Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1390

Act Like an Entrepreneur Inside Your Organization

We often find ourselves engaged with members of large organizations on questions of how to be more innovative and entrepreneurial. In virtually every case we hear something like this:

“I have an idea for a new product (or process, system, program, etc.). I’m not dead certain it can be pulled off, but if it could, it can have a significant impact on the business. It’s not within the day-to-day scope of my job and I certainly don’t want to put myself or the company at significant risk, but it would be a shame if I didn’t try to move the idea forward somehow.  How do I do this within a pretty traditional organization?”

We have come to call these kinds of managers “entrepreneurs inside” because though they work within an established organizational context, like entrepreneurs, they have ideas that upset the status quo.  And like entrepreneurs, these entrepreneurs inside face a substantial set of risks—even though organizations are calling for more creativity, more innovation, and more entrepreneurial behavior from employees.

To help, experts have rushed in with diagnostic tools and organizational methodologies designed to “unlock” these desired behaviors. Jennifer Prosek catalogs a number of these approaches in Army of Entrepreneurs. But we and others see little evidence of substantive change. 85% of the respondents to an Accenture survey reported that “employee ideas are mostly aimed at internal improvements rather than external ones.”  In fact the average life of Fortune 500 organizations continues to shrink from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University, as do the number of world-changing ideas emerging from them. Our notions of sustainable competitive advantage are truly challenged.

So how can companies get more entrepreneurial behavior from employees, and how can entrepreneurs inside act on their ideas, while minimizing risk to themselves and to their organizations?

To that end, and based on studies of entrepreneurs both inside and out, we have created a set of four simple steps for taking effective entrepreneurial action within an organization (or for managing your entrepreneurs inside).

These steps do, in fact, provide more opportunities for “entrepreneurs inside” to test and start more ideas and, by extension, to increase the likelihood of organization improvement.

First, it all starts with Desire. If you are going to start some sort of improvement effort you must want to do it. Without personal motivation to take any step into the unknown, no matter how small, there is no possibility for success. Curiosity is sufficient but if it’s “just a good idea” that you don’t personally care about, stop wasting your time and those around you by considering it any further.

Then ask “What am I willing to invest to take the first step?” Successful entrepreneurs generally don’t try to calculate what they will ultimately get from their efforts, and instead ask “What can I afford to lose” if the next step doesn’t turn out as expected. Given the uncertainty inherent in their work this “acceptable loss” frame of reference represents a powerful offset to the traditional notions of “expected return” that stop most efforts before they ever begin.

External entrepreneurs consider money, time, opportunity cost, etc. as the primary categories for consideration alongside the intensity of their desire in determining whether or not to take the first step. It is quite different for entrepreneurs inside where the most significant investment (and risk) criteria they consider is their social standing and relationship capital within the organization. Their peers and their immediate boss become the important gatekeepers to the first step.  We find ourselves working with entrepreneurs inside to address these social capital issues in exactly the same way we have advised traditional entrepreneurs to manage their financial risks.

And then “Who can I bring along with me?” External entrepreneurs are constantly making deals for free or low-cost assets and resources. Entrepreneurs inside do likewise but they are also acutely looking for employee partners and supportive bosses (or at least passive ones) as they build a marketplace and political support for their evolving idea. This internal network consists of both emotional and physical support.  You want enough to get started given your investment analysis and an orientation toward building as you further your efforts against the idea.

Now it is time to Act. Remain open to what happens and its implications for your next step and then immediately build your next step on what you learned and the result you just achieved. This Act-Learn-Build cycle is the proven and safe recipe for entrepreneurial success. Form the habit of acting your way into the future with low-cost, low-risk steps using the means you and your network have readily at hand.  Over-planning and over-thinking are not nearly as effective. External entrepreneurs are often supported by the discipline of staged venture capital for this work.  Entrepreneurs inside instead use their emergent networks to explore their learning and build support for what comes next.

These simple steps have worked for others and for many of the people we’ve worked with inside organizations, and should help you address the question of how to get started.

What Makes a CMO Powerful

As new conditions and capabilities relentlessly change how business is done, marketing – that is, the internal function responsible for shaping demand for a company’s offerings—is being challenged to reexamine its own workings. My own research interest is in the top of those functions: the leader of the marketing group (whom I’ll henceforth call the CMO, for Chief Marketing Officer, though not all have that specific title). What affects the power that person wields in the company, and his or her ability to have a positive impact on its fortunes?

