Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1421

Do Genes Affect Our Attitudes Toward Interdependence?

Numerous studies have shown that Americans of European origin have a more independent, and Asians have a more interdependent, social orientation, as measured by questionnaires asking about agreement with such statements as “I feel it is important for me to act as an independent person.” But this social-orientation difference is about 6 times greater among people from both backgrounds who are carriers of two particular alleles of a dopamine-receptor gene known as DRD4, according to a team led by Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan. The alleles appear to predispose people to acquire behaviors that are considered socially desirable, the researchers say.

Health Care Becomes Entrepreneurial (Finally)

All of us know that you have to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. Launching, let alone sustaining, a new enterprise can be challenging along almost every dimension − mentally, emotionally, and often financially. Historically, this reality has been even more sobering in the health care sector, where the typical hardships experienced by any start-up have been amplified by numerous industry-specific challenges: Extensive regulation, entrenched players with a strong grip on the status quo, confusing paths to entry, and an even more opaque path to payment have made health care a particularly treacherous territory for entrepreneurs.

But ongoing changes in policy, technology, and industry culture are now creating unprecedented opportunities for those with just the right kind of crazy. In our group at Merck, we are witnessing this opportunity firsthand as we collaborate with start-ups in the areas of digital health, big data, and health IT.

Four dynamics are driving this new era of health care innovation:

Finally, there is a financial incentive to innovate. Government-led measures to reform health care such as the HITECH Act, which infused billions of dollars into improving the sector’s use of information technology, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), create a business case for performance improvement that never existed before. Accountable Care Organization (ACO) models in both the private and the public sectors are rewarding providers for lowering the overall costs of care and keeping patients healthy.

While the managed care movement made a similar run in the early 1990s, the movement towards accountable care, bundled payments, and other population health efforts have not caused the type of backlash that managed care did − in large part because most of these models have not meaningfully restricted patient choice. RxAnte, Evolent, and Humedica are just three of the many new companies seizing the opportunity to help old players comply with new policy standards that focus on improving outcomes and efficiency.

New players are fearlessly sensing the opportunity. Health care is attracting an influx of talent from other industries to tackle some of its toughest problems. Top-tier thinkers from data science, business, finance, and the digital world are coming together to find new solutions. Through the venture capital community, veteran corporate leaders like John Scully, Steve Case, and Gerald Levin are contributing capital and deep business expertise to numerous health-related start-ups. Tech company founders like Max Levchin of PayPal, Samer Hamadeh of Vault.com, and Naveen Selvadurai of Foursquare are diving into health care as well, bringing new perspectives and talent into the domain. All recognize the enormous size of the opportunity to make a profit while improving care, lowering costs, and improving health.

According to a recent Rock Health report, venture funding of digital health companies exceeded $1.9 billion in 2013, up 39% from 2012.

Access to data is enabling us to better understand and address problems. Improving the amount of and access to higher-quality data will enable stakeholders across the health care ecosystem to work together to better understand the gaps and flaws in care. While we are only in the early days of the open data movement, innovative uses of data will empower new approaches to improving outcomes. The intelligent use of data will have a transformative influence on all points of care. Entities like Optum Labs are bringing together physicians, pharmaceuticals companies, hospitals, ACOs, and researchers to identify predictive analytic algorithms than can anticipate when patients are likely to get ill — so that we can intervene and improve outcomes.

Consumer technology offers direct access to patients. With unprecedented access to information, patients are being empowered in new ways. The proliferation of wearable devices from companies like Fitbit and online support communities like PatientsLikeMe are sparking a dramatic rethink of how patients can learn about and monitor their health. These technologies currently affect a small share of the population. But as they continue to improve and adoption by consumers grows, there will be a plethora of opportunities for  innovators.

All of these developments spell the dawn of an exciting new era for entrepreneurs, techies, investors, clinicians, and, last but not least, patients.

Can You Crowdsource a Big Idea?

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously said, “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.” This insight is almost a tagline for the rise of online distributed innovation, commonly referred to as “crowd sourcing.” A number of scholars at Harvard Business School have gotten in on the act, studying how crowds solve problems in new product development, scientific breakthroughs, and even trying to find the tomb of Genghis Khan. Recently, Nitin Nohria, Dean of HBS, challenged some of us to apply what we have learned to a core function of the school – generating relevant, rigorous knowledge.

