Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1394

Don’t Sell a Product, Sell a Whole New Way of Thinking

We all know the story.  A team creates a groundbreaking new innovation only to see it mired in internal debates. When it is eventually launched in the market, there is an initial flurry of sales to early adopters, but then sales cycles become sluggish. Pilot customers are enthusiastic, but broader adoption is slow even with customer support and training. All the pieces are in place to create “disruptive innovation” and “cross the chasm,” but the results are disappointing. What’s missing?

The problem is that data, information, and value propositions are not enough to sell innovative products. We all know the saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But when it comes to innovation, the truth is often “I’ll see it when I believe it.” To sell your idea to executives, buyers, and users, you have to change not only what they think, but how they think. Without the right mental model, they won’t see the problem, understand the benefits, or make the change.

Mental models are how the brain makes sense of the vast amount of information to be processed every moment of every day. They are the lens through which we see the world. The filter that separates the signal from noise. The framework for attributing cause and effect. The “sorting hat” to decide what makes into our conscious awareness.

To understand the power of mental models, consider Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, an Austrian physician working in the 1840s. He observed that the death rate for puerperal fever fell tenfold when doctors washed their hands before treating patients. He shared his findings with his colleagues to introduce handwashing as a standard practice. Despite the data, his fellow doctors dismissed his findings. In fact, his colleagues and even his own wife thought he was losing his mind. They had him committed to a mental institution where he died shortly thereafter.

Why couldn’t Semmelweis persuade people of his innovation? In the 1840s, the mental model of disease was an imbalance of four “humours” in the body such as phlegm, bile, and blood. Every disease was entirely internal and unique. With this mental model, Semmelweis’ colleagues couldn’t see how handwashing could affect a person’s health. It didn’t matter what the data said.

A few decades later, Louis Pasteur proved that germs, not humours, were the primary cause of disease. With this new mental model, doctors could understand how handwashing would affect health. Personal hygiene became a new standard of care. Unfortunately, this was too late for Dr. Semmelweis. He had failed to shift his colleagues’ thinking, and thus failed to shift their behavior.

Innovators change the lens through which we see the world. Companies that successfully market and sell innovation are able to shift how people think not only about their product, but about themselves, the market, and the world. Steve Jobs was one of the great mindshifters of our time. He championed the mantra “think different” and shifted the way people think about technology to be more personal and human.

Shifts in mental models go deeper than traditional thought leadership. Most thought leadership tries to establish a company as an expert within the existing mental model. Shifts in thinking challenge the prevailing model.

Over the last ten years, Salesforce.com has grown from an upstart to a market leader in enterprise software. From the beginning, Salesforce.com has focused on shifting the paradigm of computing as much as shifting customers over to its product.

For years, the company’s marketing strategy has focused on the idea of “No Software,” reflecting the shift from packaged, installed software to cloud computing and software-as-a-service. Salesforce.com recognized that only after buyers understood the mental model of cloud computing could they understand the benefits of Salesforce.com as a product.

To put the power of mental models to work in your business, start with three steps:

A. Identify the shift

The first step is identifying the underlying shift in thinking. This is different than your value proposition. It’s an assumption (usually unconscious) about how the world works.

To find the shift, ask yourself a few questions. What was the original insight that led to the innovation? Where do you feel people “don’t get it” about your solution? What is the “aha” moment when someone turns from disinterested to enthusiastic?

Try to frame it as a From and a To. This is not about bad to good, just better for the current context. As an example, consider companies selling software and services related to “big data.” The shift is not about “simple to intelligent” or “smaller to bigger.” In the area of data, the “aha” might relate to a shift in thinking about decision-making (from intuition to analytics), in data models (from spreadsheets to algorithms), or how the data is used (from target to empower)

B. Find the sticking point

Next, determine how mental models are getting in the way of your success. The sticking points are usually in one of three areas. You can tell which one by the associated symptom.

