Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1397

Strategies to Attract Superpower Marketing Talent

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

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

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

Who: Look for dual superpowers

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

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

How: Think of it as marketing, not HR

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

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

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

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

What: Meaning over money

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

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

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

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

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

The New Marketing Organization

An HBR Insight Center




Why Marketing Needs More Introverts


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


A Method for Better Marketing Decisions

4 Things You Thought Were True About Managing Millennials

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

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

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

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

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

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

Millennials want more purpose at work. False.

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

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

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

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

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

They want more work-life balance. Somewhat true.

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

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

Millennials need special treatment at work. False.

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

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

Declines in Donations Outweigh Direct Costs of Catholic Priest Scandals

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

The Stakeholders You Need to Close a Big Deal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marc Andreessen and Jim Barksdale on How to Make Money

The tech luminaries on bundling and unbundling in the digital age. For more, visit HBR.org.

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How to Avoid Collaboration Fatigue

It’s nearly impossible to escape a meeting or conference call without someone touting the virtues of collaboration. After all, researchers have linked collaboration to increased innovation, and many have compellingly argued for collaboration’s role in better leadership performance. Collaboration just feels right — like a big hug or a warm puppy.

But collaboration also has an overlooked dark side.

Picture this: A complex issue is identified. A diverse, cross-functional team is assembled to solve it. Key stakeholders are gathered. Information is collected. Options are debated. Approval is sought. And then… nothing happens. So more information is gathered. More stakeholders are invited. More conference calls are logged. More debate ensues. More approval is sought. Round and round the project goes — when, where, and how somebody will decide, nobody knows.

This is a recipe for collaboration fatigue, and if consumed in large doses for prolonged periods, this potent blend of abdication, confusion, and indecision will poison your team. So the question is: How can you leverage the advantages of collaboration while limiting your exposure to the morale-sucking effects of collaboration fatigue?

You can start by answering the two questions below. If you have clear answers to these questions, there’s a good chance that a lot of your collaborative woes will subside.

What is the project’s purpose? It’s easy to assume that everyone on your team already knows the project’s purpose. “We’re here to solve the supply chain problem” or “we’re here to build a new product.” And it’s easy to assume that your team will know that its objective is to produce the highest quality solution at the lowest possible cost in the shortest amount of time. These are flawed assumptions, and they usually turn good collaboration into bad collaboration. For example, when your team inevitably has to choose between the lowest cost solution and the speed-enhancing solution for the supply chain, which objective wins? Should the new product address the needs of a premium customer segment, or be a market disruption aimed at attracting non-consumers? These decisions require a shared strategic direction, not an on-demand cost/benefit analysis.

So before you begin, make sure everyone is crystal clear about the primary strategic objective. It will help your team make hard choices going forward.

Who will make the decision? At some point, your team will have to make a decision based on the insights and research it has gathered. And although defining the project’s purpose will be a huge help in guiding the way, there’s sure to be conflicting opinions and unavoidable tradeoffs. When the time comes, who will make the call? Is it a single person, or a vote? If it’s a vote, who is the tie-breaker?

The best time to answer this question is at the beginning of the project before the pressure has mounted and the temptation to schedule just one more meeting, one more round of data collection, or one more conference call grows too strong to overcome.

To be sure, some collaboration fatigue just comes with the territory. The reason you pursue collaborative ventures in the first place is because you need to address an ambiguous, highly visible, boundary-crossing issue for which responsibility and control is spread evenly across many people. Decades of research show that these high demand/low control situations are a veritable petri dish for job stress and burnout.

But you can mitigate the fatigue even in a situation like this. The fact is collaboration also has a bright side over and above its (occasional) connection to performance. Human beings are wired to connect. It just feels good. You can leverage that positive inclination in order to produce more positive results — objectively and emotionally. All it takes is a little direction and a lot of decision making.

A Case for Group Risk-Taking

I work in the investment business, where risk-taking is an occupational necessity.  There isn’t anyone successful at managing a mutual or hedge fund who avoids risk; we just need to face it carefully.  Traditionally the industry encourages a solo approach to evaluating risk; at Fidelity Investments, where I worked for over two decades, each fund is assigned to one person who makes all the buying and selling decisions. When results are strong, the manager basks in the glow, prestige, and compensation attached to outperformance.  When performance suffers, a situation experienced by anyone who has managed a fund for over ten years, you feel like an impostor and reach for the Pepto Bismal.