Far from being “dead,” as some like to claim, the CMO position seems solidly established: by my counts, the proportion of firms having the CMO position has remained fairly constant over a decade at around 40%, with some indication of an increasing trend over the last few years. Many firms appear to agree that marketing is too important to be left without high-level leadership, and that CMOs should be in the C-suite bringing a marketing perspective to inform strategy. As my research with Vijay Mahajan has shown, CMOs are more likely in firms where there is a strong emphasis on innovation and differentiation (requiring deep customer insights to be effective), and in firms where marketing assets (such as corporate brand) have high value. We conclude that CEOs appoint CMOs when they recognize the centrality of these to strategy formulation.

There is, however, no magic that goes along with the mere appointment of a CMO. We find that companies having CMOs do not, as a class, outperform companies that lack the position. Clearly, some CMOs drive high revenues and healthy margins, but others do not. This might seem like a very simplistic statement but it gets to the heart of the matter. It behooves us, both marketing practitioners and academics, to understand what the successful CMOs and their firms are doing right.

On the part of the firm, some key considerations have to do with the power the position is endowed with. Formal power comes through the control of critical resources, often a matter of where the CMO position is located in the C-suite hierarchy. Vijay Mahajan and I find that CMO positional power improves firm performance in firms with a divisional structure, as it gives the CMO the formal authority to align the strategic marketing plans of the various divisions. However, in firms diversified into unrelated businesses, CMO power needs to be moderate –for political and rational reasons, since such firms have powerful divisional heads with diverse agendas.

One way in which the CMO position gains power is when the CMO is given the additional responsibility of other functions. For example, we have seen marketing organizations take command of sales, public relations/communications, product development, and major parts of information technology management – and many have advocated for more expansions of marketing’s scope.  (Meanwhile, marketing’s detractors are just as quick to say that it should be stripped of various functions, sometimes including marketing itself!)  Here, research I have conducted suggests that greater power to the CMO can yield benefits to a firm. For example, in my research on power mentioned above, results show that when CMOs have the additional responsibility of sales, firms deliver superior growth. Notably however, only 15% of the CMOs studied had such a dual responsibility. Similarly, in a forthcoming publication with Monique Bell, I find that the addition of public relations to the CMO’s responsibilities, in general, has reputational benefits and impacts profitability. However, the findings are nuanced. The benefits of bringing PR under marketing’s purview, for instance, only show up for relatively small firms; large firms might be better served by keeping the CMO position independent from what might otherwise be considered related functions. (Because these large firms have powerful and diverse stakeholders, managing reputation might call for more focused, careful management through the creation of separate positions in the C-suite.) As for our finding that the marketing+PR dual responsibility for the CMO has a positive impact on firm profitability, a closer look at the data reveals that this is only true of firms selling primarily services (versus goods). A logical explanation we propose is that service firms have richer and more granular customer data, as well as multiple touch-points, and thus are able to gain the synergistic benefits facilitated by such a dual responsibility.

Thus, there is no one size fits all model. Note, by no means am I saying that CMOs should not strive to be powerful – or conversely, that CMO power is, in and of itself, a good thing for a business. Firms and CMOs should work to increase the power of the position only if doing so will improve the CMO’s effectiveness in reducing C-suite marketing uncertainty and enhance the CMO’s strategic and operational impact. Research and practitioner experience will no doubt highlight even more conditions under which the CMO position, and its various aspects such as compensation and role definition, can be shaped to ensure CMO success.

The CMO’s power to succeed isn’t only a product of firm-level decisions, of course. It also depends on attributes of the individual. The person hired to lead marketing must stand up to the task by being a strategic and operational marketer, adept at developing, protecting, and using effectively the firm’s key marketing assets. In the context of the C-suite, he or she must be authoritative as the voice of the customer – and more broadly, bring the information and insights that will reduce C-suite uncertainty in the marketing domain.

The requirements to operate effectively as part of the top management team also go beyond marketing-specific strengths. Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsico, in a recent interview compared the C-suite to an ensemble of musicians, with a good CEO making it capable of jazz improvisation. Her point was to emphasize that in times of rapid change, there can be no predefined score. Besides being a master of his or her instrument (or functional toolkit), each player must also be nimble and able to adapt to the others’ improvisations, which in turn take their cues from the changing demands on the firm.

