Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1439
April 1, 2014
The Price of Popularity: Lower Ratings
In the two years after books win splashy awards such as the Man Booker Prize, their average ratings on Goodreads.com decline by about a quarter-point on a 1-to-5 scale, whereas those that were runners-up maintain their high ratings, say Balázs Kovács of the University of Lugano and Amanda J. Sharkey of the University of Chicago. A big award draws a larger audience, which includes a greater proportion of people whose tastes aren’t aligned with the book’s style or subject. Also, readers sometimes react negatively to popularity and are thus more inclined to give lower evaluations to popular books, the researchers say.



Tell Your Whole Story in an Interview
I start job interviews with the same question every time: “Tell me about your path leading up to today. Why is this role the right fit for you now?”
What happens next is predictable:
“My first job out of college was at an international aid organization…”
“I worked for a number of years in publishing before I…”
“I started out in finance but then…”
I typically wait for a pause and ask candidates to start earlier. I tell them that I want to hear the details from their story that illustrate what drives them — their purpose. They often raise eyebrows, giggle nervously, or cross their arms.
“How far back do you want me go?”
“As far as you can,” I invite them.
Few candidates have rehearsed a response.
This is because we typically tell our professional stories beginning with our first job. After all, that’s what’s on our resumes and so it’s the narrative we tell ourselves and others about our work life. But that’s not when our stories begin.
In fact, your early years are critical to shaping your core values and authentic, untarnished self. Your natural interests, how you spent unstructured time, and the activities and ideas you were drawn to provide clues to your purpose. Your story didn’t start with your first paycheck. Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks reflected on Sting’s talk at the 2014 TED conference, in which he revisited his childhood as a middle-aged man, seeking inspiration from some of his earliest experiences. His talk highlights that even those of us living a clear path need to look backward for inspiration and guidance to move our work forward.
As the senior vice president of Echoing Green, a global nonprofit responsible for seeding over 500 innovative social change organizations, I’ve reviewed thousands of resumes. Between evaluating over a decade’s worth of Echoing Green Fellowship applications and interviewing hundreds of candidates for roles within my fast-growing organization, I’ve read my share of career objectives, acronyms summing up years of intensive studies (from MBAs to MDs to MSWs), and quirky identifiers (haiku master, flash mob frequenter, tropical fish expert).
When I pick up a resume, I scan to the earliest years. I’ve found that the older a candidate is, the more likely she is to gloss over those experiences. We become expert at explaining job transitions, major career pivots, and even our school-to-career path. But most people fail to include their full story — the one that started much earlier in life.
So, what if you backdated your resume?
What if you let the critical first influences weave through your professional experiences? What if, instead of casting aside early pivotal experiences, you used them as the foundation of your narrative, to illustrate what really drives you? What if, in addition to continually adding new roles to your resume, you surfaced stories hidden in family albums that help explain why you do what you do?
Through Echoing Green’s Work on Purpose program, I lead a workshop dedicated to this very concept. Participants receive a handout with three headings: Education, Work & Volunteer Experience, and Skills & Abilities. The twist is that I ask them to populate these categories based on their experiences from birth to age 10, and then ages 11-17. I ask them to reflect back on a time when work and play were not always distinguishable. What clubs were they a part of? How did they spend their time before they were inundated with work emails and responsible for bill-paying? What were they drawn toward before they, their family or teachers started put boxes around their identity?
Looking that far back isn’t easy. It helps to interview a parent, a teacher, or an early mentor to draw out the interests and skills from your earliest years. You might hear a story that surprises you or helps to explain an element of your personality. Often participants rediscover interests and unearth predispositions. I then ask them to use the answers to connect what they rediscovered about themselves with the work that they pursue today. As John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”
You can backdate your resume today. Start by interviewing someone who knew you well in your youth, or asking yourself these questions:
What did I gravitate toward naturally?
What activities did I lose myself in?
What did I talk about all the time?