PRESENT: The model of how things work today. Do people fail to see a problem that seems obvious to you? If so, they are operating with a different model of the current state. This is often because they don’t see how things are related. As an example, the movie An Inconvenient Truth was successful in shifting many people’s mental model of the relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming. If you are trying to get people to see a problem or opportunity, focus on disrupting their existing mental model.
FUTURE: The model of how things could be in the future. Do people recognize the problem, but fail to see how your solution could solve their problem? This was the situation faced by Dr. Semmelweis in his Vienna hospital. People agreed that mortality was a problem, but they couldn’t see how handwashing could make a difference. If you are trying to get people to understand the benefits of your solution, focus on shifting their thinking in a way that reveals why your solution would be effective.
TRANSITION: The model for how to bring a new future into being. Do people recognize the problem, and the value of your solution, but fail to make the change? Sometimes people recognize the need to jump from the trapeze bar they are on, and can see the merits of the new bar you are offering them, but feel they can’t make the jump. In this case, focus on a mental model related to the transition. Define a roadmap that explains to them how to get from where they are to where they want to go.

C. Build the program

Shifts in thinking don’t happen overnight, any more than going to a weekend yoga workshop makes you flexible. Think of it like learning a second language or building a new habit – in this case a mental habit. People need to see how the new way of thinking plays out in different contexts and situations.

“The really good innovations – the ones that change the world – need to be explained before they’re accepted,” Beth Comstock, the Chief Marketing Officer of GE, recently wrote. One of GE’s mantras is therefore “mindshare before market share.” GE’s strategy focuses on being a “content factory” to disseminate powerful stories. Interestingly, GE is also the home of Crotonville, one of the world’s top corporate universities. Perhaps in the future we will see corporate universities expand beyond employees to serve customers and clients as well.

Albert Einstein once said, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” Companies that help customers shift their thinking will be more effective at solving problems and ultimately selling products.

To Do Things Better, Stop Doing So Much

Greg McKeown, author of Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, on the importance of being “absurdly selective” in how we use our time.

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You Can’t Be a Great Manager If You’re Not a Good Coach

If you have room in your head for only one nugget of leadership wisdom, make it this one: the most powerfully motivating condition people experience at work is making progress at something that is personally meaningful. If your job involves leading others, the implications are clear: the most important thing you can do each day is to help your team members experience progress at meaningful work.

To do so, you must understand what drives each person, help build connections between each person’s work and the organization’s mission and strategic objectives, provide timely feedback, and help each person learn and grow on an ongoing basis. Regular communication around development — having coaching conversations — is essential. In fact, according to recent research, the single most important managerial competency that separates highly effective managers from average ones is coaching.

Strangely, at most companies, coaching isn’t part of what managers are formally expected to do. Even though research makes it clear that employees and job candidates alike value learning and career development above most other aspects of a job, many managers don’t see it as an important part of their role. Managers think they don’t have the time to have these conversations, and many lack the skill. Yet 70% of employee learning and development happens on the job, not through formal training programs. So if line managers aren’t supportive and actively involved, employee growth is stunted. So is engagement and retention.

Can you teach old-school, results-focused line managers to coach their employees? Absolutely. And the training boosts performance in both directions. It’s a powerful experience to create a resonant connection with another person and help them to achieve something they care about and to become more of who they want to be. If there’s anything an effective, resonant coaching conversation produces, it’s positive energy. Hundreds of executive students have reported to me that helping others learn and grow is among the most rewarding experiences they’ve had as managers.

Starting today, you can be significantly more effective as a manager — and enjoy your job more — by engaging in regular coaching conversations with your team members. As you resolve to support their ongoing learning and development, here are five key tips to get you started.

Listen deeply. Consider what it feels like when you’re trying to convey something important to a person who has many things on his mind. Contrast that familiar experience with the more luxurious and deeply validating one of communicating with someone who is completely focused on you and actively listening to what you have to say with an open mind and an open heart. You can open a coaching conversation with a question such as “How would you like to grow this month?” Your choice of words is less important than your intention to clear your mind, listen with your full attention, and create a high-quality connection that invites your team member to open up and to think creatively.

Ask, don’t tell. As a manager, you have a high level of expertise that you’re used to sharing, often in a directive manner. This is fine when you’re clarifying action steps for a project you’re leading or when people come to you asking for advice. But in a coaching conversation, it’s essential to restrain your impulse to provide the answers. Your path is not your employee’s path. Open-ended questions, not answers, are the tools of coaching. You succeed as a coach by helping your team members articulate their goals and challenges and find their own answers. This is how people clarify their priorities and devise strategies that resonate with what they care about most and that they will be committed to putting into action.

