Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1424

Create a Work Environment That Fosters Flow

Everywhere we look in business, timetables once measured by calendars can now be clocked by egg timers. So how can we keep up? In a word — and according to an ever-increasing pile of evidence — “flow.”

Technically defined as an “optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best,” the term takes its name from the sensation it confers. In flow, every action, every decision, arises seamlessly from the last. In this state, we are so focused on the task at hand that all else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Our sense of self vanishes. Our sense of time distorts. And performance goes through the roof.

In my book, The Rise of Superman, I examine how extreme athletes — surfers, snowboarders, skydivers, and others — have used flow to lift athletic performance to levels unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, but the much more important point is that anyone can tap this state. It’s ubiquitous. It shows up anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met — and that includes the world of business.

In a 10-year study conducted by McKinsey, top executives reported being five times more productive in flow. Think about that for a moment. This means, if you can spend Monday in flow, you’ll get as much done as your steady-state peers do in a week. In fact, according to these same McKinsey researchers, if we could increase the time we spend in flow by 15-20%, overall workplace productivity would almost double.

At the heart of this doubling sits a complicated cascade of five neurochemicals which, when combined, accomplish intrinsically what most organizations fail to achieve by fiat. In flow, the brain releases norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin. All five affect performance. Norepinephrine and dopamine tighten focus, helping us shut out the persistent distractions of our multi-tasked lives. Endorphins block pain, letting us burn the candle at both ends without burning out altogether. Anandamide prompts lateral connections and generates gestalt insights far more than most brainstorming sessions.  And serotonin, that feel-good chemical at the heart of the Prozac revolution, bonds teams together more powerfully than the best-intentioned offsite.

But really understanding what makes these chemicals so powerful requires diving deeper into their impact on motivation, learning, and creativity. Let’s take them one at a time.

Motivationally, these five chemicals are the biggest rewards the brain can produce, and flow is one of the only times the brain produces all five simultaneously. This makes the state one of the most pleasurable, meaningful and — literally — addictive experiences available.

And we’ve all seen this in action. When coders stay up three says straight to launch a new app, flow, even more than caffeine and cold pizza, is what gets them to the finish line. “Researchers describe flow as the source code of intrinsic motivation,” says Jamie Wheal, Executive Director of the Flow Genome Project (where I am Director of Research). “Once an experience produces the state, we will go to extraordinary lengths to get more of it.“

Equally critical in an environment of rapid change is our ability to learn faster. Here too, flow can help. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the greater the chance that experience moves from short-term holding into long-term storage. As flow produces one of the most potent neurochemical cocktails around, the state has a massive impact on our ability to acquire new skills and knowledge. DARPA, for example, found that military snipers trained in a state of flow learned 230 percent faster than normal. Scientists at Advanced Brain Monitoring in Carlsbad, California, ran a parallel civilian study and found that flow cut in half the amount of time it took to train novice marksmen up to the expert level.

“In all our studies of extreme performance improvement,” says John Hagel, co-founder of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge, “the people and organizations who covered the most distance in the shortest time were always the ones who were tapping into passion and finding flow.”

Flow’s impact on creativity may be its most important role in today’s accelerated climate. “The major complaint you hear from people today is they’re overwhelmed by the amount of information coming at them,” continues Hagel. “Flow allows you to absorb that information, synthesize it, and integrate it. This drives the creative process. So while everyone else is driven to distraction, people in flow are adapting — they’re using the state to take performance to the next level.”

This happens because creativity is recombinatory — the product of novel ideas bumping into old thoughts and birthing something utterly new. In flow, norepinephrine and dopamine help us shut out distraction and gather more information (i.e. novel ideas). But these same chemicals also enhance pattern recognition, allowing us to make faster connections between ideas. Anandamide, meanwhile, augments lateral thinking, producing connections between much farther-flung ideas.

By turbo-boosting learning, motivation and creativity, flow is amplifying the three core competencies required to keep pace with radical change. Yet these dividends don’t come without serious investment. Restructuring businesses around flow means radically altering their DNA, shifting emphasis from mechanistic efficiencies to deep human engagement. Not many companies are up for this challenge. But in an era of relentless progress, making a present tense commitment to flow may be the only way to stay ahead of a breakneck future.

So how can we produce more flow in our lives and organizations? Flow states have triggers — pre-conditions that lead to more flow. Some are psychological, while others are environmental, social or creative. But since flow is a state of total absorption, all are ways of heightening and tightening attention, driving focus into the present moment.

Take high consequences, one of the environmental triggers. The idea here is straightforward: flow follows focus, and consequences always catch our attention.

For the extreme athletes I studied, these were often physical risks, but the science shows that other risks — emotional, intellectual, creative, social — work just as well. Moreover, all risk is relative. Sure, a professional surfer may need to paddle into a 50 foot wave to pull this trigger, but if you’re shy and quiet, then simply speaking up during an important meeting is enough to do the same.

These facts also tell us that those Silicon Valley companies with “fail forward” as their de-facto motto have an incredible advantage. If employees don’t have the space to fail, then they don’t have the ability to take risks. And if you’re not incentivizing risk, you’re denying access to flow.

