Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1399

Make Sure Your Employees’ Emotional Needs Are Met

In the early 1940s, Abraham Maslow started asking questions about human motivation— questions I study, too. In 1943, he published his first article on a theory he called the Hierarchy of Needs.

Today, the theory is usually depicted as a pyramid, although Maslow didn’t use one in his original writings; it’s a textbook creation. At the bottom are physiological needs: food and water. The next levels represent safety needs, then love needs, then esteem needs. Self-actualization (personal growth and fulfillment) is at the pinnacle, suggesting that it can only be reached when the other four needs are met.

People latched onto this pyramid structure immediately. But, in doing so, they forgot Maslow’s many notes about the dynamic messiness of human motivation, which we usually experience in one conscious stream rather than small parts. “We have spoken so far as if this hierarchy were a fixed order but actually it is not nearly as rigid as we may have implied,” Maslow wrote. He would probably be appalled at how we use his theory today.

Case in point: In my work as a psychologist and organizational consultant, I recently sat in on a strategy session at a global company. The managers were discussing how to better engage their employees. One senior executive suggested they focus on cash-based incentives. Why? She cited Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, explaining that salaries and benefits would provide people with food and shelter – physiological needs. Employees could then move up the pyramid to achieve career success and, eventually, a higher purpose – the feeling that their work bettered society. She felt that the organization had to get compensation right first.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard Maslow’s name in a meeting of managers. The hierarchy has become something of an unquestioned “fact”.  It’s cited in HR manuals, business class syllabi, and leadership presentations. People use it to push the idea that the basics – like a fair salary or a safe work environment – are the employee engagement tools that matter most. But here’s the problem:  the pyramid version of Maslow’s theory doesn’t usually apply to the world of professional work.

In today’s developed-world workplace, physiological and safety needs are, for the most part, already met. Salary and benefits can enhance motivation, but organizations shouldn’t focus on them disproportionately because emotional experiences can matter equally, if not more.

In a recent study of outstandingly engaged business units, I asked people what drove their high engagement scores. Only 4% of respondents mentioned pay. Instead, they highlighted feeling autonomous and empowered, and a sense of belonging on their teams.  We all know people who trade high salaries and even safety for love, esteem,and self-actualization at work – the accountants who become high school teachers, or the journalists who move to war zones with pennies in their pockets.

The reality is that human needs can’t be neatly arranged into a pyramid. Motivation isn’t simple, and it’s certainly not linear. Different people are motivated by different things. Even Maslow began to worry about the uses of his theory at the end of his life, arguing that the most important way to achieve personal satisfaction was to face one’s inner demons. He entered psychoanalysis himself at age 61 to deal with long-repressed anger.

I understand why we’ve latched onto the hierarchy of needs. A motivation checklist would be nice. But we’re not working with a fixed or universal process. There are many factors that contribute to engagement, including teams, autonomy, interesting work, recognition, and individual development.  So don’t let the basics of compensation and benefits drive your people strategy or the way you lead. Your employees deserve much more than a pyramid.

Overcompensating Someone After an Accident Can Backfire

Research participants who were overcompensated with a payment of €100 for a €10 textbook that had been damaged by spilled Coke were 63% less likely to attribute the gesture to true moral obligation than were participants who were compensated for the exact cost of the book, says a team led by Tessa Haesevoets of Ghent University in Belgium. Because of guilt and suspicions about the payer’s motives, recipients of overcompensation tend to be less satisfied than people whose payment better matches the level of damage, the researchers say.

4 Ways Leaders Can Create a Candid Culture

When leaders want to create an open culture where people are willing to speak up and challenge one another, they often start by listening. This is a good instinct. But listening with your ears will only take you so far. You also need to demonstrate with words that you truly want people to raise risky issues.

Take the former president of a major defense company, whom I will call Phil. No one at the 13,000-employee firm believed Phil when he announced that he was going to create a culture of candor and openness. And why should they? He already had three strikes against him: his workforce, his past performance, and his manner.

