Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1388

How to Spread Empathy in Health Care

Social network scientists have shown that emotions and values can spread in a community with the same patterns as infectious diseases. They have described how the people who are most connected to others may be the first ones to get hot gossip, but they are also most likely to get the scary new virus that has just shown up in town. These observations suggest an interesting opportunity for making health care better, and even more efficient – if health care organizations can figure out how to create an “epidemic of empathy.”

What would an epidemic of empathy look like? There would be a steady, relentless increase in the proportion of clinicians and other personnel who are clearly tuned in to what was really happening to patients and their families. Coordinated and empathic care would not seem to patients as miraculous and unpredictable as the lightning bolt of love (“un colpo di fulmine,” as the Italians put it). Instead, delivery of such care would become the norm; it would become increasingly fundamental to the way health care personnel saw themselves.

The time for such an epidemic has arrived. We certainly have the motivation – health care has become so complicated that patients constantly complain that they feel like they are lost in the chaos, and being treated like a collection of organs and diseases rather than human beings.   They worry that no one is actually looking out for them – their physicians are staring at computer screens during visits, trying to absorb the flood of data relevant the patient’s problems.

But I think we finally have the knowledge and the means to create an epidemic of empathy. Social network scientists – most notably, Nicholas Christakis and his colleagues – have shown that obesity, smoking, and even happiness spread in societies via interpersonal connections. If a friend of a friend gains weight, you are more likely to gain weight even if you have never met that person, because a norm is subtly developing around you that suggests that it is OK to eat super-sized fries rather than push them away. Christakis has shown that people copy the behaviors of people they know directly, and, amazingly, those of others who may be physically removed from them, but are just one or two degrees removed in their social networks.

Good habits can spread via social connections, too. Using experiments involving thousands of subjects, Christakis and his colleagues have shown that altruism (as reflected in charitable giving) also diffuses through social networks – and “diffuse” is the right word. Charitable giving is indeed contagious; we respond to peer pressure to contribute. But it also falls off as the connections to the recipient of largesse weaken. In their book, Connected, Christakis and his co-author James Fowler write, “we would rather give a gift to a friend who will never repay us than to give a gift to a stranger who will.”

Can health care organizations take these insights, and use them to spread compassionate and connected care, and make it the new norm? In fact, the work is well underway, in bits in pieces. The question is who will be the first to put those pieces together.

One critical step is to create the shared vision of what empathy means. The Cleveland Clinic empathy video, now viewed by millions around the world, is just one example of how health care organizations are finding new ways to remind their personnel of what their patients are going through. Use of the word “suffering” by clinicians and leading medical journals was rare in the past, because the term was considered overly-emotional, but “suffering” is being invoked with increasing frequency by health care providers – again, with the goal of reminding clinicians of the anxiety, confusion, and uncertainty that their patients endure.

A second critical step is to understand what drives patients’ suffering. The pain and disability that result from their diseases and their treatments are of course major factors, but so is the avoidable suffering that results from dysfunction of the delivery system – the long waits to be seen, the chaos that results when clinicians are not coordinating their efforts closely, the uncertainty about what is supposed to happen next, the dehumanizing impact of an impersonal bureaucracy. Issues like food and parking are trivial to patients compared to these concerns.

A third step is to collect enough data so that meaningful analyses can be performed at potential units of improvement – including the individual physician. That means using electronic surveying technologies, collecting email addresses on every possible patient, and sending surveys to seek information after every hospitalization or office visit. In this way (and only in this way) can enough data be collected to identify which clinicians are delivering care that is coordinated and empathic. In short, we need to deploy “big data” and crowd-sourcing techniques so that we can track individual patients’ experiences and then bring information that drives action from providers.

That brings us to the question of how to go about actually driving that action. To date, health care organizations have used “carpet bombing” strategies, in which all personnel are urged to be more sensitive to patients’ needs. With increasing ability to profile the performance of individual physicians, many organizations have been focusing on the physicians who seem to be doing worst – the “bad apple” approach.

But to create an epidemic of empathy, organizations need to use a complementary approach – find the personnel who have the best patient reports regarding the coordination and empathy of their care, and try to spread whatever it is that they are doing right. They can be identified using the same data used to identify the physicians who are not doing well. Then, the subset of “good performers” can be identified who are also well-respected by and connected to many of their colleagues.

The goal is to make these well-respected, connected personnel who understand what empathic care means the Typhoid Marys of the empathy epidemic. This Appreciative Inquiry approach can be accomplished through educational sessions – for example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital put on a session called “Love Stories: Deconstructing and Learning From Successful Doctor-Patient Relationships,” in which a highly respected physician and one of his patients were interviewed (in the When Harry Met Sally-style) about what made their relationship successful. This type of educational session can be used to identify and spread “techniques,” like asking patients the question, “Help me understand what I can do to help you.”

