Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1440
March 28, 2014
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Under 30)
Silicon Valley is perhaps today's most polarizing business locale and topic, in the media at least. Noam Scheiber's investigation into the tech community's bias against older entrepreneurs and programmers (older = over 30ish) only fuels the persistent accusations of sexism, racism, and an overall beer-drenched culture. To be sure, there's a lot to find disturbing: The story of a 40-something Boston entrepreneur with a great product and no funding; hiring processes that emphasize "culture" and thus weed out anyone who seems like a grown-up; and an almost absurd story of a busy San Francisco plastic surgeon who has seen an uptick in male clients. Scheiber points out that it doesn’t have to be this way — there are places where innovation doesn’t rely so heavily on the industry-disrupting bets that draw hordes of young people. Germany, for one — German innovation is more focused on incremental improvements.
Other takes on the topic include a piece by Jon Nathanson, who proposes that the real problem isn't profiling or the pattern of celebrating the Zuckerbergs of the world, but the lack of a reliable data set proving that people in their twenties are the only ones capable of building the next Facebook. Or there's Ann Friedman's response: "While I empathize, I found myself stifling a yawn as I read the Botoxed bros' tales of woe. I’ve heard all of these stories before. It’s just that the storytellers are usually women."
Talking About the FutureThe Surprising Link Between Language and Corporate Responsibility Working Knowledge
The way in which a company articulates its vision of the future is related to how socially responsible it is — but we’re not talking about lists of 10-year goals. Recent research by a group of business scholars, including Christopher Marquis of Harvard Business School, found that it's the construction of language that really matters. Building on a previous finding that speakers of languages (such as English) with strong future tenses focus less on the future (because, in part, it seems so far away), the group tested the corporate social responsibility performance of companies in countries with both strong and weak future tenses. Corporations in countries with strong-future-tense languages scored 26% lower on CSR values than those with weak-future languages. But don't fret, all you people who speak English or Spanish! If your company has branches around the world, it's less likely that your language will affect the firm’s CSR performance.
One-Sheet StrategyInside Airbnb's Grand Hotel PlansFast Company
Maybe I'm less plugged into the sharing economy than I should be (I've decided that a pink Lyft mustache would look positively hideous on my foreign subcompact), but I do sometimes wonder how the heck the big-name companies in this field plan to sustain themselves. I got a partial answer about Uber thanks to this helpful article last December, and now there's an in-depth management profile about vacation-rental business Airbnb. The company is betting not on expansion of its sharing capabilities — what would amount to a horizontal move — but on how it can transform the hospitality industry. CEO Brian Chesky is leaning on a cadre of top advisers, a legendary manager from the boutique-hotel business, and a mysterious one-page strategy document to execute on an all-too-familiar (and yet potentially attainable) goal: "Apple has a consistent UI on every phone, but the content is unique every single time," Chesky says. "That's what we want."
Give It UpHow to Become Productively Generous Psychology Today
Adam Grant of Wharton gives me something new to worry about: Am I "productively generous"? The term has such a nice ring to it that I shamelessly want it to apply to me, which probably means I’m automatically disqualified. People who are productively generous somehow manage to give to others without compromising their well-being or falling short on traditional measures of success. How do they do this? The trick is that they reject three common beliefs about giving: that it’s about being "nice," that it’s about being altruistic, and that it’s about refusing help from others. Thus they have the courage to give critical feedback that people don't always like to hear, they watch out for their own interests even when helping, and they accept aid when they need it. All of this enables them to make sure the assistance they provide is effective — that it truly matters to the people who are the object of their efforts. Productive generosity does wonders for the helper, Grant says, boosting his or her well-being by strengthening relationships and injecting meaning into the helper's life. —Andy O'Connell
Bridging the Gender GapHow One College Went from 10% Female Computer-Science Majors to 40%Quartz
Underrepresentation by women in tech fields is like the weather, as Mark Twain would say: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Now Harvey Mudd College is showing that something can in fact be done: Nearly a decade ago, the tech-focused California school hired a female computer scientist and mathematician, Maria Klawe, as president and began a concerted effort to increase the number of women majoring in computer science. The college did things like offering a summer of research between freshman and sophomore years so that students could put their knowledge to use. The result has been a quadrupling of female computer-science majors. The college also made a few strategic name changes, altering the title of one programming course to "Creative approaches to problem solving." —Andy O'Connell
BONUS BITSHistory Lessons
The Cubicle Turns 50 (Men's Journal)
Going Viral in the Nineteenth Century (Lapham's Quarterly)
The Fantastical Vision for the Original SeaWorld (The Atlantic)
Don’t Settle for Being an “-er Brand”
As a member of a start-up advisory program, I regularly hear pitches from aspiring technology entrepreneurs. My job is to sort out the companies with potential from those that need to go back to the drawing board. One way I do this is to use what I call the “-er brand” filter.