What did I love to read?
See what themes you can extract to further your understanding of yourself. Connect these discoveries with what you do now or want to do. Seek out professional development opportunities that reconnect you to these early tendencies. Look at job postings through a new lens. And even be bold—tell a story from your youth in a job interview that explains why you think you’ll thrive in a new role.
Much of our thinking about our careers and our purpose in the world is about looking forward, thinking about how to make progress toward our ultimate goals. The beauty of uncovering your past is that you are afforded the chance to create a sturdier, truer road map for where you want to be. Backdating your resume lets you look forward and back so you can tap into your full story to inform your career choices.
I’m not suggesting you include your lemonade stand venture under “work experience.” But I do hope that the practice of rediscovering your early years will help unleash the why behind the titles on your resume, and help you find your purpose.



March 31, 2014
Senior Managers Won’t Always Get Along
It’s virtually impossible to like everyone you meet. It’s even more unlikely that you will get along with everyone at work. People have different personalities, biases, values, ambitions, and interests, all of which affect the chemistry of their relationships. And if you throw in the pressures of the workplace, it’s hardly surprising that tensions arise between colleagues and co-workers. But when members of a senior management team don’t get along, the negative impacts can cascade through an organization. Those conflicts have the potential to reduce productivity and morale for dozens or hundreds of people.
Let’s look at a two (disguised, but real) examples:
In a manufacturing organization, three members of the senior team were told that they were on the short-list to become the next CEO. The ensuing competition exacerbated already strained relationships between them, such that they barely talked with each other outside of formal meetings. Taking cues from their bosses, the people that worked for them began to form “camps” and reduced their levels of cross-functional discussion and collaboration as well.
In a financial services firm with a history of fairly autonomous business units, one senior manager was charged with creating a common approach to product development. After several of the business leaders pushed back on the standardized approach, she wrote them off and thereafter only worked with friendly and receptive areas.
It would be easy to say in both of these cases that the CEO should have intervened and forced people to work together more effectively. The reality is that in many organizations the CEO is either unaware of these dynamics, doesn’t know what to do, or chooses to ignore them, thinking that senior managers should be able to work these things out on their own. In other cases, like the first example here, the CEO might even foster the competition, almost like a lab experiment to see what happens.
So what can you do if you are part of a “frosty” management team, either as a direct contributor to the tension, or an observer of the dysfunction? Here are two suggestions:
First, get the issues out from under the rocks and into the light of day. Few things cripple a management team more than having elephants in the room — and in the organization — that no one acknowledges. Get beyond the conspiracy of silence by talking to the key parties, either individually, in small groups, or as a team, about what’s going on. This needs to be done delicately and sensitively, without blaming anyone or pointing fingers (which could make things worse), but the conversations need to get started with a goal of making the business better.
In the case of the competing executives cited above, for example, one of the managers initiated a lunch meeting for the three of them — and explicitly talked about the awkwardness of the situation and how it was affecting other people on their team and in the company. All three then agreed that, while the situation was not optimal, they should do everything possible to do what’s best for the company and not just their own ambitions — and they conveyed this to their teams. Although this didn’t end the tensions, it certainly made it easier to keep doing business until a new CEO was selected.
The second way to deal with situations like these is to gently force the contending people to work together on projects or issues that are important to the company. In other words, when senior managers need to put on “bigger hats,” it helps them to transcend the interpersonal rivalries and dislikes in order to achieve the broader objective. For example, in the financial services company mentioned earlier, the HR executive, concerned about the deteriorating relationships, quietly influenced the CEO to tackle a key strategic issue by setting up a few small cross-functional teams — and made sure that the executives who were not getting along were paired up.
There is nothing that says that members of a leadership team need to like each other. They do need to realize however that when they don’t “get along” their dysfunctional relationships can reverberate throughout the organization. Preventing this from happening is a responsibility of the whole team.