If Nooyi’s analogy is apt, then one implication is that high CMO turnover cannot have positive outcomes. It takes time for a new CMO to understand the needs of the C-suite and those of the firm, and to therefore contribute effectively to a firm’s success. More established, and more powerful, CMOs can arguably achieve more.

Research on this issue, still in its early stages, is being pursued by many of us in the academic field. Meanwhile, the more firms invest in recruiting and retaining the right CMO in an appropriate position of power, and the more that CMOs invest in taking the right job and doing it right, the more likely we are to see success stories. This in turn should lead to more firms appointing a CMO, thus ensuring that marketing gets the attention it deserves at the highest levels of the firm.

The New Marketing Organization

An HBR Insight Center




Should Marketing or R&D Have More Power?
Why Technology Won’t End the Marketing Hierarchy


A Method for Better Marketing Decisions
Innovation Is Marketing’s Job, Too

Freedom of Information Laws Had a Big Impact on Corruption

Freedom of Information laws in American states reduced the rate at which officials committed corrupt acts by about 20%, according to an analysis by Adriana S. Cordis of Winthrop University and Patrick L. Warren of Clemson University. In the immediate aftermath of implementation of strong FOI laws, corruption-conviction rates approximately doubled, suggesting that the regulations made it easier to detect malfeasance. Over time, conviction rates declined, suggesting that overall corruption diminished, the authors say. The changes are more pronounced in states with more intense media coverage.

Even When Women Ask for a Raise, They Don’t Ask for Enough

Margot, my client, was offered a “great” job as the CFO of a fledgling unit within her company. It was a nice little step up for her, and she was thrilled by the prospect. Margot had earned this promotion by spending the previous six months running her department while her boss was out on leave. She did an exemplary job leading a vast piece of the company and was rewarded with a modest promotion. My first thought? Big whoop, Margot.

In her landmark study published in 2003, Linda Babcock found that women don’t get ahead at work because they don’t step up and ask for money and promotions. Our research indicates that this finding still applies, but perhaps not in the way people think.  In the process of coaching hundreds of top female executives over the past decade, we’ve routinely interviewed hiring managers and pored-over 360-degree feedback reports in search of trends and commonalities. One of the things we’ve found consistently is that women do, in fact, step up and ask for more money and better jobs. But they don’t ask for enough. They take what they get on their first try without lobbying for what they really deserve—more.

Dial it up. Many of the women we coach are worried about being perceived as pushy, when in reality they’re not advocating for themselves as forcefully as they should. To help them calibrate their efforts we tell them to visualize a TV remote—and visualize dialing it up three clicks. That brings the volume up to just about where it needs to be. When it comes to increasing your ask, there is a vast gap between wishy-washy and assertive.

Here’s what we mean:  1.) “I believe I deserve a raise.” That’s wishy-washy. 2.) “Based on my work during the acquisition I deserve a [be specific] raise.” That’s confident. 3.) “Based on my work managing the team during the acquisition I deserve a [specific] raise and I would like to be put on the fast track for a [be specific] promotion.” This is truly assertive.

This is the range of comments we see everyday from women in 360-degree feedback conversations. The best way to “dial up” an ask, then, is to take credit for your accomplishments and ask for a specific reward that is commensurate—and don’t accept anything less.

Raise your expectations. If there are two job openings, why not ask for the dream role rather than the smaller promotion? Always ask for more than you think you deserve in terms of the job and salary level. We’ve found that women consistently undervalue themselves. They also underestimate where a given position falls in terms of salary range. This may be why a man, in most cases, is paid better than the woman sitting next to him doing the same job. They expect to be well-paid and they are not afraid to ask for more.

Ask up the ladder. Research indicates that men are more willing to exchange favors than women are, and we believe that puts them in a better position to line up promotions. Women hesitate to trade on their relationships because that feels crass and unseemly. We coach women to network in a much more purposeful way and establish a quid pro quo of career favors with colleagues. In addition, women shouldn’t be reticent to network with their boss’s boss. Yes, you need to proceed with caution in terms of protocol, but courageously hob-knobbing above your level can earn you respect and get you noticed.

Ultimately, this is how Margot got the job she deserved. She did the CFO role well for a few months. During that time she got to know the division president and told him a little about her experience managing the unit. He was impressed and eventually offered her a much bigger position in the company. It took a lot for someone like Margot (she’s modest) to lobby so far above her pay grade, but she did it well and it paid off in terms of career advancement. And no one thought she was aggressive or overbearing, as she had feared.