First, Phil’s workforce had successfully repelled every attempt at culture change in previous decades. Well-intended change efforts had continually failed. Why would this time be different? Second, his own leadership history was not exactly one of give-and-take. He had a command and control style and the closest he got to dialogue was one-way “management briefings” he held monthly with his “chain of command.” And finally, he was imposingly large, his face was one of studied expressionlessness, and his voice had an involuntary imperiousness even when asking you to pass the salt.

And yet, Phil needed to dramatically improve quality and costs at the 60-year-old tactical aircraft designer and manufacturer — and he knew that the stifling culture was suppressing the very ideas he needed. Once he set out to better engage his employees, however, within a matter of months he succeeded at transforming the company culture.

Like many leaders, Phil’s first attempt at fostering candor was by using his ears. And it immediately fell flat. At the end of a highly scripted management briefing he announced, “I will now take questions. You may ask anything you wish.” He scanned the audience for raised hands. None. Thirty painful seconds later he would have been happy for even a twitch to indicate engagement. Crickets.

While some executives would have blamed the audience for its timidity, Phil understood the problem was a lack of safety. He reasoned that the behavior he was trying to encourage was so counter-cultural that any rational person would be terrified to try it.

With the studied intensity of a good engineer, he decided to demonstrate that this defense company was a safe place to talk about anything. Employees had decades of data from their own painful experiences that told them taking a risk to raise controversial questions was quickly punished. Phil and his senior team needed to produce enough disconfirming data to call these fears into question.

Phil did four things that went beyond listening:

Praise publicly. He created a safe forum for people to raise questions—then spoke publicly about those who asked them in laudatory ways. It may sound like small potatoes, but simply adding a column called “Ask the President” to the weekly internal newsletter was a daring move. He instructed his communication team to forward him the most universally asked and highly sensitive questions. He personally penned every response. He was careful to sympathize with the questioners and to validate their concerns. The workforce took note—seeing evidence that disagreement would no longer be treated as insubordination. Questions could be asked anonymously or not, and over time more and more of the questioners identified themselves — which gave Phil a chance to commend them in the newsletter for their candor. Public praise is more about influencing those who hear it than those who receive it.


Prime the pump. Phil began meeting regularly with groups of opinion leaders from throughout the organization — encouraging them to bring their toughest questions. One topic that never came up was criticism of a major reorganization Phil imposed two years previously. So he primed the pump. In one of these sessions he said, “How are you feeling about the IPT/Team structure we started two years ago? I’m sure there are frustrations with this one. What barriers are you facing? What isn’t working?” When people don’t feel safe speaking up, leaders can show that it is safe by saying the hard things themselves. By saying the unsayable, and doing so with a tone of voice that suggested respect for this view, Phil created a little more safety. And the dam burst. For the next 90 minutes the group poured out their views on the inadequacies of the new structure. Phil acknowledged their concerns and invited them to discuss modifications to the model. Most importantly, this influential group began spreading the word that Phil was sincere about being open to criticism.


Lead by teaching. Phil went beyond encouraging openness to teaching it. He and his senior team taught hour-long sessions on how to have what my colleagues and I call “crucial conversations” — how to diffuse strong emotions, how to speak candidly without provoking resistance, how to quickly build rapport, and so on. As people acquired these new skills, their confidence in speaking up increased. The fact that Phil personally taught the skills showed how invested he was in having open conversations.


Sacrifice ego. On one memorable occasion Phil said in front of a group of middle managers: “I’ve been told I am unapproachable. I don’t know what that means. I would appreciate any specific feedback any of you would be willing to offer me.” The rest of the group looked on in awe as one brave soul, a manager named Terry, raised his hand. “I would be happy to, Phil.” Terry met later with Phil and gave a couple of suggestions – which Phil then shared publicly. Phil sacrificed his ego to show how much he valued candor and openness and that people were safe with him.

