the nanodegree is just too small.

 

What Writing a Book Taught This Consultant

Thrilling, terrifying, altogether great. Nine months after publishing my first book, that’s my assessment of the author experience. Now that I’m back in the swing of strategy consulting, I’m finding some of what I learned from the writing process to be useful in client work. I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far.

I’m hopeful there’s useful perspective here for consultants, accountants, PR professionals – anyone who gives counsel for a living. For brevity’s sake, I’ll refer to all of us as consultants.

Tell a story. Successful writing requires commitment to storytelling and to enlightening. Business writing leans towards the latter. I think it should lean much more towards the former – storytelling is a skill more consultants need. The best young people at any consulting firm bring a lot of analytical and research skills to the job, but it’s remarkably difficult for that great talent to learn to tell stories. I don’t mean small anecdotes, though those are good too; I mean weaving the facts into a cohesive narrative that feels relevant to the audience.

One of the best consulting experiences I’ve had was with the corporate identity experts Phil Durbrow and Ken Pasternak (see their work at Marshall Strategy). A watershed moment in Phil and Ken’s work is when they sit with the client organization and weave a story for them of who they really are. Phil and Ken synthesize months of interviews into a very few impressions, a contrast or two, and a narrative. “Usually,” says Phil “the client’s response is ‘you know us better than we know ourselves.’” Phil and Ken’s stories resonate with the client because they’re not only informed by data, they ride above the data. Its magical to watch when done well. If this doesn’t come naturally, writing is a great exercise. It drives you to a clearer, cleaner, more resonant narrative.

Embrace risk. When you publish a book, you are sharing your work with a much larger public than you reach in consulting, on a much broader topic, and with less real-time feedback. More than once while I was writing, terror set in about whether I was being precise, correct, and clear.

Repeated waves of terror later, I concluded those attributes were important but ultimately not the measure of success. Success would be achieved if I sparked new thinking. At one point, I recognized I was going to write that U.S. companies had become risk-averse relative to their competitors worldwide. That shook me up. I shared it with a couple U.S. CEOs. They didn’t like it one bit, and more than once, it sparked really open, heated discussion. There’s no part of the book I am happier to have written.

That lesson is supremely valuable in consulting. A slam-dunk is not a meeting in which you stun the client into silence with your brilliance. It’s one in which you spur the right conversation and debate. The contrary finding is one of the most important ideas you will bring to a client. They may not agree with you, but they will think anew with you.

Listen better. Most consulting relies on questions and interviews as the basis for the insights we build our advice on. Yet most consultants I know approach stakeholder interviews as a rote matter, or worse, a burden. Set your questions on paper, record the answers, and get through it.

There are reasonable drivers for that approach. We have very specific questions for which we need to build a set of responses. We often have a lot of interviews to do. The result can be a wealth of data and a paucity of insight. Long-form writing can lead you out of that trap.

For my book, I wanted to know the person I was interviewing, what drives her, why she made certain decisions, and how she views the world. This required intense listening and an active willingness to wander. I routinely encouraged the people I interviewed to stray from my questions and just talk. If I picked the right people, they would navigate to the real insight better than I would.

I also listened not just to what was said, but how it was said – the language used and the style of the individual as he said it. That brought life to my writing, but I also found application for it in my consulting. If I am present enough to notice that someone is stressed when he describes an event or interaction, I will follow up to find out why. Each person who sees that level of conscious engagement appreciates it. It transforms the interview into a discussion, and sometimes a relationship. The best thing is, it’s cost-free — it takes no more time to pay attention to these elements than to ignore them.

Allow emotion. While writing, I was more emotional than when consulting. That may surprise those who work with me, since my personal investment in consulting work is observable. However, when consulting, I’m not mercurial. I don’t indulge in rage, break down, or laugh at nothing, all of which occurred more than once while I wrote the book.

Having those emotions nearby helped me research and write with some pathos. Now, my book is not particularly pathos-laden. It’s a business book. But I aspired to understand my subjects as well as I could, and that meant understanding myself and keeping my emotional life a little closer to the surface than usual.

Coming back to consulting, I find that sharing emotion, or rather passion, is not all bad. The most compelling business leaders are quite human. If there’s not a place to let that show with clients, are you really bringing your best to the work?

Don’t make it all about you. When writing, you spend a lot of time alone. In the push to complete the first draft of my manuscript, I spent about a month alone in a mountain cabin. The snow and a modest reduction in personal hygiene led to a shocking transformation only my family got to see via Skype. I was a little less office, a little more The Shining.

Consulting is about others – the client, your partners, and your teammates. Your advancement is closely tied to your ability to understand and deliver for others. Can you diagnose the client’s core issue and help solve it? Can you bring the best out of the best people? Can you help those around you fulfill their potential? If you can do these things, you’re probably a pretty good consultant.

