Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1439

Why Amazon Is Copying Zappos and Paying Employees to Quit

Last week, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos released his annual letter to shareholders. As is the case every year, it is a tour de force of ideas and initiatives about the customer experience (Amazon Prime), disruptive technology (Fire TV), fast-growing product initiatives (Amazon Web Services), and strategic consistency. (As he does every year, Bezos attached his first letter to shareholders from back in 1997 to underscore the company’s long-term commitments.)

Still, for all these big, cutting-edge innovations, it was a small, pre-existing idea, something that Amazon borrowed from one its subsidiaries, that generated the most public attention. Bezos’s letter unveiled his well-named Pay to Quit program, in which the company offers fulfillment-center employees one-time payments to leave Amazon. Each employee gets the offer once a year. The first time, it’s for $2,000. The offer increases by $1,000 each year after that up to a maximum of $5,000.

If Pay to Quit sounds familiar, there’s a reason. The idea was invented several years ago at Zappos, the online retailer based in Las Vegas that has become iconic for its zeal about customer service. Tony Hsieh and his colleagues call their program The Offer, and it’s made as new recruits experience the company’s deep-dive training program. The Offer, which applies to all new Zappos employees, not just front-line service people, started at $100, went to $500, then $1,000, and now stands at one-month’s salary. Amazon bought Zappos back in 2009, and now Jeff Bezos is shipping some of this upstart’s ideas into his behemoth organization.

So what to make of this pay-to-quit boomlet? Why are high-profile innovators like Tony Hsieh and Jeff Bezos making it easy, even attractive, for employees they worked hard to recruit to leave their companies and move on to the next thing?

The first (and most obvious) answer is that unhappy people make for unsuccessful companies. As Bezos notes in his letter, “In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.” This is not, it should be stressed, an indictment of the organization or people who choose to leave. Great companies are great precisely because they stand for something special, different, distinctive. That means, almost by definition, that they are not for everybody. It takes a certain personality type to thrive in the extroverted, almost theatrical, culture of Zappos, or the driven, no-nonsense culture at Amazon. If there isn’t the right fit, it makes perfect sense to quit.

But the more valuable role of these offers may be their impact on the employees who choose to stay. Once a year at Amazon, front-line employees, whose jobs are anything but glamorous, get a chance to sit back, reflect, and choose whether to re-commit to the company and their colleagues. In a sense, Pay to Quit is an annual performance review of the company by its employees: Can I imagine not working in this department, with these people, for this company? It is they who are making the call, they who are choosing not to take the money and run — which creates a deeper sense of engagement and affiliation.

Who can forget the memorable scene in The Godfather, when Michael Corleone explains to his older brother, “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.” (The Corleone’s, of course, had different techniques for persuading colleagues to, ahem, leave the organization.)  The spirit of enterprise today, the energy that makes great companies tick, is precisely the opposite of that much-quoted piece of management wisdom.

Work is personal. That’s the driving force behind the truly great companies I’ve gotten to know, an unshakable sense that a company’s capacity to create economic value for its customers connects directly to its ability to create a sense of meaning and camaraderie for its people at every level of the organization.

And that, I’d argue, is the real takeaway of these programs for leaders in other companies, whether they choose to implement some version of them or not. With all the threats and challenges and competitors in the world, so many of the business leaders I meet focus on the age-old question: What keeps you up at night? What are the problems and worries that nag at you? But the much more powerful question, especially for people on the front-lines of business is: What gets you up in the morning? What keeps everyone more committed than ever, more engaged than ever, more excited than ever, even as the competitive environment gets tougher than ever?

Sure, the most successful innovators think differently from everyone else — Hsieh and Bezos personify that mindset. But the most successful companies care more than everyone else — about customers, about colleagues, about how the organization conducts itself in a world with endless opportunities to cut corners and compromise on values.  You can’t be special, distinctive, compelling in the marketplace unless you’ve built something special, distinctive, compelling in the workplace. Your strategy is your culture, your culture is your strategy.

Here are the questions that matter: How engaged are people at every level of the organization in the company and their work — how personally do they take things? How much money would it take to persuade them to leave the organization? And, in the spirit of The Godfather, what are you doing to make sure Pay to Quit is an offer they can refuse?