One of the psychological triggers is the challenge/skills ratio. Our attention is most engaged when there’s a very specific relationship between the difficulty of a task and our ability to perform that task. If the challenge is too great, fear swamps the system. If the challenge is too easy, we stop paying attention. Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety, in what scientists call the “flow channel” — the spot where the task is hard enough to make us stretch; not hard enough to make us snap.

This sweet spot keeps attention locked in the present. When the challenge is firmly within the boundaries of known skills — meaning I’ve done it before and am fairly certain I can so again — the outcome is predetermined. We’re interested, not riveted. But when we don’t know what’s going to happen next, we pay more attention to the next. In other words, just like with the high consequences trigger, uncertainty is our rocket ride into the present moment.

So how hard do we have to push exactly? While the answer varies between individuals, 4% appears to be a loose rule of thumb. The challenge must be 4% greater than the skills one brings to it. And here’s where many get it wrong. A high performer will blow by 4% without noticing. They’ll go for challenges far harder and miss the sweet spot and, without the motivational reward of flow (to say nothing of its performance boost), they’ll burn out. Underachievers miss because 4% is the point where one gets seriously uncomfortable. So while high performers must learn slow and steady wins this race, underachievers must learn the opposite: that being uncomfortable is a sign of progress, not a reason to run away.

These two triggers are only the beginning, but two other points are worth remembering. First, when people tend to think about action and adventure sports, the danger involved tends to blind many to the obvious. Certainly, the abundance of physical risk in these environments drives flow, but these athletes also rely upon 15 other triggers — none of which require any physical risk. They range from uninterrupted concentration (sorry, open office plans), to clear goals, to immediate feedback.

Second, flow science is already being applied in business. Some companies (Facebook, Google) are focused on individual triggers, while others (Toyota, Patagonia) have already made flow a fundamental part of their core philosophy. Thus, it’s not just that tapping into flow can help an organization keep pace with an exponential world, it’s that there’s a good chance that your competition is already applying these principles and soon — because of the state’s significant amplification of performance and productivity — there may be no other way to keep up.

Electronic Tolls Do a Lot More Than Speed You on Your Way

Electronic toll collection has such a powerful effect in cutting highway traffic congestion, and therefore vehicle emissions and air pollution, that it leads to reductions in premature births and low birth weights, say Janet Currie and Reed Walker of Columbia University. Introduction of the E-ZPass system in New Jersey reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2 kilometers of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8%, respectively, in comparison with births to mothers near traditional toll plazas. Carbon monoxide, an important component of engine exhaust, has been implicated in negative birth outcomes.

Win More Sales with an Indirect Strategy

For the past two decades, business-to-business selling has been conducted in basically the same way. Salespeople directly approach customers armed with facts, features, and the benefits of their products to convince customers to buy. However, customer decision making has changed and today’s buyers are smarter and more sophisticated than ever. In addition, competitors have not sat idly by. They’re focused on defeating you so they have educated themselves about your products and sales tactics.

Sales success today requires a new way of thinking about sales strategy. The question is, what is the right strategy?

In his classic book Strategy, famous military historian Lidell Hart detailed the “indirect” approach to war. In painstaking detail he described the superiority of the indirect strategy over the direct strategy, using examples throughout the history of warfare. He theorized that the outcome of every major war from Roman times through World War II could be attributed to the grand strategy the parties selected. Instead of a brute force direct attack to overwhelm the enemy, the victors always chose to battle indirectly. When forced to fight, the indirect strategy involves using surprise, intelligence, logic, and human nature to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses.

For example, at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, the smaller Carthaginian army under the command of Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army using the indirect strategy.  Hannibal placed his weakest infantryman in the middle of his line to give the impression of vulnerability while positioning his heavy infantryman and cavalry on the flanks. As the battle progressed, his flanks closed in on the surprised Romans and they were vanquished.

Hart argued that the indirect approach was not solely a war strategy but also an influential philosophy that could be applied wherever opposition to new ways of thinking exists. He said, “The direct assault of ideas provokes a stubborn resistance, thus intensifying the difficulty of producing a change of outlook.” For example, “The suggestion that there is a bargain to be secured is far more potent than any direct appeal to buy.” Below, you will find seven principles of the indirect strategy and their business-to-business sales application.

1. Employ psychology. The first and foremost principle is that the indirect strategy is a psychological operation (“psy-op” in military jargon) based upon understanding, predicting, and influencing human nature. In sales, winning requires earning the trust, respect, and friendship of another human being. The victor builds the strongest customer relationship. The secondary psychological goal is to sew doubts among your enemies, because a halfhearted warrior is more than halfway to losing.

2. Plan your overriding strategy. During a long sales cycle of several months or more, it’s easy to focus on individual battles and lose sight of winning the war. The sales cycle is reduced to a series of battles without an overriding grand strategy. Salespeople become fixated on the next customer interaction, proceeding from the initial sales call to the sales presentation, then on to the product demonstration and evaluation. However, all salespeople are like generals who should create a strategy to win their wars long before the first battle begins. The successful military leader preplans how and where he will attack in accordance with the resources at his disposal. The victorious commander achieves his objective through calculated maneuvers to gain the advantage and counter tactics to neutralize his enemy’s advantages.