For two years my colleagues and I measured the frequency of people raising risky issues with peers, subordinates, as well as with senior managers at this defense company. Within the first few months of Phil’s campaign, these measures shot up by double digits, and continued to increase during the rest of this period. For example, employees were 15% more likely to report that they were comfortable sharing bad news up the chain of command—a remarkable change from the past.

Listening matters. But sometimes you’ve got to open your mouth too and make positive statements to generate the safety people need.

Does Cheap Online Video Trump Text?

TED’s clever Chris Anderson came to speak with the Skoll Foundation board and pointed out that it would take an individual an entire year to give 500 speeches to live audiences of 100 people each in order to reach an audience across the country of 50,000. With TED, though, a good talk can reach that audience in 6 hours.

That got me thinking about the dominant technology for influence or persuasion throughout history. Until about 500 years ago the dominant technology was oration — and arguably a particular form of it: compelling storytelling. But it was a distribution-challenged technology. The person with both a desire to persuade and a persuasive idea had to be physically present with the audience and there was no amplification. So the audience was small, limiting the effectiveness of the technology of the day in persuading large numbers of people.

The most powerful adaptation of that technology was to have a sufficiently persuasive story that someone would be willing to invest in the labor required to hand-transcribe your words and then use those transcribed words to propagate your story orally to small groups. The most successful such app in the world was the Bible.

Gutenberg changed all of that. In the middle of the 15th century, he created a breakthrough technology for the distribution of persuasion: the printing press. That produced a cost-effective way of capturing a persuasive argument in print, making many copies of it and distributing it far and wide. Books became the dominant form of persuasive technology and sister products like newspapers and magazines used the same fundamental persuasion technology: formulate your argument in prose, typeset it, print numerous copies inexpensively, and distribute them broadly.

Arguably that remained the dominant persuasive technology for half a millennium. And because it was so dominant, the general way to think about it (including the way I thought about it until I listened to Chris Anderson) is that it is simply a superior technology. Hamlet on stage at Stratford is great but in influence it simply pales in comparison to the Penguin version of Hamlet distributed across the globe.

But with sober second thought, I now see that the Penguin version was not so awesomely superior. It was superior in exactly one respect: it was an inexpensive way to distribute the content far more broadly.

It was disadvantaged in two important ways. First, it just isn’t as persuasive as the audiovisual version. For a given individual, Hamlet, the book, just doesn’t match Hamlet at Stratford. Why? We humans only have been exposed to persuasion by prose for 500 years. Evolutionarily, print argumentation is still a very new technology and our brains seem to like the old technology better.

Second, the printed book is pretty darn inflexible. Once the book is written, it takes a lot of effort to change it — and the existing book or magazine article or newspaper column never changes. You can do a new edition but that takes a long time. If you want to change an oral persuasion, just change the words and fire away.

So Gutenberg offered the world a gigantic tradeoff: sacrifice persuasion effectiveness and flexibility, and I will give you distribution. The world accepted the bargain and lived happily for 500 years.

Then in the early 20th century came the movies, which were very primitive, but oh how people loved them – even without any words in their first manifestation. The visuals were compelling. Then words came, and then color, and patrons flocked to the medium. In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner persuaded powerfully.

Movies’ distribution economics were an improvement: unlike plays, they could be distributed broadly without the actors present. But the infrastructure was pretty onerous. You had to have a movie theater and fixed times resulting in a non-trivial penalty in time, inconvenience, and out-of-pocket cost to the audience you hoped to persuade. Still the medium grew like crazy and produced many great fortunes and beloved stars.

That was merely the opening salvo in the takeover of a new technology. When the Internet enabled cheap, ubiquitous, and utterly flexible distribution, the world got YouTube and TED Talks. Persuasion attained virtually infinite reach, costless to the recipient — not only in out-of-pocket costs but also in convenience of time and place.

But best of all — by far — the Internet uses the evolutionarily preferred medium: audiovisual expression.

TED Talks and YouTube are not new persuasion technologies. They are a new distribution system for a very old technology: visual oration. We now have an age-old winning persuasion technology combined with an unbeatable new distribution methodology.

