Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1406

Is the World Cup Worth the Billions Brazil Invested?

With the World Cup in full swing, Brazil’s streets are full of cheers for athletes from the 32 countries competing for the win. Yet the jury is still out on whether Brazil will win in the long run for hosting these events or whether it will become a failed and embarrassing episode in the country’s history. There are three main categories of investment worth evaluating:

Investing in a positive image. Brazil has long been touted as being able to host the best parties in the world, and so far, Brazil has not disappointed. The streets are beautifully decorated, and a festive air has been evident both in the opening ceremony and in the events. FIFA has reported that almost all of the three million tickets have been sold, and the stands have been full of cheering fans, saving Brazil from the issue of empty seats that plagued the London Olympics two years ago.

But is it likely that this will improve Brazil’s image and increase tourism, which is often cited as a benefit of hosting mega-events? The answer is sobering: There is mixed evidence (see this study and another) that tourism increases significantly in the long term or that it offsets the costs of tourism-related improvements to hotels, attractions, and infrastructure.

What is more, the damage that can be caused to tourism by unrest can more than outweigh the benefits of being an attractive place with a good party atmosphere. While many of the recent protests in Brazil’s biggest cities are moving out of the spotlight, those in Sao Paolo have been the biggest issue facing this mega-event so far, clashing with the bright and cheerful atmosphere in the rest of the country and serving to remind fans that there are bigger issues at stake than the ultimate victor of the competition. The strike of the city’s public transportation workers has also created major disruptions to spectators and has embarrassed Brazil on the world stage. This may end up having a greater impact on Brazil’s image as a safe and stable place to travel to or invest in.

Investing in urban infrastructure. Brazil is reported to have spent $11 billion to $14 billion on preparations for the World Cup. Most of this has gone to the construction of stadiums (both new builds and refurbishments) and the construction of supporting infrastructure in the 12 cities hosting events around the country. This is a huge sum for any urban project, and it is clear that residents have expected this outlay to produce significant improvements. Mega-events typically try to offset the cost of investment against long-term benefits, such as improved transportation, increased investment in the country, and improved sports facilities. The cities that have been most successful investing in mega-events have integrated these plans into a long-term strategy for redevelopment, entwining plans in the ultimate objectives of the residents of that city. Barcelona, for example, used the 1992 Olympics to rejuvenate the city, which resulted in a significantly improved urban core.

However, the legacy and benefits of mega-events are notoriously difficult to measure, and it is exceedingly unusual for the full cost of a mega-event to be recovered, even when accounting for better infrastructure. The construction for the World Cup has been over budget and late, and while this is par for the course for many mega-events, it doesn’t mean that it is a good investment. Sadly, eight workers lost their lives during the construction, a disturbingly high number for the industry and another black mark for the event in the glare of the global media spotlight.

Investing in sport. One of the benefits of hosting the World Cup is that the games are held in a number of different cities, meaning that the distribution of funds is spread more widely across the country than is the case with the Olympics, which are concentrated in a single city. Ideally, this should allow the opportunity to bring elite sporting facilities to a number of areas throughout Brazil, providing opportunities for developing young athletes and increasing access to the much-loved national sport of soccer.

While this is certainly the case for some of the stadiums that have been built in Brazil, many of the facilities have been criticized for being built in remote locations that do not have major sports teams. These may nevertheless serve to catalyze local regeneration if the legacy plans are realized. But given the opposition that many of them have faced, it will be a long and difficult challenge to transform and maintain these facilities. A number of other cities have faced similar challenges after mega-events: The Athens 2004 Olympic Games are often cited for having created a number of white elephants, or empty stadiums.

Brazil may still be able to capitalize on some of its investments in the World Cup, but there are a number of signs that it may have missed its golden opportunity to make a significant difference in the lives of its citizens by giving the urban infrastructure a major coordinated boost. There is certainly a risk that the country will be left with empty stadiums and good memories, rather than any material impact.

It’s not too late for the Olympics, though.  There is still time for Brazil to make significant strides in consolidating its plans and delivering on the legacies promised. The concerns of the public raised in recent protests should be heeded, and organizers should really think about the value that can still be achieved.

When to Go with Your Gut

Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, on how to know when simple rules and snap decisions will outperform analytical models. For more, read Risk Savvy: How to Make Good Decisions.

Download this podcast

Why Women Don’t Negotiate Their Job Offers

Research shows that women are more reticent than men to negotiate their salary offers. For instance, one study of graduating MBA students found that half of the men had negotiated their job offers as compared to only one eighth of the women. This general pattern has been replicated in survey studies of working adults and in laboratory experiments. It begs the question: Why? Is this a “confidence” problem? Is negotiation a skill for which men are simply better socialized than women? Why leave money on the table?

Researchers have examined the why, and the answer has more to do with how women are treated when they negotiate than it has to do with their general confidence or skills at negotiation. Numerous studies have been conducted in which participants rate their impressions of employees who negotiate for pay and of employees who let the same opportunity to negotiate pass them by. The researchers then compared people’s willingness to work with that employee after evaluators saw him or her negotiate, or not. If evaluators were less inclined to work with the same employee after seeing him or negotiate, we deemed that the “social cost” of negotiation.

