Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1433

Rooting Out Hubris, Before a Fall

Hubris, the sin of overweening pride or arrogance, may be the most misunderstood disorder an executive will ever be confronted with. It’s not just narcissism; it’s much more dangerous than that.

Actually, no one nailed the nature and dynamics of this problem better than Aesop did: The Hare, in a circumstance where he should prevail (racing the tortoise), snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, after making a jackass of himself with his pre-race prattle. Had the Hare avoided hubris (and his famous nap), he would have handily trounced the tortoise, and moved on to signing autographs and giving press interviews. Pride did not just goeth before the fall; it actually caused the fall.

I’m reminded of how intrigued – and ignorant — most people are about hubris every March when the NCAA basketball tournament begins. Invariably, one or more top-seeded teams are toppled by an underdog, prompting some wag to proclaim the loser a victim of hubris. While hubris can infect entire organizations, hubris is usually an isolative disease, because at its core it’s about defiance.

The Hare’s public prodromal – in advance of their self-destruction, hubris suffers show the world what’s wrong with them — is a key feature of the disorder. Hubristic individuals have a tendency to evince features of an “oppositional defiant disorder” when imploding. College basketball teams, in contrast to what some March Madness commentators contend, don’t do this. Some highly ranked teams may choke on the pressure of being expected to excel, and some may not take all competitors as seriously as they should. But to understand hubris you need to recognize that it is first an act of defiance, and only after others have been completely offended do those suffering hubris take actions that ensure they will not achieve the successes they guaranteed they would.

By contrast, narcissism is a character disorder, which means it starts in the teenage years and defines a person’s entire modus operandi.  If, owing to a childhood that left you bereft of good feelings about yourself, you feel a need to preen and self-promote to merely stay afloat psychologically, that problem sticks with you forever. Psychotherapy can dampen a narcissist’s tendency to self-aggrandize, but under duress he’ll regress and become insufferably self-centered. A narcissist is pretty much a narcissist all the time.

Hubris, on the other hand, is a reactive disorder: Either the unfortunate consequence of endless laudatory press clippings leading to supreme over-confidence, or the culmination of a winning streak that causes a person to suffer the transient delusion that he is bullet-proof. Many good people will, under bad circumstances, suffer from hubris— but they tend to recover after toppling from their pedestals shrinks their egos back down to size.

Kenneth Lay, the former CEO of Enron, is a good example of executive hubris. Long before the company imploded, Lay lauded his company for being a “new economy” corporation “before it became cool to be one.” In an email sent to employees and the public only weeks before Enron’s coffers ran dry, Lay boasted, “Our performance has never been stronger, our business model has never been more robust. We have the finest organization in American business today.”

What is tragic about Lay’s self-destruction and the Enron collapse — apart from the number of lives ruined by it — is that Lay built the business, retired, and returned in a effort to save it, not to feather his own nest. Yet ultimately Lay could not throw himself on his shield and admit defeat, so he let his pride get in the way of reason, causing devastation as a result. Unable to watch his pride and joy fail, and unwilling to make the hard decisions that might have saved a diminished version of it, he decided to cook the books – and in so doing, his business’s goose.

Is there ever a way to deflate hubris while it’s still inflating, before the bubble disastrously bursts?  A few structural modifications of your corporate zeitgeist – or clarifications of principles you assumed were clear and accepted — along with some well-placed and properly-timed shots of tough love should do the trick.

Chief among the aspects of your corporate culture that you must imbue in all employees –but particularly the stars who are most vulnerable to hubris— is the virtue of humility. In Shakespeare’s King Lear, the Fool warns the ill-fated monarch, “Have more than thou showest; speak less than thou knowest.” This is hard to do today, in our society, when every putz at an athletic event waves a foam #1 Finger and you rarely see a major league baseball player get a hit and not gesticulate in a manner that suggests he is using LSD. You cannot change society, but you can make this sort of grandstanding verboten in your business.

Even if you do so, however, you cannot ensure that one of your “big hitters” won’t make a public display of himself following a major success. This is the time for tough love: Let him know in stern terms that his celebratory antics are not becoming. Remind him that most people enjoy rooting for underdogs, dark horses, and long shots – especially when they’re competing against top dogs.  (Avis Corporation’s “We’re #2!” ad campaign capitalized on just this feeling.) It’s human nature to enjoy the sight of an idol falling off a pedestal.

This is why humble pie should be the only desert served in the corporate cafeteria: If an employee earns a reputation for being arrogant (exhibiting hubris), everyone, even colleagues, will want to see him fail. Since it is well known that “Heavy rests the head that wears the crown,” never hold coronation ceremonies at your business, and if a star insists on self-anointment, let him know that he is not engendering admiration in others but, rather, making himself a target.