In the end, it is important to put things in the proper perspective. There is very little risk—and tremendous reward—in asking for the big job. You will never be considered for it if you don’t. And simply stepping up for it means that you are registered for a promotion. Letting people know you want a bigger job is the first step in securing it.

Millennials Are Entering a Changed Workplace. Not.

Discomfiting StatisticsWhat’s Wrong with Millennial Employment, in Three ChartsFortune

Sometimes the U.S. government’s exhaustively and exhaustingly dry reports yield startling results, as Fortune discovered. A Department of Education study of college graduates shows, for example, that the wage gap starts early: Four years out of college, male graduates were already making much more than their female counterparts, even if you control for field of study and other factors. A male engineer, for instance, earned $68,000, on average, while his female peer earned $65,817.



Another finding: The 65.2% of for-profit college graduates who were employed and not in school earned a full-time median salary of $54,000, compared with $47,500 and $45,000, respectively, for graduates of private nonprofit and public universities. Another: Even though Asian-Americans are the best-educated and highest-income racial group in the U.S., ethnically Asian college graduates’ unemployment rate in 2012 was 11.9%, higher than blacks’, whites’, or Hispanics’.

Ferocious CuriositySeeker, Doer, Giver, PondererThe New York Times

I’m sure there have been past profiles of the intriguing billionaire mathematician James H. Simons—after all, he’s been around for decades, earning and donating vast amounts of money, generally enjoying life (despite the accidental deaths of two of his five adult children), and giving Dos Equis’s “most interesting man in the world” a serious run for his money. But if so, I somehow missed out, because the name and story were new to me when I saw this piece in The New York Times about the smiling, ever-generous cigarette fiend with the “ferocious curiosity.”



“Jim,” as he is known to all, not only did pioneering work in mathematics; he also founded Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund that relied on scientists to make predictions and trade in global markets. A few words to live by: “I like to ponder…pondering things, just sort of thinking about it and thinking about it, turns out to be a pretty good approach.”

Holiday at PradaThe Value of Luxury PoseursThe New Yorker

How might a luxury brand like Prada expand its horizons without alienating its customer base? New research from HBS professor Anat Keinan and doctoral candidate Silvia Bellezza sheds some light. In an expansion on Bellezza and Keinan’s article “How Brand Tourists Can Grow Sales” in the current HBR, the New Yorker describes their clever experiments aimed at figuring out how core customers of Prada and Marc Jacobs felt about the idea of stores handing out logo-emblazoned shopping bags, meant as limited-edition collectors’ items, to anyone (gasp!) who walked in. Turns out core customers are fine with this as long as the noncore customers are presented as brand “tourists” who use the bags to demonstrate their affection for the brands. –Andrea Ovans

Unsolid GroundLessons from a Drowning NationWashington Post On Leadership

Executives in struggling industries sometimes find themselves in the unenviable position of having to plan for the end of a company. But imagine if you had to plan the demise of a whole country. “It’s scary,” Anote Tong, president of the Pacific Ocean nation of Kiribati, says in this Washington Post video interview. His country is being swallowed by the rising sea. Some people don’t want to leave, so part of the solution involves planning to build up some of the land so that it can serve as a refuge. For those who choose to go, “our responsibility as leaders is to prepare them,” he says. “We have to provide them with the kind of education that would ensure that if and when they relocate, they would move as citizens who are skilled and would find jobs and who would move with dignity. Dignity is absolutely vital, because people who have lost everything else must not lose their dignity.”

Rich Dads, Rich Kids175 Years Later, The Mellons Have Never Been Richer. How'd They Do It?Forbes

My family is obsessed with books and puzzles. Yours might be obsessed with fishing or hockey. The Mellons are obsessed with capital preservation, and that’s the secret to the longevity of their wealth (of course, it helps to have capital to preserve in the first place). Thomas Mellon made it clear that each generation “must push forward a bigger pile than he or she was given,” says Forbes. This worldview is handed down without many covenants or restrictions, and with “nary a family office or annual meeting.” Compare that saga to Forbes’s tale of the Strohs, which shows that as “hard as it is to build a family business designed to last in perpetuity, it’s shockingly easy for any successor to tank it.”