In repeated studies, the social cost of negotiating for higher pay has been found to be greater for women than it is for men. Men can certainly overplay their hand and alienate negotiating counterparts. However, in most published studies, the social cost of negotiating for pay is not significant for men, while it is significant for women.

The results of this research are important to understand before one criticizes a woman — or a woman criticizes herself — for being reluctant to negotiate for more pay. Their reticence is based on an accurate read of the social environment. Women get a nervous feeling about negotiating for higher pay because they are intuiting — correctly — that self-advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them — more so than for men.

But here’s a twist: we love it when women negotiate assertively for others. It’s just when women are negotiating assertively for themselves — particularly around pay — where we find a backlash. Unsurprisingly, research also shows that women perform better (e.g., negotiate higher salaries) when their role is to advocate for others as opposed to negotiating for more for themselves. Men’s behavior and the ensuing social effects don’t shift much depending on whether they are advocating for themselves or others.

OK. So, we shouldn’t blame women for being more reticent than men to negotiate for higher pay. But, is there anything that women can do about it? Thankfully, yes.

The answer is to use a “relational account” — or what I have learned from Sheryl Sandberg to call a “think personally, act communally” strategy. Using a “relational account” or “I-We” strategy involves asking for what you want while signaling to your negotiating counterpart that you are also taking their perspective. So, how does it work?

First, you want to explain to your negotiating counterpart why — in their eyes — it’s legitimate for you to be negotiating (i.e., appropriate or justified under the circumstances). Sheryl says that in her negotiations with Facebook, she told them, “Of course you realize that you’re hiring me to run your deal team so you want me to be a good negotiator.” Sandberg wanted Facebook to see her negotiating as legitimate because, if she didn’t negotiate, they should be worried about whether they’d made the right hire.

Second, you want to signal to your negotiating counterpart that you care about organizational relationships. After pointing out that they should want her to be a good negotiator, Sheryl recounts saying, “This is the only time you and I will ever be on opposite sides of the table.” In other words, “I am clear that we’re on the same team here.”

In experimental research testing evaluators’ impressions of alternative negotiating scripts, we found that relational accounts helped women both get what they wanted and make the impression that they wanted to make. For instance, one successful relational account that we tested was very similar to Sheryl’s, but was written for a more junior employee: “I don’t know how typical it is for people at my level to negotiate, but I’m hopeful that you’ll see my skill at negotiating as something important that I can bring to the job.” Note that I’m not suggesting that women use these scripts word-for-word. Come up with an “I-We strategy” that makes sense in context and feels authentic to you.

When the explanation for why the woman was negotiating seemed legitimate, people were more inclined to grant her compensation request (as compared to when she was simply negotiating for a higher salary without that explanation). When her script communicated concern for organizational relationships, evaluators were more inclined to work with her. Indeed, there was no significant difference in the willingness to work with a female employee who negotiated using a relational account (“I-We” strategy) as compared to female employees who let the opportunity to negotiate for a raise pass. Variation in the negotiation scripts did not significantly influence the evaluations of male negotiators.

I should highlight that not every legitimate explanation for negotiating helped women. For instance, conventional wisdom in the negotiation community has been to negotiate for a raise when you have another job offer. We tested multiple negotiation scripts based on an outside offer — even ones suggesting that the offer just dropped in the employee’s lap. Unfortunately, in all of the outside-offer scripts we tested, the suggestion that the employee would leave if the offer were not matched seemed to undermine the impression that the employee cared about organizational relationships. As a result, evaluators reported being more willing to grant a woman with an outside offer a raise, but they were disinclined to work with her (as compared to if she let the opportunity to negotiate pass). The outside-offer scripts had no significant effects on the evaluation of male negotiators.

The key to a relational account (or “I-We”) strategy is to explain why your counterpart should perceive your negotiating as legitimate in terms that also communicate your concern for organizational relationships.

I should acknowledge that this idea of using “relational accounts” or “I-We” strategies drives some women crazy. It makes them feel like they are bending to unjust stereotypes or simply being inauthentic. I sympathize with that reaction. We were surprised while doing the research that it would be so hard to make the backlash effects go away. But, every movement needs its idealists and pragmatists, and I am playing the pragmatist here.

It is good advice for any negotiator – male or female — to ask for what they want in terms that their counterparts will perceive as legitimate and mutually beneficial. But for women, it is especially helpful because it unburdens them from the social costs of self-advocating. By sharing this research, I hope to shed light on this bias. Most people don’t want to discriminate. With more self-awareness as negotiators and evaluators, we can work to close this gender gap.

