Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1425
May 2, 2014
What Happens After You’re Forced to Resign
Their faces are plastered on TV sets and web pages in brief moments of public outrage; but what happens to the people forced out of their jobs by scandal, particularly if their resignations were more symbolic than indicative of any leadership failure? This is the story of one such person, Martha Johnson, who resigned two years ago as the head of the U.S. General Services Administration after a scandal involving an extravagant employee conference that involved lots of federal contract violations. Though she wasn't involved in the conference, she took the fall. Now, as the Washington Post's Lillian Cunningham writes, "time hasn't quite started up again." Johnson is now "just another 61-year-old without a job." Her losses – job, money, prestige, influence – are a poignant reminder of how important work can be, and why coping with its sudden disappearance is a much bigger challenge than going into the office every day, no matter how high-pressure the job may have been.
Becoming Invisible As Objects Go OnlineForeign Affairs
The future of the Internet of Things is bright, especially in areas such as energy, health care, weather, and making cities more livable. But in order to realize this future, we need to learn and employ the lessons from the architectural evolution of the internet, facilitating openness and distributed operations rather than the closed proprietary systems of individual manufacturers and service providers. A team at MIT is focused on developing "Internet 0," a slower, simpler system for bringing IP to the smallest devices. The hero of this system is the microcontroller, a simple processor with just a small amount of memory. As the technology becomes more integrated into everyday life, it will, paradoxically, become more invisible. –Jeff Kehoe
Sans Chic Making Wearable Tech More WearableThe New Yorker
Speaking of technology becoming invisible, let's face facts: Wearables are ugly. Indeed, Facebook's most recent acquisition, Oculus VR, "looks like a scuba mask with a metal plate bolted to the front of it," writes Amy Merrick. As former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts joins Apple this week, Merrick wonders whether she can solve one of tech's most vexing challenges: "how to create wearable technologies that people actually want to wear." To do this, she must address a couple of issues: 1) Engineers may "delight in advertising they're wearing the new device," but most other people don't want to look like a weirdo resembling "the character Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager"; and 2) People don't generally want to be reminded that they're constantly plugged in. One solution may be for Ahrendts to adhere to what's called "intimate computing," which "evokes a product that is sensual and tactile, personal and discreet." Or, in Trekkie parlance, "more Burberry, less Borg."
An Argumentative Evolution The Untold Story of Larry Page's Incredible ComebackBusiness Insider
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this long piece about Google's Larry Page is the way being argumentative evolved in both Page's mind and within Google's organizational culture. In the beginning, butting heads was the rule: It's how Page and cofounder Sergey Brin bonded in the first place and how they came to be seen as caring more about ideas than people's feelings. This worked, until spectacular growth, as well as a massive public firing of managers, led investors to demand a more seasoned CEO – someone to lead and, in part, babysit Page. So that’s what Eric Schmidt did.
Almost a decade later, here’s reinstated CEO Page telling senior staff members that Google "would never reach its goals if the people in that room did not stop fighting with one another." While it's tempting to see this shift as the ultimate redemption story, it actually kind of is, but not because Page is suddenly Mr. Rogers. It's because Page learned to recognize when fighting is useful for a company – and when it isn't. In essence, he learned how to manage it.
Vortex of Debt ScammedMatter
In poor communities, there's a vicious world of debt that's mostly invisible to middle-class folks. It starts with payday loans – money borrowed to close the spending gap before the paycheck arrives. Worse, borrowers fall victim to scammers who demand hefty payments, threatening legal action. That's what enrages Mike Davis, a computer-security expert and former hacker who takes a particular interest in internet con artists.
As Danny Bradbury writes in Matter, Davis has become a white hat amid uncountable black hats online, and his goal is to lure scammers so he can bust them. But over the course of this long and winding tale, his white hat starts to look dingy as he stealthily records phone calls, phishes for passwords, and generally gets his hacker on in pursuit of the crooks. The point of all this isn't Davis's lack of saintliness but a much larger issue that's rarely raised in discussions about computer security: that despite all the publicity about attacks on banks and big corporations, the reality is that on the internet, as elsewhere, crime disproportionately victimizes the poor, exploiting their fear and powerlessness. –Andy O'Connell
BONUS BITSDo You Want to Know?