As someone who has dedicated untold hours to persuasion via the written word, this is a pretty unsettling storyline for me. Am I truly in the buggy-whip business? Maybe. But I will rationalize and assert that persuasion still requires compelling argumentation. The capability that I have been working on throughout my career — generating a compelling argument — remains important and substantially unchanged. But I may have to come to terms with the possibility that the book, the article, and even the blog post may all be persuasion technologies heading toward obsolescence.

What It’s Really Like to be a Female CEO

CEO DearestWhy PepsiCo CEO Indra K. Nooyi Can't Have It All The Atlantic

Sheryl Sandberg may have claimed one of the catchiest titles of the decade for a whither-women book — Lean In — but Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi has a pretty good one too, if she ever wants to go there: Her book could be called We’re Screwed, which is a memorable line from a memorable Q&A with the owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, before an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Just as women in the corporate world are entering management, in many cases their parents are becoming needy elders, their kids are growing into needy adolescents, and with midlife bearing down, their husbands are often reverting into needy teenagers, she says. “So we’re screwed…we cannot have it all.”



The leader of the world’s second-largest food and beverage company tells a classic CEO-mom story of her receptionist filling in when her daughter Tyra calls to ask permission to play a video game. Mom can’t come to the phone, but the receptionist knows to ask certain questions, such as: Have you finished your homework? Once Tyra gives the right answers, the receptionist allows her to play Nintendo for a half-hour. “If you don't develop mechanisms with your secretaries, with the extended office, with everybody around you, it cannot work,” Nooyi says, because the corporation’s demands on the boss are overwhelming. Her husband Raj always said that Nooyi’s priorities were PepsiCo, PepsiCo, PepsiCo, their two kids, Nooyi’s mom, “and then at the bottom of the list is me.” She adds, with a laugh: He should be happy he’s on the list at all. —Andy O’Connell

Worst to First What Is the Worst Thing You’ve Ever Made? Pacific Standard

Anyone who has ever tried really hard to make difficult, worthwhile things, whether businesses or books or pancakes, has a “worst” in his or her past. This is a piece about those worsts. Jen Doll talks to nine people about their complicated feelings around these (usually early) attempts at greatness. Most of the interviewees are writers, but the stories resonate beyond the literary world. She discovers that, by and large, worsts are viewed with more affection than revulsion, because they mark the path from apprentice to real practitioner. They’re the scars we’re proud to have earned. The revulsion is there too, though: Author Philipp Meyer describes his first unpublished novel as “600 pages of incoherent nonsense.” —Andy O’Connell

Religion and the Corporation Could the Hobby Lobby Ruling Unleash a 'Parade of Horribles'?Knowledge@Wharton

Regardless of where you stand on this week's 5–4 Hobby Lobby ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, which said that closely-held for-profit companies don’t have to provide the full range of birth-control options to employees, this interview with Wharton legal studies and ethics professor Amy Sepinwall is worth reading (or listening to, on podcast). It covers a lot of ground (including the "horribles" referred to in the headline), but particularly noteworthy are her thoughts around what we expect from companies.



The notion in the dissenting opinion that profit is the central purpose of a for-profit company is "a very cynical take on what corporations are about," Sepinwall says. She points out that many companies engage in philanthropy, help the environment, and take care of their employees. "If we're going to celebrate those aspects of the corporation," she continues, "then I think it's important to recognize that some of the convictions that a corporation might have are religiously motivated and, within limits, to accommodate those convictions." But making sure the leaders of a company do, in fact, harbor those convictions is another, trickier story — particularly if taking a religious exemption offers the company the prospect of saving money.

Well, Sort OfFlexible Working Extended to All Employees in UKThe Guardian

Britain may be on the brink of a massive sociological and economic experiment — or nothing of the sort — as a law goes into effect this week giving all UK workers the right to request flexible working hours, a privilege once extended only to caregivers. The law allows any worker to request nonstandard working hours to accommodate further education, child care, volunteering in the local community, working part-time, or even just avoiding rush-hour commuting.