The adoption of these practices from the Typhoid Marys can be accelerated by the use of financial and non-financial incentive systems that remind clinicians that every patient encounter is a high-stakes event – the biggest thing that will happen to that patient that day, week, or month. For example, the University of Utah has led the way in putting all patient comments about every physician on-line on their Find-a-Doctor web site, and now others have or soon will be following suit. Knowing that every patient will likely have the chance to offer a comment on-line about their care has powerful effects. As one orthopedist put it, it forces him to be at “the top of my game” for every single patient. Such comments suggests that transparency closes the social distance between the physician and the patient, making it more likely that physicians’ empathic instincts will come out.

Despite the added pressure for compassionate and coordinated care, I haven’t met a clinician yet who thinks there is anything wrong with this. In fact, everyone in health care knows that we have a problem, and that even patients whose care is technically excellent often do not feel cared for. The cure for this disease is to create an epidemic of our own, and I think we know how.

 

The Authenticity Trap for Workers Who Are Not Straight, White Men

Many employees are encouraged to “just be yourself,” only to find their authenticity — and their career ambitions — constrained by unwritten office rules about appearance, speech, and behavior. Professionals of color, women, and LGBTs find there is a much narrower band of acceptance, and the constraints bite harder than wearing more polished outfits, getting a decent haircut, or even de-emphasizing an accent. Because senior leaders are overwhelmingly “pale and male” — professionals of color hold only 11% of executive positions in corporate America, women currently make up just 5% of Fortune 500 CEOs, and there are even fewer openly gay chief executives — they often feel they have to scrub themselves of the ethnic, religious, racial, socioeconomic, and educational identifiers that make them who they really are.

As I explain in my new book, Executive Presence: The Missing Link between Merit and Success, performance, hard work, and sponsors may get top talent recognized and promoted, but “leadership potential” alone isn’t enough to boost even the most qualified men and women into top jobs and prime opportunities. Moving up in an organization depends on looking and acting like a leader, on being perceived as having “executive presence” (EP). According to research from the Center for Talent Innovation (CTI), EP constitutes 26% of what senior leaders say it takes to get to the next promotion. But what if conforming to your organization’s definition of EP clashes with your sense of self?

CTI research found that 41% of professionals of color felt they needed to compromise their authenticity in order to conform to EP standards at their company. Respondents of Asian descent were afflicted the most — particularly Asian men. Among women of color, Hispanics were the likeliest to say they’d sacrificed authenticity in order to conform. And, according to CTI’s recent research into women in science, engineering, and technology, women in these male-dominated industries feel they have to change the way they communicate, dress, and behave in meetings to survive in a testosterone-suffused environment. Some 41% of LGBT respondents are not out at work, and 23% of men and 15% of women believe that passing — pretending to be in a heterosexual relationship; changing their mannerisms, voice or clothing; or hiding LGBT friendships — has helped their career.

Walling off parts of your life can cost you not only personally but also professionally. Ray, an African-American accountant, didn’t feel comfortable sharing his strong ties to his church and community because he feared it would undermine the impression that he was like everyone else at his firm. Because of his decision to “hide,” he says, he found himself excluded from high-profile teams and projects, even though he had twice the experience of some of his colleagues. “It’s a case of the invisible man,” he explains. “The less you get to be yourself, the less likely others are to remember you for high-visibility assignments and the less visible you will indeed become.”

This vicious circle has serious ramifications for engagement and retention. More than half of closeted LGBT workers we surveyed told us they feel stalled in their careers, compared with 36% of gay employees who are out at work. They’re more disengaged, too: They were 73% more likely than their out counterparts to say they intended to leave their firm within three years.

If you want to be perceived as leadership material, do you suppress your difference or embrace it? Is assimilation a smart career strategy or a sellout, a compromise to your authenticity or just a compromise?

In deciphering the “hows” and “whys” as well as the “dos and “don’ts” of lifting up your authenticity in the workplace, consider how the landscape for multicultural professionals is shifting. As our economy grows ever more globalized and competition for market share intensifies, companies are under ever-greater pressure to innovate — both to retain market share and to capture new markets in emerging economies and underserved markets. New CTI research reveals that your inherent difference can make you a valuable asset to teams — and leaders — who can benefit from the unique perspective that difference confers.