The Ultimate Productivity Hack Will Be Robot Assistants
Our current phase of technological evolution is turning science fiction concepts into scientific facts: driverless cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on roads in the United States and parts of Europe; thought-controlled robotic prosthetics are helping people who have lost limbs regain the ability to walk and ‘grasp’ every day items in their hands; machine learning — the ability of a software program to actively learn from previous texts and submit suggestions — in our smartphones and computer systems nudges us towards which movie to watch or book to buy.
There is another seemingly mundane but profoundly important application of this technology: to better managers ourselves and our time. The future of productivity is coming, and it will rely on Artificial Intelligence.
The underlying technology behind all of the advances in robotic technology mentioned above is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). A.I., often referred to as the ability of computers to think like humans, has been a main goal of many computer and cognitive scientists for the last sixty to eighty years. And one of the principle goals of A.I. developers has long been to help humans be more productive.
With the exception of commercial ventures such as Google’s search and related products, the largest known A.I. project to date was instigated by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2003, DARPA contracted SRI International to lead a reported $200 million, five-year project to build a virtual assistant. The project consisted of up to 500 experts in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, human–computer interaction, flexible planning, and behavioral studies who were tasked with building a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO).
The goal of CALO was to become what the technology industry now calls a ‘cognitive assistant,’ – similar in function to what many of us think of as a personal assistant. This ambitious goal envisioned a software program that learns by ‘observing and learning from the past, acting in the present and anticipating the future.’ CALO would be able to assist its user with organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human communication, resource allocation, task management decisions, and scheduling and prioritizing.
In 2008, with the agreement of DARPA, a private company co-founded by three of the engineers from SRI International was spun out of the CALO project. The company was registered as SIRI Inc. and by 2010 was acquired by Apple and launched as part of the iPhone operating system in October 2011.
So disruptive was this realization of the cognitive assistant that at the time of Siri’s launch, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt called it a competitive threat to Google’s core search business. In other words, it had the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we interact with information.
Schmidt elaborated on this potential in his recent book: The New Digital Age – Reshaping the future of people, nations and business:
Centralizing the many moving parts of one’s life into an easy to use almost intuitive system of information management and decision-making will give all interactions with technology an effortless feel. These systems will free us of many small burdens, including errands to do list and assorted monitoring tasks – that today add stress and chip away at our mental focus throughout the day. By relying on these integrated systems, which will encompass both the professional and the personal sides of our lives, we’ll be able to use our time more effectively each day.
Suggestion engines that offer alternative terms to help a user find what she is looking for will be a particularly useful aid in efficiency by consistently stimulating our thinking process, ultimately enhancing our creativity, not preempting it. So there will be plenty of ways to procrastinate too but the point is that when you choose to be productive, you can do so with greater capacity…
…Other advances in the pipeline in areas like robotics, artificial intelligence and voice recognition will introduce efficiency into our lives by providing more seamless forms of engagement with the technology in our daily routines.
This technology will surely save many of us time in our daily affairs.
All of which suggests that today’s breakthroughs in A.I. are tomorrow’s breakthroughs in productivity. Google, Apple and others, such as Intel and IBM, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in A.I. research and development and patent applications as a means of providing a solution to help us manage our most precious resource – time — through the use of a personal interactive cognitive (robotic) assistant.
When I tell Siri or Google Now to remind me to contact a client about some matter next time I am in the office, it stores a reminder and its geo-location positioning device pings me as I sit at my desk. If I want to collect flowers on my way home it will notify me of the closest florists on the route . It can reserve restaurant tables and in some countries Google Now can even read a restaurant menu. Soon it will also check if it serves your dietary preferences before recommending the restaurant.
Through voice recognition I can dictate a text message or email and have it sent by my cognitive assistant. The more I use this technology the more it recognizes how I break down tasks and the times of day I am most productive, ensuring that I am most efficient on high priority tasks. The ability of today’s cognitive assistants is really quite remarkable, but it is just the beginning.