Why Only One Top Banker Went to Jail for the Financial Crisis (The New York Times)
Is Your Job at Risk from Robot Labor? (Quartz)
The Origins of Office Speak (The Atlantic)
If You’re Feeling Unappreciated, Give Someone Else Credit
Harry is one of our most successful family business clients. A high school graduate, his first job was pouring concrete. Once he joined the family business, he showed a real gift for leadership. Strategically brilliant, disarmingly funny, a driven worker, and still grounded in his deep values, Harry grew the firm at more than 15% per year. He embodies much of what we all admire in leaders.
Yet something was amiss in the culture of the business Harry had created. The co-owners, his sister and cousin, had gotten to a place where they were considering splitting up their successful business. Their working relationships had ground to a halt as they pointed out faults in Harry’s leadership. The more he was criticized, the more Harry agitated against their involvement in the business. Core decisions were not being made, as one family member after another threw a monkey wrench into the works.
One day, at a particularly unproductive meeting, Harry exploded: “No one appreciates all the sacrifices I’ve made for this company. The countless nights spent at industry conferences with people I don’t like; the weekends with bankers and lawyers to finish the deals; the sleepless nights worrying about missing bank covenants. You all take this success for granted!” In short, Harry felt under-appreciated, and it was affecting the company’s performance.
Appreciation is so fundamental to business success that in our work with family clients we hold “appreciations” sessions – a formal process where family members come together to openly express positive emotions about each other. There are no “yes, buts” – this is not a venue for feedback but rather a way to communicate honest and sincere gratitude about what someone else has done for you and meant to you.
Of course, this is not rocket science, but there is sound theory that supports it. After publishing his best-seller Getting to Yes, Harvard negotiations expert Roger Fisher paired up with psychologist Daniel Shapiro to write Beyond Reason, which moves beyond the first book in acknowledging the power of feelings to gum up even the most reasonable negotiations. Significantly, Fisher and Shapiro say that to be a top negotiator, people must first learn to express appreciation to each other. That’s number one on their list. Appreciation generates the positive emotions that cultivate respect and tolerance for the other person’s beliefs and opinions and actions.
Psychologist John Gottman, well-known for his research on couples, has also shown through mathematical analysis that couples that show appreciation to one another have longer and happier marriages. Indeed, a large body of recent research in the social sciences demonstrates that expressing appreciation is also beneficial for the giver, who feels more positive about him- or herself, and more satisfied with social relationships.
But appreciation has to be a two-way street; to create an appreciation culture, the leader has to get the ball rolling. So, instead of feeding Harry’s painful plea for appreciation, in the meeting we flipped his request and said, “Harry, we hear you. But we are going to ask you to do something that is going to feel a bit uncomfortable. Look your sister in the eyes, and tell her something that you appreciate about her.”
Harry was slow to overcome his skepticism to our request, but eventually he dredged up some heartfelt sentiment: “Without you, we’d be nowhere,” he told his older sister. “Actually, I’d be nowhere – still pouring concrete and spending all my time flying planes. You recommended me for my first sales job when no one else saw any potential in me. You’re sharp and you’ve guided our people decisions with real wisdom. You’ve always been there for us, for me. Thank you.”
Without any urging, Harry’s sister and cousin returned the appreciation, expressing previously unsaid but deeply felt gratitude. They articulated how much they felt Harry had sacrificed for the company, for them. They talked about the joy of being able to go on a good journey together.
The reality that people like and need to be appreciated seems so intuitively obvious that one can only scratch one’s head and wonder why is doesn’t happen more often. It’s a fundamental human need to feel valued by people we esteem, especially by family members. Yet we all feel under-appreciated at least some of the time, not least of all because we assume that other people are taking full credit for our successes.
