Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1443

College Grads Are Taking High School Grads’ Jobs and Delivering Better Results

A new CareerBuilder survey found that a college degree is more valuable than ever — both for job applicants and the employers who hire them. According to the research, three in 10 American companies say they’re hiring college-educated workers for jobs that used to be held by high school grads, a trend that cuts across industries. Companies are also more interested in hiring people with advanced degrees.

And in CareerBuilder CEO Matt Ferguson’s new book, The Talent Equation, written with Lorin Hitt of the Wharton School and Prasanna Tambe of NYU’s Stern School, additional research shows that these more educated employees are delivering results, as measured by costs subtracted from total sales, and divided by number of employees.

And yet, with the cost of college rising sharply in the U.S. over the last few years, is this really good news for the workforce? There are also implications for income inequality: if college grads are taking jobs high school grads would have gotten, what becomes of those who can’t afford college?

I spoke with Ferguson to find out. Below are some edited excerpts from our conversation.

Given the rising cost of college — student loan debt has surpassed credit card debt in the U.S., and is now more than a trillion dollars — is this trend a good thing?

I think we have to figure out how we lower the cost of education. I’m also concerned we’re not measuring outcomes for students for the debt they’re incurring. We can’t continue to have education costs that rise so much faster than inflation, or education that doesn’t have outcomes and leave students with so much debt. Governors of both parties have made proposals at the state level to bring down the cost of education, or to fund students that study scientific or technical fields. I think that’s indicative of what’s going on, and the level of the problem.

That raises the question of whether companies are hiring more college grads because jobs now require more education, or whether it’s just a tough labor market — maybe college grads today have to take jobs they might not have taken 10 years ago. The managers in your survey were evenly split between these reasons. What do you think?

I think both are big drivers. But I’d like for it to be the case that people are hiring more educated people because it’s driving productivity in the market. If companies are hiring more educated people for the other reason, a tight labor market, you’re not going to retain them. If they’re not getting an opportunity commensurate with their degree, they’ll leave when they get a better offer. Any companies doing that are setting themselves up to have a problem.

But the other reason, that college educated workers can improve innovation and productivity, that’s more sustainable.

Your research did find that companies are seeing double-digit returns on hiring more-educated workers. You found that for customer service workers, a 10% increase in employees with bachelor’s degrees was associated with an additional $26,000 in net value per employee. That number was $31,000 for sales workers and a whopping $63,000 for management workers. Why was the ROI so much higher for management?

With managers, you get leverage — you get somebody who can impact the whole group based on their performance. Sales and customer service employees are more individual performers.

Interestingly, your data did not find a similar correlation for IT workers. Why? 

We had a couple hypotheses. First, a high percentage of information technology workers have college degrees already, so it’s probably harder to show much of an impact there. And second, the ones that don’t have college education and have been self-taught are pretty quick learners innately. Anyone who has navigated into that industry has self-selected in, and it’s an industry where you have to keep teaching yourself new things as you go along, like new programming languages.

At the same time, you found that in STEM fields, there was even more of a trend of hiring college grads — in the general population, 27% of employers said their educational requirements had increased, and 30% are hiring more college-educated workers for positions formerly held by high school grads.

In STEM, it’s 46 and 43%. What’s going on in STEM fields to exacerbate these trends?

A lot of things classified as STEM may have historically been more technical in nature, like a machinist who may have gone through vocational training. High schools used to do a lot more of that type of training and preparation, and companies and factories would absorb those workers and give them any additional training they needed. And you used to see those people stay in those jobs for life. They never left. They never got their college degrees; they never had to. I grew up in Indiana and high schools in those days were pretty good at reflecting what local businesses needed. But now those businesses are shutting down, and the high schools aren’t doing the same kind of training.

STEM today, as we think of it, are things that are very high level, requiring bachelor’s degrees and even advanced degrees. And that’s what’s driving the jobs of the future.

In a sense, some of your findings seem to go against other studies that have found that employers think colleges aren’t giving students needed skills, and one well-publicized study that showed many college seniors hadn’t actually learned any new facts. Why do you think your study turned up a result that’s more education-friendly?

Harvard would say that they’re not teaching their undergrads technical skills, but to critically think — to have an understanding of the world that allows you to adapt throughout your life. A lot of schools do that today; it’s very important. We have to be careful painting with a broad brush, and of going too far towards the alternative, where all we want to give them is a technical skill. Some of the [state] proposals on the table lean too far in that direction.

If two years from now that skill is out of date, you’re not giving students the tools to learn new skills and adapt within an economy that is changing at an increasingly rapid rate. I think why these companies in our study saw a benefit is because they got a little bit of both.