Keep in mind the formula that psychologist and philosopher William James developed for enhancing self-esteem: Self-esteem is derived from the ratio of your successes to your pretensions (or, as we would say today, your “performance expectations”). If your employees buy this model, they will naturally see the advantages inherent in promising low and striving to deliver high— a natural method for preventing hubris.

As psychoanalyst Carl Jung observed, “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface … a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.” To save a hubristic person from himself, discover what his “small voice” is saying to him and nudge him off his high horse.

But remember that you – like all of us — are naturally repulsed when super-talented people swagger, regardless of how well they perform for you. Thus, when delivering “tough love,” be sure to over-emphasize the love — the “tough” will take care of itself.

Do Millennials Really Want Their Bosses to Call Their Parents?

How far would you go to build a strong relationship with your employees? Would you go as far as calling their parents?

In an interview last fall with Fortune magazine, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi revealed that she often writes letters to her direct reports’ parents to thank them for “the gift” of their children. Some of those parents even write back. Nooyi said her gesture has opened up new and intimate lines of communication not only with the parents, but also with her top employees.

“And it opened up emotions of the kind I have never seen,” Nooyi told Fortune.  “Parents wrote back to me, and all of a sudden, parents of my direct reports, who are all quite grown-up, and myself, we had our own communication.

“And one executive, I remember, he went home and he said to his mom, ‘You know, my boss is really giving me a tough time.’ And his mom told him, ‘Nuh-uh, not about her. She’s my friend!’”

Nooyi also admitted that she has called the parents of potential hires, urging them to convince their children to accept a job with PepsiCo. She recalled trying to recruit a high-potential candidate who had an offer from another company. In order to gain some leverage, Nooyi called the candidate’s mother and explained why her son should take the PepsiCo offer. When he found out the CEO of PepsiCo had called his mom, he took the job.

Is Nooyi demonstrating the new best practice for recruiting top talent? Is this a caring gesture by a top business leader, or a creepy intrusion into the private lives of her employees? Does it cross a line between work life and personal life?

PepsiCo is not the only big employer to reconfigure its relationship with millennial employees to include more interaction with parents. Recently, LinkedIn gained international attention when it sponsored a bring-your-parents-to-work day. More than two dozen companies in 14 countries participated last November, allowing employees to show their parents exactly what they were up to. Some companies, like Google, have been offering employees chances to expose their parents to their work lives for years.

These companies recognize that Millennials, and the generations that follow them, have a different perspective on their careers and the role their parents play. They also realize they can make powerful, personal connections with their employees when they encourage parents to be proud of their kids’ accomplishments.

As someone whose parents have always struggled to understand what I actually do for a living, I can see value in these efforts. Bridging that gap of understanding between the generations seems like a good thing.

However, I believe as leaders we need to step back and think about these practices more broadly. Connecting with parents of employees may be a good thing in some ways, but part of me worries that we may be perpetuating helicopter parenting once reserved for the elementary school playground. So before jumping on the bandwagon, you really need to consider the implications to your company and consider the real value to your company.

At the same time, it’s also important to remember that while some younger workers do want to involve their parents in their work-lives, not all of them do.  A 2012 study of US post-college job applicants by Adecco, a big player in the HR field, found that 8% took their parents with them to job interviews – not an insignificant number, but not an overwhelming majority either. Three percent actually asked to have at least one parent sit in on the interview. And there are plenty of boomer parents who would see a phone call from their child’s boss as an intrusion.

And yet at Knightsbridge, many of our consultants report that parents can make or break a job offer. Some parents even get involved in negotiations on salary and benefits. We have also heard about managers getting calls from their employees’ parents, who have concerns about how their kids are being treated at work.

Is this what Millennials really want – hand-holding at interviews and parent-manager conferences? Are we ever going to let Millennials grow up? I asked the Millennials on my own team what they thought of Nooyi’s letters and calls to parents. Not surprisingly, I got a variety of different responses.

Some of the first employees to get back to me said that Nooyi’s gesture appeared heartfelt and sincere, demonstrating real caring for her employees. But other team members questioned Nooyi’s motives and suggested she was being more manipulative than maternal. She may have frustrated as many employees as she impressed.

The lesson here is that today’s workforce is constantly evolving, and it’s incumbent for business leaders to stay on top of how to best to engage their talent. There is no one approach to reaching out and connecting with younger employees. For every employee who might appreciate you reaching out directly with their parents, there will be others who are genuinely creeped out by the gesture. The only way around this is to get to know your employees as individuals. Spend time with them, ask them about their lives, and show them you really care about who they are as people. Be transparent — this is why Nooyi is successful. The way she reaches out is personal. No hidden agenda. Just connecting honestly, to deepen relationships.