Heartbleed, the Branding of a Bug, and the Internet of Things

One week later, and the Heartbleed Bug news cycle is winding down without any known reports of catastrophic damage. A case of security wonks crying wolf? No, says cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneier, who is known for measured, thoughtful responses to vulnerabilities and called this one “catastrophic.” HBR spoke with Schneier about what he considers the surprisingly effective response to Heartbleed, how difficult security is because of humans, and why he’s happy Heartbleed wasn’t discovered in the near future, when the Internet of Things will make it much more difficult to fix bugs.

You’re not known for hyperbole, but on your blog you called Heartbleed ‘catastrophic’ and said that on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s an 11. What makes it so bad?

Heartbleed is a vulnerability that affected an enormous number of servers on the Internet, and affected them in unpredictable but potentially disastrous ways. Turning the vulnerability into viable attack code was trivial — a few lines of scripting code is all you need — and could be executed without leaving a trace. Stealing the SSL key of a site is an enormous deal, and one that affects all of the site’s users. Fixing it was hard, and required multiple steps and coordination between people. In that way, the fix was both technical and procedural. Basically, it was so bad because there was so much uncertainty. We didn’t even know how to quantify the risk.

Has anything changed in your opinion about how bad it is?

Yes and no. One site suggested it may not be as easy to get private SSL keys as we thought, which would make it less dire. And the process of patching the vulnerability and regenerating keys and certificates is going smoother than anticipated. But we’re finding the vulnerability in unpatchable hardware systems, and we haven’t yet seen how criminals have taken advantage of this.

It appears that the introduction of this bug into the OpenSSL encryption system was an honest mistake. Can we afford to have honest mistakes when coding encryption?

Unfortunately, everything will always have the risk of mistakes. People are fallible, and everything we do involves people.

But we ought to come as close as we can to eliminating such mistakes. When websites say they are secure, what can we expect that to mean?

We can expect it to be more marketing than anything else. Secure isn’t an on-off binary property. It’s relative and situational. I feel secure in my home, even though it’s vulnerable. I feel secure on airplanes, even though they occasionally crash. Websites are no different.

Do people understand this risk the way they do those others? Are they aware of the hazards of being so ubiquitously connected?

People definitely don’t understand SSL and what it does and does not protect. But, in general, Internet security is pretty good. The Internet is surprisingly safe. We’re able to work and play on the Internet without many problems. Of course there’s a lot of cybercrime, but it’s minor.

The social Internet seems like the perfect medium to create overreaction and hysteria about a bug like this. Surprisingly it hasn’t happened. It has all felt rather orderly and measured. Why is that?

We in the security community are generally terrible about communicating information about vulnerabilities to the general public. Heartbleed has been an exception; the researchers did an excellent job explaining the problem and the fix. They had a slick and informative website. And they gave the vulnerability a cool name and a logo. That logo worked; all the news outlets used it, and it gave people a visual reminder of the story. It created broad awareness in a smart way.

In other words, it was branded.

Yes. There’s a risk that we’re going to be accused of “crying wolf.” If there isn’t blood on the streets or planes colliding in midair, people are going to wonder what all the fuss was about — like Y2K. If you slap logos on every vulnerability, people will ignore them and distrust your motives. But it’s like storms. The bad ones get names for a reason.

What else are we learning from Heartbleed?

We’ve learned how hard the human aspects of a security system are to coordinate. We’re learning that we don’t have the infrastructure necessary to quickly revoke millions of certificates and issue new ones. We’re learning that some of our critical open-source software is maintained by volunteers who have busy lives, and that often no one else is evaluating that software’s security. We’re learning how complicated the process of disclosing a vulnerability of this magnitude is. Some larger companies got advance warning so they could fix their sites. Those that didn’t get advanced warning are understandably annoyed, but if everyone gets advance warning then it isn’t advance warning anymore. We’re learning how difficult it is to build security involving people.

On a distributed system like the Internet, how can we ensure near-total eradication of vulnerable systems?

We can’t, but we can monitor progress. We can scan the entire Internet and compile a list of vulnerable sites in less than half an hour. Many groups are doing this, and we’re learning that most sites have patched and re-secured their systems. I worry less about them, and more about the embedded systems — like cable modems and routers — that don’t have a means of upgrading. With devices like those, fixing the vulnerability involves a trash can, a credit card, and a trip to the computer store.