Thanks to continued progress by A.I. researchers, the long-imagined potential of cognitive assistants is finally arriving. As robots become increasingly intelligent, so too will we.



How to Improve Your Decision-Making Skills
We are faced with the need to make decisions every day. Should we bring product A or B to market? Which marketing strategy should we use? Of the choices that we have available, who is the best person to hire or who would make the best partner? In each case, we try to rely on as many facts as we can so that we can make a reasonable estimation of the best path to follow. At first glance, the approach of weighing the evidence rationally seems perfectly reasonable. Yet, in so many instances, rational predictions fail. Why is that? And what can we do about it?
Rational thinking is prone to several biases and problems. Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on cognitive biases, points out in an HBR article that a team that has fallen in love with its theories may unconsciously ignore or reject contradictory evidence, place too much weight on one piece of data, or make faulty comparisons to another business case that suits its bias. In this same article, he points out that a McKinsey study of more than 1,000 business investments showed that when companies worked to reduce the effects of bias, they raised their returns on investment by seven percentage points. He provides a checklist of 12 questions to detect and reduce bias, one of which is “Has the team involved fallen in love with their decision?” The first step, then, is to use a checklist to minimize decision biases, much like the one suggested by Kahneman.
And then there are psychological traps. John Hammond described these psychological traps in detail, pointing out how we may fall into the confirming evidence trap (seeking out evidence that justifies our choices rather than looking at the whole picture), the status quo trap (shifting deck chairs on the Titanic rather than jumping over while it is sinking) or the sunk cost trap (throwing good money after bad in the hope of recovering initial losses rather than simply cutting bait before we are completely drained). A recent client of mine is a good example of the latter, having continued to invest his money in developing a technology despite being aware of a superior competitive product that reached the market before his development was complete. Acting on your awareness is a critical step. And acting sooner rather than later may actually save the day.
Another problem with rational thinking is that of “trial and error,” as suggested by Karl Popper. He believed that no decision could be considered correct unless it is subject to testing and scrutiny in order to accept or reject it. Once again, this would appear to be a rational and scientific approach to decision-making, but recent critiques point out that people making decisions are inherently subjective and decisions are influenced by each person’s own values, so that even how we implement a strategy may be influenced by what we believe. You could, for example, choose to believe that most businesses fail (and that would be true), and as a result, never pursue success in business. This would clearly not serve you if your business idea were more like one of the exceptions. For managing the subjective nature of people when making decisions, a recent article by R.J. Ormerod suggested that there are three things that you can do: (1) Use a two-tiered approach with a small group of core people who set the standards that a larger group can implement with autonomy but within those standards; (2) Tap into as much knowledge within the organization as you can, and (3) Ensure that those carrying out the decisions are involved in making them, and take into account a wide variety of views prior to setting the context (involving those responsible for taking the decision, those who have to implement it, those affected by it but are not involved, and those who can offer expertise on some aspect or other). For example, key management, sales, customers and other experts should be involved.
Yet another example of “pseudo-rationalism” is induction, a commonly used “rational” technique of basing future decisions on the past, the problems of which have been outlined by David Hume. Just because two things always seem to occur at the same time does not imply that they always will. Our past experiences create brain patterns that unconsciously steer our attention to things selectively. For example, you may think that your online marketing efforts always fail because they are not structured within a campaign, even if you observe this repeatedly. However, it may simply be that your brain pattern of expected failure limits all future efforts. In this case, you have to change your expectation, not your marketing strategy. Therefore, when faced with evidence from the past, try reversing your cause-and-effect thinking. Is your marketing strategy impacting your success, or is your prior lack of success impacting your marketing savvy?
To remember this advice for making better decisions, I suggest the mnemonic TRICK: Two-tiered approach, Rapport with strategic team and implementers, Involve all from management to customer, Cause and effect reversal, and use the Kahneman perspective. This five-step approach can allow you to implement plans with a perspective that is much more aligned with how the brain really works than a simple “rational” (or “pseudo-rational”) approach.