Er brands rely on other products or brands to explain their own. Hyundai is an -er brand. Its brand appeal is based on the assertion, “We’re just as good as Lexus but cheap-er.” Burger King is an –er brand, copying McDonald ’s smoothies and wraps with claims to be light-er and healthi-er. When Microsoft introduced Bing, its assertion of offering a fast-er search engine than Google sealed Bing’s fate as an Internet service step-child.
Red flags go up whenever I hear a pitch that explains how a new offering is just like another but is small-er, bigg-er, thinn-er, light-er, fast-er, sexi-er, whatev-er. Hearing “we’re just like X brand but we’re…” sets off warning signals about breakthrough ability and long-term viability.
An -er position is a dangerous one to adopt. It relegates your brand to subordinate status compared to the brand used as your reference point – and it tells customers that your brand possesses only comparative value, rather than having its own inherent value. It also puts your brand under constant pressure to introduce new products on Brand X’s time line, because now your brand value is tied to Brand X’s product. You have little basis for achieving meaningful and sustained differentiation.
Great brands never settle for being an -er brand. The brands that capture the imagination of customers and investors alike are those that have no reference point other than themselves. Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz says his venture company invests in companies that present a breakthrough idea. “By definition they are not obvious. In fact, they seem insane. If they didn’t seem insane at the time, they wouldn’t be breakthroughs.”
That sets the bar quite high, and I understand not every product can be truly new to the world. But even if an offering is somewhat derivative, the brand can – and must — be clearly different. You shouldn’t have to use an existing brand to explain yours. A well-conceived brand platform and positioning can relegate competitors to irrelevance.
There are several ways to position a brand as breakthrough. Instead of – or in addition to — differentiating on the what of your brand, use the why, who, and how.
1. Why — purpose and values. A distinctive mission and values can be a powerful – and inimitable — way to connect with people. Dove showed how to break through in a commoditized category like bath soap with a compelling purpose, to celebrate every woman’s unique and real beauty. In the tech space, Etsy became so popular so quickly not only because of its unique product selection but also because of its commitment to the humanity and authenticity of craft.
2. Who — target customers. Some brands distinguish themselves based on who they’re for – and in some cases, who they’re not for. In the height of the flash sale website craze, Zulily was started as a site for discriminating moms. By positioning the brand between value-oriented mass brands and exclusive boutiques, the company attracted the attention of a certain type of shopper — and its success (consistent double-digit growth and a $2.6 billion IPO valuation in 2013) can be attributed to its continued focus on that target.
3. How – personality. When a unique brand personality manifests itself in a unique customer experience, it enables a brand to rise above competitive comparison. Southwest Airlines exists in a class of its own in large part due to its fun personality. Harley-Davidson, Trader Joe’s, and The Honest Co. are other companies that have leveraged their personalities to become extraordinary brands. Using brand personality in this way is not simply about developing creative communications; it’s about infusing every aspect of your operations with your unique character.
Every company chooses whether it wants to be a great brand or an –er brand. Great brands don’t settle for riding someone else’s wave. They chart their own course and invite the world to navigate around them.
It’s Time for a New Discussion on “Women in Leadership”
The time has come to reframe the gender issue. The chancellor of Germany, the head of the IMF, and the chair of the US Federal Reserve are women. General Motors, IBM and Lockheed Martin are run by women. Sixty percent of the world’s university graduates are women, and women control the majority of consumer goods buying decisions. In the US, women under 30 out-earn their male peers and 40% of American households have women as the main breadwinner. In many companies and countries where I work, from Iran or Brazil to Russia, managers tell me that they recruit a majority of young women as they clearly outperform their male peers.
And yet women continue to be underrepresented in most businesses, especially at the senior levels. Given this split – women’s potential on the one hand, and their relative absence from the highest levels of business on the other – it is tempting to keep banging on about “fairness” and “equality” on the one hand, or to assume that surely the women who don’t make it to the top must be doing something wrong on the other.
In fact, it is time to shift the discussion away from a lingering women’s problem or an issue of equality and instead focus on this as a massive business opportunity. Instead of continuing to discuss the problem, we ought to present solutions: roadmaps to businesses that are better balanced, arguments that help companies and managers understand and benefit from shifting global gender balances. The shift is away from wondering what is wrong with women who don’t make it to the top, and towards analysing what is right with companies and leaders that do build gender balanced leadership teams – and tap into the resulting competitive edge.