Focus On: Negotiating




Negotiating Is Not the Same as Haggling
Negotiate from the Inside Out
To Negotiate Effectively, First Shake Hands
The Simplest Way to Build Trust

Manage a Difficult Conversation with Emotional Intelligence

I once worked with a leader — we’ll call him Karl — who needed to have a difficult conversation with an underperforming (but key) team member. To prepare, Karl built ammunition by creating a list of the employee’s shortcomings. He sensed that the interaction would end poorly and he felt extremely anxious about it.

Workplace conflicts like this one are often unavoidable. Just as you disagree with your spouse, your best friend, or your parents, at some point you are likely to disagree with someone at work. Many leaders, like Karl, choose to approach situations of conflict with logic: if a team member isn’t pulling his weight, get proof; if your office mate makes an egregious mistake, take note of the ways her mistake breaches company policy.

But while logic is an important aspect of conflict resolution, it is only part of the equation. Emotions cannot be ignored. In fact, research suggests that suppressing your emotions – deciding not to say something when you’re upset – can lead to bad results. Have you ever yelled at your spouse or child after a frustrating day at work – a frustration that had nothing to do with him or her? That’s what psychologists refer to as “emotional leakage.” When you bottle up your feelings, you’re likely to express your emotions in unintended ways instead, either sarcastically or in a completely different context. Suppressing your emotions is associated with poor memory, difficulties in relationships, and physiological costs (like cardiovascular health problems). Emotions matter.

When Karl came to me with questions about his upcoming meeting, I walked him through a plan based on the principles of emotional intelligence. This plan would help him acknowledge logic and emotion during the meeting.

First, I suggested that Karl recognize the emotions at work in the situation. Karl knew how he felt – he was extremely frustrated. However, he also needed to consider the emotions of the underperforming employee, who likely felt scared and threatened. Perspective-taking is essential to effectively navigating conflict. When they sat down, Karl suspicions were confirmed: he could tell from her crossed arms and facial expression that she was already on the defensive.

Second, Karl needed to assess the impact of those emotions on his behavior and the behavior of his employee. Emotions are double-edged swords. Everyday negative emotions help us stay analytical and task-focused. During a conflict, though, negative emotions can result in criticism and nitpicking (just the type of thinking that Karl had been engaged in). Positive emotions support big picture thinking, brainstorming, and creativity. But if we’re not careful, we can start looking at the world through rose-colored glasses and lose track of reality. With the power of positive and negative emotions in mind, Karl began his conversation by highlighting the reasons why he wanted to keep the underperforming employee in his office. He introduced positivity into the discussion, which helped them listen, relax, and engage in problem solving before approaching negative topics.

Third, Karl and I discussed the importance of understanding the swirling cloud of emotions present during this workplace conflict. Emotionally intelligent leaders are aware of what causes their emotions, and they also think through what outcomes are most desirable. While planning for the meeting, Karl began to wonder why: Why were they each experiencing frustration and defensiveness? Why was the employee underperforming? During the meeting, he shared his observations. He asked open-ended questions, hoping compassionately to understand what was happening for the employee. “How are you feeling about your current projects?” he asked. When she noted that she was bored, he continued, curiously. “Why is this happening? What are some of the key skills that you’d like to be cultivating?”

Finally, Karl needed to manage the emotions of the situation by deploying strategies that would lead him to his objective – keeping the employee in his office, and creating a plan to improve her performance. In this case, that meant scheduling the meeting over coffee in the atrium (this helped to encourage open conversation). Also, when the employee came up with overly optimistic goals, Karl logically demonstrated the seriousness of the situation, all the while praising her initiative. In the end, the employee felt that she was being treated fairly – Karl had listened intently and was open to her ideas – and together, they came up with a plan of action.

Emotions aren’t just the result of a workplace conflict. In fact, emotions usually are the conflict. They need to be acknowledged and planned for. Recognizing emotions, assessing their impact on thinking, understanding them, and managing them is a roadmap for navigating through those often-murky (and anxiety-provoking) waters.

Focus On: Conflict




Choose the Right Words in an Argument
Why We Fight at Work
Don’t Hide When Your Boss Is Mad at You
When and How to Let a Conflict Go

Education Needs to Factor In Entrepreneurship

Nearly every debate about the “value” of a college degree is based on two questions: “Is college worth it?” and “Does someone with a degree earn more than someone without one?” Both of these questions come up year after year as headline fodder despite the fact that at a macro level, the answer to both of them is an unequivocal yes.

Unfortunately, both questions frame the debate as if America’s jobs and income will automatically rebound, regardless of our interdependence on a global economy and the increasingly fast pace of technological change. There’s a third question we must ask instead, and it’s one with far more long-term importance to the economy: “Do college degrees adequately teach value creation?”

The answer, sadly, is largely no.

Value creation doesn’t mean creating individual wealth for our grads; it means empowering our grads with the know-how to innovate, create jobs and contribute to long-term economic growth. And who creates more value than entrepreneurs?