The CTI research shows that an inherently diverse team — one that includes members who are female, nonwhite or of non-European origin, or LGBT — boosts the team’s innovative potential by providing critical insights into the unmet needs and wants of overlooked or underserved end users like themselves. For example, at Standard Chartered in India, one female executive drove the transformation of two bank branches in Kolkata and New Delhi into all-women branches, a move which increased net sales at these branches by an impressive 127% and 75%, respectively, from 2009 to 2010. (This compared with a paltry 48% average among the ban’s other 90-plus Indian branches.) Additionally, at Morgan Stanley, one openly gay financial advisor spearheaded an accreditation campaign in domestic-partner estate planning that won the firm some $120 million in client assets because affluent members of the LGBT community preferred to work with financial advisors who understood their unique predicament.

Ultimately, the authenticity conundrum can be solved by enabling others to recognize the value that your difference brings: Leveraging your unique understanding and vital insight can help solve intractable problems or realize unfulfilled market potential. In today’s hypercompetitive world, the organization absolutely needs you to bring your whole self to work. By proving that diversity can pay big dividends, you can also demonstrate why it’s okay to “just be yourself.”

3 Reasons You Underestimate Risk

In hindsight, many risks seem obvious.  And when we do take the time to evaluate potential risks, there is often not much that is profound about them.  Yet so many of us fall prey to unforeseen risks, believing that they came out of nowhere or that they could not have been anticipated.  While this may be true in some cases, most of the time risk blindness occurs due to the way our brains are wired. Here are three reasons why we’re blind to risk, and what we can do about it.

The first reason for risk blindness is that reward obscures risk. When things are going well, we tend to fly high and lose ourselves in the thrill of the reward. One study (literally) demonstrated this effect. Participants (non-commercial pilots) were instructed that they would be flying a plane that had reached the decision altitude.  At that point they were given information that would influence whether to abort flying (unsafe) or not (safe).   Under usual circumstances, when given signals to abort, the brain’s reasoning and conflict regions would start to signal danger, but when presented with a reward, as in this study, these regions in the brains of the study participants were more silent. So what can we do to avoid falling into this trap?  One thing would be to routinely ask the simple question:  What is my winning preventing me from seeing?  If we did this, investors on a roll may register market conditions differently, and businesses experiencing huge successes from recent product releases would not be blind to the impending competition.

The second reason for risk blindness relates to sunk costs. Why do we continue to throw good money after bad?  And what is going on in our brains when we do this? Studies show that we may tend to avoid looking at our losses in life, and that some people are more averse to this than others. A recent study added that when we throw good money after bad, it is because the brain’s “accountant” does not contribute to financial decision-making as much as it usually does because prior investments prevent it from “speaking up.” To prevent falling in this trap, we should be more honest with ourselves about failed investments, and also learn that facing losses is better than avoiding them. One way to address this is to automate sunk cost analyses into your strategy process. Schedule such an analysis every month to consciously check in with yourself or your team.

The third reason why we sometimes don’t see that we are headed straight to a wall is what I call “future aversion”—the problem of assuming that because the future is unknown it cannot be tested.  As a result, when faced with decisions about the future, we may rely solely on present data rather than trying to assess and test the unknown.  Furthermore, we often seek to avoid punishment due to errors, yet studies show that punishment improves learning after an error.  To avoid falling into this trap, especially with the business landscape changing as often as it does, we have to become less averse to acting without data. Taking small steps to test out ideas may be better than the most pristine thought process beforehand.  Also, if it does not work out, we need to reframe “punishment” as a helpful redirection so that we can test out the next idea. The struggle here is that testing costs time and money, but we can mitigate some of these challenges by taking a more long-term view, and that testing an idea may help us in the long run. Finally, intuition can help us “know” things about the future that we do not know consciously. The brain is capable of feeling before knowing why, so testing out your hunches often makes good sense.

Risk blindness is something we are all prone to, and by asking these simple questions of how winning, aversion to loss, and paralysis in the face of the unknown impact our decision-making, we may be able to prevent much larger losses in the longer-term.

Why Do Recent Grads of For-Profit Colleges Outearn Other Graduates?

The 65.2% of graduates of for-profit colleges who were employed and not in school earned a full-time median salary of $54,000 in 2012, according to a Fortune report on a study by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics. The comparable figures for graduates of private nonprofit and public universities were $47,500 and $45,000, respectively. One possible reason: Graduates of for-profit colleges tend to be older and have more job experience; for example, of the graduates who attended four-year for-profit colleges in 2008, 60% were over 26 years old when they received their degrees.

How Big Data Brings Marketing and Finance Together

When Raja Rajamannar became CMO of MasterCard Worldwide in 2013, he moved quickly to transform how the credit card giant measures marketing. His artillery: Advanced Big Data analytics. MasterCard had always been a data-driven organization. But the real power and full potential of data was not being fully realized by marketing.