Working with Professor Clayton Christensen on the research that became “The Capitalist’s Dilemma,” and taking a page from his book, we thought, How might we disrupt our own knowledge generation process? While HBS certainly has brilliant professors who are creating new knowledge, the mathematical truth is that there are more smart people outside of HBS than within it. We realized that we had a strong connection to an enormous untapped asset — the HBS alumni — and decided to formulate a “beta” challenge to test with the alumni of Clay’s course, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise (BSSE in HBS-speak). We used the OI Engine software, dreamt up by Tom Hulme while he was studying at HBS and currently used for OpenIDEO, a diverse community that solves challenges with a social-impact focus. In one sense, this project was cutting edge, but it builds on really promising methods developed by organizations like the open source software community, the Wikipedia collective, TopCoder, OpenIDEO, General Electric, Siemens and NASA.

You can see the outcome of our challenge in this HBR article, as well as in an interactive exhibit showing how the process worked.

Here are some lessons we learned along the way.

Consider what your question assumes.

We invested considerable time in framing the challenge question, How do we innovate for long term growth and job creation? We could have opted for a simpler or broader question, but we hoped the tough challenge would pique the intellectual interest of community members. In hindsight, this set a significant hurdle to participation: we selected for people that understood the challenge, found value in it, and felt that they had something to add. While this resulted in high quality contributions, it also led to at least some selection bias. In this situation, we consciously accepted this trade off for reasons both substantive, like our desire to build on an existing knowledge base, and contextual, such as managing HBS’s inaugural foray into working collaboratively with the crowd.

Ask the right parts of your community.

We consciously decided that virtually all of the invited community would be alumni of the BSSE course at HBS, both because they shared a common intellectual framework and because we believed they would be more likely to answer a call to action from Clay. While our ultimate goal is to tap a broader group, research suggests that starting with a small, connected community is the best way to seed a thriving community.

Set norms for contributions early.

We quickly observed what we called a “culture of composed contribution”; people did not seem comfortable thinking aloud (as it were) in front of the community. This response was in marked contrast with other open source situations, but very much in line with HBS culture. The general reluctance to contribute imperfectly finished thoughts created a significant barrier to entry; we suspect that it discouraged creative but less developed ideas that could have pushed thinking, been more open to refinement, and served to build ties among participants. Next time, we might deliberately contribute less refined ideas at first, to convey their acceptability and usefulness.

Get people up to speed.

As the infographic reveals, our collective thinking evolved over time; while many early ideas shaped the article directly, other ideas sparked others’ thinking, sometimes weeks later. Given our time-poor community, this made urgent the challenge of bringing community members up to speed. (The site generated an extraordinary amount of material.) Our solution was to offer accessible building blocks of the conversation. We featured contributions that we thought would give the users a soft re-entry into the challenge and sent summary newsletters to the community outlining some key activities on the platform.

Keep them coming back.

Our colleagues in the HBS Digital Initiative have studied the construction of online communities; they often begin as small, passionate, and densely populated, then later become a collection of interlinked communities. We hope to pull a much larger group in to our discussions in the future and otherwise explore how to bring the crowd into all aspects of our mission. (A continuation of the work done on Capitalist’s Dilemma appears at this site – please join in.)

In a more general sense, we intend to continue exploring how “the crowd” can contribute to academic work, how together we can deepen our understanding of complex, hard-to-solve problems, and how – maybe, just maybe – we can contribute to solving those problems. With that in mind, we would love to read your feedback on this process and thoughts in the comments below on what other challenges the community might take on.

Managing the Immoral Employee

Out of all the management questions we should be asking, this is surely the least asked. How do we handle individuals who are prone to unethical behaviors, especially if they are talented and hard to replace?

There are three reasons why this subject is more or less taboo. First, morality is hard to define, especially without getting too philosophical, and management writers are typically allergic to metaphysics. Second, it is controversial to label people as immoral (although alternative terms – unprincipled, dishonest, corrupt – are hardly euphemisms).

The third problem is that managers struggle to judge moral character, not just in their subordinates but also in themselves. Many managers suffer from a common misconception, that honesty and competence are positively correlated, but there are as many honest people who are incompetent as competent people who are dishonest.

Hence much of the management world operates under the illusion that employees are generally ethical, and that bad apples are not only an exception but also easy to detect. Yet dishonest work behaviors, such as staff abuse, rule bending, and theft cost the economy billions. Take the Enron and WorldCom scandals, which cost the U.S. economy around $40 billion during the first year alone – that’s as much as the federal government spends on homeland security every year.