3. Know your enemies. How well do you know your competitors? How much time do you spend studying their websites, products, and marketing collateral? Do you take the time to perform an honest win-loss analysis after each engagement? Most salespeople argue that they simply don’t have enough time for these types of activities. However, history repeats itself for those who don’t learn from the past.

4. Be the first on the battlefield.  As a rule, it is always best to be the first salesperson in an account. The chance to understand a customer’s environment first, establish relationships, and set the criteria for the selection process are obvious advantages. But if you work for an underdog company that competes against industry favorites, being the first on the battlefield is the difference between success and failure.

5. Get privileged information from spies. Nearly twenty-five hundred years ago, Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote about the indirect strategy when he said, “Knowledge of the enemy’s position can only be obtained from other men. Hence, the use of spies.” These words are still true today. In order to win any complex sale you need proprietary information that only a spy can provide. These spies are members of the selection team, other company employees, or business partners. They provide valuable information about the internal machinations of the selection process and inform you about the thoughts of the various selection team members. Without a spy, you never know how well you are positioned in an account or what the enemy’s next move will be.

6. Understand how the objective is organized. All battlefield commanders need location-based information so they can map the way to reach their objective. Similarly, salespeople need a complete understanding of how the evaluators are organized within their company because political power during the decision-making process goes far beyond the lines and titles on an organization chart.

If you are involved in selling an enterprise solution, you already know the importance of understanding the inner workings of the various departments within a company. Your product might be purchased by the information technology department and used by accounting and manufacturing. Therefore, it’s critical to map out the political interrelationships between evaluators and their respective departments of the organization.

7. Create turning points. The indirect strategy is based upon creating turning points which cause enemies to lose momentum they can never regain. Like a battle, every deal has a critical moment, or turning point, that determines the winner and the loser. In sales, information can be used to create turning points that eliminates competitors. Your expertise on the customer’s industry, understanding of best practices, knowledge of unflattering facts about your archrival, and the willingness to raise critical issues the customer is unaware of can be used to create turning points.

For the sales warriors of the business world today, the difference between being hailed as a hero or branded a failure hinges on winning. But in order to win, you must know the steps it takes to develop a winning strategy. Winning is everything in sales as it is in war. In the words of master strategist Napoleon Bonaparte, “Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.”

10 Kinds of Stories to Tell with Data

For almost a decade I have heard that good quantitative analysts can “tell a story with data.” Narrative is—along with visual analytics—an important way to communicate analytical results to non-analytical people. Very few people would question the value of such stories, but just knowing that they work is not much help to anyone trying to master the art of analytical storytelling. What’s needed is a framework for understanding the different kinds of stories that data and analytics can tell. If you don’t know what kind of story you want to tell, you probably won’t tell a good one.

This insight came in an interview a couple of years ago with Joe Megibow, a leading analytics practitioner who was head of web analytics at Expedia and is now Senior Vice President of Omnichannel E-Commerce at American Eagle.  We simultaneously realized that there are several different types of analytical stories, and that it might be useful to create a typology of them.  I later created what I think is the first typology of analytical stories in my book (with Jinho Kim) Keeping Up with the Quants and, since its publication last year, I’ve refined the typology further. Practically speaking, there are four key dimensions that determine the type of story you can tell with data and analytics:

Time:  Analytical stories can be about the past, present, or future. The most common type of analytical story is about the past—it’s a reporting story using descriptive analytics to tell what happened last week, month, quarter, or year. By the way, most visual analytics stories are also of this type. They’re not the most valuable form of story, but it’s undeniably useful to know what happened.

Stories about the present are most likely to involve some form of survey—an analysis of what people or objects are currently up to. It may actually involve survey research—asking people what they think about something. In some cases survey analysis involves a statistical model of what factors drive others. We might call those explanatory survey stories. In general there are lots of minor variations on the survey story. In the book we talk about social science surveys, surveys of cable TV viewers, and surveys of bombers in World War II.

Stories about the future are predictions; they use, of course, predictive analytics. They take data from the past (it’s hard to get data from the future!) to create a statistical model, which is then used to predict the future. Quants create prediction stories all the time—about what customers are likely to buy, about how likely it is for an event to happen, about future economic conditions. These types of prediction stories always involve assumptions (notably that the future will be like the past in some key respects) and probability. The good news is that we can specify the likelihood that the story will be true; wouldn’t that have been nice for fairy tales?

Focus: Are you trying to tell a what story, a why story, or a how to address the issue story? (I am thankful to several Procter & Gamble executives for pointing this out). What stories are like reporting stories—they simply tell what happened. Why stories go into the underlying factors that caused the outcome. How to address the issue stories explore various ways to improve the situation identified in the what and the why stories. A really complete story may have all of these focus elements. P&G has made considerable progress in getting agreement on the what story quickly, and then spending more time and energy on the why and how topics. Key to doing that is having all parties involved in telling the story working off the same data.

