Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1392

Xenophobia? What Xenophobia?

A study in Germany shows that the presence of partially assimilated immigrants increases native Germans’ general satisfaction with life: A 1-standard-deviation rise in the percentage of immigrants in a given region is associated with a 0.142-standard-deviation increase in natives’ subjective well-being, says a team led by Alpaslan Akay of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. The reasons are unclear but may have to do with natives’ liking to live in a society that includes immigrants who hold jobs and can speak German, the researchers say.

No One Should Have to Choose Between Caregiving and Work

Years ago, I regularly saw a neurologist who was treating me for chronic headaches. On one particular appointment, my doctor deviated from his usual laconic manner and asked me a few questions about my daily life. I explained that like many 40-somethings, I had a busy schedule. I worked full-time, had three kids and a husband who traveled. And by the way, my father had dementia and was going to stay with me during my mom’s recuperation from hip surgery.

“Hmmm,” the doctor muttered disapprovingly. “That’s too much.”

“Well that’s my life.” I replied defensively. “No different from lots of other women out there.”

“It may be.” the doctor responded. “But your body is telling you this is more than you can reasonably handle.” Annoyed, I initially pegged him as a guy who doesn’t get it. But in time, his message sunk in.

Like many caregivers, I was in the workforce – while sandwiched between the needs of my kids and aging parents. Along with 65.7 million Americans, I was part of a large contingent of people who provide 80% of long-term care in this country. Most of us don’t even identify ourselves as caregivers; just good daughters, sons, mothers, and fathers trying to do our best, yet constantly feeling like we are falling short of doing an adequate job of anything.

The stressors of being a sandwich-generation caregiver can take their toll physically, emotionally, and financially. On an individual scale, providing care for a senior family member can cost families upwards of $5,000 year.

Add to the mix your own children (mine were teenagers at the time needing my attention, but acting like they didn’t) and there’s a significant price to bear — for the caregivers, of course, but also their employers.

On average, caregivers miss 6.6 work days a year. The lost productivity adds up to a big cost to companies — to the tune of $17 to $33 billion annually. And since getting rid of children or parents is not an option, exiting the workplace is often an overwhelmed caregiver’s last resort. While the FMLA (Family Medical Leave Act) allows employed caregivers to take up to three-month leave from their jobs, most people don’t get paid during that time. And for those who walk off the job entirely due to caregiving responsibilities, total lost wages are estimated to be around $324,000 for women (including any Social Security they would have earned) and only slightly less for men.

But what if your job could ease the burden? Some companies are making it easier for caregivers to stay at work. Once afraid to speak up, caregiving employees are now giving voice to the realities of what they are up against: When your cell phone rings and you get that unexpected call, you can’t really hide the fact that Mom’s home health aide didn’t show up. You are going to have to blow off that mandatory management meeting to take her to the doctor instead.

Companies support these workers first and foremost by providing flexibility. A surprising number of caregivers have told me stories of being unable to leave work early or come in late to help care for mom or dad, even though they had a plan to make up the time. Not only do employers run the risk of caregiver workplace discrimination lawsuits, but word spreads fast and competition for talent is fierce. A 2012 National Study of Employers by the Families and Work Institute and the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) supports this notion: “Organizations that can offer more flexibility around reduced time, caregiving leaves and flex careers will have a competitive edge in recruiting and retaining employees as the aging workforce and dual focus on personal and professional lives among younger employees become increasingly important drivers in the labor market.” Being known as a flexible supportive work culture is not just good management, it makes good business sense.

But employees often need more than just flexibility — they need help. According to a recent study by ReAct (stands for “Respect a Caregiver’s Time”) and the National Alliance for Caregiving, best practices in workplace eldercare include access to web-based information, resource and referral programs, discounted backup home care, and paid time off. Companies often start by surveying employees to determine areas of strongest need. One organization offered seminars on caregiving topics such as, “Should Dad Still be Driving?” and “Caring for a Loved One with Dementia.” When the seminars were over-subscribed, it was clear there were employees out there in the throes of caregiving. The organization subsequently moved forward with a resource and referral program as well as on-site support groups.

Employees who work at companies that offer eldercare benefits are more apt to reach out for help and, as a result, are more likely to stay on the job. Take Nancy for instance; a 48-year-old single mother who works full-time as an administrative assistant at a university. Nancy’s 85-year-old mother lived alone and was beginning to show signs of dementia.  When Nancy learned her organization offered an eldercare benefit called “Senior Care Planning” (part of Care.com’s Workplace Solutions program), she was relieved. Through this benefit, Nancy was connected to a master’s-level social worker who helped her come up with a plan.  Since the university also had a back-up care benefit, the social worker found a home care agency that could provide Nancy’s mom help with basic transportation and errands ­— tasks that Nancy would have done herself otherwise.