We all often get trapped in what we call “the credit game.” By this we mean that everyone focuses on what he or she did personally for the success of the business, denying the contributions of others. The problem with the credit game is that it’s generally a zero-sum game. For Jim to win, Jane has to lose. Placing too much emphasis on individual accomplishments saps everyone’s willingness to sacrifice for a collective goal. This is the cycle that Harry and his partners got themselves into – they were playing the credit game in their heads. Speaking their appreciation aloud has helped them to break free.
While family businesses powerfully exemplify these dynamics, they exist in all relationships. Given the demands of many careers today – intellectual, physical, and emotional – and the difficulty of expressing appreciation, you may be particularly vulnerable to feeling under-appreciated at work. But you can’t just yell: “Hey! I’m working my tail off! Appreciate me!” Appreciation, as Harry found, is like playing catch – you need to throw the ball to have it come back.
We’re aware that appreciations can sound hokey, even inauthentic. But dozens of times we have seen it break through the bitterness corroding relationships. Harry’s appreciation was not a silver bullet – there is no silver bullet. But his heartfelt appreciation opened up a space for the real work to get started. That’s what appreciations are all about. Try it. Show some appreciation to someone today and see what comes back.
Editor’s Note: Some identifying details such as names, identities, industries, and financial information have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
Are You Confusing Strategy with Planning?
Most people agree that the two strongest human urges are survival and procreation, but there is very little consensus on the next most powerful. I believe it’s the need to succeed. Humans hate to fail — hate it more than almost anything else.
But what about all the people in the world who apparently have no drive for success — for instance, kids who choose to be drug dealers rather than get an education and “succeed”? I see a different explanation for such behavior. If you hate failure, you have a wonderful way of ensuring that you don’t experience it: Play the game you know you can win.
Think about it. On one hand, you can tackle a difficult challenge and face the prospect of failing. On the other, you can strive for a manageable goal and pretty much guarantee that you’ll achieve it. I would argue that most people systematically choose the second course of action.
So it’s not that kids who drop out of high school and become drug dealers lack a desire to succeed. Quite the contrary. Their desire is so great, in fact, that they risk their lives and liberty to fulfill it. But they take care to do something they can succeed at, not something for which they feel set up to fail — namely, the path followed by more-privileged kids.
The drive to succeed affects behavior in the corporate world as well. Each year every company engages in an elaborate dance around the budget. The managers responsible for meeting budget goals argue to their bosses that the targets should be set lower — competition is tough, the economy is slowing, the distribution channel is turbulent, and so on. I interviewed Jack Welch several years ago, and he rather hilariously described the process at GE.
Setting yourself up to succeed is a good idea in some contexts. But it’s usually a bad idea in strategy making. Instead of doing the difficult work of making a coherent set of choices to position themselves to win, most companies default to writing a strategic plan that lists a bunch of initiatives with associated financial projections.
The decision to default to planning instead of strategy is often not explicit. Rather, it just feels comfortable to slide in that direction. So I’ve created a brief questionnaire for managers to gauge whether they’ve abdicated their responsibility in this way.
Take this assessment, and discover whether you’ve fallen into any of the “comfort traps” of strategic planning. I hope it helps you aspire to a better strategy.
How Social Entrepreneurs Can Have the Most Impact
Social enterprise in the U.S. is a fast-growing, but fragmented, movement. Looking at a recent release of data from The Great Social Enterprise Census, only a fifth are larger than $2 million in budget, just 8% employ more than a 100 people, and 60% were founded in the past 8 years, when the movement really began to gain momentum.
What happened in 2006? And is this kind of rapid growth good news?