Depth: There is also a depth dimension to analytical stories. When I spoke with Joe Megibow, then at Expedia, about this, he said that many of their stories were “CSI” projects—relatively small, ad hoc investigations to find out why something suboptimal was happening. One of his favorite examples involved discovering why some Irish customers were dropping online transactions when they got to the postal code input form. It turned out that some rural Irish locations don’t have postal codes. Just like on CSI—story solved in a short time.

The alternative I call “Eureka” stories, which involve long, analytically-driven searches for a solution to a complex problem. When you solve it, you want to yell, “Eureka!” My primary example in the book involved discovering the right way to refer and price potential buyers to real estate agents at Zillow. The project was core to the company’s business model and was worth a long story; after a few false starts and the use of several different analytical methods, they got it right. These types of stories are typically long, important, and expensive, so getting stakeholder buy-in is critical if you plan to reach the end of them.

Methods: Finally, there are different types of stories based on the analytical method used. Are you trying to tell, for example, a correlation story—in which the relationships among variables rose or fell at the same time—or a causation story, in which you’ll argue that one variable caused the other? In most cases, doing some sort of controlled experiment is really the only way to establish causation. People—particularly those in the media—tell bad stories all the time because they confuse causation with correlation.

These ten kinds of stories are not mutually exclusive.  There are certainly other method-based stories, and probably other important dimensions as well. But knowing that there are at least ten ways to tell analytical stories is much more useful than knowing only that you should tell one. There are other important aspects of analytical storytelling as well, such as that the story told to businesspeople should generally begin with the result and recommended outcome. You can save the details of how you got there analytically for the footnote of your report or presentation. And terms like R2, coefficient, logistic, and heteroskedasticity should not be appearing in your public story at all!

Persuading with Data

An HBR Insight Center




Visualizing Zero: How to Show Something with Nothing
Data Alone Won’t Get You a Standing Ovation
Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself
Data Goes Best With a Good Story (and Vice Versa)

The Trouble with Leadership Theories

Several years ago a client of mine, Rob, fell in love with Jim Collins’s book Good to Great. Within a month he had given copies to everyone on his team.  Soon after, language from the book made its way into Rob’s everyday speech.

One idea he especially loved was Level-5 leadership. “If we want to be great,” Rob would say, “we need more Level-5 leadership.”

I quickly grew tired of hearing him say it. His references to it were too vague and preachy. I could tell that his team was growing tired of it too.

Eventually, I asked Rob what Level-5 leadership meant to him. And more importantly, what it looked like in his organization. Not in a sound bite, but in his own words.

His answer:

We need a vision of this company for the next 10 years. We’ve spent too much time resting on our successes from the past 10. Either we come together as a team to figure it out or we’re going to drift into oblivion.

We have to be focused on building something bigger than our own bank accounts. We’ve lost sight of a broader purpose.

Our success has to start with our people. We have to inspire them to want to build something great alongside us. We have to be crystal clear about what the vision looks like in action. Then we have to walk the talk ourselves.

Rob’s answer wasn’t really what Collins meant by Level-5 leadership. Yet it was powerful in its own right. I could understand where Rob stood and what he believed. The power, of course, didn’t come from just his words; it came from his strong connection to them. That connection was missing when he tried to use Level-5 leadership as shorthand for his own thinking.

To be clear, Good to Great is filled with excellent research and insights. And leadership theory has its place. Theories pull disparate ideas and data into working models, distinguishing concepts and providing a systemic perspective.

But the trouble with leadership theories is they’re easy to hide behind (often inaccurately). They become proxies for actual leadership. When something important is on the line, people don’t follow five-tiered triangles, four-box matrices, or three concentric circles. They follow real people.

I advise clients to capture theories of leadership in their own words. Merge book smarts with street smarts. Avoid using jargon and vague concepts.  Make it visceral and real. Keep it brief; write it on a single sheet of paper.

A year ago, a client asked to see my one-sheet theory of leadership. I hadn’t done the exercise in a decade. That night I revisited my theory and rewrote it.  In fifteen minutes and six brief lines I captured my current thinking about great leadership, exactly as it came to me.  Here’s what came out:

I believe:

There’s too much noise in business today.  There are too many things vying for our attention.  Senior leaders must be diligent about cutting out the noise to get their organizations focused on what really matters.

Playing it safe is dangerous.  You never maintain the status quo by playing it safe.  You get worse.  You lose your edge.  You lose your confidence.  You don’t feel alive. You can’t win.  

Mediocrity is cancerous.  Once you begin to accept mediocrity, it sends signals that it’s acceptable.  Before long everyone and everything around you is mediocre.

Unless you’re relentlessly open and honest in your communication—constantly—things fall apart.  I believe that close to 100% of all business problems can be traced back to poor communication at some point.

People want to do great things.  They want to build great things.  They want to be involved with other great people.  Great leaders create the conditions for other people’s greatness to come out.

You need to hold people’s feet to the fire.  Do it with compassion.  Do it with love.  Do it with respect.  But don’t let people off the hook.  This is where mediocrity starts.

I was surprised at how good it felt to write these statements. It felt better than I remember from my previous versions. When I shared the statements with clients, there was strong resonance. Two people actually posted them at their desk. I wondered why; after all, the content wasn’t topically new.