Are we headed towards a future where “education inflation” is such that people who only have bachelor’s degrees are seen as undereducated?

What I’m worried about is not what you’re describing, but that today, we’ve got people without jobs and jobs without people. Today’s unemployment rate is not reflective of the health of the labor market, because people have dropped out of the labor force — overall participation is down. So if everyone has a bachelor’s, that would be a good problem to have, because we wouldn’t have jobs without people anymore.

Insurance Companies’ Untapped Digital Opportunity

Consumers fumed over the rollout of Healthcare.gov and the state health insurance exchanges last fall. First, they couldn’t get online. Then, once they did, the information was hard to understand. For consumers accustomed to easy shopping on Amazon or eBay, choosing a health insurance plan online was an exercise in frustration.

That frustration highlights how important it is for insurers – not only health insurers, but also property and casualty and, increasingly, life insurers – to master digital. While retailers and cable companies moved their businesses online years ago, many insurers, struggling with legacy technology and outmoded organizational structures, are playing catch up. And yet a shift to digital would improve performance across three areas:

1. The ability to mine the digital data consumers leave behind on the internet, social media, driving apps and even health-monitoring wearables could help carriers to better target customers, price and underwrite policies more accurately, and manage claims more effectively.

2. The simple digitization of existing insurance processes (allowing quotes to go straight through processing, for example, and rapid product configuration) could yield strong improvement to operating profit margins.

3. Increased digital marketing could improve opportunity to connect with existing customers, allowing firms to better upsell, cross sell and retain valuable customers.

Based on our experience, a thoughtful digitization program can deliver up to 65 percent in cost reduction, a 90 percent reduction in turnaround time on key insurance processes, and improve conversion rates by more than 20 percent.

Yet, while insurance companies all understand that digital is having an impact on their business, few appreciate how fast and how fundamentally the business is changing. In a recent McKinsey survey of the digital practices of more than 30 leading U.S. and European P&C and life insurers, 39 percent had not articulated a digital strategy across the customer decision journey at all. While most insurers do focus their digital efforts in marketing (83 percent) and sales (78 percent), carriers have focused on the early stages of the customer decision journey (supporting research and quotes) and lagged in their post-purchase ability to serve existing customers digitally).

Some carriers’ budgets are so fragmented they cannot even tally their total digital spending, while others have so many organizational silos that it’s impossible to get any alignment on digital direction and scale. In fact, only 50 percent of carriers have budgeted for long-term digital goals, and just 30 percent have a multi-year investment plan to support digital.

So what does digital excellence in insurance look like?  Based on our survey, we found that the top performers consistently do the following things well:

1. They have a digital strategy that’s well defined along the lines of marketing, sales and service—and well-informed by customer insights.  In fact, digital leaders know their customers so well that 50% of their interactions with them are personalized.

2. They’ve placed bets on specific digital capabilities for the future (such as mobile) and have invested to rapidly build those capabilities.

3. Their operating model and governance are suited to the organization’s digital maturity, size and capability levels.  As the organization’s digital maturity increases, many digital functions become decentralized and are integrated into broader business unit activities.

4. They have good talent: 80 percent of their digital talent has digital experience (e.g., from leading academic institutions and digital organizations), and over 60 percent have a rigorous digital training program in place.

5. They’re committed to a test-and-learn culture: top digital performers reward risk-taking as part of the learning process.  They have robust analytics in place, with 85 percent of their digital spend measurable in terms of return on investment.

Any effort to become a great digital insurance carrier must begin with a deep understanding of consumers and their shopping journeys. Today’s consumer decision journey is a highly iterative and fluid process, where digital tools make it easy for consumers to check out brands, compare offers, and get recommendations. For example, as auto insurance shoppers move from gathering information through the quote and purchase phases (and beyond to post-purchase support), they are more open than ever to considering new brands and dropping considered brands at each step. Most consumers no longer stick to a preferred channel from start to finish. Some 33 percent of shoppers will switch carriers when it comes time to purchase. We’ve found that about 70 percent of car shoppers start their shopping online, and many are heavily influenced by word-of-mouth (including social media) along their journey.

The digital carrier takes advantage of those insights, and others, to inform which battlegrounds are most critical for success, which processes to digitize for a better customer experience, and how to use digital data to inform business decisions, such as whom to target and how to price a policy more accurately. For instance, Progressive has been very focused on the initial consideration and moment-of-purchase battlegrounds. To that end, it has developed the Progressive app, which makes buying insurance simple by generating quotes for auto insurance from just a photo of the applicant’s license.