Invest in Tomorrow’s Workforce, and World
We all know that education is an investment — but it’s not solely a personal one. The prosperity of nations and the health of economies is linked to the educational attainment levels and size of a skilled workforce.
For businesses, the danger of underinvesting in skills can be great. This was a major theme at the Global Education & Skills Forum last week in Dubai. At the forum we were reminded that the global economy is facing a “talent time bomb.” Whichever way you look at it, the countries producing the majority of the next generation of workers are still the ones least able to help them develop.
For example, the UN informs us that over the course of the 21st century, Africa’s share of the world’s population will nearly double, from 13.1 to 24.9%. Collectively, the UN projects, the less developed regions of the world “will grow 58% over 50 years, as opposed to 2% for more developed regions. Less developed nations will account for 99% of the expected increment to world population in this period.” Nigeria, in particular (with a population projected to exceed that of the USA by 2050), will increase its workforce threefold in the next 50 years. Therefore we need to see significantly greater investment in the education systems of these parts of the world – and others. And not only for their own benefit, the economic fortunes of many other global regions depend on it.
As Sarah Brown, chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, has said, “The evidence is clear for the business community that investing in education leads to a more relevant talent pool to drive societal and economic growth.”
Yet when we look at how corporate money is spent on social objectives, there is no evidence that education is being prioritized. On the contrary, healthcare spending by corporate donors is nearly 16 times higher than education spending. Given this, UNESCO’s recent call for 20% of global corporate philanthropic funding to be channeled to education projects is welcome.
But as good managers have discovered in so many realms of human need, pure philanthropy is not the only means for addressing social challenges. We need to remind ourselves that educating skilled workforces is an investment opportunity. And we need to focus on the aspect of the situation that surprises me the most: the lack of innovative financing mechanisms to allow investors (companies, individuals, or governments) to channel much needed funds to where we all know they will reap a reward.
For companies and other profit-motivated investors, investing in broad-based education presents some challenges. Developing talent is a long game, and skills gaps can take a generation to close. There is a “tragedy of the commons” problem, as well, whereby employers do not have to invest their own funds to enjoy the benefits of investments made by others. We generally see it as the duty of government to build schools, hire teachers, and provide access to education while businesses hire the best talent once it emerges. Where a business has engaged in “upstream” education, it has usually limited its involvement to short-term placements or CSR programs in the developing world.
But we can do better than simply throwing up our hands and leaving the hard investing to the public sector alone (an approach, by the way, that is costing governments $129 billion a year according to UNESCO).
But there is progress being made. For example, new instruments known as “Social Yield Notes” could allow the funding of development to move from a model of bilateral grants and aid to an equity framework, where the value of the equity is determined as a function of the delivery of social outcomes. A more detailed description of how a Social Yield Note could work, as well as broader discussion of what it will take to develop a new generation of talent, can be found in Investment in Global Education: A Strategic Business Imperative, a 2013 report compiled by Accenture Development Partnerships, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, and Total Impact Advisors.) The broader point is that our finest financial minds are equal to this kind of investment challenge and could come up with increasingly sophisticated tools.
To be clear, this is not about privatizing state education systems. It is about mobilizing capital on a global scale to ensure that every child can have the right to a quality education. Delivered through education systems that are agnostic on the age-old debate of public vs private but with a singular focus on outcome and impact.
So what can the rest of us do to spur the development of better finance, and take investment and corporate involvement to the next level? At the very least, we should begin talking more about the investment opportunities presented by the education gap.
We can also point out how small changes can make very big differences. For example, when my colleagues and I looked at India, we noted that about two-thirds of children born there do not complete secondary education. But, according to the OECD, countries that are able to attain literacy scores even 1% higher than the international average will achieve 2.5% higher productivity rates and 1.5% higher GDP per capita than countries with average literacy scores. UNESCO research indicates that if only basic reading skills could be taught to the students in low-income countries, we would see 171 million people lifted out of poverty, which would constitute a 12% drop in the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day.