Whether it’s a personal letter, a phone call, or a day set aside annually, I believe it’s important for any leader to pause and reflect on the approach that will work best for you and your company. For example, we do a lot of work with clients in high potential programs. They usually end with a capstone event – something marking the young leaders’ accomplishments. That would be a natural opportunity to engage parents by inviting them to attend an event like that.

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Millennials demand to be treated differently than previous generations in almost all aspects of their careers. Compared to previous generations, they’ve blurred the line between work and personal life considerably. And that means leaders need to learn new strategies.

But don’t treat this like a fad. There may some leaders who read stories about PepsiCo, LinkedIn, and Google and decide to jump on the bandwagon. If you do this it will be little more than a gimmick.

Overweight Women, but not Men, Face Employment Discrimination in China

In China, urban workplaces discriminate against people whose weight falls outside the expected norm—with the exception of overweight men, says a team led by Jay Pan of Sichuan University in China. For women, being overweight decreases the probability of being employed by 15.2%, on average, but there is no such penalty for overweight men. Being underweight is a different story: It decreases the probability of being employed by 22.9% for women and 34.3% for men. Obesity also hurts people’s employment prospects, and for women the penalty is three times greater than for men.

What Gets in the Way of Listening

As your role grows in scale and influence, so too must your ability to listen. But listening is one of the toughest skills to master — and requires uncovering deeper barriers within oneself.

Take, for example, our client, Janet, a successful principal in a management consulting firm.  She recently received 360-degree feedback from colleagues that she needed to improve her listening skills.  This confused her — she had always thought of herself as an active listener.  When we asked her colleagues why, they described how she wouldn’t exactly answer questions in meetings — and how she often had different takeaways from the rest of the team.  Janet wanted to explore what was happening.  It seemed simple enough, and yet why was she having trouble? The key, ironically, is to focus on yourself.

Ignore your inner critic. Janet realized that she wasn’t tracking to the dialogue because she was nervous about her own performance.  Her mind was attuned to a different voice — that of her own inner critic — monitoring how she was doing in the meeting.  This was especially true during presentations. Janet’s performance anxiety overshadowed her ability to hear the concerns underlying each question and kept her from noticing the audience’s cues to move along. Shift your focus from “getting a good grade” to the presentation’s greater purpose. What excites you about the topic or audience?

Expand how you see your role. To fully listen, you must first believe it is a critical part of your job.  To quote from Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind’s article, Leadership Is a Conversation, “Leaders who take organizational conversation seriously know when to stop talking and start listening.”  As Janet continued to explore why she wasn’t listening, she realized she’d boxed herself in.  As a management consultant, she described her role as, “providing efficient solutions to clients.”  We discussed how she might update her view from problem solver to trusted advisor — one that not only provided counsel but listened deeply to clients’ issues and concerns.  Consider if you’ve boxed yourself in by role definition.  Do you believe your primary job is to provide direction only?

Put aside your fear and anticipation. Listening demands being fully present and ready to respond to what might get thrown your way. But our listening shuts down when we’re anticipating what might happen next.  Janet found that while another person was talking, her mind was already thinking about what she might say next or anticipating what might be said.  This was especially true during difficult conversations, when she anticipated confrontation. She’d rush through what she wanted to say without listening as a way to avoid her fears of conflict. But listening is an especially important skill in navigating difficult conversations, where multiple interests and agendas must be aligned.  Our full attention is demanded to understand what the hot-button issues are or what the potential misunderstandings might be. Notice if your listening shuts down when you’re emotionally uncomfortable.  Are you aware of your triggers? 

Be open to having your mind changed. Janet also realized that she was working hard to appear confident and to make sure she was offering her point of view in meetings.  In trying to be more assertive, she came off as having prematurely made up her mind.  One of Janet’s partners shared this tip, “I do have a viewpoint going in but I don’t assume or try to show I’m the smartest person in the room.  In fact, I go in with the assumption that my colleagues are smart too and therefore might have good reason for having a different position.  I’m willing to hear them out for the sake of getting to the best answer, not just my answer.”  Listening, then, is actually a sign of incredible self-confidence. Are you trying too hard to convey confidence and missing others’ perspectives in the process?

While tactically there are many ways to strengthen your listening skills, you must focus on the deeper, internal issues at stake to really improve. Listening is a skill that enables you to align people, decisions, and agendas. You cannot have leadership presence without hearing what others have to say.

8 Ways Not to Manage Your Email (and 5 and a Half Tactics that Work)

In 1635, England’s Charles I expanded the island’s mail delivery service to the public — with postage paid by the recipient and based on the weight of the letter. If Great Aunt Henrietta wrote you a 10-page letter asking why you weren’t married yet, throughout most of the country you paid for the privilege of receiving it. It wasn’t until 1840 that the Royal Mail switched to a system in which postage was prepaid by the sender.