Ultimately, the social worker identified an assisting living community that would meet mom’s needs over the long haul. Nancy’s response: “This certainly made a lot of this easier. You almost need a degree in this sort of thing to be doing it! This is a wonderful blessing.”  And for many folks who are trying to figure it all out on their own, this type of expert assistance can be a lifesaver. If you spend all your time as a caregiver stressed out and figuring out logistics, you may miss out on the good stuff – and that includes being engaged in your job while spending precious time with your family.

My own three children are grown now. My home is quieter — my life less hectic. Since my dad died, I am more acutely aware of how fleeting life in the caregiving sandwich can be. Although there were some calamitous moments – I brought my dad to work one day when his caregiver didn’t show up — I don’t regret the path I chose. And I know that the time spent caring for my father and children, despite all the stress and uncertainty, had moments of joy and sorrow, with a large sprinkling of gratitude.

But as I talk with working caregivers across the country, and despite the progress some companies are making, I still see similarities with my own experience as a working mother of three children and adult daughter of aging parents: the secrecy, frantic calls to find last-minute care, and the frustration and fear that grew as I tried to do it all without letting my employer see me sweat — or more likely, cry. As caregivers, we can’t do it alone. Backup care programs, resource and referral services, and expert guidance can provide real solutions, but they can only be effective if the work environment is caregiver-friendly.  Ultimately, we are all in this together. At some point, most of us will either be caregivers — or need them.

4 Things You Thought Were True About Time Management

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t struggle with how to make the most of their time at work. How do you stay on top of an overflowing inbox? How do you get work done when your day is taken up by meetings? How can you get through a continually expanding to-do list? How do you even find time to make a list in the first place?

To make matters worse, there are lots of misconceptions about what time management really comes down to and how to achieve it. Let’s look at some of the most common suggestions and assess whether they’re actually true.

It’s about managing your time. False.

Time management is a misnomer, says Jordan Cohen, a productivity expert and author of “Make Time for the Work That Matters.” He says that it’s really about productivity: “We have to get away from labeling it ‘time management’. It’s not about time per se but about how productive you can be.” He likens it to the difference between dieting and being healthy. “You can diet all you want,” he says, “but you won’t necessarily be healthier.” In the same way, you can pay close attention to how you spend your time, manage your email, etc., but you won’t necessarily be more productive.

Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of The Progress Principle, whose expertise in this area comes from reading the work diaries of thousands of workers who documented their struggles to get work done, says it’s more about managing your overall workload. Many managers simply take on too much. “If you don’t keep an eye on the commitments you’ve made or are making, there is no time management technique that’s going to solve that,” she says. Sure, this might be an organization-level problem — many managers overload their team members ­— but she says that most professionals have more control over their workload than they might admit. “It is possible to say no. It is possible to negotiate,” she says. Cohen agrees: “While your schedule may not be yours per se, you can be judicious about what you go to and how you manage it.”

You just need to find the right system or approach. False.

“Having a system can be useful, but it takes more than that,” says Amabile. “And what works for each person, like spending an hour and a half on focused work at the beginning of the day, will not absolutely for another person.” The key is to continually experiment with techniques. “Some things may or may not work in a particular context or situation,” says Cohen. Try lots of different approaches — really try them. Don’t change the way you check email for a week and declare it a failure. Set metrics for measuring success, give the approach time, and consider involving someone else — your boss or a coworker — to help you evaluate whether it really worked.

You need to devote time to change. Somewhat true.

One person I spoke to said her biggest challenge was finding time to put time management systems into place. She didn’t have the day or two she felt she needed to set aside. Amabile says this may not be necessary: “Small tweaks can make a big difference. The best approach is to start out with a few small things. Progress in this context might mean that you find yourself with some additional time each day when you can reflect and think. Even if it’s just an additional 20 or 30 minutes each day, that’s progress.” But it depends on how bad your situation is and how desperate you feel. Amabile mentioned one person who decided to use her vacation week for a major overhaul to achieve less stress. She looked at how she was using her time, her level of commitments, and experimented with a few techniques that people had suggested. “She felt things had gotten so out of control that she wanted to give herself the gift. But that was an extreme measure that was necessitated by the extreme situation,” says Amabile.

It’s up to you — and only you — to get it right. Somewhat true.

This may be partly true. “There is no one who’s responsible for how productive you are,” says Cohen. In that sense, this rests on your shoulders. He is clear: “You’re expected to be productive, so you better take this puppy on yourself.” But Cohen and Amabile both say you can’t do it alone. “If you’re in an organization where there are pressures for immediate responses or turnarounds on all requests or there is no room for any kind of slack, it’s very tough to do time management on your own,” says Amabile. She points to Leslie Perlow’s research about small tweaks you can make in any work environment. Still, it may be tough. “Organizations unknowingly put a lot of barriers in front of you to get your work done — unclear strategy and clumsy processes, to name just a few,” Cohen says.