You can find the answer to the timing question nestled among the facts that David Bornstein lays out in the preface to his book, How to Change the World. That year, two global headlines raised the profile of social enterprise: Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace prize. And Bill Gates announced he was shifting his priorities from software development to social impact by moving full time to his foundation. In the broader U.S. population, two generations made clear that their interests, too, lay in helping society. Civic Ventures had recently released its first survey of baby boomers and found at least half were interested in “encore careers” helping others. Meanwhile, 19,000 high-scoring college graduates across the U.S. applied for Teach for America—including 10% of the graduating classes of Dartmouth and Yale. My organization, The Bridgespan Group, received 1,800 applications for 18 entry-level positions consulting to nonprofits and philanthropy.
Since then, TFA has become one of the largest employers of Ivy League graduates. Huge companies like IBM have created programs to train and transition retirees into social sector roles. Leading MBA programs have doubled the number of courses they offer that have social enterprise content. Elite undergraduate business schools like Babson College have changed their mission statements to explicitly include social value. And the number of applications to social enterprise fellowships like Echoing Green has soared.
All to say, the sector is hot, which brings me to the second question: Are social entrepreneurs stoking the right kind of growth? With so many small start-ups, are social entrepreneurs at risk of creating well-intentioned, but fragmented efforts that won’t ultimately change much? This is indeed the risk, but they can avoid or offset this fragmentation by adopting three approaches that allow even the smallest social enterprise to have outsized impact:
Scale impact, not organizations. My colleagues Jeff Bradach and Abe Grindle point out that even the most successful social enterprises are reaching only a fraction of the need. Take the issue of youth unemployment. The biggest success story in the U.S. is Year Up, an organization that mentors and trains disconnected youth into living-wage jobs. After a decade of persistence, the organization now reaches 2,000 kids per year, yet there are 6.7 million young people out of school and out of work.
Every social entrepreneur — with organizations large or small — will need to find a way to go beyond making progress to solving the problem. Instead of growing their organizations, they need to think about making the problems go away. Promising approaches include widely distributing solutions via technology like massive open online courses (MOOCs) that make education available globally or mobile apps that provide vital market and weather information to poor farmers around the world; or via existing national or global platforms (think: business, government, community colleges, YMCAs); or changing social norms, as we’ve seen with smoking cessation, designated driving, and consumer recycling and conservation. Scottish social entrepreneur Mick Jackson, founder of WildHearts in Action, is attempting to forge a generation that marries entrepreneurship to economic justice through microloan-based business competitions across British schools and universities that generate profits for microloans in developing countries.
Lead collaborations, not just organizations. As the world shifts from creating value through repetition (building, growing, or serving more efficiently) to a world where change begets change, you need leaders who can make sense of a kaleidoscope of processes and relationships — beyond the four walls of their organization. Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, points to the necessary skill of becoming a leader of teams of teams.Think about the pace of new cancer therapies — and how research center directors lead knowledge sharing between labs across continents and oceans. Or consider Kwabena Darko of Ghana, who helped found that country’s microfinance sector by forging a collaboration between global NGO Opportunity International, his national startup Sinapi Aba, and a myriad of village- and town-based trust groups.
Amplify the voices of the constituents you seek to serve. Even far-flung or pint-sized choruses for change can wield great influence when they unite and come from a place of deep authenticity. Any social entrepreneur who wants to help a disadvantaged constituency help itself, needs first to give power to its voice, as my colleague Willa Selden advocates. The social entrepreneur needs to create ways for their constituents to have influence and ownership over the solutions. Razia Jan, the founder of Zabuli Education Center in Afghanistan, for example, is empowering Afghan girls to speak up in their homes and communities by providing them with free education. In California, social innovator and MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Mauricio Lim Miller founded Family Independence Initiative, which helps low-income families forge their paths to economic mobility and then to guide others.
These are often baffling challenges and yet they are the real work of any entrepreneur. A Wendell Berry poem read at a memorial of the late founder of the academic field of social enterprise, Greg Dees, sums it up:
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work,
And that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
Note: This post is adapted from my remarks at Babson College’s 2014 Lewis Institute Social Innovator Awards.