I think of this fact often when checking my email. I hope it doesn’t take 200 years to figure out how to make the initiators of these messages — rather than their beleaguered recipients — bear the burden of their sending. But until then, recipients have to manage. And often, we have to manage without the kind of administrative support 20th century executives relied on.

Two years ago, frustrated by this state of affairs, I published a cri de coeur on this site railing against the lamentable state of inboxes everywhere. Making my despair public had an unanticipated side effect: I started hearing from people who’d discovered tips and tools that could help. In the months since, I’ve experimented with a range of different options. There were several oft-recommended tactics that failed utterly for me, and a few that did work. The way I see it, we’ve got to band together to defeat the email Hydra, so here’s what worked for me and what didn’t. Notably, most of the successful tactics had less to do with email and more to do with general time management — although there were two important exceptions.

What worked:

I stopped seeing it as separate from my “real work.” In the information economy, email is real work. So I made a conscious decision to stop looking at email as something that took me away from important work and start viewing it as part of building  relationships — something that’s really important to me. Once I made this mindset shift, it was easier to make time for email.


I stopped using email to manage my to-do list. This post describes my pre-conversion life pretty well: I’d leave important messages marked as unread to remember to come back to them later (but then they’d get buried by new messages fairly quickly) and I’d email to-do lists to myself. Having tried paper to-do lists and several different task tracking apps (including one that transformed my list into a quest — though I never advanced beyond “Junior Ent Sapling”) I’ve finally settled on Trello, which is super-simple and has a fantastic app/desktop integration.


I stopped allowing days of back-to-back meetings. I used to let my calendar get filled up with meetings; at the end of the day, I would return to an inbox filled with hundreds of unread messages and a sinking feeling in my heart. I tried to fight back by blocking out large chunks of my calendar a couple of times a week, but my coworkers, seeing a 2-hour “meeting” in my calendar would know it was a fake and book me anyway. Now I book 30-min or 1-hour meetings at random times throughout my week, so that I always have about two hours “free” per day. (Try to catch me now, suckers!)


Two weeks before I go on vacation, I put the dates I’ll be away in my email signature. This is a much better way of giving colleagues a heads-up than a mass email message, which few people will read or remember, and it lets me deal with last-minute requests before I leave so that I can fully disconnect while I’m away. When I return, I steadfastly avoid meetings for a couple of days so that I can catch up. Unless you are a sitting head of state, I don’t see why you should have to check your work email from a vineyard in Tuscany, or the back of a burro in the mountains of Patagonia, or sitting by grandma’s Christmas tree. I realize that some people’s bosses are unreasonable about this; part of why I work at HBR is to convince these bosses that they are wrong.


I stopped expecting a human brain to solve a problem created by technology. I used to feel bad — really bad — when important emails would get lost in the impenetrable wall of unimportant near-spam that took over my inbox every day. (No, I do not think HBR should publish an article on the start-up selling a toilet seat for cats, but thank you, Ms. Publicist, for suggesting it — three times.) I finally accepted that this was a technology problem that required a technological solution. After looking into a few options, I installed SaneBox, a filtering system that uses an algorithm to decide which emails are the most important. Those are shunted into your inbox, which suddenly looks much less cluttered; the rest go into a “SaneLater” folder. I go through the SaneLater folder every other day to make sure nothing crucial is languishing in there. I also started using Unroll.me, which combines your newsletter subscriptions into one daily digest and unsubscribes you from the lists you don’t want to be on.


I use my smartphone much more. (This is the “half” tactic.) While most of the published advice I’ve read on managing email urged me to avoid relying on my phone, I’ve found that it helps me craft quicker responses that get right to the point (in case you haven’t noticed already, I have a tendency towards the verbose). And since it says “sent from my phone” in the signature, people aren’t as likely to be offended by brevity.

What didn’t work:

Checking email at certain times of the day only. This frequently suggested tactic has never worked for me. When I’ve tried, I end up reading and answering email straight through until my next appointed “check-in” time; or I get left out of important online conversations happening among my colleagues between my check-in times; or I miss timely messages.


Strategic use of out-of-office messages. I’ve tried putting up an auto-response if there’s a day I really am booked in meetings or when I’m simply buried in deadlines and trying to get manuscripts out the door; my recipients found this defensive. For longer breaks, I’ve also tried the trick of saying, “Please re-send your message when I am back in the office on such-and-such date,” another widely cited tactic. Recipients found that arrogant.


Keeping emails incredibly short. It’s one thing to be concise; it’s another to omit both salutation and sign-off — and punctuation. As an editor, sending these sorts of emails (“sounds great thanks”) bothered me on a personal level. Did I really not have time to say “Hello, Professor Fitz-Herbert” or insert a comma? Really? These super-brief emails made me feel icky. I also think they made me sound like kind of an asshole.