“Modern businesses know that flexible working boosts productivity and staff morale, and helps them keep their top talent so that they can grow,” said Deputy Prime Minister Nicholas Clegg. Still, many of Britain’s small businesses already offer flexible hours, and as sweeping as it might sound, the law grants only the right to ask. Employers retain the right to say no, from which there is no appeal. That leaves it to corporate leaders to decide how much of a risk they might incur from sticking with face time and what they would stand to gain or lose from managing the hassles of offbeat schedules. —Andrea Ovans

Take a LookVisualizing AlgorithmsMike Bostock

This blog post by New York Times graphics editor Mike Bostock was enthusiastically sent around HBR this week by a colleague. In the post, adapted from a recent talk at Eyeo 2014, Bostock explains, in a way that even I could understand, how computer algorithms work. He offers a host of examples along the way. Perhaps most important, he notes that "algorithms are also a reminder that visualization is more than a tool for finding patterns in data. Visualization leverages the human visual system to augment human intellect: We can use it to better understand these important abstract processes, and perhaps other things, too." So kick back with a cold one and spend an hour with this beautifully designed piece. It may help you better think about visualizations in whatever business you may be in.

BONUS BITSPeople and Data

The Incorporated Woman (The Economist)
Facebook and Engineering the Public (Medium)
Astro-Matic Baseball (Sports Illustrated)

The Hidden Enemy of Productive Conversations

We have our work cut out for us when it comes to navigating complex problems, in large part because we are hard-wired to seek certainty as quickly as possible. The research of decision scientists reveals that our best strategy for tackling these problems is to harness cognitive diversity, because groups do better than individuals, including those with the highest IQs. Complex problems are characterized by confusing systems of causal interactions; untangling these requires multiple different points of view. Diversity, as Scott Page puts it, trumps ability.

But the benefits of cognitive diversity do not materialize automatically — they have to be engineered. And groups are just as vulnerable as individuals to the number one enemy of productive thinking: path dependence.

Path dependence is the tendency for things (such as events, belief systems, personalities, evolution, and conversations) to unfold in ways that are constrained by the parameters of the path they are on. It represents the enormous influence of the past on the future. The first typewriters established a keyboard that has became so ingrained that we are still using it, despite how clumsy and inefficient it is — we have not deviated from the QWERTY path. Path dependence is why police officers do not switch occupations mid-career to become advertising executives, why Christians rarely convert to Judaism, and why group discussions often move inexorably to conclusions that do not represent the fullness of diverse perspectives that cognitive diversity offers. It is fueled by self-reinforcing behavior — feedback loops that reinforce and amplify. It permeates every conversation, board meeting, executive team meeting, strategic off-site, jury deliberation, and political agenda.

Path dependence is not always a bad thing. It is simply a fact of nature, an instance of how things work and how a random event evolves so that it is eventually not completely random. But because path dependence limits the options available for consideration, it can be problematic when the wrong path dominates. When thinking does not stray from certain parameters, creativity and results are sacrificed. The more we’re aware of the paths that constrain our thinking, the less captive we are to them. To generate deeper and more creative insights, leaders have to push a group’s thinking beyond the narrow paths that otherwise take hold.

Managers need to be mindful of the numerous contributors to path dependence. For example, the starting point of a discussion has a disproportionate influence on the path the conversation takes. When a point of view is asserted, it can gain momentum through the support of a few, carrying it down the path to firm conclusion without ever being sufficiently challenged. A constricted path also occurs when a strong counter-position is tabled without being challenged. Ideas can become just as ingrained when they are not explicitly critiqued as when they are explicitly endorsed.

In exploring the problem of groupthink, the research of Charlan Nemeth reveals how easily “majority thinking” squeezes out “minority thinking.” Even when individuals are personally persuaded by minority dissent, they tend to support the majority view in public. Nemeth challenges the notion of free-flowing brainstorming, citing experiments which show that the “no idea is a bad idea” form of brainstorming generates less creativity than the kind where participants are encouraged to actively challenge and debate each other. In one of her experiments, groups who were encouraged to “debate” a problem generated 16% more ideas than groups who were encouraged to brainstorm without criticizing one another.