Other insurers, who focus more on the experience phase of the journey, have digitized claims. Those insurers offer apps that allow people who’ve been in an accident to file claims via their phones directly from the scene of the accident, often eliminating the need for an appraiser. Taking mobile one step further, USAA is piloting voice-activation software that could turn customers’ phones into virtual clerks, drastically cutting the costs of customer service.

Harvesting digital data has enormous potential in a world where people leave vast amounts of information behind from the websites they visit, the words they search, and the social media posts they make. Numerous carriers are already mining data on social media to provide their agents with real time information about their policyholders’ life events (moves, job changes, new babies) for sales, and similarly using digital data to curb fraudulent claims. Progressive has sold more than 1 million snapshot policies where driving behaviors are monitored, and the data collected helps it tailor its pricing.

Parsing digital data could help insurers figure out a driving score, which customers to attract, and how to decrease payouts for fraudulent claims. While there are important privacy issues to address, the benefits for both insurers and customers would be significant.

Just as Darwin found that the survival of the fittest was not necessarily a function of the strength or intelligence of species but rather their adaptability, so too with successful businesses. Senior insurance executives will need to figure out how to adapt, or risk having their businesses left behind as the industry evolves.

Special thanks to Jen Mathissen for contributing to this article.

What Military Service Could Teach MBAs

In 1980, almost 60% of large, public companies in America were headed up by a male military veteran. By 2006, a mere 6.2% of these businesses had a CEO with military experience.

These numbers, from a January National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Efraim Benmelech and Carola Frydman, aren’t necessarily surprising. As the duo explained to me over email, “the decline in military CEOs is a reflection of broader trends in the U.S. population.” Indeed, by the end of World War II, U.S. military personnel numbered at more than 12 million, and the decline in military size since Vietnam is almost as dramatic as the above chart.

Using Forbes 800 and Execucomp surveys that identify company CEOs, and aided by additional research into military service, age, and education, Benmelech and Frydman were able to compare firms run by veterans and those run by executives without any military experience. Then they asked a question: “Has the disappearance of executives who served in the military from the C-suite had a real impact on corporate America?”

The answer, in short, is: Yes.

“Military CEOs seem to cope better under pressure, which is important for firms that experience distress, or for firms that operate in industries that are in distress,” the authors told me. “This seems to stem from military training and experience in difficult situations.”

In addition, “military CEOs are also more conservative in making investments and are much less likely to be involved in financial fraud.”

Importantly, these CEOs only served for a few years on average — they “either enlisted or were drafted into some of the major wars of the 20th century and left the military when these conflicts ended.” So there’s evidence that even a short, sometimes involuntary stint can make a big impact.

Further, the researchers found that, while some military CEOs also held MBAs, this fact didn’t have much to do with their tendency to avoid fraud or act conservatively about investments. “This suggests that whatever traits or experiences obtained during military service that shape the actions of CEOs are not being provided by MBA programs.” And it didn’t matter what type of military service it was — there were no statistical differences between CEOs who were in different branches of the military or the reserves.

To be clear, not all non-veteran CEOs  and their military counterparts behave differently, and we know that being conservative about investments like R&D can sometimes backfire. But given these newly-identified characteristics of military CEOs and their significant drop-off since 1980 (not to mention a coming reduction in Army size, for better or worse), it’s worth pausing to consider what current and future business leaders might be missing out on — and how to fill that gap. “We need to better define what aspects of leadership are unique to veteran CEOs, and then we need to think about how to incorporate those into business education,” say Benmelech and Frydman.

“In general, it seems like a good idea to highlight ethics and leadership even more.”

Executives Must Face Their Own Mortality

Matters came to a head for Zara, an operations executive in an IT company, when her husband Bruce found her hyperventilating on their kitchen floor at 6 a.m. on Christmas morning. “She was close to total collapse. After work the night before, she had gotten everything ready for Christmas. Our deal is that I take over on Christmas day, so that morning, she should have stayed in bed with a coffee while I did the work. And yet, she got up early, and when I went to look for her, I found her collapsed on the floor.”

Thinking back, Bruce realized that although Zara had previously been a fairly relaxed person, she had changed over the past few years. Now, Zara was increasingly ratty on weekends, she would work on public holidays, and as her vacations approached, she would go into hyper-drive. As Bruce recalled, “One night she came to bed with her phone and her tablet. I said, ‘would you like me to move your bed into your study?’ She turned everything off, but she couldn’t relax. After an hour, she got up and went to her study so she could keep working. It was weird, like she was totally unable to switch off, even when I pointed out the damage she was doing to our family life.”