It is therefore time to admit that some people are more vulnerable to unethical temptations than others, and managers can play an important role in attenuating (or increasing) the rate of unethical incidents in their teams and organizations. Here are six tips drawn from the academic literature on how to manage morally weak employees:

Engage them. Research shows that job satisfaction accounts for some of the effects of moral personality traits on counterproductive work behavior. Even less ethical individuals will be more likely to act morally if they are engaged at work. By the same token, alienating employees may enhance moral disengagement even in those with higher integrity. Give employees meaningful tasks, make them feel valued, treat them like adults, and they will be more compelled to exercise organizational citizenship, no matter how principled they are.

Lead by example. Research shows that leaders’ morality level determines the degree to which employees perceive the organization as ethical or unethical. For managers, the implication is clear: if you want your employees to act morally, start by acting morally yourself. This is particularly important for direct line managers. As meta-analytics studies show, when subordinates trust their supervisors they are happier and more productive at work, so everyone wins.

Pair them with ethical peers. Although we tend to think of peer pressure as a source of antisocial behavior, peers can also inspire ethical conduct. Teaming your less moral employees with colleagues who have strong integrity will motivate them to behave more ethically. Humans learn via observation and imitation, and much of this learning occurs without awareness. Accordingly, recent research suggests that peers play a critical role in determining the moral compass of our workplace.

Invest in moral training. Most people develop their default moral predispositions before they reach adulthood. That said, organizations can influence employees’ ethical choices via explicit educational programs. For example, the Ethics Resource Center reports that businesses that implement formal programs to support ethical choices, such as whistleblowing, decrease counterproductive behaviors and misconduct rates, as well as increasing employee satisfaction.

Reduce their temptation. As Oscar Wilde once said, “anybody can be good in the countryside – there are no temptations there.” Ethical behavior is a function of both people’s personalities and the situations they are in. Everybody has a dark side, but the antisocial aspects of our personalities are much more likely to surface in toxic environments or situations of weak moral pressure. It is hard to change someone’s personality, but managers can do a great deal to affect the environment employees inhabit. Managers can help employees who are less capable of exercising self-control by surveilling and controlling them a bit more.

Create an altruistic culture. Although organizational culture cannot be created overnight, meta-analytic reviews have demonstrated that a caring culture prevents unethical work behaviors, whereas a culture of self-interest promotes them. Clearly, it is not sufficient to include “integrity” as a core organizational value – most companies do that already, alongside “creativity”, “diversity”, and “corporate social responsibility”, but that’s just the stuff they write on their websites. What matters is persuading employees that the organization truly values generous, selfless behaviors.

Of course, at this point you may be wondering: can’t you just avoid hiring dishonest people in the first place? That’s easier said than done. A manager might attempt to suss out an applicant’s morality through careful interview questions or self-report questionnaires. But as a recent review noted, there is “a logical problem with self-assessments of integrity. People who lack integrity specialize in manipulation and deceit, which makes their self-assessment a dubious source of information.” And yet since prevention is clearly the best solution, hiring managers will have to rely on other means: peer evaluations, 360-degree feedbacks, and careful reference checks. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so capturing reliable data on candidates’ reputation is the best way of evaluating their integrity. Unless we do so, immoral behaviors will remain the “silent killer” of individual careers and organizational effectiveness.

Why You Probably Won’t Move for a Job

Leaving on a Jet Plane (but Just for the Week) Don’t Get Around Much AnymoreHuman Resource Executive

Fewer people are moving for jobs today — and when people do move, not many are citing work as the reason. Wharton's Peter Cappelli is inclined to believe that the reason for this "has something to do with employment practices," and he lists a couple. One: Long-distance commuting is on the rise – people are taking new jobs without uprooting their families. Two: There's no such thing as lifetime employment anymore; when companies rebalance their workforces, adding employees at one site and cutting back at another, "it's easier to let people go in the down location and hire new ones in the up location. And they do that a lot." Most workers, he posits, understand the new dynamics: "If you were offered a new job in another city where you have no ties or networks, and you suspected that the job would probably not last more than three years (which is a good guess), how much of a raise would they have to give you to get you to move? … I suspect it would be a lot more than most employers are willing to pay."