Smart leaders have understood for a while now that gender balance delivers better and more sustainable performance. That companies with more gender-balanced leadership teams out-perform those with less. While the skeptics will spend another decade resisting this fact with demands to prove causality, the best leaders prefer leading the charge to following it. So it would now make sense to focus on the leadership competencies that enable certain leaders to build gender-balanced organizations. And to note those that don’t, and start calling them to account.
Building a gender-balanced organization takes skill, determination, and courage. It can be taught, encouraged, and rewarded. That’s what the best companies do. They put the focus and the accountability where change happens: on the front lines. As with other change management initiatives, the responsibility ultimately falls to leaders.
And yet today, many managers (both male and female) are totally uneducated in all things gender. Many business leaders around the world have no idea that women are now the majority of university graduates – from Sweden to Saudi Arabia. They aren’t aware of — or comfortable with — the differences between how men and women work. Executives have been raised to ignore gender differences (such as different communications styles or career cycles) rather than become skilled in managing them. For the same reason (“only competence counts” is the usual refrain), they aren’t used to thinking that balance itself may contribute to better performance, innovation and customer connections. So we must educate them. Stop creating internal, women-only networks — replace them with mixed-gender networks aimed at balancing management, rather than promoting women. Almost no one is against balancing, while many men and women alike are uncomfortable with targeted quotas for women. Men feel that they are deeply unfair, while women are insulted at the idea of being perceived as getting promotions only because of their gender.
I do think there is a role for advocates in this shift. External watchdog groups, focused on corporate performance and governance, can be powerful amplifiers of the kind of leadership that we are aiming for. They should be focused on measuring and celebrating what the best companies and CEOs do, and publicizing and shaming those that don’t deliver. They should be fun, relentless, and professional. They should also, I would argue, focus more on “balance” than on “women.” Include men who get it – and celebrate that fact. It’s time. Reframe, rebrand, and make leaders accountable for adapting to 21st century realities. That is the work that now lies ahead.
The world is living through one of its most historic and peaceful revolutions: the gradual rebalancing of the genders’ social, educational and economic power. We have never seen anything like it before – no wonder it has been a bit confusing. This rise, and its consequences, need to be better understood and managed by most businesses and managers. It has altered the life of every man, woman and child on the planet. It yields opportunities and competitive advantage to smart companies. Who would want to miss out on that?
The End of the Line for the Analog Phone Network
Right now, the FCC is working on the biggest transformation in over a century of profound technological progress in communications: shutting down the analog telephone network. It’s an end-game everyone needs to keep a close eye on. Whenever a major technology, especially one with a long history of regulation, approaches the end of its life, industry laggards are sure to resurface, eager to gum up the works with lawmakers.
Few would contest that the analog network, and the rules for regulating it, are obsolete. When the commercial Internet was launched, we discovered a network that proved flexible enough to handle not only data traffic but voice and video, too. Over the last twenty years, once-proprietary and technology-specific services have been migrating to the Internet in the form of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and digital television. These new services, offered interchangeably over copper, fiber, cable, satellite, and cellular networks, are both better and cheaper than the traditional analog offerings of the incumbent providers and their aging equipment.
As a result, both traditional circuit-switched telephone companies and over-the-air television broadcasters have seen their value propositions deteriorate, in Hemingway’s great phrase, gradually, then suddenly. It’s a perfect example of the phenomenon that Paul Nunes and I refer to as Big Bang Disruption.
Perhaps as few as 20% of U.S. homes still have a landline telephone connection. Half that many rely on over-the-air antenna television for video content. Until the Internet, both technologies boasted nearly 100% penetration. Such is the nature of disruptive innovation, whose impact across industries continues to accelerate thanks to exponential improvements in digital and other core technologies. Even in those sectors of the economy that have been the most stable for decades, we are now seeing fundamental business and technical assumptions become obsolete in just a few years.
When disruption is underway, it’s possible for incumbent firms to survive and even thrive. But only if they can adapt—and quickly. To their credit, the former giants of the telephone business saw the threats closing fast in their rearview mirrors and invested billions to accelerate into the future. Verizon, AT&T, and others have deployed some of the best mobile broadband networks in the world, and have built out much of a replacement all-digital network for wired services, getting into the video business (FiOS and U-Verse, respectively) in the process. It’s a whole new world of competition, giving consumers more choices and options all the time.
To complete the revolution in IP voice, however, we still need to untangle the remnants of profoundly complicated regulatory machinery that for decades carefully controlled the Bell System at the federal and state levels.
When local and long distance telephone service operated as a regulated monopoly, for example, it was up to the government to set prices, approve the introduction of new services, ensure interchange, and subsidize access for high-cost rural and low-income consumers. Some, but not all, of that regulation was retired with the breakup of the monopoly. Now it’s time for the law to play serious catch-up with a market that has continued moving quickly in unexpected directions.
Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission took a first but critical step toward retiring both the analog network and the obsolete rules for overseeing it. At the request of some of the remaining wireline companies, the FCC has invited carriers to submit proposals for technical and service experiments that will test how the retirement of the analog network can be completed as quickly as possible, without imposing undue cost on those who still rely on it.
In late February, AT&T proposed the first two trials, which if approved will take place in West Delray Beach, FL and Carbon Hill, AL. These will be voluntary, multi-year experiments, with existing customers able to switch to IP networks and report their experiences to both AT&T and the FCC. According to company releases, these communities were chosen to maximize a diverse range of factors that need to be tested — including size, density, and location.
Conducting limited and carefully managed trials will unearth the remaining engineering and policy obstacles to a smooth transition. We already know, for example, that there are a wide range of technologies attached to the phone network that were built for analog communications — older fax machines, security gate codes, credit card readers and the like. These must be cataloged, and then adapted or retired. Emergency services and other public safety systems, of course, must also be tested to ensure they function as well if not better on the all-IP network.
And remaining analog customers — many of them older, or living in remote areas of the country — need to be eased into digital voice services, preserving Congress’s long-standing commitment to ensure Universal Service at an affordable price, including subsidizing those who can’t afford basic connections. (The Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by all consumers in fees attached to their phone bills, is already in the process of being reconfigured to deal with the digital reality.)
Time is of the essence. The cost of maintaining the legacy network for a rapidly-dwindling number of customers is approaching as much as 50% of the carriers’ total expenses, a waste of capital and a diversion of money that would in every sense be better spent on the new wired and wireless digital infrastructure that consumers can’t get enough of. We need to figure out quickly the optimal path to the overdue end-of-life for our venerable phone system.
Last fall, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on the risks of moving too slowly in completing the transition. (For details about the hearing, see “The State of Wireline Communications.”) Not surprisingly, special interests are popping up, hoping to complicate the process in the interest of preserving a favored position under old laws. In my testimony, I urged Congress and the FCC to set a firm date for the transition, and to avoid being distracted by parochial interests disguised as consumer protections.
Subsidized local and rural carriers, for example, are in no hurry to see the old network go away. And public interest groups who don’t understand the engineering genius of IP networks are urging lawmakers to transplant the Frankenstein rules of analog network interconnection to the Internet’s elegant peering architecture, where agreements are so simple that nearly all of them are done on a handshake — not a morass of government filings and approved tariff schedules.
State and federal regulators are themselves challenged by the communications industry’s Big Bang moment. With literally hundreds of VoIP providers worldwide (many of them offering free digital voice connections), the need for close scrutiny of industry participants is greatly diminished. VoIP services are almost entirely unregulated, yet the result of that freedom has been not a diminution of consumer protections but rather its exact opposite. Regulators, too, must find a more appropriate role for themselves in the all-IP future, more as cheerleaders for market competition than as substitutes for it.
The FCC is now moving in the right direction, balancing a wide range of business, policy, and consumer interests. Let’s hope it does not succumb to the wishes of the foot-draggers, and their all-too-familiar kinds of pleas to slow the pace of progress.
Your Belief That the World Is “Just” Can Make You Cruel
People’s wish to see the world as just and orderly sometimes leads them to harm those who have already suffered injustice, according to Daniel P. Skarlicki and R. Anthony Turner of the University of British Columbia. In an experiment, managers with self-reported hiring experience provided lower ratings for fictitious job applicants whose only difference was that they had been mistreated by their former employers, such as by being laid off without notice. People derogate victims in this way to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to understand how individuals can suffer injustice in a just world, the researchers say.
“Government Entrepreneur” is Not an Oxymoron
Entrepreneurship almost always involves pushing against the status quo to capture opportunities and create value. So it shouldn’t be surprising when a new business model, such as ridesharing, disrupts existing systems and causes friction between entrepreneurs and local government officials, right?
But imagine if the road that led to the Seattle City Council ridesharing hearings this month — with rulings that sharply curtail UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar’s operations there — had been a vastly different one. Imagine that public leaders had conceived and built a platform to provide this new, shared model of transit. Or at the very least, that instead of having a revolution of the current transit regime done to Seattle public leaders, it was done with them. Amidst the acrimony, it seems hard to imagine that public leaders could envision and operate such a platform, or that private innovators could work with them more collaboratively on it — but it’s not impossible. What would it take? Answer: more public entrepreneurs.