Rajamannar involved finance early. To spearhead analytic efforts, he assigned a finance person – who was already embedded in marketing – to create an ROI evaluation framework and integrated her deeper into the marketing function. With a better understanding of the marketing context, she has brought a new level of financial discipline and rigor to the marketing team. This has reframed the conversation to balance the interests of both sides.

For example, in the credit card business, understanding the importance of deals with issuing banks is critical. While marketing might focus on maximizing card transactions, or swipes, finance understands that not all swipes are equal (depending on the deal with a given bank). Likewise, marketing wants to clearly quantify the impact of its long-term branding efforts while finance is more focused on macro-economic drivers of marketing performance, such as interest rates, employment levels, inflation and retail sales.

At many companies we work with, analytics becomes the connective tissue between the different visions of what drives results emerging from marketing and finance. Combining data from both marketing and finance, analytics reveals the true picture of what drives marketing performance, and connects marketing to revenue.

Inside Intel

Consider Intel, which began eyeing Big Data’s potential to quantify marketing’s contribution to revenue in about 2010. As an ingredient brand, Intel often struggled to link marketing to P&L impact. But David Ginsberg, VP, Corporate Insights, Brand and Strategy, saw the potential for analytics to create a bridge between marketing and finance by illuminating marketing’s impact on sales – the focal point of where marketing and finance meet.

Intel formed a special Marketing ROI (MROI) team – a first-of-its-kind collaboration between marketing and finance. The result has been transformational. Intel’s research team, for example, has been rebuilt as an analytics and strategic insights team that identifies, collects and harnesses unprecedented amounts of the company’s data. This now provides its marketing teams globally with predictive decision-making capabilities they never had before. Financial accountability for marketing performance has become front and center. Marketing and finance share a fully transparent analytics platform that all parties can access to run what-if scenarios, optimize marketing-dollar allocations across products and markets, and get course-correcting feedback on the performance of those allocations.

In one instance, we worked with both Intel and Facebook to quantify how the chip maker’s social media marketing on Facebook affected consumer PC sales. This targeted effort showed that paid Facebook ads and the company’s own unpaid (organic) Facebook postings increased Intel brand and product search volume by 1.9%-2.3% – which in turn led to increased PC sales.

Organizational Anachronisms Exposed

Similar reform in the relationship between marketing, finance and analytics is taking place across many sectors – from manufacturing and retail, to financial services, travel and entertainment, pharmaceuticals and toys. Analytics has exposed organizational anachronisms such as adversarial marketing-finance relationships and a focus on traditional year-long planning (instead of constant optimization) in marketing groups little changed for decades. This has spurred re-thinks that include changes to key executive relationships.

At Mattel, another company we work with, a cross-functional group of executives from insights, brand, marketing, media, digital and finance now meets regularly to adjust spending allocation plans based on modeling and analytic results, says Ed Gawronski, Global SVP. This has brought agreement on a common set of ROI metrics and helped facilitate decision making about investing in short-term sales versus brand equity.

In effect, analytics creates a common language between marketing and finance for the first time by allowing the two functions to clearly see marketing’s impact on financial performance. Consider how USAA – the nation’s 6th largest consumer P&C insurer – has reinvented how marketing, finance and data analytics work together, starting with a first-ever partnership between the CMO, CFO and Chief Data Analytics officer.

Roger Adams, CMO says: “As USAA developed into a data-driven organization, we were able to accurately predict the impact of different marketing investment decisions. It’s completely reframed the conversation.” Forrester Research recently published a case study describing how USAA’s new partnership between marketing, finance and analytics has helped deliver better business insights.

At MarketShare, we’ve seen these partnerships play out in a change in who’s sitting at the table during discussions with major brands about advanced marketing analytics technology. Once mostly marketing, it’s now equal parts marketing, finance and analytics. In some cases, finance even leads a vendor selection process once dominated by marketing.

Companies that fail to update their marketing organizations and continue using antiquated measurement solutions are at risk of being left behind. New marketing-finance relationships combined with advanced analytics technology are increasing efficiency and delivering “found” dollars to the bottom line. Short of creating a killer new product or service, there are few ways a big company can move the needle quite so dramatically.

The New Marketing Organization

An HBR Insight Center




The Future of Marketing, as Seen at Cannes Lions
Why Marketing Needs to Hire a Corporate Folklorist
What Makes a CMO Powerful


Strategies to Attract Superpower Marketing Talent

Strategies to Promote Women Should Vary Across Cultures

The proportion of women in the leadership ranks of organizations remains low around the world but, from country to country, there is surprising divergence. According to recent statistics, boardroom representation by women ranges from about 1-2% in Japan, to 17% in the United States, and much higher in countries like Norway (~40%).