Moral and Financial The Case for ReparationsThe Atlantic

This is the most important thing you will read this week (if not this decade, written without hyperbole), particularly if you live in or do business in the United States. An excerpt:



"Having been enslaved for 250 years, black people were not left to their own devices. They were terrorized. In the Deep South, a second slavery ruled. In the North, legislatures, mayors, civic associations, banks, and citizens all colluded to pin black people into ghettos, where they were overcrowded, overcharged, and undereducated. Businesses discriminated against them, awarding them the worst jobs and the worst wages. Police brutalized them in the streets. And the notion that black lives, black bodies, and black wealth were rightful targets remained deeply rooted in the broader society. Now we have half-stepped away from our long centuries of despoilment, promising, 'Never again.' But still we are haunted. It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us."

Look BusyNo Time: How Did We Get So Busy?The New Yorker

It’s the norm in many of America’s elite professions — management, consulting, medicine, the law, certainly journalism — to work and work until you can’t see straight, then to go to bed and get up and work some more, day after day, even weekend after weekend. Are we nuts? Wasn’t the whole point of entering an elite profession that you wouldn’t have to work like a dog? John Maynard Keynes thought so. In 1928 he predicted that in a couple of generations, when capitalism matured, people in developed countries would need to work only about three hours per day.



In a new book, Overwhelmed, Brigid Schulte looks at why Keynes turned out to have been so wrong, and she finds unexpected nuances. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes in a review in The New Yorker, lower-wage workers have indeed experienced increased leisure time, while high earners have reported intense time pressure. Maybe it’s all about money: At the top of the wage scale, putting in more hours can mean getting a lot more pay. Or maybe we’re too susceptible to the hard-work mystique — to the “busier than thou” attitude that’s so pervasive these days. Or, as The Atlantic's Derek Thompson rebuts, maybe we're not as busy as we think we are. —Andy O'Connell

Fine by Me Kill the Cover Letter and RésuméNew York Magazine

If I had a dollar for every time a friend delivered an impassioned rant about the loathsome act of writing a cover letter, I would have so much money that I would never need another job and thus would never have to write a cover letter again. Exaggeration aside (and, you know, I quite like my work), Jesse Singal does a splendid job of rounding up the research-backed evidence against "the packet" — the résumé and cover letter. One of the most important criticisms is that companies’ traditional system of basing decisions on packets, while designed to be objective, is fraught with bias. And then there’s the question of whether packets are a good predictor of the skills a potential employee brings to the table. Singal outlines alternatives companies are turning to; but unless — or until — business makes a major shift, let me suggest reading this.

Give It UpHow Warren Buffett Made Me Smarter About Charity Forbes

We give a few bucks to this charity and a few to that, but are we really helping to make the world a better place? Richard Eisenberg writes in Forbes about a six-week online course he took on charitable giving and how it changed his thinking. Don’t be misled by the article title: Warren Buffett had nothing to do with it, though his sister did. Doris Buffett’s Learning by Giving Foundation partnered with Northeastern University to offer the course, which taught students how to evaluate nonprofits according to, among other things, their management and operational excellence.



But good luck trying to get that kind of information from nonprofits. Eisenberg was “surprised — no, disappointed — by how few provided the kind of specifics about their financials and staffing that would let prospective donors make informed decisions.” One important lesson: Don’t discount a charity simply because it pays its executives well. Another: If you’re going to give, be a sustained giver, making repeated donations to the same organizations. That helps ensure a steadier, more predictable income stream. —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITSA Little Privacy, Please

Why Companies Should Compete for Your Privacy (Working Knowledge)
Welcome to the New, Monetized Internet, Where Privacy Is Going to Cost You (Pacific Standard)
Fine Line Seen in U.S. Spying on Companies (The New York Times)

Adaptive Strategy Is a Cop-Out

Managers today are all obsessed with VUCA, an ugly acronym encapsulating the notion that business faces more volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity than ever before, requiring an entirely new kind of approach to strategy.

That new way comes under many terms: discovery-driven strategy, emergent strategy, lean strategy, agile strategy, to name just the best known. They all hold, more or less, that in this VUCA world, you just have to try stuff, see how it works, and adjust. Thinking about strategy before doing something is so retrograde, so pre-VUCA.

I just don’t buy it.

There is really no actual evidence that ours is a more VUCA world than previous ones. In fact, every generation claims that its times are the most turbulent ever.  Partly this is because the past is known and understood, so we forget how uncertain everything seemed at the time.