Although the mindset of young people is shifting toward a more entrepreneurial way of thinking, our education system is lagging behind. According to the annual 2014 Youth Entrepreneurship Study conducted by YEC and Buzz Marketing Group, 81 percent of non-self-employed individuals believe they will be a business owner or self-employed at some point because of the new economy. Eighty-seven percent of young people want to pursue entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, 62 percent weren’t offered any entrepreneurship classes in college at all — and of those that were, 62 percent deemed them inadequate.

At the same time, entrepreneurship in the U.S. is declining steadily; despite the increase in hype around entrepreneurship, the actual firm entry rate (businesses less than a year old as a share of all businesses) fell by half between 1978 and 2011.

This must change.

Here are some strategic ways to ensure that a four-year college education is most certainly “worth it” for the next generation of leaders:

Start preparing young people for success before they start college. Understanding value creation doesn’t start on day one of college. It starts with the K-12 system. To that end, we must help more of the youngest Americans access programs like Junior Achievement and Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE).

By providing experiential learning in financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and work readiness, these programs train young people to apply the “hard” skills learned in K-12 to real-world problems, preparing them to recognize opportunity in work of all kinds. Such programs also increase the rate of business creation; according to one NFTE study, 36 percent of their grads actually started businesses, compared to 9 percent of the control group.

Once students are in college, we must equip them with the skills they need. Namely:

Create real dialogue between universities and business leaders. Universities and colleges could bring in business leaders to create apprenticeship and internship opportunities, mentor students, and provide clear pathways for graduates of all degree programs to both find work and make an impact on their communities.

Bringing entrepreneurs in to help design curricula or mentor current college students, especially those earning MBAs or undergraduate business degrees, would provide the training they need to solve real, current problems through companies of their own. Babson’s hands-on entrepreneurship curriculum would be a good model for other colleges to look at.

Rethink the “core curriculum” to meet actual business needs. Thirty-seven percent of the YEC/Buzz survey respondents said that, if they found themselves unemployed, they would try to start a business or freelance — versus the 19 percent who would go back to school or the 21 percent who would take any job they could find.

However, if we don’t teach young people how to freelance or start a business in college — not because they necessarily want to, but because they might have to — then we are not doing our job. No matter the major, every degree program should include experiential learning so that grads are able to apply their learning to the increasingly high-tech, fast-paced world we live in.

To do so, educational leaders must start consulting with the people actually creating jobs when designing core curricula. Partnerships can speed up that process; companies like IBM are partnering with schools (again, Babson among them) to develop curricula that blends business training with the IT skills U.S. companies will need in the next decade.

Onboard more grads into startups. Getting practical experience in a small business or start-up setting is an invaluable experience for students, whether they plan to start a business or simply need to nourish the kind of 21st-century skills (team-building, leadership, entrepreneurial thinking) employers today value highly.

And yet, year after year, many of our top-tier grads continue to end up in the same three sectors: finance, consulting and law.

But it’s not for lack of interest — even though an astounding 88 percent of Millennials want to work for a startup, most startups have neither the cash nor the bandwidth to recruit at top schools and compete against major corporations for talent. Organizations like Venture for America provide a roadmap for onboarding America’s best and brightest into the startup world. Plus, VFA plugs its trainees into cities sorely in need of economic revival and capable talent (Baltimore, Las Vegas, Detroit, and others) — creating value locally while also preparing young people to create their own business opportunities.

Creating value can’t just be about one person’s individual learning or one person’s paycheck. Rather, a degree must also be about equipping a generation of highly educated and capable individuals to contribute to building a better, more sustainable economy — so that they can someday help create the tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs America needs to keep moving forward. That is the real value colleges must unleash in order to truly be “worth it.”

 

CEOs Sometimes Need Outside Help

We know we want leaders who are smart, decisive, transformative, and possessed of a singular vision. But there’s an often-overlooked factor that can make the difference between success and failure: a leader’s ability to go far outside the organization—mobilizing networks of critical expertise—to get help in solving problems.

Outside the organization? Why would the CEO of a huge corporation with vast capabilities need to look elsewhere for assistance? If outside help is truly needed, doesn’t that say something pretty negative about the CEO’s own staff and existing supply chain?

The reality today is that businesses, governments, and nonprofits are so complex and often must move so quickly that in many cases, finding answers to difficult questions requires tapping experts, service providers, and innovators scattered all over the world.

As Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, pointed out years ago, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people don’t work for you.”

Malaysian authorities’ initial failure to track and recover Flight 370 shows how a lack of outside help can impede solutions during a crisis. National and airline leaders weren’t able to adjust to the fluid and complex situation by engaging external resources in the critical first hours and days after the plane’s disappearance. Collaboration and coordination eventually improved, but still faltered at times.

By contrast, consider the 2010 Chilean mining disaster, which resulted in the triumphant rescue of 33 miners trapped underground. As Faaiza Rashid, Amy C. Edmondson, and Herman B. Leonard found, Chilean president Sebastian Piñera immediately and effectively mobilized not just the critical government ministries and industry executives but also a variety of outside experts across the globe—from an Australian mapping software company to UPS. At the mine site, project leader André Sougarret sought assistance while managing the boundaries of the rescue effort to screen out contributors who lacked expertise or workable proposals. Together the officials and engineers overcame unprecedented technical challenges and brought about a rescue that most observers hardly thought possible.