A colleague shared her take. “The statements are powerful because they’re not polished. They’re just what you believe. You’re not trying to encapsulate hundreds of data points into a grand, catchy theory. You’re not trying to be politically correct and perfect.”

I think she’s right. People are tired of the leadership buzzwords and models that feel too tidy, analytical, and removed. A client recently told me his executives are suffering from “framework fatigue.” I understand; I think we all are. The language of leadership has become so cookie-cutter and cliché that we filter it out.

Of course, the act of great leadership is never cliché. It’s an art. It should be informed by smart research, yet it should be shaped by on-the-ground experience. Both are critical.  By all means read the theories, attend seminars, and talk to luminaries. They provide a solid foundation. But then ask yourself, what do I believe makes a great leader?  Trust your gut and experience. Don’t worry about making it perfect. Worry about making it a reflection of what you truly have found to work. Your theory might not have all the spit and polish of formal leadership theories, but it just might be what takes you and your organization from good to great.

How a Public-Private Partnership Is Saving Lives

Every day, about 800 mothers die bringing new life into the world. If nothing is done, that will translate into about 3 million deaths in the next decade. But if corporations join the public sector in recognizing that this problem is a convergence of societal, economic, and cultural factors and apply good management practices to address it, we can bend the curve.

This is one of the central findings of Merck for Mothers, a 10-year, $500 million initiative that my company has undertaken. Now in its second year, the initiative’s goal is to create a world where no woman dies from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. More than 75 programs involving a wide range of partners (maternal health experts and providers, NGOs, governments, academia, professional and quality improvement organizations, private sector businesses and scientists) are under way in 30 countries, including the United States.

Within the numbers of women’s deaths are real-life stories. When her mother died in childbirth, nine-year-old Gudia Devi of Uttar Pradesh, India, faced an unfair, all-too-common situation: She forfeited going to school in order to take care of her younger siblings. This domino effect has no end. Without change, young people like Gudia are likely to be caught in the same cycle − sacrificing their youth and education to become surrogate mothers and bear the unintended responsibility of parenthood.

If you believe this is a problem confined to the developing world, consider this: The rate of maternal mortality in the United States has doubled in the past 20+ years. Right here in this country, every year approximately 900 women die − and 50,000 nearly die − from complications due to pregnancy and childbirth. Shockingly, 46 countries in the world have a lower rate of maternal mortality than the United States.

And it gets worse. The vast majority of these deaths don’t have to happen, which make these losses even more tragic.

While there has been progress made in many countries by smart, passionate people in global health, the United Nations acknowledges that its Millennium Development Goal to dramatically reduce maternal mortality by 2015 is at great risk for failure.

Maternal mortality is an enormously complicated problem. In sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, crisis epicenters, mothers are at risk due to a host of problems including scarce medical supplies, inadequate refrigeration for life-saving medicines, lack of transportation to medical care facilities, and cultural norms such as hiding pregnancy. In some countries, what passes for an ambulance is a donkey cart. Long-awaited bulk shipments of medical gloves can arrive full of holes, unusable. Getting medical assistance might require the permission of a reluctant mother-in-law or husband who regard intervention as embarrassing or dangerous.

But by applying a business lens to the challenge − looking beyond traditional health models to identify private-sector approaches − Merck for Mothers and our partners are making progress toward creating a world where no woman dies needlessly in childbirth.

Understand the customer. Businesses gain their strategic focus from understanding the “customer” − in this case, that’s the mother-to-be herself. To help understand a woman’s preferences and challenges, Merck for Mothers has begun to incorporate focus groups and community advisory committees in our work. This is essential to developing services she will use and, longer term, putting into place solutions that will have a lasting impact.

One of my favorite examples comes from Zambia, where our team spoke with local women to get their take on what should be done to stop women from dying. Voices we heard in this “market research” told us that pregnant women may walk for miles through dangerous floodlands and game reserves to get to a place where they can deliver. These conversations gave Merck for Mothers and our partners (governments, a medical professional group and NGOs) clear direction. We are now finding ways to design self-sustaining models of maternity “waiting homes.” These are places where women from remote areas in the late stages of pregnancy can stay to be close to the clinics where they will give birth.

Develop the capabilities of small businesses. The private health sector − independent midwives, private clinics, and local pharmacies − enjoys high levels of trust among patient customers throughout rural Africa and India. These small, entrepreneurial businesses have vast but unrealized potential to deliver high quality, affordable, and comprehensive maternal health services. On one level, they need to learn and implement basic business essentials such as financial management and human resource development. Yet the harder challenge is to make sure the resulting models we help develop are sustainable. To this end, Merck for Mothers is funding programs that help teach these small businesses franchise design, accreditation strategies, performance-based incentives, and supply-chain management to help address the persistent problem of inventory stock-outs, for example.

Measure and evaluate. These staples of management excellence are central to making progress. We are applying them to our programs in two ways: 1) to enhance data collection and reviews here in the United States to better understand why the maternal mortality rate has been climbing; and 2) to assess the effectiveness and sustainability of our own partnerships, both from an epidemiological and health economics perspective, through a third-party evaluator.