Beyond cable modems and routers, there’s the Internet of Things. Should we be thinking about Heartbleed in the context of that phenomenon?

Yes. I recently wrote an essay that talked about the difficulty of securing all of the low-cost embedded computer systems that are going to become common in our lives over the next few years. These are devices that are made cheaply with very low margins, and the companies that make them don’t have the expertise to secure them. Heartbleed would have been much worse in a world of Internet enabled thermostats, refrigerators, cars, and everything else, and that’s the world we’re headed toward.

It sounds like we’re going to need some way to classify infrastructure as critical and non-critical. Or we’ll need to license the people who are allowed to tinker with critical code like OpenSSL? Are we moving toward a more deeply regulated environment? Should we be?

A lot of our critical computer infrastructure is in private hands, both corporate and community. There’s value in having regulations surrounding this code, but there are risks as well. Better is to build resilient systems that are better able to survive things like Heartbleed. And remember, this is a singular event. It’s not like this kind of thing has been happening every month, or even every year. This is the worst vulnerability the Internet has had to weather in a long time.

When you hear that OpenSSL, which is considered critical infrastructure, is being developed by four underfunded developers, are you surprised? Should we be shocked to know that this critical piece of security is an economically challenged, somewhat neglected coding project?

Yes, it was surprising. And again, this is where resilience is important. It’s going to be a long time before we are sophisticated enough to prevent these kind of vulnerabilities. We need to learn how to thrive despite them.

The Real Reason New MBAs Want to Work for Goldman Sachs

What attracts top talent? Is it great benefits, flexible hours, steep pay packages, or state-of-the-art training? New research suggests it’s something simpler – but more difficult to obtain.

Prestige.

The status of a firm is quite possibly the leading driver in attracting the best of the best, at least in investment banking, according to a paper recently accepted by the Strategic Management Journal. Matthew Bidwell, an assistant professor at Wharton, and his colleagues wanted to better understand how something not-so-concrete like reputation stacks up against more tangible enticements. And, in particular, they wanted to find out whether the ability to offer more money is really a competitive advantage. Investment banking in particular offered a good testing ground for these questions because there’s a clear hierarchy of firms, and because a firm’s place in that pecking order is readily quantifiable via surveys on websites like Vault.com.

The researchers found that business school graduates “who had won more awards or graduated with honors took jobs at higher status firms,” supporting their hypothesis that top talent flocks to firms with better reputations. And when they polled current MBA students applying to work at investment banks, “the extent to which firm reputation would help with future employability” was ranked as their most important decision-making factor.

Because of this, high salaries aren’t a competitive advantage, at least at first. “You get the best people, and you don’t have to pay as much as you should early on because they want the stamp of ‘Goldman Sachs,’” Bidwell told me. Employees also want to work with other top talent, which helps when it comes to building strong networks. “When people are thinking about jobs, it isn’t benefits, flex time, or pay,” said Bidwell. “It’s how it will position you for the next step of your career.”

But when Bidwell and his co-authors took a long view of how people choose and then manage their careers over time, a couple of interesting things started to happen. First, they found that the benefits of working for a high status firm don’t take hold until about five years in. And in general, people at top firms wind up seeing those benefits, via more money or better jobs elsewhere. Indeed, the researchers found that that “an employer whose status is ten units higher (e.g. Goldman Sachs vs. Vanguard) pays about 15 percent more for employees at the VP level.” There’s no significant pay difference for new MBAs — Goldman essentially gets better talent for the same price. “In the early stages of your career, positioning yourself for later is important,” Bidwell says. “Subsequently, it’s not – you’re good, and you want to see the benefits.”

Second, and perhaps more importantly, status and reputation start to become the very reason great people leave places like Goldman Sachs – by design. “There’s an increasing tension,” Bidwell told me. “These companies are attractive to join because they’re attractive to leave.” They effectively make a person’s next career step more valuable, and there’s never a shortage of new grads willing to step in to continue the cycle.