How to Screen for Motivated Workers Who Are Drawn to Your Social Mission: Offer Low Pay
Providing employees with a social “mission” in their jobs doesn’t increase their effort: In an experiment in which workers could generate donations to NGOs of their choice, people whose jobs had a mission made no more effort than purely self-interested workers, say Sebastian Fehrler of the University of Zurich and Michael Kosfeld of Goethe University Frankfurt. However, there’s a subgroup of workers who choose mission-oriented jobs, and these workers tend to be more motivated. If you’re a mission-driven company, you can screen for them by offering low salaries, the researchers say.
The Status Quo Is Risky, Too
Are you ever frustrated by teammates who cling to the past while you try to introduce novel ideas or new strategies? If your ideas are met with choruses of “that will never work,” “we can’t take that risk,” “let’s just stick with the plan,” your teammates are likely falling prey to a common decision making bias that former Rotman dean Roger Martin refers to as Underestimating the Risk of the Status Quo. If your team’s strategy can be summed up by the English wartime slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On,” you need some new approaches to tackle their resistance.
Martin describes how executive teams carefully explore the risk of different courses of action, but neglect to make a similar assessment of the risk of staying the course. Armed only with the risks of changing, it’s natural for the team to shy away from decisive action. Unfortunately, failing to assess the risk of the status quo does not mean the risks won’t materialize—it just means you won’t be adequately prepared when they do.
If you are a member of a leadership team facing a critical strategic decision, you have an obligation to address these biases before inaction leaves your business irrelevant. There are several strategies you can employ to combat the risk of underestimating the status quo.
Start by bringing the strategic planning conversations back to your current strategy. Frame the conversation in terms of changes in what customers need or want. If the customers haven’t changed much, point to changes in the competitive environment that make your strategy less sound today than it was when it was developed. Mine societal, economic, political, regulatory, and technological trends to identify any external changes that necessitate a shift in your strategy.
Then develop a risk profile for your current strategy using the same framework you’re using to assess your new strategic options. If you have assessed the risk of your strategic options in terms of brand risk, operational risk, market risk, and so on, do the same for the current strategy. An apples-to-apples comparison will allow the team to make a more balanced assessment of the best course of action. If reputational risk is high in the proposed strategy, but equally high in the existing strategy, it’s not a legitimate criterion on which to make the decision. Focus the team on the incremental risk of the new options and highlight any places where the proposed strategy is actually less risky than the existing one.
If executives on your team are endlessly asking for more information, effectively stalling any decisions or progress, try getting the team to put some boundaries in place. You can use questions like, “How much do we need to know before we can make a good decision here?” or “What would it take for you to have 80% confidence in this path?” or “What is our window for making this decision?” By calling attention to the indecisiveness and helping your teammates get more comfortable with acting in the absence of complete information, you are more likely to get traction to move beyond the status quo.
Finally, deal head-on with team dynamics that stem from turf issues or self-interest. It is a delicate situation when new products risk cannibalizing existing businesses, but that’s the reality of innovation. If you’re seeing protectionist behavior on your team, invoke the best interests of the organization. I use the curves laid out in Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma to show how continued incremental progress will leave the organization vulnerable to competitors who are actively trying to change the nature of the battle. Then you can say something like, “What are we doing about the coming war over wearable computing? It’s not here yet, but how do we ensure we’re not irrelevant when wearables really gain momentum?”
It’s now common practice to manage risk with heightened awareness, disciplined processes, and due diligence. Unfortunately, we are more likely to apply these tools to evaluate the risk of changing than to evaluate the risk of staying the same. If your teammates are anchoring your business in the past, it’s your responsibility to help them see the risk of the status quo.
May 1, 2014
Ruth Reichl on Challenging Career Moves
The renowned author and former editor of Gourmet talks about the magazine’s closure and her recent transition to fiction writing. She is featured in the Life’s Work section of the forthcoming June issue.