BONUS BITSCountering Intuition

Has 'Disruptive Innovation' Run Its Course? Not Yet… (Knowledge@Wharton)
Playing Golf, and Other Mistakes CEOs Make (LinkedIn)
Linus Torvalds: 2014 Computing Pioneer Award (IEEE Computer Society)

How to Explain a Career That Looks Stalled

People hold on to jobs too long for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s loyalty to co-workers at a company you’ve outgrown, or maybe you spent a long time thinking you were just about to get promoted… but never got the call. Or perhaps you simply had a lot going on in your personal life and your somewhat dull job felt steadying. During the downturn, many people decided to stay in whatever job they had, figuring that any job was better than no job.

Whatever the reason, if you’ve stayed in a role long after your growth and learning in that role plateaued you need a plan for presenting your experience to recruiters and hiring managers. If this is the flavor of your resume – if your last decade sounds like the same year repeated 10 times — you’ll face tough questions as you look for a new job. When asked about your learning, your challenges, and your career plan, your answer cannot be a variant on “I played it safe.”

How can you show you’ve grown?

There are ways of making even timid choices sound less passive or defeatist. For example, you can focus on the benefits of continuity, and the things you learned by sticking with projects over the long term. Unpack for an interviewer the way your role changed, even if your title didn’t. Plenty of companies in the recession laid off some people and redistributed their work to the survivors without promoting them; if this applies to you, talk about the additional responsibilities you took on (without trashing your current employer, of course).

Dig deeper for good narratives showing skill development – just because evidence is hard to find doesn’t mean it’s hidden beyond reach. Many roles today involve digital skills they didn’t even just a few years ago. Have you had to learn new technical skills or software?

If you’ve been underemployed for a while, take steps now to push your personal learning agenda. Seek secondments, new training opportunities, and informational interviews to bring your industry knowledge up to date. Review what you’ve done to bring out all those points when you pushed back or took control.

Present events as a conscious choice (“I decided it would be better to remain in the role and see how I could develop it…’” or “That setback was actually fortunate, as it meant I had to find a work-around”).

If you have managed to achieve results in a declining market with diminishing resources, say so – but make sure you also present stories which show you can manage growth.

If you’ve been under-challenged for the last year or two you’ll need to work hard on evidence of recent achievement. Make the most of recent projects and successes, and show how you’ve kept your skills and industry knowledge up to date.

Prepare a convincing, short, upbeat answer to the question, “Why haven’t you moved on earlier?” Discuss valid reasons such as wanting to see a project to its conclusion, team loyalty, picking the best time to make a career change. Show your career is in your control, not steered by events.

Above all else, if your career has been on hold, don’t blame the economy. Everyone’s doing it, and it communicates a failure to make the best of difficulty. Emerging organizations are leaner, flatter, and require people to use a mix of lateral thinking and assertiveness to move forward on thin resources. If your career strategy to date suggests that you duck and hide when you hit setbacks, an employer will assume that’s your normal working style.

Strategies to Attract Superpower Marketing Talent

Today’s most competitive marketplace isn’t technology but talent. The challenge of attracting and retaining talent is particularly acute for marketers. Their function has been turned upside down and inside out as a result of digital technology, empowered employees, and connected customers.

In this new world, the best marketers exhibit five superpowers – each of which requires new types of talent. Our previous article describes each of these superpowers with examples from Intuit, Sephora and others. As a recap, they are: To hear what no one else can hear; to be part of the conversation, even when you’re not in the room; to leap tall piles of data in a single bound; to make silos disappear; and to bring out the superpowers in others.

How can you attract and retain the talent that can give you these superpowers?   What will create the gravity that pulls top talent into your company’s orbit and keeps them there? As a provider of marketing talent to Silicon Valley’s top companies, one of our firms, The Sage Group, has seen a consistent pattern in the talent strategies of the most effective and innovative companies. These strategies address who you hire, how you hire, and what you do once they’re on board.

Who: Look for dual superpowers

It used to be that top talent was exceptional at a particular skill or function. But the demands of marketing today means that top talent is able to combine skills that don’t often go together, and might even seem to be opposites. The combinations we see in most demand are:

Creative + analytical: These people use both the left and right sides of the brain to reach the head and the heart of customers.  As the data gets bigger, you have to know what questions to ask to turn information into insight.
Leadership + digital acumen: Many digital natives lack leadership experience and many seasoned leaders lack digital expertise. Truly top talent is skilled at both leading internal teams around a shared vision and building digital products and communities.
Content creation + product expertise: Brand marketers are becoming more and more like publishers. There are content creators who can engage an audience but don’t know the product, and product experts who lack the ability to tell a good story. The result is an ability to connect and engage both colleagues and customers.
Innovation + execution: Marketing teams can no longer be divided into those who come up with ideas and those who execute them. The best talent has an ability to envision what’s possible and make it happen.