Nine years ago, when I co-founded an investment firm, we chose a different approach to decision-making, characterized by group risk taking.  Two to four of us, working on each type of investment involved – stocks, alternative asset classes, venture or private holdings — must all agree on the merits of the transaction.

Why did we decide on this, rather than the traditional “czar” structure?

As a fund manager, I was very aware that the pain of losing money was markedly worse than the satisfaction of gaining an equal amount.  I didn’t realize that noted academics Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman were studying this exact phenomenon, which they officially named “loss aversion.”

I felt that I would be perfectly happy, in our new enterprise, to forego the personal credit for good decisions if I could also share blame for the mistakes.  I anticipated, but without any evidence,  that shared pain would be less severe than solitary suffering.  My partners agreed that the group approach made sense.

While I acknowledged that, perhaps selfishly, I wanted to avoid the disproportionate emotional response to loss, this was not the only reason we preferred a group risk-taking approach.  We had decided to create a concentrated portfolio of 30-35 names, wide-ranging enough to capture at least 90% of the diversification of the S&P 500 but of a manageable size so that three of us could carefully analyze and follow all of our holdings, an impossibility with a large number of stock positions.  Each of us would need to convince others of the merits of her or his selections, backing up conviction with strong research. We would only buy or sell a position if everyone agreed. Our combined effort offers “less opportunity to be sloppy” (as one of my partners puts it) and forces an extremely thorough analysis and close monitoring of our holdings. The bar to convince your colleagues is higher than for just yourself.

Studies have now shown that loss aversion leads individuals to make irrational decisions, but that groups often make better ones.  One study found that, in various lottery scenarios, groups of three or more were significantly more risk averse than individuals, particularly when the probability of winning was 40% or less.  Once people joined a group and discussed their options, they consistently moved toward a risk-neutral position. Groups did accept slightly more risk in the highest probability bets.

How is group risk taking working for us?  Because our performance has been good (knock on wood) since our inception, I have to like the process. Through the financial meltdown in 2008, I still felt sick staring at my screens, but I appreciated that we bonded over how to manage through the market implosion rather than point fingers at each other (although I confess, that still happened occasionally – we’re only human).

What are the potential downsides?

Groups may play it safe, with each individual choosing to pitch ideas most likely to win broad approval. While we all insist otherwise, there may be a subconscious bias against spending the time building a case for a concept that could be rejected as too risky.

Group efforts could also result in horse trading, where I might support one partner’s idea in the hope that he’ll back me the next time I pitch a name.  In over 9 years, I have not been part of any side dealing with any of my colleagues, and I suspect that this has not happened at all.

Another concern is that group decision-making may simply take longer. I don’t sense any lengthening of the days taken between first hearing the idea and pulling the trigger, but I know we devote more time collectively to the analysis. (Research has also found that groups don’t necessarily take longer to make decisions.)

Of course, no system of group risk taking could succeed without positive group dynamics, mutual respect for each other’s abilities, and a collaborative spirit – but that’s true of all teamwork, not just investing.

Toxic Talent Management Habits

All organizations have problems, and they always involve people. Indeed, talent management issues are a major cause of organizational underperformance. For example, a recent report by Deloitte, based on data from over 2,500 business and HR leaders from 90+ countries, shows that employers around the world are poorly prepared to tackle key human capital challenges, such as “leadership, retention and engagement, the reskilling of HR, and talent acquisition.” I see five specific bad talent habits over and over again. They all threaten the effectiveness of the modern organization.

1) Being unaware of one’s actual company culture: Senior managers, executives and founders often agree in their evaluations of the organizational culture. Unfortunately, these views bear little resemblance to how most employees see the culture. Viewed from the top, culture looks a lot like the PR blurbs found in company websites: “We are passionate believers in diversity, innovation, and corporate social responsibility.” Viewed from the bottom – when the values of an organization are crowdsourced by surveying most employees – organizations look rather different; that is, not so great. Open-source websites, such as Glassdoor, which record employees’ experience of their working environment, provide a much needed reality check for self-deceived leaders.