Pursue scientific innovation. This, of course, is critical in reducing maternal mortality and requires management. Merck’s scientists consulted with dozens of health care providers to understand and identify ways to overcome barriers to treating the leading causes of complications and death in pregnancy and childbirth, including post-partum hemorrhage and pre-eclampsia. The conversations underscored that technologies that save women in more developed countries are totally impractical in places without refrigeration or electricity. To save lives in low-resource countries, our scientists are connecting research counterparts who together can make real progress. By building alliances, and adding to them our own complementary scientific expertise, we are taking forward steps to make medicines easier to use and less likely to degrade in settings with limited infrastructure.

Raise awareness. This is an enormously powerful part of the equation for saving mothers. Just look at how patients and patient advocacy groups have moved us forward in combating HIV/AIDS, heart disease, and breast cancer. The private sector was a major contributor to those successes; we must use our voice now to create awareness of the causes of maternal mortality and its impact, and to help bring about innovation to save mothers.

What has been achieved? In a year’s time, maternal mortality in the areas in Zambia and Uganda where we’re working with partners has decreased by a third. Management expertise from the private sector has been crucial to that result, bringing about better health care delivery − and new hope for women as they bring new life into the world.

Problems as complex and heartbreaking as maternal mortality will require continued analysis and constructive solutions. Imagining a mother’s joyful embrace of her newborn is reward enough to rally for results.

If You Have a Bad Boss, These Are Your Options

A good boss provides encouragement, development, mentoring, and support, while also being fair, constructively critical, and helpful in integrating employees into high-performing teams. This is a boss you remember for years, one who has a lasting impact on your career.

But what happens when you end up with a really bad boss – someone who not only lacks these positive characteristics, but is also a negative force? Do you just grin and bear it, complain to higher authorities, look for an escape route, or do something else? Here are two quick (disguised) examples:

Sheila was an up-and-coming manager at a well-known manufacturing company. Several years ago, she was asked to build and run a small team that would invest in start-ups aimed at bringing new technology into the company’s supply chain. Since this was a minor operation, Sheila’s supervisor, the head of Supply Chain, paid her very little attention. Eventually, her team built a portfolio that caught the interest of the CFO and the CEO, and soon she was meeting regularly with them. Unfortunately, Sheila’s success with the C-suite was met with jealousy and anxiety from her boss. For the next year, the boss turned down requests for more resources, gave her poor performance reviews, and spread the word that Sheila was “difficult to manage.” Eventually he moved the team away from Sheila and left her as an individual contributor.

Howard was a high-potential manager at a large life sciences firm. For the past two years he had led a well-regarded team of analysts who provided performance reports to business units. When a new head of Financial Planning and Analysis was brought in from the outside, however, Howard suddenly couldn’t do anything right. His new boss criticized the way things were done, belittled members of Howard’s team, created discord with the business unit heads (their clients), and refused to listen to anyone’s input. And when Howard tried to spend time with this boss and develop a more personal relationship, he was castigated for being “high maintenance” and someone who “needs reassurance” to do his job.

Obviously both of these cases are somewhat extreme (although I have many similar ones to draw upon). But they do illustrate how a bad boss syndrome leaves subordinates feeling trapped and intimidated, with nowhere to go. If Sheila or Howard complain to the next highest level, it could make things worse and reinforce the claim that she or he is “difficult to manage” or “high maintenance.” If they go to HR or an executive with their concerns, they could be branded as troublemakers or difficult subordinates. But if they do nothing, they will be miserable and lose the respect of their direct reports. It’s a tough dilemma.

Luckily, there are a couple of alternatives. They come with no guarantees, but they may be worth considering.

The first is to wait it out. Bad bosses can be like bullies who eventually get tired of harassing people, particularly once they realize that it won’t get them anywhere. The key is to keep doing a good job, while making sure that people above and beyond your level know that you are still performing. Most of the time, a boss’s bad behavior is visible to others, so hanging in there, without complaining, will be viewed positively. And over time, a bad boss may even self-destruct and lose credibility. In fact, that’s what happened to Howard’s boss, who was eventually marginalized by his own peers. Howard ended up with a bigger job in a different part of the organization.

The second alternative is to seek other options, both inside and out. Use the situation as an opportunity to reassess your career, your work-life priorities, and how you define success. When there are no catalytic situations forcing us to think about our trajectories, we stick to a certain path because it’s comfortable — even though it may not be optimal. Having a bad boss can force you to think about what you really want. In Sheila’s case, the turmoil that her boss generated pushed her to think about getting into the start-up sphere, using the contacts she had built over the years. In the long run, the bad boss liberated her to pursue another direction.

Nobody likes having a bad boss. But if you do, there are ways to survive.

Decriminalizing Marijuana in UK Led to More Illness from Hard Drugs

A one-year experiment to decriminalize marijuana in a borough of London led to 40% to 100% increases in rates of hospitalization, mostly of young men, for illnesses related to use of hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin, say Elaine Kelly and Imran Rasul of the Institute for Fiscal Studies in the UK. The increased hospitalizations from the experiment, which removed possession of small quantities of cannabis from a list of prosecutable offenses, led to additional annual costs of about £80,000 per year. Past studies have suggested that cannabis use may lead users to consume harder drugs, the researchers say.