Aiming for Inbox Zero. I think we will look back on the brief craze for Inbox Zero the way we now look back at the 80s aerobics craze: evidence of a mad and ultimately warping desire for perfection. Inboxes are not meant to be at zero any more than women’s upper thighs are meant to look like aluminum tubes. I now aim to keep the unread messages in my inbox to the double-digits. When things start ballooning up, I sigh, get into to work a little earlier, and hammer away at them until they’re back down to size — the same way I reluctantly (but temporarily) switch from pastrami to arugula when my favorite jeans feel tight.


Following the “only handle it once,” rule. This is a really difficult one for most knowledge workers, not only editors. Thinking takes time. Sometimes even answering a simple yes-or-no question means asking for other people’s input, doing background reading, or conducting a bit of research. I can usually make those judgment calls fairly efficiently — or else I wouldn’t be good at my job — but I can’t do it obeying the “OHIO” rule.


Setting up elaborate folder systems. How can a person who barely has time to read her email possibly have time to sort it? That’s what the search box is for.


Asking other people to change their behavior. I did try asking people to put key information in the subject line, use the Red Exclamation Point of Doom if — and only if — it was truly an urgent message, or to send me one email with all of their questions rather than five short emails each with a different query. Despite the efforts of a few (which I appreciated!), by and large this was a predictably Quixotic quest.


Complaining. Treating email like the enemy made important people hesitant to email me; I’d be left out of important conversations because, “Sarah’s always so busy.” Instead of being able to dip in and out of the discussion based on what I thought was important, people started turning off the spigot. I was not a fan of that, as it turned out.

My reformation is far from complete. Messages still slip through the cracks. A bad flu messes up my entire carefully constructed system. And I still get irritated when people send a second email “just to make sure you got my email!” — especially if 24 hours haven’t elapsed since the first message. (With tools like Signals, no one needs to ask that question anymore.) But since becoming more disciplined about managing my email, I find I get fewer of those messages.

There is an old saying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: to drink from a firehose, you need to use a straw. If email is the firehose, apps like Signals, Trello, SaneBox, and others are the straws. And modern missivists can at least be thankful that, unlike the letter-writers of 17th century Britain, we have keyboard shortcuts for “copy” and “paste.”

The Long Road to “You’re Hired!”

That Elusive HandshakeThe Recovery Puzzle: A New Factory in Ohio Struggles to Match Jobs to Job-SeekersThe Washington Post

We're all familiar with the unemployment numbers, as well as the persistent cries that it's difficult to match job seekers with open positions. But unless you're on hiring Ground Zero, it's tough to understand exactly what this puzzle looks like, let alone how to put it together. This wonderfully written article puts the reader in the shoes of Bernie Coyle, who wants to hire 40 people to work in a new egg-white-extraction factory in the aptly named town of Fort Recovery, Ohio. His excitement about giving people jobs can't be overstated. But from poorly written cover letters to interview no-shows to (yay) an eventual hire, Coyle's story underlines one of the central tensions of the American economic recovery that seems easily solvable: Even though a lot of qualified workers can’t find jobs, a lot of jobs can’t quite find qualified workers.

Don't Drink Your Own Kool-AidA Broken Place: The Spectacular Failure of the Start-Up that Was Going to Change the WorldFast Company

Better Place was the car-battery start-up that was going to revolutionize transportation until it didn't. In this lengthy investigation of the company, writer Max Chafkin says founder Shai Agassi "made great Kool-Aid and then drank it all himself." Chafkin relies on the nifty narrative technique of inverting eight entrepreneurship rules ("Think locally and globally – all at once," for example) to explain what went so terribly wrong. Among the problems: Agassi "effectively committed to a business model before he even settled on a name" and didn't bother to hire people with management or automotive experience. According to many, he also packed an unhealthy amount of hubris. With an eventual daily burn rate of $500,000 – before the company even had a car for sale – it's no wonder the company went bust.

Don't Fight ItHow to Think Like the Dutch in a Post-Sandy World The New York Times Magazine

Can you imagine deep concrete pits in New York City that would serve as basketball courts most of the time but would be allowed to fill up with water during periods of flooding? Or floating office buildings in Miami? How about artificial islands in other low-lying U.S. cities that would be designed to safely flood during storm surges? These are the kinds of innovations being implemented in the Netherlands, which has moved beyond a dams-and-dikes mentality to embrace the country's relationship with water, because in Holland, water is everywhere and rising all the time. Russell Shorto's profile of Dutch flooding expert Henk Ovink looks at how – and whether – the U.S. might similarly manage a delicate dance with the oceans. Will rugged American individualism stand in the way of effective solutions? Maybe so. –Andy O'Connell

But They Give The Jobs Back in the End 'Gods' Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs from RobotsBloomberg

The robots may not be coming to take all of our jobs – but knowing how to work with them is going to be imperative. This, in part, is what's driving a new Toyota program requiring people – that's right, actual humans – to build cars by hand. There are now around 100 manual-intensive workstations in three of Toyota's Japanese factories, where younger employees learn how to, for example, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts. The company hopes that these employees will then be able to make automated processes more productive. "We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again," Toyota's Mitsuru Kawai says. "To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine."