Our work indicates that this variation is partly a function of national differences in cultural tightness – that is, the degree to which a culture’s norms are clear and likely to be enforced by authorities through the use of sanctions. In tighter cultures, individuals may be fined for chewing gum or spitting in the streets, but in looser ones, they may receive no more than a disapproving glance. Research shows Pakistan and Turkey are among the tightest countries, and Ukraine and New Zealand among the loosest. The U.S. is considered slightly loose; France, the United Kingdom, and Germany are increasingly tight.

Using nationally reported statistics from the World Bank (2011) , we found that nations with tighter cultures tended to have fewer female legislators, senior officials, and managers. For example, just 3% of leadership positions were held by women in Pakistan, but numbers stood at 38% in Ukraine.

To explain this, it helps to understand how leaders emerge in the first place. According to psychologists, people rise to the top when they are seen as matching a set of pre-existing beliefs that individuals hold about leadership. The problem is that, across cultures, this leader prototype has historically emphasized characteristics thought to be masculine rather than feminine. Some blame the circumstances of early human history, when leaders needed physical strength to help the group survive and protect it from outside threats. But the prototype persists. Often, even women candidates themselves don’t see how they fit into the leadership mold.

Loosen commitment to such cultural norms, and beliefs are likely to change. However, tighter cultures have their advantages too:  When authorities are willing to implement new practices, they are quickly adhered to. Consider gender egalitarianism measures,  such as equal pay and encouragement to attain a higher education and participate in professional development . We’ve found that when nations commit to such practices, those with tighter cultures succeed in promoting women leaders, whereas those with looser cultures do not.

As a result, culture-specific recommendations are in order. Mandatory gender quotas – targeted numbers backed by sanctions for organizations that do not comply – can be an especially promising strategy in tight cultures. Take Norway, a relatively tight country that mandated 40% female representation on boards of publicly listed companies, backed by the threat of dissolution for those that didn’t meet that goal.  The result was a transformation:  the proportion of women directors went from below 10% pre-quota to the 40% target.

Such strong policy is unlikely to be seriously considered or successfully adopted in looser societies. Authorities are more likely to put forth quotas with weak or no sanctions, and the citizenry maybe more resistant, preferring to let capable women rise through the ranks organically. Effecting change in these nations therefore depends on influencing leader prototype beliefs– portraying leadership role as compatible, attainable and desirable for women and increasing the exposure of successful female executives. Some evidence supports this.

The point is:  when pursuing gender diversity, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Measures that work in some countries, might fail spectacularly in others. Cultural context matters.

The Benefits of Bargaining with Your Customers

If you are selling something, you must often wonder how to determine your buyers’ willingness to pay (WTP), especially when you have many different kinds of customers. The more accurate your estimate, the more likely you are to sell or the less money you’ll leave on the table for the customer.

My recent experience of shopping for a quality leather coat in a Middle Eastern mall shows one powerful way to discover a buyer’s WTP. When on vacation, my wife and I came to a leather coats store and spent two hours trying different coats. Ahmed, the seller, was a sturdy 50-year-old Turk with penetrating brown eyes. He told me that his family had run shops for centuries.

A fluent Russian speaker, he asked us where we were from, and I replied that we were from Russia, but not from Moscow. I was not being dishonest, I was born in Russia, we speak Russian at home, but now we live in France. But I wanted to pay a price a Russian tourist would pay (not one from Moscow, though, which is known to be a rich city), which I expected would be less than the price a French tourist would end up paying.

When I asked for the price of the first coat that I tried on, Ahmed quoted about 2,000 euros but he also said that he would give me a good discount. After trying 15 plus different models, I realized that I loved a black coat that looked like the one worn by the characters in the film The Matrix, at a list price of 2,700 euros. It was too long for my taste, but Ahmed said that his tailor could reduce the length of the coat and we started bargaining over the price.

Ahmed wrote down 1,500 euros, I wrote 500. Then he wrote down 1,000, I wrote down 700, and then he wrote down 800, which turned out to be the price I was willing to pay. But then my sensible wife stepped in and told me that I should not be paying even 800 euros for the leather coat before it was actually shortened, as there was no guarantee that the tailor would do a good job.

Ahmed countered that he had a similar coat that was already shortened. He showed me a coat with a list price of 1,800 euros. I liked that coat too and we went back to the bargaining table. He wrote down 670 euros. Since my willingness to pay for the coat was already anchored at 800 euros (the price I was willing to pay to look a bit like a Matrix hero), I wrote down 600 euros and we shook hands.

On the way back home, I reflected on the experience. Someone told me that in such stores, Russian tourists could buy coats for 400 euros. But my brain had gotten anchored at a much higher list price (1,800), plus I had been willing to pay 800 euros for a different one, so 600 euros looked like a great deal compared to these two reference points.