2) Confusing employee engagement with happiness: Although employee engagement deserves all the attention in the world, the concept has been hijacked by the self-help industry, who equate it with happiness. However, the main purpose of work is not to make people happy, but productive. And engagement matters precisely because of its connections with productivity, which are twofold: first, engaged employees feel more energized and see work in a more meaningful manner, which makes them more productive; second, when employees are given the opportunity to be productive, they are proud of their achievements, which, in turn, boosts their engagement levels. Notice that happiness can be left out of the equation here. In fact, many employees are engaged and productive without being happy; and it is equally feasible for employees to be happy without being engaged or productive. In short, managers should try to create meaningful challenges for their employees, instead of worrying about their happiness levels.

3) Ignoring the toxic effect of office politics: All organizations are political, but most underestimate (a) just how political they are, and (b) the degree to which politics eclipses smart and rational decisions. For decades, psychologists have been studying office politics – defined as those informal, illegitimate, and largely invisible forces of influence intended to maximize the self-interest of certain individuals at the expense of the organization’s interest. These studies provide compelling evidence for the adverse effects of politics on employees’ productivity and wellbeing. Most notably, perceptions of office politics have been linked to higher levels of stress, turnover intentions, and burnout, as well as lower levels of job satisfaction and employee engagement. Most of these associations are found across different job sectors, age groups and cultures, which makes organizational politics a global epidemic.

4) Misunderstanding leadership: Few topics are more widely discussed (and researched!) than leadership. However, popular views on leadership are out-of-sync with the science of leadership, and HR professionals are much more influenced by the former than the latter. As a result, there is a big difference between what organizations actually do about leadership, and what they should do. For instance, most managers – and this is also true for senior leaders – are selected for either technical expertise or personal charisma, when the quality that really matters most is their ability to build and engage teams. To make matters worse, charismatic leaders are often too narcissistic to put the interests of their teams and the organization above their own interests.

As a result, good leadership is rare; and managerial incompetence is the norm. Consider the following facts: (a) the average CEO is on the job for only 18 months; (b) disengagement is a global epidemic (with as many as 70% of employees reportedly not engaged); (c) the top causes of disengagement and most widely-cited reasons underlying turnover intentions all have to do with people’s direct manager; (d) self-employment rates have been rising steadily, mostly because people are fed up with poor management. As a Harvard University poll recently demonstrated, 70% of Americans believe there is a national crisis in leadership, and yet spending on leadership development programs has doubled in the past two decades (to $14 billion). It is time for organizations to select and develop people with actual leadership potential, as opposed to picking individuals who are good at navigating the corporate landscape, advancing their own career and self-interests, or fitting the popular stereotype of charismatic and Machiavellian leaders.

5) Relying on intuition instead of data: This is arguably the deadliest of all talent management sins, because it underlies the previous four points. How can you properly manage talent if you don’t know how talented your employees are? Despite the wealth of data and evidence available on leadership, management, and organizational effectiveness, most organizations play it by ear, and make promotion and hiring decisions based solely on the intuition of their leaders, board members, and managers. Although reasoning biases are universal to all human beings, they are particularly pronounced in managers, not least because they tend to be more overconfident than the average person. Allowing intuition to proliferate unchecked by metrics allows prejudices of all types to flourish while undermining true talent.

To be sure, intuition does sometimes work, but only when it is grounded in expertise. The issue, then, is not to completely eliminate intuition, but to align it with facts and reason in order to make intuitive decisions more effective than they are for the average novice.

In short, to the extent that organizations are able to accurately evaluate their culture, energize their staff, minimize the influence of office politics, and properly assess leadership potential, they will be more likely to outperform their competitors. And the best way to achieve that is not by trusting their leaders’ gut feeling, but by following a rational, data-driven, and scientifically informed approach.

The good news? All of these bad habits are self-inflicted wounds.

Restore Trust at Work with These 3 Words

We are allies. Three simple words. Yet when spoken by a manager to an employee, these may be three of the most powerful words possible.

Most of us spend the majority of our waking hours at work, on our way to and from work, or thinking about work. When we meet someone new, the first question Americans ask and are asked is typically, “So, what do you do?” When we describe someone else, we usually lead with their profession: “She’s a doctor.”

Given how important work seems in our lives, it is tragic that most employment relationships are built on a lie.

Managers pretend that employees have a job for life. Employees pretend that they intend to work for their company for the rest of their careers. But deep down, both parties don’t believe their own words.