But do we think that the world didn’t feel really VUCA when the Black Death was killing 25% of its inhabitants? Do we think that the world didn’t feel VUCA when we discovered that the planet was definitively not flat? Do we think that the world didn’t feel VUCA when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor?  Of course not: VUCA is not only with us now, it has always been with us, a constant companion.

A logical implication of this truth is that forward planning has always had limited effectiveness. That rather undercuts any argument that traditional strategy doesn’t work because you can’t plan for anything these days. Why would we ever have thought it worked in the VUCA of the 1970s or 1980s if we don’t think it will work in the VUCA of today?

My point is this: people arguing that strategy needs to change are making the fundamental mistake of assuming that strategy is planning. This has never been the case. Strategy, as I argue in my book, is and always has been about making an integrated set of choices that determine where the firm should play and how it should win there.

My gripe with the new strategy-as-fast reaction thinking is that it’s a cop-out. Making prior choices about where to play and how to win is really hard and uncomfortable. I’m not trying to say that you should never adapt. Any good theory gets adapted. The point is that you have to make a prior choice that you can adapt. The temptation with adopting adaptive strategies is that you never make that prior choice.

Bottom line, I believe the fad for adaptive strategy models is an excuse for not making hard, dangerous choices. We argue that because they are impossible to make, the best course is to continue doing what we’re doing until we have a clear reason not to. And what are we doing today? Well, we’re probably making plans, because that’s what we know how to do, what we’re comfortable doing. Which brings us full circle to what we know doesn’t really work.

To see if you’re stick in this trap, take a look at this self-assessment I’ve developed. 

When Innovation Is Strategy

An HBR Insight Center




How Boards Can Innovate
When to Pass on a Great Business Opportunity
How Samsung Gets Innovations to Market
Is It Better to Be Strategic or Opportunistic?

A Crossroads for India, and Its Business Landscape

For the first time in three decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won so many seats (282 out of 543) in India’s recently-concluded general elections that it can hope to be in office for the next five years without the support of another political party. Not only does that give the BJP an unequivocal mandate for change, but also, it allows the right-of-center party to adopt a long-term perspective while making policy decisions. Most Indians are jubilant, the stock market has shot up by 20%, and, in the week after the results were announced, the Indian rupee appreciated the most among 78 currencies that Bloomberg tracks.

Although Narendra Modi, the 63-year-old former chief minister of the western state of Gujarat, will take over from an economist, Manmohan Singh, as India’s prime minister on May 26, fixing the Indian economy will, ironically, have to be the new leader’s top priority. After all, India’s growth has slowed to a crawl, with GDP expanding by less than 5% in the last two years compared to 9% per annum in the five years before 2008.

Some of the causes are well-known, such as the government’s fiscal profligacy and runaway inflation, but there has also been a fall in foreign, private, and public investment, especially in infrastructure, mining, and manufacturing, recently. That’s partly because a deadly mix of policy paralysis, rampant corruption, and bureaucratic inertia has plagued the Indian economy for the last five years.

Almost every CEO I’ve talked to, before and after the polls, believes that Modi is a shrewd, pragmatic, and decisive leader, who can kick-start economic growth and development in India by fostering a more business-friendly policy environment. What exactly does that mean in a mixed economy like India’s?

India has recently become one of the most challenging places in the world in which to do business. This is partly due to the arbitrary interpretation of tax laws by venal revenue authorities. No one can forget how the Singh government amended a law in 2012 with retrospective effect from April 1962 to force the telecom giant, Vodafone, to pay a $2-billion tax bill. Tax claims have also resulted in the closure of Nokia’s flagship factory in Chennai with the consequent loss of 5,000 jobs. Don’t expect excesses of that sort under the Modi administration; he publicly decried the previous government’s “tax terrorism” during his campaign. That should come as a relief for multinational companies that can cope with unhelpful policies, but not with policy reversals.

It’s widely believed that Modi, just as he did in Gujarat, will try to tame India’s sclerotic, corrupt, and self-serving bureaucracy by eliminating archaic laws and regulations, and by using technology to eliminate their discretionary powers. That should result in faster clearances of investment proposals, especially those from foreign companies, by the central government. However, local governments have to provide many clearances today, so the ease of doing business will differ from one Indian state to another.