In fact, despite my efforts to conceal my French residence and ability to pay a higher price than an average Russian, I had ended up paying a similar price to what I would have paid in France when buying quality leather coats on a reasonable sale. In other words, Ahmed’s negotiation strategy had forced me to reveal my French willingness to pay.

After concluding the deal I asked Ahmed why he preferred bargaining to having fixed prices. His reply was that bargaining was a part of Middle Eastern culture and it “helps us to communicate with a customer and to understand him better.” Which is just another way of saying: I want to understand the customer’s WTP. After all, when I entered the store, Ahmed didn’t know if I was a well-off Russian, a poor Russian, or a Frenchman. If the coat’s price had been fixed at 800 euros and my WTP were 600, then I would not have bought it. Had my WTP been 1,000 euros, but the price were 600 euros, I would have saved 400 euros. At 600, my WTP was exactly equal to the price and the market cleared.

What could I have done differently to get a lower Russian price? I should have done what my wife decided to do: after also trying 15 plus different models, she took pictures of the items she liked the most and said she would come back tomorrow. After looking at the prices that Ahmed wrote for these items on our way back in the car, we decided to come back the next day and ask for a much bigger discount. Taking time to talk through the reasons why we were prepared to pay a particular price for a product helped us to avoid being trapped by an “anchor” of a much higher price and revealing our true WTP.

When I teach competitive advantage or more advanced strategy topics, executives often ask how sellers can accurately assess buyers’ WTP. My Middle Eastern experience shows how effectively negotiations with a high starting price can achieve this goal. It’s an approach frequently used in B2B sales, but I expect it could also find its way to Western retail stores selling moderate to high-priced items. I suspect that in Western negotiation cultures the initial starting price will be closer to the actual price at which the seller is willing to sell the product, so that the buyer with a very high WTP doesn’t feel like he overpaid a great deal when hearing that another person (with a lower WTP) got a much better deal for a similar product. That said, Ahmed and his ancestors have been in business for a long time and we can learn some lessons from them.

Lead Without Trying So Hard

In early 2011, I gave a TEDx speech. Because I wanted my ideas around dreaming and disrupting to come alive in a way that’s not possible in writing – and because of my nagging performance anxiety – I started working with a speech coach. Since then, I’ve given a series of talks across the country. But it wasn’t until early in 2014 when I had a true breakthrough, one as much about being a great leader as it was about giving speeches.

Rather than rushing headlong through my remarks, concerned that I would lose my place, I was able to rein in my fear, stop narcissistically worrying what others would think of me, and slow my pace. As I listened to and felt the audience, my speech became a dialogue, rather than a monologue. This interplay with the audience moved from laughter to sighs to tears – an animated conversation that felt as natural as breathing. For the first time in my life, I put aside the classical musician I was trained to be, and became the jazz musician I longed to be, an improvised connection flowing between the audience and me.

Edward Slingerland’s book, Trying Not to Try: The Ancient Chinese Art and Modern Science of Spontaneity, describes the importance of allowing our minds to let go and explore a less rigidly controlled state of being: a state in which you can only win if you don’t try to win, where you effortlessly respond to a situation. This is the Taoist concept of wu-wei (pronounced oooo-way). When a person experiences wu-wei, doing difficult things such as giving a great speech or smoothly negotiating a complex social situation, feels surprisingly easy. Wu-wei can be translated as “spontaneous action,” an action that is relaxing and enjoyable in a deeply rewarding way. During my breakthrough speech earlier this year, I experienced wu-wei. I wasn’t thinking about what I would say next, and I even lost my place a few times – just as I would in a one-on-one conversation. To my surprise, my audience of fellow conversationalists stuck with me. Perhaps because I wasn’t trying to “win” – I was just trying to be really present in the room.

“One of the signals that a person is in wu-wei,” says Slingerland, “is that the person has de (pronounced duh), translated as ‘virtue’, ‘power’, or ‘charismatic power.’” They don’t need to issue threats or offer rewards because others want to follow them. If you have de, people like you, trust you, and relax around you. This is the payoff of wu-wei. When your generosity is sincere, you draw people to you, and are, in effect, charismatic. If you can reach a state of wu-wei, you’ll get de. Quoting from Lao-Tzu:

“Demanding nothing in return for his kindness, the sage eventually obtains everything;

The sage does not accumulate things,

Yet the more he gives to others, the more he has himself.

Having given to others, he is richer still.”

My father-in-law was a farmer from a small town in Idaho, a quiet man of small means. He was no Taoist, but his seven children and thirty-five grandchildren trusted him completely and relaxed when they were around him. Having given much to others, he was rich with charisma.