A growing number of organizations now routinely draw on timely assistance beyond their own boundaries to pursue innovation, solve business or social problems, or expand ventures. These initiatives go well beyond the largely transactional exchanges promoted through crowd-sourcing approaches.

They are also quite different from CEOs’ typical outreach to various stakeholders, people who are already invested in or connected with the company. Sometimes the experts are freelancers or employees in other businesses; sometimes they’re in governments, NGOs, or academia. If the challenge at hand is industrywide, they might even be competitors. As a result, today’s leaders need to be good at building connections with a variety of outsiders beyond the usual value chains.

But making contacts is just the first, and often the least important, step in tapping experts. In my observations over the past several years, I’ve seen that effective CEOs don’t just sign up contractors; they lead in a way that mobilizes a network. They create energy, a sense of purpose, and even something of a community among people over whom they have no control. These groups of experts blur the distinctions between insiders and outsiders. How do they do it?

It often starts with greater humility. Compared with internally focused leaders, mobilizers simply have to be more humble. Even paid outsiders usually have plenty of other projects to work on, so mobilizers can’t just issue demands. They need to show much more respect and at times even deference toward these outsiders. But they can’t be shrinking violets either; they must have a confident, positive outlook and provide a strong sense of purpose and direction. Take NASA’s Mike Ryschkewitsch, who headed NASA’s Flight Readiness Review for Space Shuttle missions. He had the critical but delicate leadership role of facilitating networks of internal and external technicians, specialists, and managers to address final technical problems and approve launches in the wake of the Columbia disaster in 2003. An accomplished NASA leader, he gained the respect of all constituencies by deferring to superior expertise in the room (but he also moved decisively to close off debate when he sensed the collective was ready for a decision).

This humility often leads mobilizers to be more imaginative about what’s possible, and who can help. During the Chilean mine rescue, a key breakthrough came from a 24-year-old field engineer who showed up at the site on his own. To take a corporate example, Alan Mulally’s pioneering transformation of the fortress-like Ford organization was fueled in part collaborating with outsiders, seeking insights from regulators, investment bankers, and consumer automotive researchers, as well as major customers and car dealers. The overhaul even benefited from occasional conversations with Mulally’s counterpart at General Motors.

Finally, they tend to have an eye for networks of networks. Like good chess players, mobilizers think a few moves ahead. That means not just identifying network contributors who might help a project, but also looking to see what networks each network might bring along. In assembling a highly effective intelligence network during the Iraq War, U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal brought together siloed units from historically competitive branches of military service and government. That in itself was a major accomplishment. But instead of being satisfied with having a few representatives from each unit, he encouraged all participants to draw from their related networks of intelligence, both in Washington and on the ground in the Middle East. McChrystal’s success was marked by the steady growth of participants in the network’s regular knowledge-sharing videoconferences.

The importance of these skills in recruiting outsiders and keeping them engaged will become increasingly critical in large organizations as advancing technology makes business ever more complex, global, and interdependent.

What to Do If You Already Hate Your New Job

Everyone has bad days at the office. But what should you do if you are increasingly convinced you’ve taken the wrong job? Should you quit right away, or try to make the position work for you? And how can you put yourself back on the right career path?

What the Experts Say

“Every job is going to have tradeoffs,” says Dorie Clark, author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Your biggest challenge is to figure out whether the problems are temporary or baked into the nature of your new role. That’s where it pays to start asking the right questions, of both yourself and your boss. “Most people who take the wrong job haven’t done enough research going in,” says Priscilla Claman, president of Career Strategies, Inc., a Boston-based career coaching firm. But don’t assume that the job can’t change in ways that will encourage you to stay. Here’s how to make a bad career move work for you.

Be realistic

“No job is perfect,” says Clark. Some jobs offer a competitive salary, but a terrible commute. Others put you behind a desk for more time than you’d prefer but promise more opportunities for advancement. Ask yourself, “what did you want from this job and are you still going to get it?” says Claman. Is the role a good stepping stone to a better job down the line, or does it allow you to spend desired time with your family? “A good job will have many positive things and a few things that bother you,” says Clark. But if you are already fantasizing about exit strategies after only a few weeks, don’t ignore those signs. “You owe it to your job to think about it long term,” Clark says. “And if you are already out the door in your head, you aren’t going to serve yourself or the company very well.”

Explore if it’s salvageable

Think about whether the issues that are troubling you are temporary or structural. All those dreaded late nights at the office may come to an end in a few months’ time with a project’s completion. On the other hand, you may detest the sales part of your new sales job. If you are having questions or doubts, go to your boss and explain your concerns. “The worst thing you can do is to blindside people and up and quit,” says Clark. “You can’t have this conversation 100 percent in your head.” Come armed with ideas for how your job could adapt in ways that are better aligned with your skills and goals. You may find that your boss isn’t aware of the mismatch, and is open to deploying you in a different way. “It may be possible to get the job you want if you play your cards right,” says Claman. Or you could find that your definitions of success for the role are radically different. Either way, you’ll have more information to help you make your decision.