Discussion paths can become so self-reinforcing that Cass Sunstein points out that teams often become emboldened by consensus, arriving at more definitive, extreme conclusions than the individuals’ going-in positions. “Group polarization” occurs when initial views are accentuated by discussion, generating momentum on a single path without any counterbalancing influences. He concludes that avoiding polarization requires a structured process of deliberation to ensure participants are exposed to alternative lines of thinking.

Structured deliberation is key. Left to our own devices, even the most diverse groups of thinkers interact in sloppy, unstructured ways. Without intervention, team discussions tend to be highly path-dependent, limited to the most passionately argued opinions, the views of perceived experts, and the perspective of the majority. Complex problems require discussions that take flexible paths and cover expansive territory. High quality conversations require stewardship. Leaders need to create and encourage constructive dissent to open up new possibilities, expand insight, and generate better decisions.

Constructive dissent depends on two conditions: genuine independence of thought and constructive engagement between team members.  Leaders must encourage their teams to speak freely and independently, to correct one another’s errors and build on good ideas, and to allow the insights of others to deepen their own thinking.

Flexible, expansive conversations that resist path-dependent thinking are the best (and only) way to navigate an increasingly complex world. And fostering them is one of the most important jobs of our leaders.

Insurance Isn’t Safe from Digital Upheaval

Today, almost every industry is vulnerable to the effects of digitization and to what Accenture calls “Big Bang Disruption.” In Big Bang disruption, rule-changing innovation leads to the creation of entire product lines (or the destruction of whole markets) essentially overnight, with disrupters coming from outside the industry that they are disrupting. Technological innovations ranging from smartphones to Big Data analytics to cloud computing make it easier than ever for new challengers – especially those unburdened by legacy systems or brick-and-mortar networks – to gain access to high-quality market information and mass distribution. New services can quickly go from trial to large-scale rollout and massive adoption, and established players can fall quickly by the wayside; think of how mobile GPS applications have taken the market by storm.

The industries most susceptible to disruption are those selling information-based services that can be delivered digitally – and a perfect example is the insurance industry.

We estimate that up to $400 billion in insurance premiums could change hands within the industry over the next year. According to a global survey we conducted, more than two-thirds of customers would consider buying insurance products from non-insurers, and 23% would consider buying insurance from online service providers such as Google or Amazon.

And outsiders are responding, already experimenting with digital approaches to insurance. Tencent and Alibaba, the two leading Chinese Internet companies, recently announced a collaboration with insurer Ping An to offer insurance products online. Google bought U.K. insurance aggregator beatthatquote.com in 2011 and has since launched price comparison sites in the U.K., Germany, and France.

In the life and retirement services area, start-ups such as LearnVest offer personalized financial advice at fixed prices that most middle-class consumers can afford. LearnVest clients have access to a dedicated certified financial planner who can help them better manage their finances and achieve their financial goals, including budget planning, loan optimization, and investment allocation advice.

Of course, it takes more than market research and distribution to be an insurer. And new players face high (but not insurmountable) regulatory barriers, particularly in regard to capital requirements. Many insurers have spent decades establishing well-known and well-respected brands. They have important “hard” assets that are difficult to replicate, like large investment portfolios to back up claims payouts, complex back-office systems, and expertise.

These assets, however, will lose value if insurers don’t develop digital capabilities to meet the changing demands of their customers. At the strategic level, insurers, like other service providers, need to move from simply selling products to delivering “useful experiences.” Our research has shown that customers are willing to pay more for better advice and coverage that is carefully tailored to their individual needs. Customers also want insurance providers to not only insure risk, but to help them manage risk. And the proliferation of connected devices and the “Internet of Things” opens up new opportunities to insurers interested in meeting these needs.