Visualizing Zero: How to Show Something with Nothing
In its most revealing form, data visualization makes the “invisible” visible. It enables people to move beyond just looking at data towards actually seeing the shapes and magnitudes of its physical properties to inform and enlighten.
Discernibility is a prominent guiding decision: making the size of values as readable as possible, the distinction between categories as identifiable as possible, and the nature of relationships between entities as evident as possible.
Yet, what if there is no size? What if there are no amounts for a category? What if no relationships exist?
Welcome to the design of nothing, a delicate and often neglected aspect of data visualization concerned with showing the absence of data, representing zero, and utilizing the property of emptiness. How do we make these slippery attributes of nothingness visible?
Showing the absence of data: Though analysts and designers naturally seek to work with data that is complete, missing data can be just as revealing as the data itself. Here are two projects that make the “nothing” of missing data into something.
Firstly, in the ‘State of the Polar Bear’, by Periscopic, we see an attempt to convey the change in the population and habitat of the Polar bear around the Arctic.
Aside from the sadly apparent areas of population decline, a key observation from this project is the ‘data deficiency’ status for a large section of the displayed region, mostly part of Russia. As the project’s author, Kim Rees, explains, these areas without any data were not excluded, just greyed out: “It was a political statement to Russia to release the data they have about polar bears”. The absence of data does not hinder the project, it adds a whole new dimension to it.
In the ‘Billionaires’ visualization, by Bloomberg Visual Data, we see a number of generic blank faces included among the illustrations of the top 200 billionaires.
Those blanked out faces represent the reclusive and elusive, the ones for whom only a college yearbook photograph exists in the public domain. There’s something compelling about those who manage to preserve such anonymity, and the inclusion of their absence adds intrigue to the visualization.
Representing zero: When it comes to the challenge of representing zeros we are not talking about the absence of data but rather the absence of amount. In the below snippet from a graphic titled ‘The Uniform Distribution’, created by Dark Horse Analytics, we see the number of MLB players who wear each different numbered jersey.
What is striking about this chart is the complete absence of players who wear the number 42. This isn’t a gap in the data but simply illustrates the significance of the retiring of the #42 shirt in 1997 to honor Jackie Robinson. The retirement of Mariano Rivera in 2013, the last player allowed to wear the #42, secured the zero value in the chart above.
Another example of portraying zero comes from the famous dot-point map created by John Snow to plot the deaths from the outbreak of cholera in London in 1854. One of the most striking findings from the map is the lack of deaths registered at the brewery, despite its proximity to the proposed source of the disease.
On investigation it was discovered that the brewery workers drank the beer they were making, rather than the water originating from the pump on Broad Street.
In both these examples, zero needs to be given a home, as it is a crucial element of the story. The absence of an amount in each case is evident through contrast with non-zero values, though to identify these as zeroes and not gaps in data does require some domain knowledge for interpretation.
Utilizing emptiness: The final aspect of designing nothing concerns the deliberate deployment of blank space. Through utilising emptiness we can create quite striking displays of data and help increase readability.
In the example below, taken from the front page of the Independent newspaper, the large area of empty space on the right hand side provides context for the interpretation of the few countries that voted ‘No’ for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East.
The relative scales of each side are driven home by the generous use of white space, made all the more eye-grabbing by the fact that it is so seldom used on a newspaper’s front page.
The design of nothing may sound like an oxymoron but it is anything but. Though visualizations most often focus on significant quantities and relationships, their absence is sometimes equally as interesting. For visualization design, there is always something in nothing.
Persuading with Data
An HBR Insight Center
Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself
Data Goes Best With a Good Story (and Vice Versa)
Presentation Tools That Go Beyond “Next Slide Please”
The Right Colors Make Data Easier To Read
Sometimes Colleagues Are the Best Coaches
By the age of thirty, our personalities have stabilized and behavior change becomes relatively difficult. It’s especially hard for senior executives, who have got where they are thanks to the way they behave. Although others may think their behavior is dysfunctional, they see no compelling reason to change and place any blame for failure on others. Even if they are willing to make an effort to change, they don’t really know how and need help to do so.