For many of us, charisma is more of a struggle – or something that waxes and wanes over time. Another man very close to me, a James Garner doppelganger, is a charming law school graduate who married a model. At thirty, he was all wu-wei and de. But as he has grown older, this is no longer true. With age, he seems to have forgotten the power of giving.

Because trying not to try really is a paradox, there is no foolproof solution to experiencing wu-wei. But there are strategies. In an e-mail exchange with Slingerland, he advised, “Going into that important meeting? If you aren’t fully prepared, with your presentation clearly mapped out in your mind, a little Confucian carving and polishing is in order: try and try and eventually it will become effortless. If you are prepared, and your problem is nerves or expectations, you need more of the Daoist “not trying” strategy: relax your body beforehand with a bout of exercise, empty your mind, and focus on your breaths before you go in.” This allows you to stop worrying about yourself and what people will think of you, and be absorbed by the someone in front of you.

True leaders are absorbed in something much bigger than self. My husband’s father was a leader. I only really understood this after he passed away. Because he gave with no expected payoff, as he advanced in age, people were increasingly drawn to him, experiencing their own version of wu-wei in his presence.

The more we give, the more we have; the more we let go, the more we actually control. When we stop trying, we will have more charisma than we had imagined. And if we are real leaders, we’ll immediately give that power away.

The Future of Marketing, as Seen at Cannes Lions

Last year I wrote a post titled The Dinosaurs of Cannes about the scene at the Cannes Lions Festival, the ad industry’s star-studded annual awards show. I said, “As you walked down La Croisette the rest of the week, you could see lots of dinosaurs basking in their glory while asking what all the furry and feathered things running around at their feet and flying around above them were.” This year the new mammals and birds of the industry have begun to strut their stuff.

What these new species have in common is that they’re based on open systems. These systems are digital at their core, and leverage network effects and the ability of the “digital democracy” to find the best talent and ideas wherever they exist. Unlike closed marketing systems, characterized by agencies that wall off their in-house talent (creating a scarce and expensive resource), open marketing systems seek talent from anywhere in the world to solve problems, and then curate the best answers.

Such systems are taking on incumbents in every industry. Airbnb is not only challenging the biggest hotel chains but also challenging the bureaucracy, going after the New York City housing and tax laws that stand it its way. Now, with a valuation of $10 billion, Airbnb has the capital to take on the hotel industry and its supporters globally. The app-enabled car-sharing service Uber has also become a global phenomenon with a valuation of over $18 billion. In an ironic turn, cab drivers in London, Paris, Berlin, and Madrid decided to strike in June, 2014 to protest Uber. The result: Uber gained several hundred thousand new members. Quirky is disrupting incumbents in consumer product design and innovation, Local Motors in the automobile business, Relay Rides in car rentals and Kickstarter and AngelList in the financial sector. Name an industry and there is a new open-system player leveraging the power of the networked world to build a paradigm-shifting competitor.

As established players focus on exploiting opportunities by applying their tried and true business models, these new players, especially those being built on the Internet, take the opposite approach. They start with a market opportunity and explore ways to build a new business model that can be applied. Uber, for example, saw the gap between the demand for cabs and their availability and devised a novel and disruptive car-sharing model.

This year at Cannes it felt like the light finally went on. A slew of new open-system marketing startups made an appearance, but Cannes was also jammed full of newer tech companies built on open principles, from Spotify to Jingle Punks and MoFilms. All of these are taking a piece of the traditional marketing spend.

These open-system mammals and birds have evolved to a point where they are beginning to articulate and deliver on the new paradigm while the dinosaur guardians of the old, closed marketing world are starting to acknowledge the shift. Many of these dinosaurs – agencies in particular — seemed a bit panicked about being disintermediated. They are realizing that the open marketing systems gives brands the ability to do what agencies did themselves by creating their own marketing content and media channels. Brands can now build their own agencies based on connecting to the open marketing systems.

There are a few things that brands can do to take advantage of the emergence of these new open-system species.

1. Adapt your business models to exploit new opportunities rather than try to apply your existing one. As discussed, open-system species are agile in part because they see opportunities and create new models to go after them.

2. Take more control. It used to be that brands needed an agency to communicate with customers. Today, with the falling price of media and the real time nature of the two-way conversation with consumers, brands can do more of this themselves. Some of the best-known brands including Patagonia and Apple are building their own in-house strategic agencies, taking control of strategic and creative leadership while using an open system to collaborate with great outside talent. Those brands realize that one of their most important assets is their relationship with consumers. There will still be a place in the ecosystem for lots of players and collaboration, including agencies, but brands increasingly can take the lead.