How: Think of it as marketing, not HR

Ironically, many marketers don’t think of recruiting as a marketing challenge. Instead, they think of it as an HR issue. But acquiring and retaining talent is really no different than acquiring and retaining customers.

Most marketers would never think to execute a customer acquisition strategy without a clear value proposition, segmentation, pricing, collateral, sales enablement, metrics, and brand. Yet when it comes to talent acquisition, we forget these marketing basics.

Here are things to consider as you apply what you know (marketing) to get who you want (talent):

Value proposition: What is the source of your differentiation? Do you have a compelling elevator pitch and consistent messaging throughout your communications?
Market research: Where can you find the talent you want? What is important to them in a job, career, team and employer?
Pricing: What are the key elements of compensation (salary, bonus, benefits, equity) and how do you compare with competitors?
Sales: When you have found the right candidate, do you move quickly to close?
Metrics: What are marketing’s KPIs for attracting top talent?
Brand: Are you visible in the marketplace with a reputation for innovation and excellence? Are you known for creating “marketing that matters”?

What: Meaning over money

Keeping great talent is tough. We know one marketing executive of a top brand who has seen turnover of 30% on her team in the last year. It’s not enough to pay people well. In today’s talent market, you have to offer meaning as well as money.

The organizations we’ve seen do the best at retaining talent put effort into the following areas:

Shared purpose: Create a vision that unites and inspires the team. At SAP, Jonathan Becher has aligned 1200 marketers in 50 countries around the idea of engaging with people (instead of companies or buyers) and rethinking marketing as a growth enabler.
Stretch assignments: Empower people to go beyond their comfort zone. Visa is bringing in digital natives and giving them senior roles in brand marketing rather than digital marketing.
Removing obstacles: Don’t let politics, bureaucracy, and roadblocks get in the way. Williams-Sonoma aligned e-commerce, marketing and brand leadership to gain rapid consensus and accelerate decision-making on key priorities.
Great coaching: Recognize the vital role of employee’s relationships with their managers. Google has gone from reluctantly accepting the role of managers to embracing their pivotal role in employee engagement and productivity.
Intrinsic rewards: Look for ways other than money to reward people. For its Great Manager award, Google replaced a cash bonus with a one-week retreat with other winners and senior leaders.

These strategies help to create what LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman calls an “ally” relationship between employers and employees.

In a broadcast world, marketers’ success depended more on hiring the right agency than hiring the right talent. But in today’s digital landscape, you need top talent to create content, build community, leverage data, and drive revenue. It’s time to take recruiting back from HR and turn it into a marketing mission. We know how to attract and retain customers with an exceptional customer experience. Let’s do the same for talent. What’s your talent experience?

The New Marketing Organization

An HBR Insight Center




Why Marketing Needs More Introverts


Should Marketing or R&D Have More Power?
Why Technology Won’t End the Marketing Hierarchy


A Method for Better Marketing Decisions

4 Things You Thought Were True About Managing Millennials

There seems to be an endless fascination with Millennials at work. There are studies, books, articles, blog posts, and white papers — all about what makes them so different from the generations that came before. And as they continue to enter and occupy the workforce, more and more is written about how they behave (or misbehave) at the office.

But are these cries actually true? Is managing them all that different from managing Gen Xers or Baby Boomers? Let’s look at some of the most common claims about Millennials.

They’re completely different from “us” at that age. False.

Peter Cappelli, the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at The Wharton School, has studied the research done on Millennials and says it comes up short. “There is no real serious evidence that there’s a generational difference,” he says.

Sure, older generations look at Millennials and think they’re not like them. Those observations are based on cognitive bias, not actual differences. “It’s easy to assume young people are different in disposition because they seem different from you. But young people are always different than old people. For example, young people are much more interested in dating than those who are older and settled. And they don’t have obligations in the same way that older people do,” says Cappelli.

The only way to see if today’s 20- and 30-somethings are truly distinct from the 20- and 30-somethings who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s is to compare data. That’s what Jean Twenge, a professor of Psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me, and her fellow researchers did. They used a time-lag research method that compares people of the same age at different points in time. Twenge noticed some shifts between previous generations’ and Millennials’ attitudes toward work, but most were relatively small. And they’re not what you think.

Millennials want more purpose at work. False.