For investment banking, Bidwell says, this system works pretty well. “You bring in people young, you don’t pay them much, and you get a lot of value out of them. At the same time, you don’t want everyone to be managing director.” But he cautions that reputation as a hiring advantage might work very differently across other industries and organizations that actually want to retain great employees. And there’s also the sticky problem of how a company develops a high-status reputation in the first place: “The reason why status creates advantage is that it’s very hard to get.”

But in a lot of ways, Bidwell’s findings illuminate the need for strong alumni programs like McKinsey’s, and calls for what LinkedIn CEO Reid Hoffman calls the new employer-employee compact – in which employees invest in the company’s adaptability, and the company invests in employees’ employability. Indeed, a Knowledge@Wharton article about this research notes that firms might look for ways to help advance workers’ careers as a way of being more competitive in the labor market.

And while Bidwell notes that status-as-competitive-advantage might work well for other industries in which a firm’s status is clear, those companies pining for Facebook’s reputation might be at a loss, and not just because status is hard to obtain. Technology companies, in fact, may be the most prominent example of when reputation has a whole different meaning: status doesn’t necessarily flow from size, or novelty, or any other easy-to-predict variable. “Do you want to work for Google and Apple because they’re at the top of the tree,” Bidwell asks in Knowledge@Wharton. “Or is it actually better to go work for a really cool start-up?”

Even in investment banking, where the pecking order of prestige and the benefits of status are clear, young MBAs won’t accrue those benefits if they don’t remain with that elite company for at least five years. In an industry not known for happy employees or good work-life balance, that may be longer than most want to pay their dues.

The Big Reason to Hire Superstar Employees Isn’t the Work They Do

Most companies will tell you they want to hire and retain “A players”, and why not? It’s hard to object to building a company around the best possible talent. But what is it about superstar talent that actually improves performance? A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines this question by looking at academic departments, where productivity can be measured in terms of papers published and citations from other researchers. Superstars were defined as academics who ranked above the 90th percentile based on citation-weighted publications. The paper points to three different ways that superstars can improve an organization, and measures the magnitude of each in the context of academic evolutionary biology departments. The first, and most obvious, is the direct increase in output that a superstar can have. Hire someone who can get a lot of great work done quickly and your organization will by definition be producing more great work. But, perhaps surprisingly, this represents only a small fraction of the change that superstars have on output. The authors write:

On average, department-level output increases by 54% after the arrival of a star. A significant fraction of the star effect is indirect: after removing the direct contribution of the star, department level output still increases by 48%.

Some of that remaining increase stems from the fact that departments hiring superstars tend to be growing. Even so, output per researcher also increases substantially, well beyond the added output that the superstar adds herself. So if the superstar isn’t responsible for the organization’s increase in productivity directly, what is? The paper looked at two different explanations: that the superstar makes her colleagues more productive, and that she helps the organization recruit better talent going forward.

The researchers found that the superstar’s impact on recruiting was far and away the more significant driver of improved organizational productivity. Starting just one year after the superstar joins the department, the average quality of those who join the department at all levels increases significantly. As for the impact of a superstar on existing colleagues, the findings are more mixed. Incumbents who work on topics related to those the superstar focused on saw their output increase, but incumbents whose work was unrelated became slightly less productive. (This latter effect was too small to be statistically significant, and the authors posit that allocation of resources toward the areas the superstar works on could explain it.)

“Additional research is required to have confidence in generalizations, but there are reasons to suspect that the broad findings are not unique to academic science,” said Ajay Agrawal, professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Toronto and one of the paper’s authors. He pointed to the research on clustering, whereby the geographic concentration of talented individuals and firms in a sector increases the productivity of those participants, as consistent with the idea that talented workers can have measurable indirect effects on those around them.

Nonetheless, he suggested, the effect of superstars likely varies across and even within industries, and previous research has demonstrated that superstars do vary in how much they help their colleagues.

While generalizing these results to a particular industry or firm is unwise, the research nonetheless provides a framework for firms to think about hiring top talent. The direct benefits of a superstar can be substantial, but it’s also important to consider how the hire will effect other employees’ productivity. Not all superstars are equal in this regard, so look for someone who’s likely to up the game of those around her. Finally, it’s critical to consider the impact the hire might have on recruitment. In at least some cases, the biggest effect of hiring a superstar is who it allows you to hire next.

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)