If this sounds like your company, Amabile suggests you make attempts to change the culture. “I would urge people to push back in ways that they believe will be effective,” she says. Raise questions like, “How can we be more productive around here?” This can often be more effective than focusing on getting out of your own bind. “You have a responsibility to push back on the organization,” she says. Cohen also thinks it’s worth talking with senior management, because it’s often bigger than any single manager. “It requires a redesign of how work gets done, where decisions get made, how they get made. There’s only so much that a system can take,” he says.

For the lone professional, getting control over your workload and schedule is daunting. But knowing the difference between what people say will work and what actually does may be the first step in the right direction.

Expressing Your Vulnerability Makes You Stronger

Can vulnerability fuel growth and success? Consider the landmark research of psychologist Brené Brown as described in her book Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead. It shows that we thrive in our relationships and careers when we engage deeply in complex, stressful scenarios. Success is about participating proactively in life—not about winning a game or profiting monetarily. “There is no triumph without vulnerability,” she writes.

Brown’s research resonates with ideas Malcolm Gladwell developed in his book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants. Gladwell delineates how vulnerable individuals and groups often achieve surprising victories because of their hidden assets and virtues. Similar findings suggest that workers who allow themselves to be vulnerable to expressing genuine emotion with customers display enhanced attention and performance.  Other research suggests that “mentalization”— the process of making oneself vulnerable to the feelings of others (even opponents and enemies)—propels human connection and well-being.

In my practice as an executive coach, I’ve been inspired by these ideas and have seen them in action. Many of my clients have achieved remarkable success by apologizing for errors, seeking help from competitors, and otherwise expressing vulnerability. Some of my CEO clients have made themselves vulnerable to criticism and failure by focusing less on short-term profits and more on transforming their companies into good corporate citizens and generous employers. They used the coaching in part to implement the character virtues that research shows to be so beneficial.

These values have guided my career and, increasingly, other areas of my life where vulnerability can beget success. Here’s a case in point. When I agreed to be head coach of my son’s Little League team, I anticipated a nice break each week from my executive coaching practice. It didn’t cross my mind that coaching a group of 10 year olds in baseball would teach me valuable lessons that I could apply to coaching executives.

Nearing the season’s end, my team—the scrappy Mariners—was facing the mighty White Sox, who were the strongest in the league. In the final inning, the umpire made a controversial call in our favor. The other coach vigorously protested the call on the field —and later with the league commissioner. The remainder of the game played out under a dark cloud. We won, but Little League rules allow the commissioner to determine that a protested game must be replayed from the point in question.

Emotions ran high as we awaited the commissioner’s decision. I was feeling angry about the protest, but also concerned that I (as well as players and parents on our side) was vilifying the other coach. After losing a night of sleep about this, I knew I needed to reframe the situation and think more productively about the incident. I felt vulnerable knowing that we could lose the game and also that I wasn’t handling the situation optimally.

I took some deep breaths and emailed the other coach to apologize for not yet considering his position seriously. By the next evening, we sat together at a local watering hole talking about baseball, family, and other shared values. He explained that his protest was rooted in a concern about preserving the integrity of the game by correctly applying the rules. While I wouldn’t have protested the call myself, I was heartened to learn that his action was principled and reasonable.

By humbling myself with an apology and reaching out to this fellow coach and dad, I realized that I was taking a leadership step that I encourage in my clients. When angry or fearful, step back and be self-reflective. Don’t vilify your boss or co-workers or employees or competitors. Strive to put yourself in the shoes of your perceived adversary. Avoid impulsive statements and actions. Express regret or apology. Gain strength by allowing yourself to be humble and vulnerable.

After the commissioner allowed the protest and replaying of the last inning, the White Sox’s coach graciously offered to drop the protest and concede the win to us. But I worried that this kind of win would be unfulfilling and fundamentally wrong. So I advocated that we finish the game, even though we would risk snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

We replayed the inning and lost the game. My son was the pitcher who gave up the final run. After he wiped away some tears and I gathered my thoughts, we left the field together proud of how we’d handled the situation. The experience had drawn us closer as father and son—and that in itself was a win. It also allowed me to model for players and parents how vulnerability can solidify core values such as sportsmanship and civility, which ultimately are far more important than wins and losses.

The Mariners had “dared greatly” and lived the season to its fullest, as Brown’s research exhorts us all to do. And I exposed my own vulnerabilities, in exactly the same way that I coach my CEOs to express theirs.  I was now positioned to coach even more effectively in the future (I was “promoted” to coach a summer travel team!), and our players were poised to continue growing as young athletes. The Mariners were a winning team because of vulnerability and courage. Those are exactly the personal traits I strive each day to develop in myself, my children, the players I coach on the ball field, and the clients I coach in the C-suite.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

When Fighting with Your Boss, Protect Yourself First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing’s New Digital Role Is Shortchanging IT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People Were More Religious Before Education Became Compulsory

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

Why You Lead Determines How Well You Lead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you do this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Marketing Organization

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