Try Saying It Out LoudGreed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous IdeaThe Atlantic

You're probably not going to find yourself discussing greed at your next networking event. There's a reason for that: Greed is both central to modern business and the "hobgoblin of capitalism," argues Booth Business School adjunct professor John Paul Rollert. This isn't because "of doubts about the efficacy of free markets, but of the centuries of moral reform that was required to make those markets as free as they are." Rollert takes us through those centuries, from a time when "the pursuit of self-interest was largely reviled" to (of course) Ayn Rand. He also reminds us why we don't overtly call things or people "greedy," and the consequences of our silence: "We enjoy the benefit of being high-minded without the burden of moral restraint. We also embolden that behavior, which proceeds with a presumptive blessing."

BONUS BITSMixed Feelings

Should Airlines Attach Advertising to Your Luggage? (Boston.com)
Women and Social Mobility: Six Key Facts (Brookings)
The Heartbleed Bug, Explained (Vox)

What I Learned Watching 150 Hours of TED Talks

What makes for a great presentation — the kind that compels people’s attention and calls them to action?  TED talks have certainly set a benchmark in recent years: HBR even asked Chris Anderson, the group’s founder, to offer lessons drawn from the three decades he’s run TED’s signature events in an article published last summer.

But experience and intuition are one thing; data and analysis are another. What could one learn by watching the most successful TED talks in recent years (150 hours’ worth), talking to many of the speakers, then running the findings by neuroscientists who study persuasion?  I did just that, and here’s what I learned:

Use emotion. Bryan Stevenson’s TED talk, “We need to talk about an injustice”, received the longest standing ovation in the event’s history. A civil rights attorney who successfully argued and won the Supreme Court case Miller v. Alabama, which prohibits mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles convicted of murder, this is a man who knows how to persuade people.

I divided the content of his talk into Aristotle’s three areas of persuasion. Only 10 percent fell under “ethos” (establishing credibility for the speaker); 25 percent fell into the “logos” category (data, statistics) and a full 65 percent was categorized as “pathos” (emotion, storytelling). In his 18-minute talk, Stevenson told three stories to support his argument. The first was about his grandmother, and when I asked him why he started with it, his answer was simple: “Because everyone has a grandmother.” The story was his way of making an immediate connection with the audience.

Stories that trigger emotion are the ones that best inform, illuminate, inspire, and move people to action. Most everyday workplace conversations are heavy on data and light on stories, yet you need the latter to reinforce your argument. So start incorporating more anecdotes – from your own experience or those about other people, stories and brands (both successes and failures) – into your pitches and presentations.

Be novel. We all like to see and hear something new. One guideline that TED gives its speakers is to avoid “trotting out the usual shtick.” In other words, deliver information that is unique, surprising, or unexpected—novel.

In his 2009 TED presentation on the impact of malaria in African countries, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates shocked his audience when he opened a jar of mosquitoes in the middle of his talk. “Malaria, of course, is transmitted by mosquitoes,” he said. “I brought some here so you can experience this. I’ll let these roam around the auditorium. There’s no reason why only poor people should have the experience.” He reassured his audience that the mosquitoes were not infected – but not until the stunt had grabbed their attention and drawn them into the conversation.

As neuroscientist Dr. A.K. Pradeep confirms, our brains can’t ignore novelty. “They are trained to look for something brilliant and new, something that stands out.” Pradeep should know. He’s a pioneer in the area of neuromarketing, studying advertisements, packaging, and design for major brands launching new products.

In the workplace your listener (boss, colleague, sales prospect) is asking him or herself one question: “Is this person teaching me something I don’t know?” So introduce material that’s unexpected, surprising or offers a new and novel solution to an old problem.

Emphasize the visual. Robert Ballard’s 2008 TED talk on his discovery of the Titanic, two and a half miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic, contained 57 slides with no words. He showed pictures, images, and animation of life beneath the sea, without one word of text, and the audience loved it. Why did you deliver an entire presentation in pictures? “Because I’m storytelling; not lecturing,” Ballard told me.

Research shows that most of us learn better when information is presented in pictures and text instead of text alone. When ideas are delivered verbally—without pictures—the listener retains about 10% of the content. Add a picture and retention soars to 65%.