Finally, return on investment can be estimated and celebrated in various ways. Based on our data on Indian education costs, as well as revenues across industries, the case for private sector investment in education is strong. To take India as an example, as we do in our report, given an annual birth rate of 27 million, and a GDP per employed person of $8,939, it is simple math to calculate the “value gap” that results from that lack of access to quality education. It is over $100 billion (that’s over 5% of Indian GDP) each year. How many investment opportunities tap into such enormous potential value?
In conclusion: As some of us work on the kinds of financial instruments that will facilitate investment in global education, many more of us can work on shifting mind-sets. This is happening in many places, from Dubai to Davos (where it was discussed in several sessions this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum). Change is underway but we must speed things up. Our future progress depends on it.



Mindfulness for People Who Are Too Busy to Meditate
Mindfulness has become almost a buzz-word. But what is it, really? Mindfulness is, quite simply, the skill of being present and aware, moment by moment, regardless of circumstances.
For instance, researchers have found that mindfulness can reprogram the brain to be more rational and less emotional. When faced with a decision, meditators showed increased activity in the posterior insula of the brain, which has been linked to rational decision making. This allowed them to make decisions based more on fact than emotion. This is good news since other research has found that reasoning is actually suffused with emotion. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive and negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds. We push threatening information away and hold friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators but to data itself.
In order to reap the benefits of mindfulness, there are specific techniques that you can practice to improve your skills. You may have heard about a mindfulness-enhancing technique where you sit in stillness and practice meditating for a period of time before going about the rest of your day. This is definitely valuable. But I have a bias for being able to practice mindfulness all day, in every circumstance. In essence, you start living all of life mindfully and over time there is no distinction between your formal practice and making a presentation, negotiating a deal, driving your car, working out, or playing a round of golf.
Try a technique I call “micro meditations.” These are meditations that can be done several times a day for 1-3 minutes at a time. Periodically throughout the day, become aware of your breath. It could be when you feel yourself beginning to become stressed or overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time, or perhaps when you feel yourself becoming increasingly distracted and agitated.
In becoming aware of the breath, notice how you are breathing. Is it shallow or deep? Are you holding your breath and in so doing perhaps also holding your stomach? Or hunching your shoulders?
The next step is to start breathing so that you are bringing the breath into the belly. Do not strain. If it feels too unnatural to breathe into the belly, then perhaps bring the breath down to the lower chest. If the mind wanders, gently come back to the breath — without judging yourself for momentarily losing focus.
You will notice that by regularly practicing this micro-meditation you will become more aware and more calm. By practicing this regularly you will train yourself to be more and more mindful, and increasingly calm and focused. You can create reminders for yourself to practice these meditations two-to-four times a day; every hour or so; or before you go to a meeting — whatever is feasible. You can also use them on an ad-hoc basis to prepare for a meeting or a presentation, when you are stressed, or when multi-tasking is eroding your concentration. Micro-meditations can put you back on track, an help you develop your mindfulness muscle.
A second technique I use is “mindfulness in action.” Instead of adding a new routine to your day, you just experience your day a little differently by paying attention in a particular way, for seconds at a time.
For instance, if you have ever found yourself in a meeting and suddenly noticed that you missed what was just said or that you were “somewhere else” for the last few minutes, chances are you stopped listening. You could have been thinking about your next meeting or everything on your to do list, or perhaps you just zoned out or were focused on an incoming text message. This is incredibly common. Unfortunately, it is the cause of huge misunderstandings, missed opportunities and wasted time.
When in a meeting, try, to the best of your ability, to only listen for seconds at a time. This is harder than it sounds, but with practice you will be able to do listen continuously, without a break in concentration. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, come right back to listening to the voice that is speaking. You may have to come back dozens of times in a single meeting. That is extremely common; we don’t actually realize how often the mind wanders. Always bring yourself back gently and with patience. All you are doing is training the mind to be right here, right now.