You can’t build a trusting relationship on a foundation of dishonesty and self-deception.

Yet the “honest” approach of considering every job temporary, and every employee a “free agent” leads to a bleak, cynical world without trust or loyalty.

The answer is for managers and employees to treat each other as allies: Independent and autonomous players who voluntarily come together to work towards mutually agreed upon goals.

Treating employees like allies allows managers and companies to build loyalty without lying. Successful alliances can be renewed and updated, allowing employees to construct a successful career filled with professional growth without ever changing employers. And employees who choose to leave can do so on amicable terms and with fond memories of what the members of the alliance achieved together.

This open, accepting approach allows managers and employees to be honest with each other, providing a solid foundation for mutual trust, mutual investment, and mutual benefit. It creates a bigger pie for everyone rather than treating our work relationships as a zero-sum game.

We’ve thought a great deal about this approach and how to put it into effect, including concepts like Tours of Duty, Network Intelligence, and Corporate Alumni Networks. We’ve tried to build a rich framework that lets managers change their employee relationships, whether you’re a Fortune 500 CEO or a newly minted team leader.

But, really, your journey as a manager will begin the next time you meet one-on-one with an employee and speak the three simple words that show that you’re committed to an open, honest approach: We are allies.

Regulation Is Hurting Cabs and Helping Uber

Upfront confession: I’m a big fan of Uber and regularly use this private car service both personally and professionally. After years of experiencing taxi monopoly-like “we’ll get to you when, and treat you how, we please” service, riding with Uber is pure joy. And it’s not just me who shares this love. The company was recently valued at $18.2 billion (only Facebook has raised capital from private investors at a higher valuation). As much as I want Uber to succeed, it should do so fairly.

Much of its spectacular growth has been fueled by outdated regulation. This is because the rates of Uber’s primary competitors, taxi cabs, are set by local regulators. In Boston, for instance, the rates applicable 24/7 are standardized at $2.60 for the first 1/7 of a mile and then 40 cents for each additional 1/7 mile. These fixed rates effectively render taxi cabs to be sitting ducks. Uber and fellow ride sharing services (such as Lyft and Sidecar) can easily advertise big discounts and regulation-laden taxis are unable to respond. Conversely, during peak times, Uber can dynamically raise its prices while taxis are tied to the same static one-size-fits-all rates.

Uber is further capitalizing on this uneven pricing field by running sales this summer. In Boston. Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, for instance, the company cut UberX prices by an additional 25%. On Monday, UberX prices in New York were discounted by 20%, making the service cheaper than regular taxis. As a result, with the gulf between Uber’s prices and regulated fares widening, taxi drivers are at a further disadvantage.

Illustrating its aggressive intent on stealing market share, Uber has announced that in some markets (e.g., California), its drivers will be paid their standard 80% split on what the fare would have been before the summer discount is applied. So on a normal $20 fare (which discounted at 25% is $15), the driver would receive $16 and as a result, Uber loses $1 (plus credit card fees) on the fare. Thus, Uber is pricing below its variable costs. Interestingly, if Uber had a large market share (which to be clear, it doesn’t), pricing below its variable costs would have put the company at risk of being charged with predatory pricing by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

Local governments are the lynchpins to Uber’s growth in the car transportation services. The key issue so far has been whether Uber is providing taxi services and if so, this would require owning medallion licenses (which are expensive and in limited supply) and strict regulation. Uber has successfully argued that since its vehicles aren’t hailed from the street (a key privilege of a medallion), it’s not offering taxi services. While this distinction is subtle (using their app is so convenient that it’s arguably easier than hailing on the street), so far Uber’s argument is holding up in government decisions. Local governments need to understand that consumers view ride sharing services like Uber as close substitutes to taxis. Regulators are doing its residents an injustice by regulating taxi prices (consumers would benefit from a taxi vs. Uber price war) — and in the process unwittingly fueling Uber’s growth and enriching its stockholders.

While price regulation was relevant in the days when taxis had a virtual monopoly over private car transportation, technology has changed this market. As has occurred in a variety of markets including airlines and telecommunications, it’s time for governments to deregulate the prices of taxis to generate fair competition and truly allow the best service win. The longer local governments delay taxi price regulation, the bigger advantage Uber gains in dominating the private car transportation market.