3. Seek out great ideas wherever they are. Companies and their brands need to get away from idea myopia, the notion that one outside organization, usually an agency, must be the sole creator of marketing ideas. Not only do your most passionate fans have great ideas and the tools to communicate them but there are ideas to be found from retailers, distributors and other outside partners. Likewise, internal team members have some of the best creative ideas but are sometimes afraid to participate.

This year’s Cannes Festival proved that the new, open marketing world is much more sophisticated than it was even a year ago, with many more players fighting for the same space. We can expect that Cannes Festivals to come will be filled with even more species of open marketing organizations. While some of the old guard will go extinct, as in any ecosystem, more diversity will bring more growth and vitality to brands, and create relentless pressure for the remaining ones to adapt.

The New Marketing Organization

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IT Has Finally Cracked the C-Suite

Recently I’ve been having a very hard time talking to students, executives, and business leaders about information technology.

Even though I’ve spent most of my life in and around technology, thinking about information flows and their implications in a business context, having to use the term “information technology”—even the abbreviation “IT”—fills me with dread, almost a self-loathing, because the term is no longer appropriate in a business context. To borrow a computer-science term, the denotational semantics are all wrong.

The “IT” label is part of the glass ceiling that has limited business technologists for decades. In too many companies, IT leaders, relegated to their cost centers, are subordinate to other C-level executives. “The folks in IT” are seen as providers of services, such as fixing people’s computers.

In other, more forward-looking companies, the situation is radically different. The Great Recession forced these firms’ leaders to recognize technology’s role in driving value. As a consequence, CIOs work on go-to-market strategies as well as on acquiring and retaining new customers.

Just recently, InfoWorld magazine pointed out that CIOs have split into two groups: those who are driving value and those who are still trapped inside the data center. Cloud computing has accelerated this schism, because of its capacity to take the technology group out of the business of servicing other units. With the cloud, business units can take responsibility for their own technology. Using services such as Microsoft’s Azure, they can set up their own servers, establish storage, put applications on virtual machines, configure disaster-recovery systems, and so on. Need more storage? No problem. Experiencing lower demand and want to shrink back? No problem. These services are simple to price and simple to use.

Freed from their service role and increasingly appreciated for their business knowledge, technologist executives are finally breaking down the walls that separated technology from the organization’s other functions. This new freedom will allow them to focus more on their role as enterprise architects, creating alignment between the organization’s technological and business processes in accordance with the company’s business model. They will also be able to focus more on providing governance leadership, ensuring, as Gartner Research defines it, the effective and efficient use of information technology in enabling the organization to reach its goals. They’ll no longer be at the periphery, but will be fully integrated into the core strategic work of the firm, the business itself.

This new leadership role is captured in the emerging title of chief business technology officer. An early mover was Forrester Research, which appointed Steve Peltzman CBTO in 2011. Peltzman told me his job is “helping define and drive our business strategy, as well as being responsible for how we use technology to ‘win, serve, and retain’ customers.”

To those who argue that titles are meaningless, he says: “As soon as I renamed my department BT and my title CBTO, it did a lot of things: It signaled to the company who we were and what we were focused on. It helped us recruit and retain our own staff because they were more interested in it.” He is also critical of technology leaders who still refer to themselves in terms of “working with the business.” “The problem with that is the minute you refer to them as ‘the business,’ you’re basically signaling that you’re not the business,” he says.

While Peltzman acknowledges that technology management still has to focus on classic IT issues, such as determining which systems are critical, managing security, and deploying technology, he does not see these functions constituting his primary role.

Business leaders who question the economics of the cloud are missing the point, Peltzman says: “It’s not about the money. It’s about focus and mental cycles: How much time and energy do you put toward managing in-house technology activities?”

He believes technology leadership is about to undergo a shakeout. “You can tell the ones who will thrive and survive and the ones who won’t,” he says. “It may be a year, it may be four, but many are not going to make it because they are so focused on old-school stuff that their competitors will focus on differentiating them and beat them eventually.”

Another CBTO is Arnoud Klerkx of Sanoma Learning, one of Europe’s largest media and learning companies. He reports directly to the CEO and is a member of the management board. “I’m not responsible for ‘just’ IT,” he says. Instead, he sees his role as moving the company’s products and services into the digital era in a profitable way.

Senior IT executives in other organizations are intrigued by his title and role, he says. “Most of the time, they would love to have the same type of role, but find it difficult to change their old position within their organizations.”

As the digital era advances, it is increasingly clear that we should no longer be talking about “IT” as a corporate entity. We should be talking about BT—business technology. It’s a term that does a better job of capturing the increasingly symbiotic relationship between the firm and its technology and underscores that technology has finally, in many cases, actually become the business.