Over the past five years, India developed a reputation for being the most corrupt of the major economies, but that should diminish under the new administration. Most businesspeople agree that Gujarat under Modi was less corrupt than most other states were. Modi has vowed to crack down on corrupt politicians and he will hold the bureaucracy more accountable. However, many rules, regulations, and approvals are state-level or local matters, so the mega scams may go away, but demands for bribes and speed money will not.

India could finally have elected a central government that focuses on improving its infrastructure over the next five years. Modi has said, time and again, that infrastructure development, particularly electricity generation, railroad expansion, and road building, will be his top priorities. He has a good track record in that area, with Gujarat boasting some of the country’s best infrastructure, so that may not be empty rhetoric.

At the macro level, Modi will probably strive to build a globally competitive manufacturing sector that will become India’s much-needed job-creation engine. As China’s cost competitiveness gets eroded, and global corporations reduce their dependence on manufacturing there, there’s an opportunity to get foreign companies to move their production bases to India. Given his nationalist zeal, Modi will do his best to capitalize on that opportunity. The U.S. may be on the defensive because it denied Modi a diplomatic visa in 2005, but American multinationals, like all foreign companies, will find him extremely approachable.

While the BJP government will be receptive to foreign investors, it will also pursue India’s “self-interest.” For instance, while global pharmaceutical companies and governments have been demanding stronger patent protection and an end to the compulsory licensing of drugs in India, that’s a tough call to make for the government of a relatively poor country. Similarly, India’s need to revitalize its manufacturing sector will require policy changes including reducing local content requirements and preferences for locally made goods in government purchases. Whether Modi will bite those bullets isn’t clear.

Similarly, foreign companies’ access to sectors such as multi-brand retailing, defense production, and insurance may improve more slowly than the world might wish due to the BJP’s ideological compulsions. In these contentious matters, the government will maintain a fine balance between being compliant with its obligations to the WTO, on the one hand, and doing what’s best for local business interests on the other.

Hopefully, the Modi administration will engage in a dialogue with foreign companies and governments, and search for win-win solutions rather than announce decisions unilaterally. As a result, friction on trade and investment matters should fall substantially, and economic ties with the U.S., Japan, and Europe should expand.

Thus, optimism is warranted, but euphoria is not. The Modi government, despite its mandate for change, doesn’t have a magic wand at its disposal. It has inherited high inflation, a huge fiscal deficit, and large welfare programs and subsidies that will be hard to rein in. Besides, India’s federal system ensures that state governments deal with key issues such as power distribution, education, and land acquisition. That may prove to be a problem in the 17 states where the BJP is not in power. The BJP also lacks a majority in India’s upper house, so some major policy changes, such a national goods and services tax and the reform of labor laws, could be slow.

If we were to think of the Indian economy as a flywheel, its current rotation in the wrong direction should be arrested quickly, within a year, as business and consumer confidence grows, investment picks up, and the government pursues sensible fiscal and monetary policies. However, major reforms and strengthening institutions will take time, so the flywheel may not gather speed in the right direction for the next five years.

Still, India has a chance to return to the path of rapid economic development. China has been a growth engine for the past 20 years for many multinational companies, and many are now looking for the next China. No other country is better positioned to play that role than India, where relatively modest changes in the policy environment can unleash a torrent of investment, entrepreneurship, and prosperity.

Reference-Check Your Future Boss

What do you wish you had known about your manager before you started your current job? Work style? Personality? Approach to management? Ability (or inability) to empathize? Most advice around job searching and interviewing has become common knowledge: Research the company, ask questions about the company culture, send a thank you note, and so on. But while this routine might inform you (and get you excited) about any given company, it doesn’t really tell you about the person you’ll be working under.

My advice: Reference-check your future boss.

Think about it: Do you want to work for a tyrant? A know-it-all? A manipulator? Or do you want to work with a great coach? A developer of people?  A thought-leader? You may know exactly what you want, but it’s difficult to pick up on these traits in an hour-long interview — especially when you’re the interviewee. All the stars might be aligning for you (promising company with great growth, dream job description, attractive compensation and benefits), but one person (your manager) could affect your career more than everything else combined.

Potential employers certainly aren’t shy when it comes to asking about your background. From cover letters and on-sites to criminal background checks and logic challenges, you’re more or less asked to bare your soul. Why? They want to get to know you — to make sure you’re the right fit. Shouldn’t you be doing the same? And couldn’t you be using some of the same tools?