While not new, telematics and usage-based insurance will grow rapidly in the coming years, as consumer acceptance of personal data collection is growing. Insurethebox, a U.K. online carrier that uses telematics to collect its customers’ driving information and reward them for driving safely, acquired 200,000 clients within three years after its launch in 2010.

“Pay-as-you-drive” insurance is a clear example of the growing collaboration between insurers and customers; customers share information and insurers provide better service and lower rates. Smart homes can already send alerts about security breaches and physical threats such as fires or burst pipes. State Farm announced late last year that it is teaming up with ADT, a home security company, to provide a special offer on a home security solution to its policyholders, who may also qualify for home insurance discounts. And in Kenya, weather stations are used to provide farmers with weather index-based insurance coverage. The system enables automatic claim payments based on data from the monitoring stations, which reduces the number of costly farm visits.

For senior management in insurance, and any other industry, the big question concerning digital disruption is not If, but When. With internal and external competitors using innovative technologies to launch products that better fit consumers’ demands, company leaders need to take pre-emptive action or risk the same fate as the pay telephone.

Most companies have taken steps toward “digitization.” They are using digital technologies to increase their own efficiency and to improve the customer experience. The next step is what we call “digitalization” – using digital technologies to create new business models, products, and services, even those outside their traditional businesses. By realizing that digital technologies present an opportunity, and by getting digitalization right, large established companies have a chance of not only surviving, but becoming disruptors themselves, capable of thriving in the new environments they create.

Make Your Marketing Content Useful

Marketing messages are for consumption, just like products. Your audience will value your brand and engage with it if you create content that’s more meaningful than all the listicles and other hackneyed advice out there — content that’s worthy of publication in its own right. That’s not to say you should recycle your white papers and expect people to ferret out what’s useful. Good content meets audiences where they are, and it’s tailored to them.

John Battelle alluded to all this in his 2009 prediction that agencies would become publishers, and vice versa, and I just knew he was right. So I began writing books and digital content to help my firm’s target audience address a pressing need — creating and delivering effective business presentations. That decision transformed my company. Until that point, we had done no formal marketing. In the few years since, we have experimented with almost every possible publishing channel.

One of the first things I learned is that readers don’t like it when you try to sell them something. If the content itself isn’t useful, people won’t consume it and your pitch will be lost on them anyway. You can sell more overtly through other avenues, but trust that your readers are smart enough to associate the value of your message with your brand. They’ll know where to look when they need the goods or services you provide.

For example, take Red Bull, the energy drink maker. Though it uses traditional marketing tactics, such as sponsorships and commercials, it also produces The Red Bulletin, a monthly magazine (print and digital) that delivers stories about sports, adventure, music, and other topics its target audience cares about. Whether or not you purchase Red Bull energy drinks, you can connect with the brand and lifestyle.

Offering content like this for free doesn’t mean taking a loss. My firm initially released my book Resonate as a multi-touch digital offering on iTunes for $17.99. When we changed the price to free, people downloaded more books in the first week than we sold the entire previous year. Because it got a lot of traffic, the book was promoted on the iBooks homepage, which exposed it to an even broader audience. And our business saw a huge bump in inbound project queries, which trumped the revenue we would have received from book sales.

Distributing through channels with analytics is key, though. In the traditional publishing model, the publisher and reseller retain the names of your readers, but when you are the publisher of your message, you get “paid” in loyalty and data — lots of data. Use marketing software to make sense of all that information and to look for patterns in who is consuming your content, which pieces people spend the most time reading, and so on. If the content is compelling enough, readers will willingly give their e-mail addresses to get it. That’s more valuable than cash, because unlike a transaction, ongoing communication creates and strengthens connection.

The more shareable the media, the better. If you create a great slide, for instance, people will pass it around and reuse it. It’s a self-contained, easy-to-copy bit of insight. One of our publishing experiments was to release a full-color, full-length book for free in PowerPoint. The book, Slidedocs, established guidelines for using presentation software as a publishing tool, and the numbers showed that the market was hungry for that information. To date, it has yielded 145,288 views on SlideShare, 100,000 views on our website, and 21,420 e-mail addresses. We offered a piece of useful content, and we were rewarded with an outstanding new community of fans, followers, and friends.