Look for development elsewhere

If you do decide to stick it out, whether for financial or personal reasons, remember that there are other avenues for professional development and stimulation outside the office. Consider taking online classes or joining volunteer professional activities. “If your job isn’t giving you what you need to develop,” says Clark, “that may be your opportunity to take a leadership role in a professional organization to make contacts and build skills that help you further down the line.”

Put out feelers

If you decide leaving is your only option, “start networking as soon as possible,” says Clark. Consider reaching out to your past employer to see if your old job is still available. If you are convinced you are in the wrong job at the right company, get to know people in other departments so that you can ask polite questions about whether people there are happy, how they ended up there, and whether there are positions that might better fit your interests and skills. Developing a personal network within the company is one of the smartest things you can do if you want to stay but in a new role. “People will hire people they know and trust over the best external candidate,” says Claman. “So you have a huge advantage.”

Understand the risks

Quitting the wrong job may bring you relief, but it will also likely create a blemish on your resume. Most employers will understand that it is inevitable you will make a mistake once or twice in the course of a long career, says Clark, “but if you are changing jobs every four months for no clear reason, that’s definitely a warning sign about your reliability as an employee.” Make sure you develop thoughtful responses to future questions in interviews about your short tenure at the job, emphasizing that you felt it wasn’t a good fit for your skills and goals.

Take the high road

Resist the temptation to tell your tyrant boss what you think of her on the way out the door. “Do not get mad and do not burn bridges,” says Claman. “Because you never know when former colleagues will be valuable to you.” Employers are obviously going to be upset that their choice didn’t work out and they have to go through the process of hiring all over again. “You want to be respectful that it’s a hassle for them,” says Clark. “Be humble enough to thank them and try to leave on good terms.”

Take care with the next step

Just as you need to be careful about how you exit the wrong job, you should take care before making the next move. Don’t let your eagerness to leave your current job push you into another role that proves to be a bad fit. Consider where you went wrong in your last search and don’t be afraid to ask hard questions of prospective employers — questions like what success looks like at the company and how managers handle challenges. If you want to avoid making the same mistake twice, “look before you leap,” says Claman.

Principles to remember:

Do:

Remember that no job is 100 percent perfect — there are always trade-offs
Approach your boss early with your concerns — there may be room for adjustments that convince you to stay
Consider outside avenues for professional development to spruce up your resume

Don’t:

Blindside your boss and abruptly quit — give your employer a chance to hear and respond to your concerns
Feel obliged to stick it out — you owe it to yourself and your boss to find a role that works for you
Let the wrong job push you into another bad role — think carefully about your next move

Case study #1: Proactively build your skills

Elisabeth* wanted out of her job. As a marketing and special events coordinator for an outdoor sports company in the Bay Area, she’d worked hard for months to prove herself worthy of a promotion. But she was hurt and frustrated when her managers told her she wasn’t right for the available role. So she “made the decision to leave and took the first thing that came along,” she says.

It was a lateral move, and there were warning signs it was a bad fit from the start. “Even when I was interviewing, I knew it wasn’t where I wanted to be,” Elisabeth says. But because she felt she had no room for growth at her current company, she felt compelled to move on. Unfortunately, her misgivings proved right. Her manager was often inaccessible and the work felt repetitive and dull. “There was no room to be creative,” she says. “I didn’t have any authority to do anything.”

She began looking for new work almost immediately. But she also made a conscious decision to beef up her resume with professional development classes during her search. “I knew that this role could potentially be seen as a blemish on my resume,” Allison says. “I didn’t want to give an employer any reason not to hire me.” She took online courses in HTML, Adobe, and Excel and listened to webinars for job-seeking tips. She also sought the advice of friends working in human resource positions about how to tackle questions about her short duration at the company.

Eight months later, she landed an executive administrator role that expanded her duties outside of marketing. Today, she’s the office manager for a personal finance firm, managing budgets, expenses, and operations. Leaving the wrong job helped me find “things I didn’t know I would like,” she says.

*not her real name

Case study #2: Know your strengths

Christine Pechstein, a Kansas-based career coach for people with disabilities, loved nearly everything about her job. Her boss gave her a great deal of autonomy, she liked her coworkers, and she believed in the mission of the nonprofit where she worked. But as a single mother, she wanted to make more money than she knew the organization could offer her. “I was happy, but I knew I needed to keep my options open,” she says.

When a program manager position at a local foundation opened up, Pechstein jumped at the chance. The move increased her salary by a third, but almost immediately, Pechstein began to feel as if she’d made a mistake. Instead of interacting with clients, she was confined to a desk, dealing with grant proposals and other paperwork. “It just didn’t fit my strengths,” she says. “I’m more about people and creating programs. In the new position, I was no longer forging a path. I was following a path. I missed being in the trenches.”