Create and sustain a developmental alliance. While your role as a coach is not to provide answers, supporting your team members’ developmental goals and strategies is essential. Let’s say that your employee mentions she’d like to develop a deeper understanding of how your end users experience the services your firm provides. In order to do so, she suggests accompanying an implementation team on a site visit next week, interviewing end users, and using the interviews to write an article on end user experience for publication on your firm’s intranet-based blog. You agree that this would be valuable for both the employee and the firm. Now, make sure that you give your employee the authorization, space and resources necessary to carry out her developmental plan. In addition to supporting her, you can also highlight her article as an example of employee-directed learning and development. Follow-up is critical to build trust and to make your coaching more effective. The more you follow through on supporting your employees’ developmental plans, the more productive your coaching becomes, the greater your employees’ trust in you, and the more engaged you all become. It’s a virtuous cycle.

Focus on moving forward positively. Oftentimes in a coaching conversation, the person you’re coaching will get caught up in detailing their frustrations. “I’d love to spend more time building my network, but I have no bandwidth. I’m at full capacity just trying to stay on task with my deliverables. I’d really love to get out to some industry seminars, but I can’t let myself think about it until I can get ahead of these deadlines.” While it can provide temporary relief to vent, it doesn’t generate solutions. Take a moment to acknowledge your employee’s frustrations, but then encourage her to think about how to move past them. You might ask, “Which of the activities you mention offer the greatest potential for building your knowledge and adding value to the company?” “Could you schedule two hours of time for developmental activities each week as a recurring appointment?” “Are there skills or relationships that would increase your ability to meet your primary deliverables?” “How could we work more efficiently within the team to free up and protect time for development?”

Build accountability. In addition to making sure you follow through on any commitments you make to employees in coaching conversations, it’s also useful to build accountability for the employee’s side of formulating and implementing developmental plans. Accountability increases the positive impact of coaching conversations and solidifies their rightful place as keys to organizational effectiveness. If your employee plans to research training programs that will fit his developmental goals, give these plans more weight by asking him to identify appropriate programs along with their costs and the amount of time he’ll need away from work, and to deliver this information to you by a certain deadline. (And then, of course, you will need to act on the information in a timely manner.)

What will coaching your employees do for you? It will build stronger bonds between you and your team members, support them in taking ownership over their own learning, and help them develop the skills they need to perform and their peak. And it also feels good. At a coaching workshop I led last month in Shanghai, an executive said the coaching exercise he’d just participated in “felt like a bungee jump.” As the workshop leader, I was delighted to observe that this man, who had arrived looking reserved and a bit tired, couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the evening. He was far from the only participant who was visibly energized by the coaching experience.

So go ahead and take the interpersonal jump. You will love the thrill of coaching conversations that catalyze your employees’ growth.

IBM and Apple: From Rivals to Partners in 30 Years?

The lynchpin of the new IBM-Apple alliance will be this simple phrase in the first sentence of their joint press release: “an exclusive partnership.” It sounds so innocent—a sentiment reflected at every human marriage. The two will become one.

But business combinations are not human marriages. About ten years ago, when New Jersey Superior Court judge Margaret McVeigh settled a partnership dispute between Amazon.com and Toys-R-Us, she wrote: “Long term commitment in a world where the technology is advancing almost on a daily basis is difficult to maintain. . .What constitutes an exclusive partnership continues to be a challenge not only for individuals who work on the partnership daily, but for business entities.”

For IBM and Apple, this partnership challenge looms even larger than it did for Amazon.com and Toys-R-Us. One reason for this is that the competitive arenas in which the new Apple-IBM partnership will play are fraught with multiple allegiances. In particular, their main competitor is following a distinctly “open” model that welcomes multiple partners. Google’s Android surpassed Apple’s iPhone in units sold precisely because it is sold by many players, such as Samsung, HTC, and Motorola.

The next shoe to drop in this battle, it now seems, may well be an announcement of an open, non-exclusive alliance in the Android world that ties together Google’s own cloud services with the enterprise reach of all those IBM-rivals left out of the exclusive deal with Apple, in particular HP and Oracle. (But the fact that these two are not quite on speaking terms may not help such a combination.)

This scenario is reminiscent of the 1980s, when in microcomputers Apple famously competed with an exclusive model against the “open” model of the IBM PC. Apple’s tightly-controlled approach failed then, and IBM’s wide-open approach succeeded, though IBM itself did not capture as much value as other players in the IBM PC ecosystem (Intel and Microsoft did).