That’s why executives often engage the services of a coach. But coaching is a bit like therapy; it takes time for the results to be seen, and in that time there’s a lot of value that gets destroyed by an executive’s dysfunctional behavior. A more immediate solution, I believe, is to be found in a group coaching intervention, because an experienced coach can use the group context to leverage powerful (conscious and unconscious) psychological dynamics to trigger change almost immediately, like understanding, catharsis, and peer support.
Let me give you an example. Faced with rapid evolution in their industry, the executive team of a large energy company had decided to transform their solid but complacent organization into a high-tech, sustainability-oriented firm, a key element of which was the completion of a multibillion dollar offshore energy project. To help with the transition, and in particular with the project, the company hired two new executives. Jim, a brilliant professor of engineering, came on as the new Chief Knowledge Officer and John, an experienced petroleum executive identified by a major shareholder, became Vice President of Technology, Products, and Services.
But within just a few months of their joining, war had broken out between the new arrivals and other executives.
The company was heavily committed to its offshore energy project, making it necessary to meet specific deadlines — and pressures were mounting. Yet the team was unable to move forward and was bogged down in turf fights for resources. Open, constructive communication was missing. They distrusted each other. And everyone was falling short of performance targets.
On the advice of the strategy consultants he had engaged, the CEO decided to bring the team together for what he called a high performance intervention. The ostensible objective would be to reflect on interpersonal relationships, work practices, leadership styles, and the organizational culture, guided by an experienced group coach. The underlying agenda, however, was to create alignment and make the team more effective in implementing its strategy.
The coach began with a short lecture about high performance organizations and effective leadership. She then asked each member of the executive committee to draw a self-portrait, a picture of how they saw themselves. Despite initial grumbling and skepticism, the executives soon became quite immersed in the task. When all the self-portraits were completed and displayed on the wall, the group coach asked each member of the executive team including the CEO to talk to the group about his drawing.
Through the narrative of the self-portrait (combined with the sharing by each person of two 360-degree feedback reports), the group members discovered surprising things about each other. In Jim’s case, for example, they learned that his grandfather had been a brilliant academic but his father had followed a different drum, his life marked not by success but by failure and the disappointment of one job after another.
Jim had spent a great deal of time with his grandfather, who found in him the enthusiasm and curiosity that his own son seemed to lack. Jim’s identity as an academic had as a result become very important to him. In his present role, he felt that his creativity might be stifled, so he did whatever he could to protect what he called the “spark,” keeping his fellow executive team members at a distance. He had an underlying fear that he would become like his father, wasting away his talents.
Now, looking at the information from the 360-degree feedback reports, and listening to the challenging but supportive comments from the group, he came to realize that other people found this behavior obstructive, aggravating existing problems with the team and the company.
The exercise forced each of the executives, like Jim, to face the fact that they were part of a larger system and that their present actions reinforced already prevalent silo behavior, prevented alignment, and hampered execution. Having accepted this, they were then able think constructively and with the support of the other members of the group to find ways to modify or accommodate the problematic behaviors. Jim, for example, promised to be present at meetings where his expertise was really needed and to be more responsive to email. He also decided to hire an assistant who would help him to be better organized. The members of the team, on their part, agreed not to harass him with minor issues and respect his need for reflection time.
Through that single intervention, the executive team started to act, for the first time, like a real team. That spirit immediately made its presence felt in their work on the offshore project. At a follow-up session three months later, they all reported feeling a greater openness among themselves, marked by real dialogue and the exchange of ideas. They felt they could safely speak their minds, reveal vulnerabilities, and trust one another. This in turn facilitated stronger alignment about the direction the company should be taking. They found it easier to communicate consistently to their employees where they, as a team, were going. Finally, decisions were now being implemented and the company was seeing progress and moving forward.