Hence, reference-checking your future boss. Don’t believe it’s a viable option? Well, we recently had a candidate ask for references – from his potential manager’s colleagues and direct reports – and have seen others do the same in the past.

While we don’t see this strategy all the time (and it’s usually just for senior level roles), it raises the question: Why don’t more people take this approach? It not only shows how seriously the candidate is considering the decision, but it also establishes a more transparent, bi-directional conversation between both sides.

We’d be remiss if we suggested this as a one-size-fits-all tactic. Our candidate — who is now an employee — was able to successfully reference-check his manager both because of the relation to the position he was applying to and the fact that Medallia is simply more open to unconventional hiring approaches. But plenty of proxies exist for a reference check. You can ask other interviewers what it’s like to work with that person. You can use LinkedIn to find your potential boss’s former direct reports or business partners and reach out for their thoughts. Social media can help you identify shared connections and point you to who can give you insights. Through both digital and analogue means, you can also find out if he or she is in any clubs, associations, or alumni groups where you have contacts and can seek information.

Your job hunt should never be thought of as anything but a two-way decision. You will be investing your time, skills, and passion into a company and spending untold hours and energy working with a future boss. Make sure you’re making a good investment by asking the right questions and doing the right research. If that means asking for references, go for it. Otherwise, you might find yourself looking for a new job… to escape your new job.

Manage Your Time Without Annoying Your Coworkers

A lot of time management advice is about saying no to meeting invites or checking email less often. But those actions can cause conflict with your colleagues. Is it possible to set the boundaries you need to get your work done without negatively impacting the rest of the office? How can you manage your time while keeping relationships intact?

What the Experts Say

“Time management is essentially about how you organize work, so, except in very rare cases, it’s going to affect others,” says Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and author of The Blame Game. With any new approach, it’s critical to think about how it will impact those around you. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying, says Julie Morgenstern, a time management expert and author of Never Check E-Mail in the Morning. “Our biggest trap when it comes to time is getting caught up in a sense of service to others,” she says. The solution, says Elizabeth Grace Saunders, a time coach and author of The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment, is to “focus on the long-term goal of doing your job.” Here’s how to get your work done — while keeping your coworkers happy.

Prioritize work over availability

To start, make sure you’re filtering your time effectively. If you’re overly focused on pleasing others, you’re probably sacrificing productivity. “Your greatest value isn’t accessibility,” says Morgenstern. “It’s your ability to solve problems and get things done.” Saunders agrees: “Think less about people’s feelings and more about the strategic goals of the organization.” Your job is to complete your highest value work.

Get input from your colleagues

Of course, this doesn’t give you permission to implement whatever time-management approach you like. “Don’t be unilateral,” says Dattner. “Don’t come in on Monday and say, ‘I went to a seminar and the workshop leader said to only check email once a day so that’s what I’m going to do.’” Experiment with different techniques to see what might work for everyone. “Come up with some initial ideas and share them with your team,” says Dattner. “You might say, ‘Which would you all prefer: that I don’t check email in the morning or that I take one day off of email each week to focus on projects?’” Also acknowledge the impact your actions might have on others. Dattner suggests saying something like, “I acknowledge that this is going to save me three hours, but there’s going to be a cost of an hour to you. What can I do to make it up to you?”

Take risks

You may worry that others aren’t going to respond well to a new technique, but Saunders says that’s often not true. “Most of the time this limitation is in your head,” she says. “When my clients try new approaches, 99% of the time they work out great.” Morgenstern agrees: “Take the leap of faith and others will often experience the payoff.” This might require bucking the system. “People are so used to being overwhelmed and stressed that you can feel quite guilty taking steps to better manage your time,” says Saunders. “But you need to be willing to exit the craziness.”

Make clear what you’re doing and why

Once you’ve decided on a time-management approach, share your reasoning with your colleagues. For example, if you want to decline meeting invites, Saunders suggests you explain why — you’re working on another big initiative, other members of your team are already attending, you aren’t currently focused on that area, and so on. Or if you’re blocking out time on your calendar to concentrate on an important project, send an email to your colleagues explaining why you won’t be available. These sorts of techniques allow you to respect others’ needs and save you time.