“There are some perceptions that many people have that simply aren’t true and this is one of them,” says Twenge. Her research comparing data from U.S. high school seniors in 1976, 1991, and 2006 shows that contrary to popular belief, Millennials don’t favor “altruistic work values (e.g., helping, societal worth)” more than previous generations. In fact, they place slightly less emphasis on “a job that gives you an opportunity to be directly helpful to others” than Boomers did at the same age.

All those companies offering pay to employees for their volunteer work? They aren’t responding to a need presented by Millennials. That’s a benefit that seems to have always been valued by U.S. workers; and it may be useful motivation for younger and older workers alike. “The same is true for emphasizing how the company benefits society; GenMe is no more or less likely to be interested in the social good than previous generations were,” her report says.

Additional research by Twenge shows that a concern for others is actually lower in this generation than previous ones. “Compared to Boomers, Millennials were less likely to have donated to charities, less likely to want a job worthwhile to society or that would help others, and less likely to agree they would eat differently if it meant more food for the starving. They were less likely to want to work in a social service organization or become a social worker, and were less likely to express empathy for outgroups,” she writes.

The perception that Millennials are more concerned with helping society has always been at odds with another perception: they are entitled and narcissistic. The latter turns out to be true if you look at Twenge’s research. While the shift is small, Millennials do rank higher when it comes to positive self-esteem. “In general, this generation has very high expectations when it comes to education and the jobs they think they can attain,” she says.

But, Cappelli points out what we need to remember. “If on average the age group is slightly different than a previous age group at another time, it doesn’t mean that each kid is slightly more entitled. You’re looking at a huge population,” he says. “And if young people are more narcissistic than old people, so what?”

They want more work-life balance. Somewhat true.

Looking at the data, Twenge did see a slight rise in how much Millennials value work-life balance. “Recent generations were progressively more likely to value leisure at work … GenX and GenMe placed a greater emphasis on leisure time than did their Boomer counterparts,” she writes. Almost twice as many young people in 2006 rated having a job with more than two weeks of vacation as “very important” than in 1976, and almost twice as many wanted a job at which they could work slowly. In 2006, nearly half wanted a job “which leaves a lot of time for other things in your life.”

But Cappelli points out that those changes are still pretty minor. Plus, he says, many managers overemphasize this difference, in part, because they forget what it was like to be young themselves. When you were 22, “you probably wanted to get out of the office in a hurry — you were interested in what was going on after work,” he said in this March 2014 New York Times piece.

Millennials need special treatment at work. False.

Cappelli has a strong opinion here: “That’s ridiculous. If you felt you were part of a special generation, did you get managed differently? Young people today will stand on their heads to get a job. Why do we think we have to manage them differently?” To him, managing people based solely on their age is biased. People have lots of qualities that make them distinct: race, gender, background. Don’t stereotype. Instead of assuming that the Millennials on your team need special treatment, get to know each person individually. “Keep an awareness in the back of your mind that some things are due to age, which is true for older workers too, but what you’re observing might have something to do with other things, like ethnic background,” he say.

Of course, it’s helpful to know how to manage people at different ages. He notes that this is where the cafeteria approach to benefits originated — the idea that people had different needs at various points in their lives. And in researching for his book, Managing the Older Worker, he learned that teams that incorporate different aged workers perform better. “It’s smart to have young people and older people work together. They don’t see each other as competition and are more likely to help each other,” he says.

Declines in Donations Outweigh Direct Costs of Catholic Priest Scandals

Priest sexual-abuse scandals have cost the U.S. Catholic church a total of about $3 billion in legal fees, settlements, and other direct costs since the 1980s, but the impact of parishioners’ declining charitable contributions has been an order of magnitude larger, say Nicolas L. Bottan of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ricardo Perez-Truglia of Harvard. A parish-by-parish analysis shows that the scandals caused contributions to the church to decline by an estimated average of $2.36 billion per year. From 1950–2009, allegations of abuse were lodged against 5,768 priests, or 5.3% of all priests active in the U.S., the researchers say.

The Stakeholders You Need to Close a Big Deal

A $27 million investment by Andreessen Horowitz fueled Pinterest’s explosive rise on the startup scene. A partnership with Starbucks elevated the mobile payment company Square to a whole new level. Every high-growth enterprise can name a moment of affirmation that changed everything – that first big win that established credibility and created the launching pad for what followed. But how does one actually close that crucial deal?