Stress Isn’t a Threat, It’s a Signal to Change

Is stress impairing your performance at work and compromising your relationships? Changing the way you think about stress can help you turn stress into an ally and use it to improve mental agility and work performance; a report in the Journal of Experimental Psychology showed that physiological and cognitive benefits result from thinking of stress as “functional and adaptive” rather than a signifier of “threat.”

Turning stress to your advantage is no easy task. It requires mental discipline to pause when you’re in the grip of stress and to reframe it as potentially useful. In my executive coaching practice, I help clients transform their attitude about stress. There are many ways to do this, and the method needs to be individually tailored to each client’s unique situation. Here are three ways that clients in my practice have reappraised their stress and used it to propel positive changes:

Reconceive essential relationships. The third-generation CEO of a family business, my client experienced severe stress as his executive team (comprised of older family members) lambasted his every decision about how to run the company. Feeling defensive, he retreated from key CEO tasks such as strategic planning and securing a line of credit to keep the business afloat. Coaching focused on interpreting his stress as a signal to redefine his relationships with family members, whose support would be essential for survival of the company. Coaching empowered him to think of his family members as repositories of wisdom, people whose interests were aligned with his own. As he rethought these relationships, he transformed the monthly executive meetings from a battleground into a collaborative brainstorming session on opportunities for the company. With this newfound focus, the CEO harnessed the team’s knowledge and motivation to grow the company. Not only did he feel calmer and happier, but within four months he secured the line of credit and initiated critical discussions with potential outside investors. By reappraising his stress as a friendly message to heal valuable relationships, he protected the business and repositioned it for growth.

Develop strategic leadership skills. Another client was an attorney who was recently promoted to serving as his biotech firm’s general counsel, a position in which he was expected both to oversee the legal department and function as a strategic partner in the C-suite. He felt overwhelmed by the pressures of the two roles and the need to delegate tasks to associate attorneys. His stress mounted as he micromanaged their work and got “stuck in the weeds” of low-level tasks. We strove to reframe his stress as a signal that he should stretch beyond his comfort zone and embrace his new responsibilities as a strategic partner on the executive team. This reappraisal prompted him to begin placing more trust in his legal staff’s decision-making capabilities, to meet more often with key partners inside and outside the firm, and to embrace leadership roles that would position him more as a visionary leader than a worker bee. As he did so, his stress evaporated and he led the executive team to take a bold step toward expanding the business into a complex but potentially lucrative overseas market.

Apologize and express gratitude. Another client, the chief operating officer of an insurance company, was experiencing massive stress in the context of a work crisis. During a recent company event, she consumed an excessive amount of alcohol and embarrassed herself by making loud and rude comments to colleagues. Her behavior became so unruly that she was put in a taxi and sent home. She was terrified that she would lose her job. Part of the coaching focused on how to communicate with the CEO and executive team in the wake of this blunder. I was taken aback when she told me that she planned in an upcoming meeting with the CEO to complain that her year-end bonus was lower than she deserved based on performance metrics. My responsibility, I realized, was to respectfully confront her about how ill-conceived and potentially destructive this approach would be. After pointing out that her ongoing stress might be a signal that she was still uncomfortable with this course of action, we had a productive dialogue about alternative strategies. Ultimately, she concluded that it would be most prudent not to request a higher bonus, but instead to apologize for her behavior at the event and express thanks that she still had her job at all. This decision immediately reduced her stress level and served her well with the CEO and management team. She retained her position and continues to repair her reputation as a trustworthy leader in the firm.

These vignettes are real-world examples of what psychologists have been learning about stress management in well-controlled experiments.  If you can reappraise stress as a constructive hint that you should seriously reorient your thinking and behavior, then the stress can diminish and steer you toward a renewed sense of purpose and growth.

5 Dirty Secrets About the U.S. Economy

If there’s one thing I hate these days, it’s discussing the U.S. economy.

Will raising wages by seventeen cents destroy humanity? Will edible deodorant add 0.000007 percent to GDP? If we resurrected giant man-eating dinosaurs, could we use them to keep our warehouse pickers in line? Isn’t it awesome when the Dow hits a record high (but everything else flatlines or shrinks)?

I feel like I’m listening to a debate on the noble merits of true love between the Real Housewives and a bunch of broseph PUAs.

By my count, there are five dirty secrets about the economy we’re not supposed to know.

Number one. The biggest falsehood of all? That fixing it is something like teleporting to Jupiter: impossible! Beyond us! Science fiction!

Contrary to nearly everything you hear on the subject, my humble suggestion is this: fixing the U.S. economy isn’t impossible. It’s not even that difficult. It’s straightforward; about as complicated as tying your shoelaces if you’re wearing Velcro sneakers.

The US is a rich country that’s beginning to resemble, for the average person, a poor one. Its infrastructure is crumbling. Its educational systems barely educate. Its healthcare is still nearly nonexistent. I can take a high-speed train across Europe in eight hours; I can barely get from DC to Boston in nine. Most troubling of all, it is poisoning its food and water supplies by continuing to pursue dirty energy, while the rest of the rich world is choosing renewable energy. The US has glaring deficits in all these public goods — education, healthcare, transport, energy, infrastructure — not to mention the other oft- unmentioned, but equally important ones: parks, community centers, social services.