Train people on what to expect

Sometimes just telling people what you’re going to change isn’t enough; you have to help them relearn how to interact with you. “If you answer email every three minutes, you’ve trained people that you’re always going to be there,” says Morgenstern.  When you change it up, make sure to tell everyone — key clients, your immediate team, your boss — how and when they can now expect to reach and hear from you.” Saunders says that some of her clients have had luck putting up an auto-responder. For example, it might read, “I’m responding to email every 24 hours. If you need something more urgently, call or text me.”  This wouldn’t work for everyone, but the idea is to experiment with different approaches until you find some tactics that work for you.

Choose the right time

Changing how you work can be disruptive. Dattner advises timing your new approach wisely. “Make sure it’s not in a sensitive crunch period,” he says. You also want to be sure that you’re well positioned to request the change to your routine. “You want to be performing well and be in people’s good graces. When things are going well, you have social capital to spend,” says Dattner.

Do it together if you can

One of the benefits to changing your approach is that you’ll be modeling better time management for your team. “Managers need to be time leaders,” Morgenstern advocates. “They need to set a pattern for their departments.” Dattner recommends having “a conversation with your team about how the entire group could manage time better.” Maybe you all agree to check email less frequently or to meet less often or for less time. Just remember that the same techniques don’t work for everyone. “Some people think what works for them should work for everyone else, but there is no one size fits all,” says Saunders.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Explain to others how and why you’re changing your habits
Propose several techniques to see which will work best for you and your coworkers
Become an evangelist for better time management on your team

Don’t:

Assume that you’re better at your job if you’re constantly available
Take a unilateral approach — involve others in your decisions
Try to implement a new technique during an especially busy time or when you’re not in peoples’ good graces

Case study#1: Make the reasons clear

Jessica Tucker, a sales analyst at a consumer goods company, found that after six months in her new job, long and inefficient meetings were becoming an impediment to getting her work done. She decided to try declining more invites. “I was inspired by my manager’s manager who has a hard policy about not attending meetings unless there is a clear objective and agenda and she has something to offer and/or gain,” she says. Before she made the change, she told her manager that she was going to try the new approach, then discussed it with her team, and informed her coworkers in other groups as well.

Initially, there was some concern. Other groups were worried that that they’d miss pertinent information if she wasn’t there (Jessica provides sales reports to other teams). But this proved to be a non-issue. Jessica started to share updates with a point person on her team, who would report back to the larger group. “I aim not to put more work on my colleagues but sometimes it is a give and take. I definitely try to be fair. If a colleague goes to a meeting one week, I’ll go the next.”  And now that she’s not as tied up, Jessica also responds to coworkers’ requests more quickly. “Ultimately, I have more time to spend on the aspects of my job that matter.”

Jessica has also found that she’s now more disciplined about the meeting invites she sends. “Sometimes I don’t send invites because I realize certain people don’t need to come to the meeting or I realize it’s something I can discuss with one or two people and don’t need a formal time.”

Case study #2: Be flexible with your new approach

Andrew Watson, a business unit manager for an aerospace company, didn’t have enough time to get his work done. Between attending many meetings and making himself “always available” to his team of program managers and functional leads, he was fully booked. “I had little time left to actually do stuff,” he says. Working with his administrative assistant, he decided to block off his calendar for the same hour every day of the week. “She would not make that time available in my calendar unless a higher authority called a priority,” he says. Since Andrew had a reputation for being approachable and available, he was concerned that the change would disappoint his team and cause them to feel as if their issues were being put on hold.

At the team’s next weekly meeting, Andrew explained the change in his calendar to everyone, making it clear that he was going to do it for a trial period and then would check in. He told them that while his door wasn’t open during that hour, they could interrupt him for important or urgent matters. He also asked for their feedback. “The team was satisfied since I gave them the reasons for the change, and also the opportunity to influence how it was implemented.” Even though the hour was occasionally interrupted (usually by his boss or peers but rarely by his direct reports), the approach enhanced Andrew’s productivity. He was able to focus on important projects but was still available to his team when absolutely necessary.

Narcissists Can Be Manipulated into Caring About the Environment

Although narcissists tend not to care about the societal benefits of pro-environmental activities, their attitudes change if their “green” behaviors are likely to be seen and admired by others, say Iman Naderi of Fairfield University and David Strutton of the University of North Texas. For example, narcissists considered an environmentally friendly laptop computer to be more attractive when they were told it was for use in public, rather than at home (3.7 versus 2.7 on a seven-point scale). Narcissism may be on the rise in the U.S., the researchers say: A nationwide analysis shows that college students’ scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory rose steadily between 1982 and 2009.