For your next PowerPoint presentation, abandon the text blocks and bullet points in favor of more visually intriguing design elements. Show pictures, animations, and images that reinforce your theme. Help people remember your message.

How Founder Control Holds Back Start-ups

After enterprise tech start-up Box filed to go public last month, revealing founder Aaron Levie’s remaining stake to be just over 4% (plus stock options), commentators seemed compelled to note just how much control the 28-year-old founder had given up on the road to an IPO. One Quora user asked Levie how it felt to watch his investors “laugh to the bank after 10 years of blood, sweat, and tears.” TechCrunch was a bit more sympathetic, writing that “Levie didn’t have much choice. Box needed that funding.”

But that’s not quite right either, as a new working paper from Harvard Business School makes clear. While the culture in Silicon Valley often prioritizes founder control, new evidence suggests that such control often is a limiting factor on start-ups’ success. In Box’s case, Levie did have a choice, and by opting to dilute his own ownership, he was choosing to prioritize his company’s success. The paper in question is by HBS professor Noam Wasserman, whose previous work has examined the tradeoff entrepreneurs face between getting rich and being “king.” Wasserman’s earlier research chronicled the way this tradeoff shapes the decisions entrepreneurs make, like whether to have a co-founder or to raise venture capital. The new paper directly links founders’ control to start-ups’ value. He writes:

Startups in which the founder is still in control of the board of directors and/or the CEO position are significantly less valuable than those in which the founder has given up a degree of control.  More specifically, on average, each additional degree of founder control reduces the value of the startup by 23.0%‐58.1%.

The data comes from a survey of 6,130 U.S. startups in the tech and life sciences industries, and the results hold even after controlling for factors like firm age, capital intensity, and economic conditions. Though some entrepreneurs might bristle at these findings, Wasserman posits a simple and compelling reason for the negative relationship between entrepreneurial control and start-up outcomes:

At the beginning of the founding journey, the vast majority of entrepreneurs are missing key resources, in the form of financial capital, human capital, and/or social capital. By attracting those resources to the company, founders have a better chance of growing a more valuable company. For instance, by attracting cofounders, hires, or investors, founders can access skills, contacts, and money they were lacking. However, as examined in this study, attracting those resources can come at a stiff cost: the imperiling of the founders’ control of the company they created.

A young start-up with little to no revenue needs some way to convince employees to join it. That is accomplished by offering a mix of salary and equity. The latter requires the founder to directly give up some ownership, and therefore control. The former, at least for founders who aren’t wealthy, usually means selling a stake in the company to venture capitalists in exchange for funding that can be used to pay salaries. Either way, the founder ends up owning less of the company, and therefore able to exert less control. And Wasserman’s data suggests that this tradeoff persists as start-ups aim to scale quickly, as the need for resources outpaces revenue.

It’s not that entrepreneurs like Levie give up control because they have no other option. More accurately, they face a choice between retaining control but building a less valuable company, and giving up control in order to build a more valuable one. Levie seems to have chosen the latter. The paper found this tradeoff to be remarkably consistent across sectors and circumstances, with VC involvement associated with a significant increase in start-up value. (The same was not true of angel capital, which is negatively associated with start-up value.) This isn’t necessarily because VCs are better at guiding a company, but rather because the funding they provide can be used to hire more employees and build and market new products. None of this is to say that prioritizing building a larger company is preferable to staying smaller and maintaining ownership. Wasserman’s research merely indicates that for many founders, there is a tradeoff between building a valuable company and calling all the shots.

The Behaviors that Define A-Players

Individual contributors sometimes ask themselves, “What will it take for others to recognize my potential?” They may simply want acknowledgement of the importance of the work they do. Or they may aspire to move into management. In some cases, they’ve been told that they’re doing fine and have been advised, “Just keep doing what you are doing.”  Yet they see others being promoted ahead of them.

To see what separates the competent from the exceptional individual performers, we collected 50,286 360-degree evaluations conducted over the last five years on 4,158 individual contributors. We compared the “good” performers (those rated at the 40th to the 70th percentile) to the “best” performers (those rated at the 90th percentile and above). The first thing that struck us was the dramatic difference in productivity, as the graph below makes vividly clear.

Which leadership skills distinguished the best from the merely good? Here they are, ranked in order of which made the most difference. Exceptional individual contributors:

Set stretch goals and adopt high standards for themselves. This was the single most powerful differentiator. The best individual contributors set — and met — stretch goals that went beyond what others thought were possible. They also encouraged others to achieve exceptional results.  And yet when we asked raters to select the four skills they thought were most important for an individual contributor to have, less than one in 10 chose high goals. It appears that setting stretch goals, since it’s not necessarily expected, is a behavior that separates top performers from average.