These techniques quite literally train the mind and rewire the brain. And as a result, three critical things happen. First, your ability to concentrate increases. Second, you see things with increasing clarity, which improves your judgment. And third, you develop equanimity. Equanimity enables you to reduce your physiological and emotional stress and enhances the chances that you may find a creative solution.
Practicing mindfulness – and reaping its benefits – doesn’t need to be a large time commitment or require special training. You can start right now – this moment.



The Mortgage-Interest Deduction Mainly Helps the Rich Buy Bigger Homes
The average house size in the Washington, D.C., area, is about 1,400 square feet larger than it would have been if the U.S. government didn’t provide tax benefits such as the mortgage-interest deduction to promote home ownership, according to a study described by the Wall Street Journal. While driving up the size of houses in affluent areas, the tax breaks have done little to broadly encourage people to buy homes. The benefits cost the government $175 billion annually in lost revenue, the Journal says.



Go to Where the Actual Work Is Being Done
Do you often feel reactive instead of proactive? Do people complain that decisions at the top take too long to percolate down to the frontlines? If so, you probably manage your organization and your direct reports through weekly meetings and email. You should instead consider “leader standard work.”
Leader standard work is a term often used in lean manufacturing. However, it needn’t be confined to the factory floor — it’s equally valuable anywhere in the organization. In its simplest form, leader standard work is a regular cadence of activities and questions that bring leadership into physical contact with managers and frontline employees. It gets leaders out of their offices and onto the company floor where the actual work is being done.
Standard work isn’t just for people at lower levels of the organization, or people doing repetitive jobs. Leaders need similar standards as well. Without them, managerial time and attention are ineffectually fragmented among the dozens of pressing issues that crop up each day. Leaders also lose visibility into the overall health of the company (or a department). Their exposure and involvement consists of firefighting, not fire prevention. Moreover, employees and managers lose the vital, trust-building connection with leadership that helps sustain culture and habits through tough times.
At its most basic level, leader standard work involves:
Walking the floor of the company at regular and predictable times. The business of the company doesn’t occur in conference rooms; it occurs where employees are creating the products and services your company provides. It’s therefore necessary to “go and see” what’s happening with your own eyes. You should have a posted list of what areas of the organization you’re going to visit and when you’re going to do it. Depending on the time of year or a particular strategic objective you’re working on, you may visit some areas daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Irrespective of the cadence, it must be regular and predictable.
Conducting structured conversations. Visiting people on the frontlines is neither a social call nor an interrogation — and it’s certainly not a performance review. It consists of repeatedly asking a set of questions, such as:
What’s the target you’re trying to achieve?
How are you doing versus the goal?
What problems have happened recently?
How do you plan on solving those problems?
How can I help?
These questions are particularly powerful when they go up and down the chain of command — when CEO ask VPs, VPs ask managers, and managers ask frontline staff in a tightly scheduled series of meetings.
Structured conversations keep leadership abreast of organizational performance in real-time. They highlight problems and enable leadership to deploy resources to solve them before they metastasize.
Using simple visible tools to guide the conversation and make abnormalities visible. White boards with post-it notes or note cards showing project status are perfect examples. Without these tools, leader standard work becomes a social event — conversations rapidly lose focus, and deteriorate into vague, general discussions about “how things are going.” Grounding the conversation in the bedrock of actual work and other relevant data keeps the focus on performance and aberrations. At CapitalOne, for example, one of the procurement teams uses a board that shows where purchase requests are in the queue, how long they’ve been in the system, who’s working on them, and what problems might be slowing the process down. When managers and executives meet with the team, they can see at a glance what’s happening, and can focus their conversation on the current conditions and improvements that need to be made.