So the US should invest in its common wealth. For a decade, and more. Legions of people should be employed in rebuilding its decrepit infrastructure, schools, colleges, hospitals, parks, trains. To a standard that is the envy of the world — not its laughingstock.

Why? If the US invests in the public goods it so desperately needs, the jobs that it so desperately needs will be created — and they will be jobs that (wait for it) actually create useful stuff. You know what’s useless? Designer diapers, reality TV, listicles, reverse-triple-remortgages, fast food, PowerPoint decks, and the other billion flavors of junk that we slave over only to impress people we secretly hate so we can live lives we don’t really want with money we don’t really have by doing work that sucks the joy out of our souls. You know what’s useful, to sane people? Hospitals, schools, trains, parks, classes, art, books, clean air, fresh water … purpose, meaning, dignity. If you can’t attain that stuff, what good are five hundred aisles, channels, or megamalls?

So: invest in public goods; employ armies to build them; create millions of jobs. And they won’t be the dead-end, abusive, toxic McJobs that have come to plague the economy; they will be decent, well-paid, meaningful jobs which people will be proud to have.

Dirty secret number two: This is a bogus recovery—and it’s going to poison society, unless we are wise enough to recover from the recovery. The rich are getting vastly richer, to the point that it’s absurd that anyone should be so rich. But the average household is getting poorer; and the poor are getting trampled. The US is becoming a caste society; and the divisions between the castes are widening. Investing in basic goods is the only way—the only way — to lift millions out of the ruins of imploded lives, and into prosperity again. Yes; the only way.

Selling doggy dating apps for billions while the average household can’t afford healthcare and education isn’t an economy — it’s a travesty. Too many of our growth industries produce low-paying service “jobs” that amount to essentially being being maids and butlers to the super-rich. Sound like a healthy economy to you? I didn’t think so. Hence: invest in the basic building blocks of society — if, that is, it’s a functioning society we wish to enjoy.

Where will the money come from? Dirty secret number three: It doesn’t matter. Print it. Borrow it. Tax it from the super-rich, in whose coffers it’s merely sitting idly. It does not matter one bit. It’s a second order question. If the U.S. doesn’t invest in public goods, it will not prosper; and if it doesn’t prosper, it cannot pay off the debts it already has. Conversely, if it does invest in public goods, and creates millions of decent jobs, the source of investment will matter little; for the economy will have grown and people will be prosperous. We can debate until kingdom come whether to borrow; print; tax; and we should. But we are having a fake “debate” if we pretend that we cannot invest in society first; and then wring our hands that society is falling apart.

Key word: pretend. Here’s dirty secret number four. The pundits don’t want you to know any of the above. They want you to believe that fixing the economy is unfeasible. It’s not. It’s simple. It’s straightforward. It’s obvious. It’s a problem whose solution is as plain as the sky on a perfect summer day.

So why don’t the pundits want you to know any of that? Duh. Because if you did, well, then they might be out of jobs. Here’s what they’re already out of: ideas, time, options, and most importantly, credibility.

Every quarter now, for more than half a decade, pundits and economists have dropped their jaws and proclaimed that they’re shocked. Shocked! That the economy’s still broken!

If every month for years, your doctor frowned, and said, “I’m shocked! The meds aren’t working!”… you’d probably find a new doctor. Maybe it’s time we did the same with pundits and economists.

Remember this old story: a Soviet citizen arrives in the US at the height of the cold war. On arriving, he’s taken to the grocery store. He looks around, eyes wide, and exclaims, bewildered: “But there are no bread lines! How can this be?”. You see, everything he’d been told about the US was a lie. It wasn’t a land of decadence and barbarism; but, at that time, a land of plenty, of opportunity.

Now, in a grand irony of history, the shoe’s on the other foot. Here’s my new version of the story above.

I live in Europe and the US. I tell my friends in the US that in Europe, if you’re disabled, or seriously ill, or just elderly, many national health services will send carers to your house. That’s right; your house. To … care for you. Like the Soviet citizen of yesterday, my American friends of today say, bewildered: “But how can this be?! That’s impossible.”

Wrong. It’s not impossible. It’s precisely how real prosperity happens.

And in that parable is the story of how economies grow into prosperity. A job is created; and not just a McJob; the carer earns an income; the sick are nurtured; the economy doesn’t just grow; but it creates real human prosperity.

An economy is not just a bunch of Very Serious and Highly Intelligent economists debating how many angels can dance on the head of pin — sorry, I meant another variable in an equation in a model. It is lives. Human lives.

So here’s dirty secret number five.

We don’t live the lives we were meant to by merrily shoving Artificially Fried Chicken Flavored Dorito Slurpees down our gullets while watching our societies crumble. We live them when we build things. Great things. Worthy things. Noble things. And the greatest, worthiest, and noblest of all things that mankind has ever built are not apps, drones, corporations, or profits. They are societies in which every life counts. In which every life is truly, fully lived.

So here’s my challenge to you. You know all the dirty secrets now. Live like they weren’t.