After six months, she emailed her former boss, who was still interviewing candidates to fill her old position. She had to go through the standard application and interview process to get her old job back, but she left on good enough terms that the job was soon hers. She knew she’d have to take a pay cut and felt bad about disappointing her new employer, but “it was a gut feeling,” Pechstein says.” I knew it was the move I needed to make.”

Today, Pechstein puts the lessons she learned from the experience to work each day as a life management coach, helping focus clients’ career aims. “People think if they just had this job or made this amount of money, everything will be fine,” she says. “But they get those things and they are still miserable and feel they are missing something.” She tells clients that she knows what she preaches from experience: “Getting the job can’t be the only goal.”

The Secret to Alibaba’s Culture Is Jack Ma’s Apartment

In 2002, the year Alibaba.com first became profitable, founder Jack Ma gathered a handful of employees in his office and told them there was a secret project that they had the opportunity to join. But to do so, they would need to resign from Alibaba, work from a secret location, and refrain from telling friends or family or Alibaba staff about this new start-up they would be building.

This decision — to bet the company on a new and distinct business — was the first such move by Ma, but it would become the cornerstone of Alibaba’s strategy. Today, Alibaba looks more like a conglomerate than a typical tech company, with a diverse set of businesses operating largely independently. That transformation began with Ma’s decision to launch Taobao, the consumer commerce site that would dash eBay’s hopes in China and propel the Alibaba Group to even greater success.

The employees agreed to the secret project, and Ma revealed the location from which they’d be working: his old apartment, where years earlier he and 17 co-founders had launched the original Alibaba site.

Jack Ma’s First Day Speech in Alibaba Apartment from Taluswood Films on Vimeo.

That choice cuts to the heart of Alibaba, according to Porter Erisman, who served as a vice president at the company from 2000 to 2008, and whose documentary on his time there debuted in 2012. By launching Taobao out of the same apartment from which he had launched Alibaba.com, Ma was able to imbue the new project with the same culture of his existing company, while keeping it totally separate.

“They went off to the original apartment that Alibaba was founded in and that’s where they worked with the same kind of spirit as Alibaba in those early days,” said Erisman. “Alibaba was started in Hupan Garden. That was the name of the apartment complex. Over time we realized that this Hupan culture was important to preserve even as we grew to a big company.”

It’s clear from the documentary, Crocodile in the Yangtze, that Alibaba sees a strong corporate culture as critical to its success. Preserving culture while scaling is difficult in general, but for Alibaba the task was complicated by its decentralized approach to decision-making, where separate businesses are largely allowed to chart their own course.

Ma’s insight was that a shared founding space could unite a new project with its predecessor, even while maintaining secrecy and complete separation.

The decision to launch Taobao out of the apartment that spawned Alibaba worked so well that Ma took the same approach with Alipay, the company’s digital payment business, which launched in 2004 also out of the apartment.

Of course, this only works for skunkworks projects. As the company grew, it had to devise more traditional ways to extend a unified culture across increasingly diversified business units. To do so, Alibaba had to articulate the values it believed comprised this “Hupan culture” — principles like “embrace change” and “teach and learn” — and instill them through more traditional methods, like new employee orientations and Outward Bound-style trips.

Though Ma’s apartment no longer serves as a rite of passage for Alibaba’s innovators, the culture it created lives on. And while not practical in many circumstances, it’s worth asking whether such a strategy could work elsewhere. Imagine one of Apple’s secretive new product initiatives working out of Steve Jobs’ old garage, or a Google team working out of the Menlo Park garage where the company first located.

Erisman believes Alibaba’s core strength is growing new enterprises “from apartment phase” to national or global scale. Most companies that succeed in making that transition never think to go back to working out of a cramped apartment or garage. But in Alibaba’s case, it seems to have paid off.

Venture Capitalists’ Ethnic Favoritism Pays Off for Them

U.S. venture capitalists are more likely to invest in start-ups with executives of the same ethnic origins as themselves, and these investments tend to bring superior payoffs, benefiting from close VC–manager communication and coordination, say Deepak Hegde of New York University and Justin Tumlinson of the University of Munich. About 84% of U.S. venture capitalists are of Anglo-Celtic or European origin, a proportion that nearly reflects these groups’ share of the country’s population. 3.74% and 2.96% of U.S.-based VC partners are of Indian and Chinese origin, respectively, about 6 and 4 times these ethnic groups’ share of the population.

The Amazon Fire Launch: What’s New and What They Stole From Apple

Yesterday, Amazon unveiled the new product it had worked us up into a fever pitch to see. Its new Amazon Fire is a phone with a high-definition Gorilla glass screen, rubber casing, 13 megapixel camera, 24/7 customer service through MayDay, unlimited photo storage in the cloud, plus 12 months of free Amazon Prime membership (worth $99). The cost? $199 for a 32 GB phone or $299 for a 64 GB phone, according to pricing on AT&T’s website.