As a writer you are encouraged into what Salman Rushdie called breathtaking narcissism (actually, he used that term to describe his wife, not himself). At the urging of my publisher, I spent an entire autumn morning in contemplation of my name for the book jacket. Jonathan E. Berman? Jonathan Eli Berman? Surely only assassins need three names. Maybe just Jonathan Berman. Reinforcing the narcissism is the non-stop promotion expected of an author. In book talks, on TV, and on radio, if an author doesn’t talk about himself, he’ll be asked to.

If you’re being paid for advice, you really have no excuse to focus on yourself. So, my last reflection on writing and consulting is a caution. Be aware that writing turns you inward. For your consulting, don’t forget to turn back outward!

Most Marketers Flop at Real-Time Customer Interactions

If you’ve ever tried to learn an intricate physical skill as an adult, you know what it’s like to be a marketer today.

When adults set out to acquire a skill like golf or snowboarding or the tango, they usually break it down so they can be sure to learn each of its movements before making fools of themselves on the links or the hill or the parquet. They practice stepping, bending, and turning until they’re good at each component—and then they go out and make fools of themselves anyway, because putting together a series of movements in real time is an order of magnitude harder than doing them in isolation.

Over the past decades, marketers have gotten pretty good at collecting and crunching customer data and using it to figure out what various customer segments want. Many companies have even managed to break down silos to the extent that customer data is now under the purview of the marketing department, which I prefer to call—and which should be called—the customer department.

But customer departments now face the challenge of putting those skills together in a seamless response to consumers in real time, and in many cases marketers look a lot like novice tangoers, tripping over their own feet. In fact, many companies have made things worse, setting up their real-time customer systems (phone menus, for example) in ways that make the customer experience more painful and difficult than it was before.

At the University of Maryland, we’ve created a master’s program in marketing analytics so that we can train people to do the rapid, fluent data analysis that’s needed for personalizing fast and effective service to the customer. But until a new generation of customer-data analysts moves into the corporate world, companies will no doubt continue to struggle. The challenges are numerous, and most of them are way beyond people with traditional training in marketing: A good deal of customer data is unstructured; in many cases marketers’ analysis of tweets and emails is still rudimentary; and few marketing people have expertise in fast, automated data-analytic techniques such as machine learning.

A number of companies have availed themselves of the services of expert data-analytics firms, a move that makes good sense, given the complexity of the field. But when you outsource customer analysis, you inevitably lose a step in the race to keep up with customer sentiment in the moment, because outsourcing takes time.

Real-time customer response isn’t a new phenomenon, by the way. B2B companies have been doing it for years. The best B2B firms are very responsive to customers. For example, if Walmart calls one of its suppliers, you can bet that the supplier drops everything and gives its important customer total attention.

But compared with consumer companies, B2B firms have relatively few customers. Keeping tabs on how your key accounts are feeling and what they want is more manageable if they number in the dozens, rather than the millions.

A couple of decades ago it would have been unthinkable for consumer companies to try to monitor and respond to their customers—the cost of collecting, storing, and processing the data would have been prohibitive. But today, those costs have come down dramatically, and a number of firms have taken advantage of that change and developed the capability to keep tabs on and respond to customers very quickly. For example, many financial services companies can anticipate, on the basis of past behavior, what products a customer might need next. That college student who just took out an education loan may soon need car financing, or eventually a home loan. The company can proactively suggest these things.

Ideally, what consumer companies need is an adaptive personalization system that can analyze the customer base and figure out not only which products are trending and why but what would be the best personalized product (often an information service) for each customer. What’s more, they need to personalize the product without bothering the customer or requiring the customer to make a decision about it. In my research I find that such “automatic” personalization works better than having the customer self-customize. In media businesses, for example, companies can already observe what customers are reading or listening to, collect information about what they like and don’t like, and accordingly adjust what’s offered next (Pandora’s radio channels are an early and flawed example of this).

One of the biggest challenges companies will face as they enter this new world is distinguishing important waves in consumer sentiment from unimportant ripples, because what really matters is business outcomes. A trend is only important if it affects your business—if it moves the dial. When the media picks up a trend, the Twitterverse typically picks up the media reports, the media then reports on the Twitter reaction, and it all gets amped up in a vast echo chamber. But many trends that look impressive turn out to have no staying power. It’s easy to see in hindsight that certain trends fizzle out, but perceiving that in real time is very difficult.

Businesses are now used to thinking about customer lifetime value as well as customer equity, which is the sum of the customer lifetime values across the customer base. What they are just now getting their heads around is how the super-amplified word-of-mouth machine that is Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media speeds everything up and has an almost instant impact on customer equity. The value of the company, which is directly related to customer equity, can now go up or down very quickly. The result is that the average lifespan of an S&P 500 company is now only 18 years. These dinosaurs had better learn to scurry faster and smarter, or those little rodents under their feet will take over.

The New Marketing Organization

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