The idea of ”public entrepreneurship” may sound to you like it belongs on a list of oxymorons right alongside “government intelligence.” But it doesn’t. Public entrepreneurs around the world are improving our lives, inventing entirely new ways to serve the public. They are using sensors to detect potholes; word pedometers to help students learn; harnessing behavioral economics to encourage organ donation; crowdsourcing patent review; and transforming Medellin, Colombia with cable cars. They are coding in civic hackathons and competing in the Bloomberg challenge. They are partnering with an Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston or in Philadelphia, co-developing products in San Francisco’s Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program, or deploying some of the more than $430 million invested into civic-tech in the last two years.
There is, however, a big problem with public entrepreneurs: there just aren’t enough of them. Without more public entrepreneurship, it’s hard to imagine meeting our public challenges or making the most of private innovation. One might argue that bungled healthcare website roll-outs or internet spying are evidence of too much activity on the part of public leaders, but I would argue that what they really show is too little entrepreneurial skill and judgment.
The solution to creating more public entrepreneurs is straightforward: train them. But, by and large, we don’t. Consider Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship: “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” We could teach that approach to people heading towards the public sector. But now consider the following list of terms: “acknowledgement of multiple constituencies,” “risk reduction,” “formal planning,” “coordination,” “efficiency measures,” “clearly defined responsibility,” and “organizational culture.” It reads like a list of the kinds of concepts we would want a new public official to know; like it might be drawn from an interview evaluation form or graduate school syllabus. In fact, it’s from Stevenson’s list of pressures that pull managers away from entrepreneurship and towards administration. Of course, that’s not all bad. We must have more great public administrators. But with all our challenges and amidst all the dynamism, we are going to need more than analysts and strategists in the public sector, we need inventors and builders, too.
Public entrepreneurship is not simply innovation in the public sector (though it makes use of innovation), and it’s not just policy reform (though it can help drive reform). Public entrepreneurs build something from nothing with resources — be they financial capital or human talent or new rules — they didn’t command. In Boston, I worked with many amazing public managers and a handful of outstanding public entrepreneurs. Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob brought the country’s first major-city mobile 311 app to life, and they are public entrepreneurs. They created Citizens Connect in 2009 by bringing together iPhones on loan together with a local coder and the most under-tapped resource in the public sector: the public. They transformed the way basic neighborhood issues are reported and responded to (20% of all constituent cases in Boston are reported over smartphones now), and their model is now accessible to 40 towns in Massachusetts and cities across the country. The Mayor’s team in Boston that started-up the One Fund in the days after the Marathon bombings were public entrepreneurs. We built the organization from PayPal and a Post Office Box, and it went on to channel $61 million from donors to victims and survivors in just 75 days. It still operates today.
Public entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. It’s the pursuit by public officials and their collaborators of opportunity without regard to resources controlled. First year students at Harvard Business School are taught that entrepreneurs face substantial risk in pursuing a new opportunity and a basic Catch-22 that comes with it: that it’s difficult to reduce risk without resources and difficult to attract resources while risk is high. Public entrepreneurs face the same predicament. The course teaches four tactics to cope with the challenge: lean experimentation, scaling, partnering, and storytelling. We can create public entrepreneurs by teaching these skills, more often and jointly, to future public leaders and their partners. And we can teach them well if we recognize that public entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship, but that it also takes place in a different context and requires nuanced application of these tactics.
Lean experimentation and tests with something less than the final product can seem scary in the public sector, but special opportunities exist, too; public press and community engagement can sometimes serve as “smoke tests,” and even public betas can work well if they are managed right.
Scaling too fast — especially by adding too many personnel and too much hierarchy — can be a particular pressure for public sector officials who are accustomed to working in big institutions; scaling too slow can mean too little growth/commitment when political leadership changes over.
Partnering is de rigueur in the public sector today, but the officials must keep the power dynamic in mind and keep the “public” in the public entrepreneur; questions of profit and intellectual property are especially complex and dynamic. And where is the line between “partnering” with the public and outsourcing work to them that they likely expected government to do? The public entrepreneur needs to understand how the tools she uses — incentives, rewards, etc. — can change the feeling and ultimately the value of their partnership with the public.
Storytelling is an essential leadership tool and, if anything, this applies even more to public leaders, in whom press and public interest are especially acute. How does the public entrepreneur effectively leverage the pressure to “announce stuff” in ways that will provide incentives to run lean (as a cash flow curve would for private entrepreneurs) without foreclosing pivots and changes?
If we start with the basics of entrepreneurship, then consider the special context and dynamics of the public sector and closely examine the decisions and actions of public entrepreneurs, we can learn what makes great public entrepreneurship, and we can generate more of it.