Another reason the partnership challenge looms large today for IBM and Apple is that they have tried this before—and failed. The recent press releases of the bride and groom don’t refer to this, but history is clear. Yes, the press releases do admit that the two firms used to be arch-enemies in the 1980s. (As often happens, such rivalry yielded wonderful art—just watch one of the best Superbowl commercials of all time.) And yes, this phase is over and done with.

But we have not gotten an accounting of what happened a bit later in the early 1990s, when IBM and Apple formed the AIM Alliance—the “M” standing for Motorola, which was also part of the deal. At that time, all three companies were down on their backs, beaten down by the Wintel alliance. So they reached for a partnership that aimed to create a powerful new processor and companion software. Motorola and IBM were to work on the PowerPC chip, and Apple and IBM were to work on software in two joint ventures (colorfully named Kaleida and Taligent). Furthermore, IBM was to help sell Apple equipment in its enterprise accounts.

By the late 1990s, most of these initiatives had failed, save for the IBM-Motorola part, which did manage to produce a new chip design. The IBM-Apple part ended in delays and disagreements in software development, changes-of-heart on whether Apple technology would be licensed to others, and other such matters. The part about IBM selling Apple into its enterprise accounts sounded pie-in-the-sky from the start and, it seems, never happened. And, perhaps more importantly, Intel had forged ahead, redoubling its research efforts and producing ever-more powerful microprocessors. The PowerPC processor did get used in Apple machines for a few years, until Apple, too, switched to Intel (and now uses ARM too). The Apple-IBM joint ventures and the whole AIM Alliance faded away quietly after a rowdy start.

Like their attempted marriage in the 1990s, the new Apple-IBM alliance will either succeed fast, or unravel slowly. Samuel Johnson said that a second marriage is “the triumph of hope over experience.” Business combinations are not marriages. But we can ask now: What have IBM and Apple learned from their own experience that will justify the new hope? Investors ought to wait to hear that before getting giddy at the wedding announcement.

What lessons should they have learned from their experience? Here are some tests questions:

What will “an exclusive partnership” mean, concretely? A key success factor in any alliance is that the partners clearly delineate the scope of where they will cooperate and where they will compete. “Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote Robert Frost. Companies like Xerox and Fuji Photo Film followed this rule in their 50-year joint venture. In the IBM-Apple case: will IBM be able to make and sell cloud services and mobile software for Android and Microsoft machines? If it develops “industry specific” applications for the iPad, as the press release promises, will it also be able to develop comparable applications for other platforms?  From Apple’s point of view, if a smart, independent developer comes up with a killer “enterprise” app for iOS, can Apple sell this independently of IBM? You can go on and on asking such tricky questions, as we hope Apple and IBM have done; the test is—where did they decide to put the fence, and will it soon need mending (as Robert Frost also warned)?


“Unique IBM cloud services [will be] optimized for iOS,” the wedding announcement says. It’s impossible for us to see inside the resource allocation of IBM to understand what this implies. But another key success factor in any alliance is that each partner must devote internally sufficient resources to achieve what it promised to its external partner. IBM has many other pans in the fire, just like it had in the PowerPC days. Will the new work for Apple iOS get “optimized” sufficiently to beat out other enterprise solutions, such as might be offered by Android, Microsoft, and even by IBM itself?


Finally, will the partners be able to move fast enough in a competitive arena that is extremely dynamic? Mobile . . . Cloud . . . Data Analytics: Can you think of three fields that are more fluid today? Advantage will be to the swift. Alliances are great for putting together resources—that is why Apple+IBM is such an impressive formula. But contractual alliances are notoriously poor in making quick decisions, unless they sport an effective and well-staffed governance structure. So far, the press releases from IBM and Apple are silent on how this new partnership will be governed.

So, yes, the formula is powerful. Apple+IBM may well represent the idea that 1+1=3. But to succeed in that, the partners must also ensure that 1+1=1. The marriage must stick.

How to Spread Empathy in Health Care

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3 Reasons You Underestimate Risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Big Data Brings Marketing and Finance Together

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

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

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

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

Inside Intel

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

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

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

Organizational Anachronisms Exposed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Strategies to Promote Women Should Vary Across Cultures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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