The broader lesson from this story is that top-level interventions of this sort can make a huge difference to the implementation of a strategy or change initiative. The strategy consulting firm that advised the CEO in the story above recognizes that the strategies that it helps clients develop are all too often derailed by the inability of top executives to work well together. And this is precisely why the firm now makes group coaching for the executive teams it advises a regular component in its assignments.
Keeping Tabs on the Competition as a Start-Up
Big companies have it easy when it comes to gathering and utilizing competitive intelligence. They have a defined brand and a fairly clear picture of market penetration, differentiators, and existing products and services.
Start-ups, especially high-tech ones, typically don’t have the same luxury. But competitive intelligence – data gleaned from mostly public sources and analyzed for patterns, trends, and positioning – is important for investors and shareholders, customers, and employees (from business development to product to customer service). It tells investors why you might succeed in this particular market or in creating a new one – and who could come nipping at your heels. It can also help you outflank savvy competitors and acquire more market share. Failing to utilize it can be highly detrimental for budding businesses. So where do the underdogs begin?
Start by creating a competitive intel repository and committing to its maintenance. This can be embedded in a company’s culture during its infancy (though it’s never too late if a business is already well underway). It can be as simple as a shared file on Google Docs or Sharepoint, or a company-developed wiki. House all your information there as a living document, and over time, trends and patterns will become apparent. To make this data useful, designate someone at the company to take control of competitive intelligence. If you make competitive intelligence everyone’s responsibility, it will be forgotten. Wise companies appoint a centralized curator of competitive intel, who updates the repository and keeps everyone else informed.
Start-ups must also know what to put on their competitive intelligence radars. Here’s how to size up the competition:
Be skeptical of company websites. It’s a common mistake to look at a competitor’s website, see the same buzzwords, and assume the business is already doing what you’re working toward. But understand that a competitor’s site may not reflect what they actually do, what they intend to do, or what they’re capable of doing. Take the information with a grain of salt and dig deeper.
Identify investors and boards. Board members typically align with the VCs that funded the company (though not always), and prominent investors often have reputations that precede them – some only do angel investing, some prefer early to mid-stage companies, and others only hitch their wagons to a late-stage star. Their profiles may be a reliable indicator of where a company is in its cycle – and how seriously you should take them. It also helps to see if a company has disclosed how much funding it raised.
Know who their employees are. Sources like LinkedIn make it easy to understand the composition of a rival. The number of employees can imply the likelihood of profitability, indicate cash utilization, or give a sense of allocated capital. You can see ages, experience levels, educational backgrounds, and so on. The ratio of current to former employees is also telling – evidence of high turnover may reveal something about a company’s management style or stability.
Note the geography. Identify where clusters of employees are located. Does the company have a 15-person workforce in as many locations? That could signify a virtual setup or a lack of maturity. Do you see a company’s sales and customer service folks in the Midwest, while its engineers are clustered in Silicon Valley? Do they have a team overseas, say, in India? These data points can help you assess competitors’ maturity, speed, agility, and burn.
Use social media. You may get a fingertip sense of market penetration by checking out an opponent’s social media channels. Learn how they’re positioning themselves on Twitter and if they’re blogging on LinkedIn. A large follower base shows people are taking notice of them – but even a small number of followers can be revealing once you dig into the composition. Are influential journalists and bloggers part of their following?
Don’t forget traditional media. If a start-up makes the news, it’s doing something intriguing. Stories may give a sense of a company’s strength – if a new product has a lot of buzz, if it has the ability to rapidly transform itself in response to market feedback. Listening to the spokesperson gives you insight into how they’re positioning. What are the talking points they use? What seems to be the primary focus?
Study the leadership team. Where did those leaders go to school? Where else have they worked? Does the CEO have experience starting companies? Have multiple team members worked together before? Most start-ups fail, but if a team has experience working together and creating a product, that maturity can take it further.
Start-ups can – and should – mine competitive intelligence to refine their understanding of the market and customers, consider new product directions, and outmaneuver potential rivals.
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