It’s worth noting that public entrepreneurship, perhaps newly buzzworthy, is not actually new. Elinor Ostrom (44 years before her Nobel Prize) observed public entrepreneurs inventing new models in the 1960s. Back when Ronald Reagan was president, Peter Drucker wrote that it was entrepreneurship that would keep public service “flexible and self-renewing.” And almost two decades have passed since David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s “Reinventing Government” (the then handbook for public officials) carried the promising subtitle: “How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector”. Public entrepreneurship, though not nearly as widespread as its private complement, or perhaps as fashionable as its “social” counterpart (focussed on non-profits and their ecosystem), has been around for a while and so have those who practiced it.
But still today, we mostly train future public leaders to be public administrators. We school them in performance management and leave them too inclined to run from risk instead of managing it. And we communicate often, explicitly or not, to private entrepreneurs that government officials are failures and dinosaurs. It’s easy to see how that road led to Seattle this month, but hard see how it empowers public officials to take on the enormous challenges that still lie ahead of us, or how it enables the public to help them.
March 27, 2014
Are You the “Real You” in the Office?
Harvard’s Robert Kegan on companies that do really personal development. For more, read the article, Making Business Personal.
Google’s Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance (and Much More)
More than 65 years ago in Massachusetts, doctors began a longitudinal study that would transform our understanding of heart disease. The Framingham Heart Study, which started with more than 5,000 people and continues to this day, has become a data source for not just heart disease, but also for insights about weight loss (adjusting your social network helps people lose weight), genetics (inheritance patterns), and even happiness (living within a mile of a happy friend has a 25% chance of making you happier).
Upon reading about the study, I wondered if the idea of such long-term research could be attempted in another field that touches all of us: work. After more than a decade in People Operations, I believe that the experience of work can be — should be — so much better. We all have our opinions and case studies, but there is precious little scientific certainty around how to build great work environments, cultivate high performing teams, maximize productivity, or enhance happiness.
Inspired by the Framingham research, our People Innovation Lab developed gDNA, Google’s first major long-term study aimed at understanding work. Under the leadership of PhD Googlers Brian Welle and Jennifer Kurkoski, we’re two years into what we hope will be a century-long study. We’re already getting glimpses of the smart decisions today that can have profound impact on our future selves, and the future of work overall.
This isn’t your typical employee survey. Since we know that the way each employee experiences work is determined by innate characteristics (nature) and his or her surroundings (nurture), the gDNA survey collects information about both. Here’s how it works: a randomly selected and representative group of over 4,000 Googlers completes two in-depth surveys each year. The survey itself is built on scientifically validated questions and measurement scales. We ask about traits that are static, like personality; characteristics that change, like attitudes about culture, work projects, and co-workers; and how Googlers fit into the web of relationships around all of us. We then consider how all these factors interact, as well as with biographical characteristics like tenure, role and performance. Critically, participation is optional and confidential.
What do we hope to learn? In the short-term, how to improve wellbeing, how to cultivate better leaders, how to keep Googlers engaged for longer periods of time, how happiness impacts work and how work impacts happiness.
For example, much has been written about balancing work and personal life. But the idea that there is a perfect balance is a red herring. For most people work and life are practically inseparable. Technology makes us accessible at all hours (sorry about that!), and friendships and personal connections have always been a part of work.
Our first rounds of gDNA have revealed that only 31% of people are able to break free of this burden of blurring. We call them “Segmentors.” They draw a psychological line between work stress and the rest of their lives, and without a care for looming deadlines and floods of emails can fall gently asleep each night. Segmentors reported preferences like “I don’t like to have to think about work while I am at home.”
For “Integrators”, by contrast, work looms constantly in the background. They not only find themselves checking email all evening, but pressing refresh on gmail again and again to see if new work has come in. (To be precise, people fall on a continuum across these dimensions, so I’m simplifying a bit.)
Of these Integrators (69% of people), more than half want to get better at segmenting. This group expressed preferences like “It is often difficult to tell where my work life ends and my non-work life begins.”
The fact that such a large percentage of Google’s employees wish they could separate from work but aren’t able to is troubling, but also speaks to the potential for this kind of research. The existence of this group suggests that it is not enough to wish yourself into being a Segmentor. But by identifying where employees fall on this spectrum, we hope that Google can design environments that make it easier for employees to disconnect. Our Dublin office, for example, ran a program called “Dublin Goes Dark” which asked people to drop off their devices at the front desk before going home for the night. Googlers reported blissful, stressless evenings. Similarly, nudging Segmentors to ignore off-hour emails and use all their vacation days might improve well-being over time. The long-term nature of these questions suggests that the real value of gDNA will take years to realize.
Beyond work-life balance there are any number of fascinating puzzles that we hope this longitudinal approach can help solve. For a given type of problem, what diverse characteristics should a team possess to have the best chance of solving it? What are the biggest influencers of a satisfying and productive work experience? How can peak performance be sustained over decades? How are ideas born and how do they die? How do we maximize happiness and productivity at the same time?