Of course, expectations were high. The smartphone market is dominated by essentially two offerings, Apple phones with the iOS operating system and Samsung/HTC/other phones running on Android OS. To win major market share where even the mighty Microsoft has struggled would take a lot. So Fire also includes a button-controlled feature called Firefly, which can scan up to 100 million products for review or purchase from the Amazon marketplace (making showrooming easier than ever). More amazing, it introduces the much-heralded 3D technology called “dynamic perspective” which creates image depth and also allows for page scrolling based on the angle of one’s head. This leading-edge 3D imaging technology makes video and photo capture a more immersive, realistic experience. And I expect Fire’s 3D lock-screen images will now constitute the new badge of coolness.

All this is impressive, but as a long-time student of product launches, I was more interested in the unveiling process than the product itself.  Was the launch just as innovative as the product? Did it accomplish its goals?

The gold standard for such things was set by Apple under Steve Jobs, and it was clear some weeks ago that Jeff Bezos was taking more than a page from Apple’s book. The teaser campaign for Fire’s launch was shamelessly Apple-esque. In a YouTube video released by Amazon two weeks ago (and viewed at this point over 2.5 million times), affable-looking people in their 20s and 30s are shown from the shoulders up marveling at what they are holding in their hands. We hear their oohs and ahhs, but we never see the product. The video, featuring a very similar visual style to previous teasers by Apple, succeeded in getting the rumor mill going without giving away anything.

Of course a photo of the phone was leaked—but the glimpse it afforded of multiple cameras at each end of the device only stoked more interest in the potential for 3D capabilities. As part of the official announcement of the launch date, Bezos sent a copy of his “favorite childhood book—Mr. Pine’s Purple House” to the media, hinting that the new product would reinforce its message that “the world is a better place when things are a little bit different.” This was reminiscent of Apple’s colorful invite which teased the announcement of the multi-hued iPhone 5c by saying “this should brighten everyone’s day.”

But let’s also give Amazon credit for adding some new wrinkles to the playbook. Here were some aspects of the unveiling that struck me as innovative, and how they worked out.

Amazon granted an “exclusive” to CNET to stream live event coverage, which was an interesting move. But I doubt I am the only one who found the silly and sometimes snarky banter by the CNET reporters torture to watch for 95 minutes. I much preferred the commentary by Forbes.com, whose minute-by-minute text blogging was cogent, factual, and incisive—but unfortunately it didn’t feature video. Either way, it was disappointing not to hear Jeff Bezos’ own words about this incredible new product that is going to change the way we interact with our phone. Only experiencing coverage of the event by skeptical journalists took a great deal away from the excitement Bezos was trying to convey. The question that hung in the air: why would Amazon, given its hopes to dominate both the digital content and device world, choose not to live-stream this critical launch?

Bezos spent more than an hour talking features, taking the crowd to school on Firefly product-scanning and 3D technology. Was it the right thing to do for a hall full of tech devotees? Perhaps. For marketers, it’s always a challenge to decide how much relative focus to place on features or benefits, and understanding both is critical. But certainly no consumer was able to experience the “awesome nature” of the features being explained (since we were mostly getting secondhand screen shots from CNET’s live coverage). Watching the 3D portion of the presentation was like trying to enjoy Avatar on a tube TV.

Consumers were invited to enter a lottery to attend the launch event, and that was a cool idea. But of the 60,000 who petitioned to attend, very few wound up among the 500 media and influencer attendees. I expect we’ll see refinements—perhaps even some that are consumer generated—on this way to build excitement for the device.

The launch event took place at 10:30 am in Seattle, obviously convenient for the Amazon folks and west coast watchers. But that meant it kicked off at 1:30 pm eastern time and didn’t conclude till after 3:00 pm. The timing no doubt made it difficult for stories by national reporters to be filed in time for same-day reading—especially since the video did not simultaneously accompany the news.

While the Fire event fell short of the panache an Apple event typically delivers, and did not produce the kind of excitement this innovative device deserves, much about the launch was effective. Even through the foggy lens of blog coverage, it was clear that Amazon has introduced a wondrous new entry into the crowded smartphone category. Early adopters and innovators will no doubt rush to buy it, and they’ll show it off to their friends. More fundamentally, with the launch of Fire TV (a streaming content device similar to Apple TV), and the growth of its Appstore to more than 240,000 applications (tripled from last year), Amazon has the device and content ecosystem to support this launch. It’s obvious this multi-million dollar bet that is four years in the making wasn’t conceived on a whim.

Will that generate enough consumer demand (through a single phone carrier) to grab massive market share? This will depend on how much hype Amazon can continue to generate, and what it does next to motivate early adopters to check out this new eye candy. And then, as Amazon well knows, it’s all about the user reviews, word of mouth, recommendations from family and friends, and social chatter.

From the Most Memorable New Product Launch Survey my colleagues and I field annually, we’ve learned that consumers look for six or more sources of information before buying a new product.  Yesterday’s launch was only the beginning – consumers will need more data points to be persuaded to make this discretionary smartphone purchase – but it started the Fire.