The less effective individual contributors are excellent “sandbaggers,” having concluded that the biggest consequence of producing great work and doing it quickly is more work. They fear their managers will keep piling on tasks until they reach a point where they can’t accomplish all that’s assigned. That’s a problem for them, surely —  but also for organizations that don’t want to penalize valuable people for making extra effort.

Work collaboratively. When we asked people in the survey to tell us what they thought were the most important attributes for any individual contributor, they responded first with “the ability to solve problems” and second with “the possession of technical or professional expertise.”  So it’s probably not surprising that these fundamental characteristics were shared by average and exceptional contributors alike. Third on the list, though, was “the ability to work collaboratively and foster teamwork.”  And this trait did distinguish the great from the merely competent.

Many individual contributors strive to work independently. Some believe that if they remain solo performers, their contributions will be more likely to be noticed. They may be thinking of some educational experience where they stood out because their effort was acknowledged with high grades and test scores.  If so, they fail to see that the main purpose of an organization is to create more value by working together than everyone can produce by working outside the company on their own.

Volunteer to represent the group. The best individual contributors were highly effective at representing their groups to other departments or units within the organization. If you want to stand out, have the courage to raise your hand and offer to take on the extra work of representing your group. In this way you will gain recognition, networking opportunities, and valuable learning experiences.

Embrace change, rather than resisting It. One of our clients describes her organization as having a “frozen middle” filled with people who resist and fear change. Change is difficult for everyone, but is necessary for organizational survival.  The best individual contributors are quick to embrace change in both tactics and strategy.

Take initiative. Often individual contributors, by the very nature of their role in the organization,  slip into a pattern of waiting to be told what to do. Great contributors develop a habit of volunteering their unique perspective and providing a helping hand.  Think for a moment about the projects or programs going on in your own company.  Which of them have your fingerprints all over them? Initiative requires more than doing your current job well.

Walk the talk. It’s easy for some people to casually agree to do something and then let it slip their minds. Most people would say that this is mere forgetfulness. We disagree. We believe it is dishonest behavior. If you commit to doing something, barring some event truly beyond your control, you should follow through. The best individual contributors are careful not to say one thing and do another. They are excellent role models for others. This is the competency for which the collective group of 4,158 individuals we studied received highest scores.  That means, essentially, that following through on commitments is table stakes. But exceptional individual contributors go far beyond the others in their scrupulous practice of always doing what they say they will do.

Use good judgment. When in doubt about a technical issue or the practicality of a proposed decision, the very best individual contributors research it carefully rather than relying on their expertise to just wing it. Making decisions takes up a relatively small portion of the day for this group, but the consequences of the decisions they do make can be enormous. Outstanding contributors are open to a wide range of solutions and careful to consider what, and who, will be affected if something goes wrong.

Display personal resilience. No one is always right. Everyone suffers disappointments, failures, and disruptions. If they make a mistake, the best individual contributors acknowledge it quickly and move on. They don’t brood on other people’s mistakes. They ignore slights and hurtful comments. They realize that what undermines your reputation is not making mistakes but failing to own up to and learn from them.

Give honest feedback. We tend to think of feedback as a manager’s responsibility. And it is. Since this is not a formal role or usual expectation of individual contributors, it’s one of the behaviors that can make them stand out. Even done imperfectly, feedback from peers can be valuable because it’s so rare. If done with kind intent, demonstrations of how you might approach some task, gently raising questions a coworker may not have considered, or perhaps pointing out some specific things a colleague did that was particularly helpful to you or somewhat distracting, can be highly prized. The best individual contributors were able to provide feedback in a way that was perceived not as criticism but as a gesture of good will.

If you want to stand out from the pack, excelling at any of these nine behaviors can make a substantial impact on the way others perceive you. So we recommend selecting the one or two that might matter most to your effectiveness in your current assignment to work on improving.  In making your selection, consider asking your manager and peers for feedback on how effective you are in all of these areas. Not only will they give you additional insight, but sharing your plans to improve will increase the likelihood that you will follow through. What’s more, if managers know of your improvement goals they may find development assignments that will help.

If you are a manager with individual contributors reporting to you, consider periodic coaching to encourage them to adopt more of the behaviors that will help them stand out from the crowd. It will strengthen their careers and will also help them to benefit your organization even more than they already do.

Has the Perma-Temp Job Market Arrived?

Many labor experts see the surge in temp jobs and contract work in the United States as a sign of a long-term shift in the employment market away from permanent jobs, according to the Wall Street Journal. In March 2014, more than 2.8 million workers, or 2.5% of the workforce, held temporary jobs, up from 1.7 million in 2009; nearly 40% of such positions are in manufacturing. Temp jobs allow employers to quickly staff up or downsize in periods of growth or contraction, and they tend to be lower-wage: The average weekly temp-job pay of $554 is one-third lower than that of all jobs.