Based on many years as a business founder, advisor, and investor, I would argue that getting the green light has as much to do with understanding human nature as it does with business fundamentals and finances.

Specifically, closing a deal requires identifying three key stakeholders who have the power to influence the decision: champions, decision makers, and blockers. Even more, it requires understanding their motivations.

Getting a foot in the door, the first hurdle in closing a deal, requires identifying the right champion within the target organization. While a champion has influence over the decision, he is not the ultimate decision maker. In fact, champions rarely have significant power in the organization—but they know who does and their expertise is usually respected. Champions understand the personalities and processes on a granular level and can navigate the culture within an organization.

The primary motivation of the champion is status: champions want to feel important. The champions I’ve known have been motivated by a host of related factors – generating personal visibility, drawing attention and resources to their domain, or being perceived as innovators. Whatever the specific reason for endorsing a deal, the common thread is that champions are at a point in their career where they are willing to take a risk.

In 2008, I was on the business team at OnLive—a high-flying start-up in search of huge amounts of cash to turn a big idea into reality. In the face of the global capital meltdown the only way to procure large sums was from corporate investors. OnLive’s product enabled high-end video games to be hosted in the cloud and played from any device. AT&T was the ideal partner and investor for OnLive: they were playing catch up with Comcast in high-speed internet access for the home and with Verizon for wireless. Adding video gaming service to their broadband offering would give AT&T a unique advantage over their rivals. The ask: invest $35 million for exclusive bundling rights to the US market.

Our champion, Pete, was a mid-level executive tasked with bringing gaming opportunities to AT&T. Pete wanted to gain respect within AT&T both to improve his chances of advancement, but also (and maybe most importantly) to feel like he mattered. Realistically, Pete’s best hope for getting promoted was to raise his visibility—and OnLive was the perfect vehicle to do so. Cool new technology, new market for AT&T, competitive pressure, etc. Pete worked tirelessly to help us understand all the players within AT&T.

A champion, by definition, is deeply invested in getting the deal signed, and the key to working effectively with him is to focus on collaborating to convince the decision maker to say “yes.”

While champions are risk tolerant, decision makers are the opposite. Generally senior executives, decision makers have the power to say yes to a deal and are held accountable for the final outcome. As such, they have a lot to lose and their anxiety level is in direct correlation with the level of expected scrutiny should the deal fail. Regardless of where they started their careers, most decision makers spend the majority of their days dealing with macro issues and are unlikely to have the expertise required to have a detailed understanding of your company or product. This means that they rely on the advice of others for recommendations.

The decision maker at AT&T was CEO Randall Stephenson. His goal was to effectively capture the potential upside of an emerging market and shut out AT&T’s competitors without sacrificing his own credibility. The key to winning over a decision maker like Stephenson is working with a champion to provide enough data, analysis, and outside validation to ensure that those who would question his decision see a trail of sound and thoughtful due diligence. Pete spent 9 months helping us build a solid platform of credibility that would limit Stephenson’s risk if the investment turned out to be bad.

Blockers are the potential deal destroyers that stand between champions and decision makers. They have the decision maker’s ear. While champions are aggressive and decision makers are risk averse, blockers are subversive. Blockers don’t have the power to say yes, but they can get in your way and make it hard for the decision maker to give the go-ahead. For a variety of reasons, blockers are intent on derailing the deal. He or she may have an “alternative” idea that rivals what the champion is pushing or they may be concerned about losing the limelight to an adversary.

At AT&T, the blockers were VPs sponsoring competing deals, various subject matter experts, and an army of corporate finance people.

Like champions, blockers want to feel important, but their importance stems from being the naysayer. Whatever the motivation behind the detraction, it’s critically important to pay attention to blockers and either win them over or neutralize their misgivings. In the end, Pete and OnLive convinced the blockers, including Stephenson’s lieutenants, of the merits of the deal by proving considerable outside third-party support for their vision.

With that, Stephenson felt he could defend his decision. The end result was over $75 million in financing, an exclusive nationwide distribution deal and a credibility point that ultimately allowed OnLive to sign other distribution and financing deals worth over $250 million with companies like HTC, British Telecom, Juniper Networks, Hewlett Packard and Warner Brothers.

The secret to closing deals lies in mastering this balance – if you can support your champion, coax your blocker, and convince your decision maker, you’re golden. Each of the three stakeholders brings a unique set of motivations to the table – your job is to understand them in order to align their interests to get the deal done.