Equally important is a visible management board for leadership that shows whether they’ve followed their own standards: did they visit all areas they were supposed to? Did they perform the checks they planned? Did they spot any problems they want to be sure they address on their next visit? At Group Health in Seattle, leaders have a highly visible system that shows everyone the visits executives are supposed to make each day and if they’ve done so. This system creates predictability and two-way accountability.
It’s tempting for leaders to complain, “My work life is utterly chaotic and unpredictable. There’s no way that I could set — or follow — this kind of schedule.” Remember, though, that standard work comprises only a small percentage of your day. And when done consistently, will reduce the amount of firefighting that you have to do. Modeling this kind of behavior is the most powerful way to embed it in your culture.



March 28, 2014
Don’t Compare Virtual Reality to the Smartphone
“Over the next 10 years, virtual reality will become ubiquitous, affordable, and transformative.”
This was the justification for Facebook’s massive purchase of Oculus, makers of the Rift virtual reality headset. While Facebook is still working diligently on mobile applications, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to hint that the acquisition places the company on the cutting edge for the next pervasive platform: virtual reality.
Unfortunately, Zuckerberg’s “platform” reference has elicited many comparisons of Oculus to Google’s purchase of Android, the company that would provide Google with its own smartphone operating system. While Virtual Reality may one day be pervasive, the disruption of VR is nothing like disruption of mobility. And the strategists everywhere, who invest corporate capital in acquisitions, would do well to know why.
Disruption is an explanation of how small nimble companies unseat industry giants – but it is simultaneously a story of market expansion and the provision of ever cheaper and more accessible goods and services. The theory of disruption explains why incumbent businesses – with high fixed cost infrastructures and embedded beliefs about what the market wants – fail to adopt business models that lower the cost of their services and drive product accessibility to entirely new sets of users. For instance, when Henry Ford disrupted the automotive world by building a company that used process assembly at scale to drive down cost, he abandoned the industry held belief that variety was important. Others, with expectations that people needed variety, refused to play Ford’s scale game (or failed trying). When Legalzoom decided to attack the overpriced industry of law, they used software systems to automate the provisioning of legal documents. The company offered far less variety than actual lawyers, but were able to drive prices to a point that more people could consume those services.
While the Rift may prove transformative to the gaming or entertainment industries, its reach is narrower than Android. Virtual reality is not a disruption to the computing market, instead it stands poised to disrupt content consumption. That stands in contrast with Android and mobility which, by its very nature, made computing cheaper and more accessible to people everywhere. Smartphones offered the opportunity to extend the same disruptions related to process automation and software aided intelligence that was brought on by the PC revolution to billions of computing endpoints around the world. Mobility offered a chance to recreate the entire information technology industry, an industry far more expansive than entertainment and media – an industry that is foundational to every company’s value chain across the globe.
Virtual reality is a way of experiencing the content within a computing platform. It’s a new type of user interface that immerses its user fully in a software environment. VR may require similar dedicated visual hardware, but it is not synonymous with augmented reality (e.g., Google Glass) which overlays digital information on the physical world around us. Augmented reality further extends the reaches of the internet, tagging physical objects with optical recognition. VR is insular. It relies on the computing power we already have to transport users to a digital world that is stored in the computing devices we already own. It doesn’t push the reach of the microprocessor.
Certainly, if Oculus is successful, Facebook could end up owning the VR platform that everyone loves. It could find itself offering the platform that makes the experience of courtside basketball, front row theater, and summiting Everest available to users who couldn’t have imagined consuming those experiences before. It has the potential to begin disrupting the travel and entertainment markets and become a pillar of the high-end gaming industry. Facebook could have a very lucrative investment in its hands.
But by its nature, Oculus depends upon the computing infrastructure that is already in the world. It is not a platform that makes the consumption of all types of information cheaper and more accessible. Its system is more expensive and higher performing than a smartphone. VR might very well become a major platform for consuming content, but until we all decide to plug into the Matrix, the disruption of VR can’t be equated to the disruption of mobile computing.



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