The best part is that, just like the Framingham researchers, we don’t yet know what we’ll discover. They worked for 20 years before trends began to emerge, and today those findings are among the clearest risk factors of heart disease we’ve got–think cigarette smoking, lack of exercise, and obesity. gDNA is still in its infancy, and is inherently limited because we’re only including current and former Googlers. But already Googlers tell us that learning more about themselves has been eye-opening. In the future, we hope to find ways to share our data and findings more broadly. It’s thrilling not just to reimagine work at Google but to get to work with academics and other partners who can bring new perspectives to help us think beyond our ranks.
People Science needs to be adaptive. By analyzing behaviors, attitudes, personality traits and perception over time, we aim to identify the biggest influencers of a satisfying and productive work experience. The data from gDNA allows us to flex our people practices in anticipation of our peoples’ needs.
We have great luxuries at Google in our supportive leadership, curious employees who trust our efforts, and the resources to have our People Innovation Lab. But for any organization, there are four steps you can take to start your own exploration and move from hunches to science:
1. Ask yourself what your most pressing people issues are. Retention? Innovation? Efficiency? Or better yet, ask your people what those issues are.
2. Survey your people about how they think they are doing on those most pressing issues, and what they would do to improve.
3. Tell your people what you learned. If it’s about the company, they’ll have ideas to improve it. If it’s about themselves – like our gDNA work – they’ll be grateful.
4. Run experiments based on what your people tell you. Take two groups with the same problem, and try to fix it for just one. Most companies roll out change after change, and never really know why something worked, or if it did at all. By comparing between the groups, you’ll be able to learn what works and what doesn’t.
And in 100 years we can all compare notes.
Where to Find Authentic Entrepreneurs
I still remember when Steve Jobs was featured in business school case studies as an example of bad leadership style. At the time, Apple was a less-than-successful computer company, and Steve – ever the loner – had moved on to create Next, another less-than-successful one. When things go poorly for a nonconformist, how easy it is to call them the fool. But on those rare occasions when the loner gets it right – see Jobs a few years later when he returned to Apple – he does so in a big way. Nothing pays off so well as a nonconformist strategy that wins.
Many people come to the Silicon Valley in search of nonconformist entrepreneurs, looking for the next big thing. But here’s the problem: here, entrepreneurship is the norm. The way to conform in the Silicon Valley is to act like an entrepreneur. I’ve often been told by spectacularly intelligent Stanford students, sheepishly, that they have accepted a well-paying job at a big established company. That such great news is delivered with embarrassment says something about the culture of the Silicon Valley. In places where entrepreneurship is all the rage, you can’t tell the loners from the poseurs. It makes it really hard to figure out who really means it.
To find a nonconformist entrepreneur, we should look to places where entrepreneurship is unpopular. Consider Tokyo. A company’s status matters a lot in most countries, but this is especially true in Japan. So it was shocking when the “Purinto Kurabu” (in English, “Print Club”) appeared all over Tokyo back in the 1990s.
Japanese teens lined up for blocks to get into one of these booths for a picture with their friends, which would then come out on a sticker. Ultimately, this little device proliferated worldwide, and made a lot of money along the way. But unlike most Japanese innovations, it did not come from a big established firm. Instead, it came from a start-up company, “Atlus,” formed when Naoya Harano struck out on his own. His little company was creating some of the earliest fantasy-based video games, such as “Megami Tensei” (in English, “Transformation of the Goddess”) and had a cult following in Japan.
But these games did not pay the bills. Harano, desperate and intelligent (a great combination), made money any way he could – distributing billiard tables to gaming rooms, setting up karaoke machines in empty container vehicles around Tokyo, and the like. The consummate loner, Harano would likely have stayed off our radar screen, except that one day his unpredictable behavior led to a fantastically successful product. In fact, the idea for the product itself came from a female secretary at Altus. This never would have happened at one of the huge, established Japanese conglomerates, where a new idea from a low-status female worker would have had no chance. But in the hands of a nonconformist entrepreneur, the idea saw the light of day.
Other examples abound once you look for them. In the UAE, you might be surprised to find twofour54, an entrepreneurial media hub in Abu Dhabi run by Ms. Noura Al Kaabi. Coming out of Peru, you’ll find Kola Real, formed during a coup d’état in 1988, not exactly an ideal environment for business incubation. Or, in Kamchatka, you’ll find ecotourism ventures by Wild Salmon River Expeditions, initiated by an alliance between a former American military officer and his Russian associates. Name your own unusual circumstance. Where entrepreneurship is least expected, only the authentic entrepreneurs show up.