A good book seems to sell itself. Ideally, marketing content should function the same way. Your material will be read — and spread — if it’s useful to others. So find out what your target customers are craving, and feed it to them.

More U.S. Parents Tell College-Age Children: You’re on Your Own

American parents are more likely now than in recent years to say that their children should pay for college: The proportion of adults saying their offspring should pay for most college costs rose from 27% to 32% over the past two years, with those advocating that children pay every cent rising from 12% to 15%, says CNN. Accordingly, the proportion of parents planning to help their children pay for college declined 4 percentage points, from 81% last year to about 77% this year. Yet 96% of survey respondents said they continue to view a college education as valuable.

The Cost of Continuously Checking Email

Suppose each time you ran low on an item in your kitchen—olive oil, bananas, napkins—your instinctive response was to drop everything and race to the store. How much time would you lose? How much money would you squander on gas? What would happen to your productivity?

We all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. And yet surprisingly, we often work in ways that are equally wasteful.

The reason we keep a shopping list and try to keep supermarket trips to a minimum is that it’s easy to see the cost of driving to the store every time we crave a bag of potato chips. What is less obvious to us, however, is the cognitive price we pay each time we drop everything and switch activities to satisfy a mental craving.

Shifting our attention from one task to another, as we do when we’re monitoring email while trying to read a report or craft a presentation, disrupts our concentration and saps our focus. Each time we return to our initial task, we use up valuable cognitive resources reorienting ourselves. And all those transitional costs add up. Research shows that when we are deeply engrossed in an activity, even minor distractions can have a profound effect. According to a University of California-Irvine study, regaining our initial momentum following an interruption can take, on average, upwards of 20 minutes.

Multitasking, as many studies have shown, is a myth. A more accurate account of what happens when we tell ourselves we’re multitasking is that we’re rapidly switching between activities, degrading our clarity and depleting our mental energy. And the consequences can be surprisingly serious . An experiment conducted at the University of London found that we lose as many as 10 IQ points when we allow our work to be interrupted by seemingly benign distractions like emails and text messages.

The trouble, of course, is that multitasking is enjoyable. It’s fun to indulge your curiosity. Who knows what that next email, tweet or text message holds in store? Finding out provides immediate gratification. In contrast, resisting distraction and staying on-task requires discipline and mental effort.

And yet each time we shift our focus, it’s as if we’re taking a trip to the store. Creativity expert Todd Henry calls it a “task-shifting penalty.” We pay a mental tax that diminishes our ability to produce high-level work.

So what are we to do?

One tactic is to change our environment to move temptation further away: shut down your email program or silence your phone.  It’s a lot easier to stay on task when you’re not continuously fending off mental cravings. This approach doesn’t require going off the grid for a full day. Even as little as 30 minutes can have a major impact on your productivity.

The alternative, which most of us consider the norm, is the cognitive equivalent of dieting in a pastry shop. We can all muster the willpower to resist the temptations, but doing so comes with considerable costs to our limited supply of willpower.

Another worthwhile approach is to cluster similar activities together, keeping ramp-up time to a minimum. Instead of scattering phone calls, meetings, administrative work, and emails throughout your day, try grouping related tasks so that there are fewer transitions. Read reports, memos and articles one after another. Schedule meetings back-to-back. Keep a list of administrative tasks and do them all in a single weekly session. If possible, try limiting email to 2 or 3 predetermined times—for example 8:30, 12:00 and 4:30—instead of responding to them the moment they arrive.

In some jobs, multitasking is unavoidable. Some of us truly do need to stay connected to our clients, colleagues, and managers. Here, it’s worth noting that limiting disruptions is not an all or nothing proposition. Even small changes can make a big difference.

Remember: it’s up to you to protect your cognitive resources. The more you do to minimize task-switching over the course of the day, the more mental bandwidth you’ll have for activities that actually matter.