You’d think that professionals might be better at turning up these high-risk, high-reward authentic entrepreneurs, but they’re not. Professor Elizabeth Pontikes of the University of Chicago and I examined thousands of software firms over more than a decade. Companies and venture capitalists chase hot markets. Entries into markets triggered more entries, and markets that saw companies fleeing went cold. Venture capital magnified this boom and bust cycle: firms were especially likely to enter markets that had recently attracted VC funding, and VCs moved into markets that had recently attracted VC funding (especially those that had attracted attention from large, high-status VCs). Organizations that entered when VC fundings were booming were increasingly likely to fail, and those financed in a VC funding boom were unlikely to make it to an IPO. By contrast, those (fewer) firms that entered markets during bad times were then increasingly likely to prevail.
Nonconformist thinking has the best potential for genius. Those who follow the herd may or may not be right, but for sure they are predictable. The loners, those willing to go against the consensus, are anything but predictable. They may well be wrong, in which case they look the fool. But when the loners are right, we think of them – later, with hindsight – as geniuses. No wonder we resonate to Robert Frost: “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
An earlier version of this post appear at BarnettTalks.
The Case for Team Diversity Gets Even Better
We know intuitively that innovation goals are well served by cross-functional “SWAT” teams that are diverse in their membership. As Andy Zynga argued in an earlier post, diversity is a means to overcome the cognitive biases that prevent people from seeing new approaches or engaging them when found. But while this seems only logical, is there empirical evidence to support it? When such diversity is enforced can we expect it to produce results? How do we know “more is better”?
Stanford professor Lee Fleming and his colleagues have been working on these questions by looking for patterns in the teams behind patents. They find that higher-valued industrial innovation (by its nature also riskier) is more likely to arise when diverse teams are assembled of people with deep subject matter expertise in their areas. Other interesting findings in Fleming’s body of work include the observation of a bimodal distribution of outcomes for diverse teams (that is, a relatively high rate of failure and high rate of big successes, with not much middle ground); and the discovery that different kinds of communications networks foster different levels of diffusion of innovation. Fleming focuses on cross-pollination in the context of “big D” Development, which often involves recombination of existing knowledge to serve commercial goals.
Along similar lines, Ben Jones and colleagues at the Kellogg Business School of Northwestern University published a paper in Science last year focusing on diversity in the production of new knowledge, as reflected in the research literature. Looking for patterns across some 17.9 million papers indexed in Thomson Reuter’s Web of Science, they demonstrated that the most influential papers (most highly cited) were those that exhibited an intrusion of interdisciplinary information. They also found that groups were more likely to foster these intrusions than solo researchers. This is entirely consistent with Fleming’s findings for industry, and his attempts to dispel some of the mythology around lone inventors. (One difference in the studies is that, thus far, Jones hasn’t observed the bimodal distribution that Fleming does; there is apparently no cluster of papers with abnormally low citations which also feature intrusions of outside knowledge.)
Taken together, the studies led by Fleming and Jones make a good case for assembling that SWAT team that can bring multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on a problem. It isn’t always obvious how to do so, but we at NineSigma can point to an instructive example at AkzoNobel. AkzoNobel is a multi-national, multi-divisional manufacturer and distributor of coatings systems, or more simply put, paint. But paint is really not as simple as just paint; for example, coatings for automotive applications are very different from decorative finishes. Among AkzoNobel’s divisions are more and less conventional manufacturers of chemicals and polymers. Having grown by acquisition, the company has the typical silos, with organizational and geographic boundaries inhibiting the diffusion of knowledge.
AkzoNobel was already breaking down external barriers by engaging in open innovation, inviting solution ideas from outside the company. Management wanted to break down the internal barriers, too. The solution was to implement essentially the same Request for Proposal process inside the organization, broadly training large numbers of technical staff about the process, and more intensively training a core group of “Internal Program Managers” to provide the coaching and guidance required for a well-specified search.
Two years after that decision, it’s clear, first of all, that the system is working. Individuals with challenging problems are now able to reach out across the organization and assemble their own ad-hoc SWAT teams. As you might expect, tracking of system usage shows some groups adopting the new capability more aggressively than others, but overall, people have proved eager to tap into a system that gives them rapid access to colleagues in other divisions and countries. There is also solid evidence of input solicited from other divisions reenergizing the idea pools feeding into many R&D projects. Measurement of the success of the effort isn’t an exercise in just counting communications; the focus is on real problems being solved and new opportunities being identified.
Large-scale results from scholars like Fleming and Jones are valuable confirmation that, when teams are diverse, meaningful innovation is more likely to happen. AkzoNobel’s experience shows that a management team can put a system in place that makes assembling such teams the norm. It’s what we’ve suspected for a long time – but it’s great to have solid evidence.
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