When Bruce called the company the day after Zara’s Christmas morning collapse to inform them that she would be taking medical leave on doctor’s orders, her boss replied that everyone in the office would be relieved to hear the news. They had been concerned about her health and behavior for some time, although her performance had been as satisfactory as ever. In addition, her colleagues found her zeal for taking on ever-increasing amounts of work to be quite a challenge for them. Her boss agreed it was time for Zara to take a break. She added that the company was prepared to offer Zara the support of an executive coach or therapist to guide her towards more efficient work practices.

After Zara was ready to return to work, Zara’s boss suggested she contact me to explore coaching options. Zara accepted her boss’s offer reluctantly, but after she had described the recent events in her life, we established a working alliance. We started by identifying recurring patterns related to her manic work behavior — including times when such behavior kicked in, and how she felt in those moments — and then we discussed possible underlying causes.

Reflecting on her behavior, Zara came to realize that a major contributing factor to her stress was that she would soon be thirty-five, the same age as her mother was when she had died, leaving Zara and her siblings alone with a despondent father. As this watershed date approached for Zara, it reactivated thoughts and feelings connected to the event. Although she had not been consciously aware of these lingering emotions, our discussions helped Zara make the link to her current pattern of frenetic activity.

At thirty-five, Zara was younger than most sufferers from death anxiety-related behaviors; for most people under forty, death is something of a distant abstraction. They still see life unfolding as “time-from-birth.” But after a person turns forty, death or illness of loved ones often causes a person to begin thinking of their own existence as a matter of “time-left-to-live.” It’s a profound shift in mindset that motivational theories or textbooks on organizational behavior scarcely address. In fact, most people in Western societies push all thoughts of death into the recesses of the mind. You certainly don’t hear people in boardrooms dwelling on the subject—and it is even more difficult for people under forty to acknowledge the type of existential wake-up call that Zara had experienced with her panic attack.

This is a big problem, for organizations included. When we repress our fear of death and refuse to confront it, like Zara, many of us develop a death anxiety that can all too easily manifest itself in one or more of several highly dysfunctional behaviors:

Manic overwork. Zara’s incessant working was a sort of anti-depressant, a way to distract her mind through a flurry of activity. It’s a common response to anxiety but it is destructive in the long run. Unexamined anxiety begets increased activity, which offers only a temporary respite, prompting even more activity. The escalating pace of activity, however, cannot be maintained. Manic behavior cannot forever repress the unacknowledged feelings that drive it. Unfortunately, in contemporary organizations, work addicts like Zara are often praised and compensated for their unhealthy behavior — until the day they collapse or make a serious mistake.
Avoiding succession issues. For people reaching retirement age, death anxiety often plays out in a refusal to confront succession. Succession planning evokes the impending loss of power that stepping down will bring. And at a deeper level, it runs counter to the deep-seated wish we all have to believe in our own immortality. Although this is very rarely acknowledged, many CEOs avoid thinking about succession for these reasons, and loyal colleagues are wary of raising the subject lest it seem that they wish to hasten the CEO’s demise. As a result, many CEOs stay on far too long. Meanwhile the organization stagnates and productivity stalls because of the leader’s fear of letting go.
The edifice complex. Political leaders like to create a tangible legacy — an organization, building, or award in their name. Indian emperors build monuments like the Taj Mahal, American presidents have their libraries. Similarly, aging CEOs often initiate grandiose projects — complex, game-changing deals that would fall through without them—often describing the project expressly as part of their legacy. Unfortunately, this type of project may distract the CEO from other, more important issues — like leadership development and succession planning — and in addition may be directly value-destructive. Again, traditional motivational theories are at a loss to explain this kind of behavior, but to a psychologist the drive to construct these “edifices” is explained by death anxiety, a desire to achieve immortality that trumps all other goals.

All these behaviors are attempts to deny or cheat death in some way, but they are doomed to fail, because death is inevitable. The only way to avoid being anxious about death is, instead, to embrace life and to look for ways to give it more meaning, which typically involves engaging more with other people and with the aspects of life outside work.

In Zara’s case, I worked on focusing more of her energy and time on the pleasures to be found in the life she had with Bruce and her children. Over time, she learned to become better at delegation and priority setting, to scale back her working hours, and to develop the capacity to disconnect from work when out of the office. She started by making relatively small changes, such as not answering her phone at mealtimes, not taking her laptop to the table or to bed, and not looking at e-mails on weekends. As these habits took hold and she engaged more with her family, her desire for constant work-related activity decreased, and her anxiety about not being constantly busy declined. I was not surprised to learn that her performance at work actually improved, and that her colleagues once again enjoyed her energy and creativity.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht once wrote, “Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.” An inadequate life is often the result of frenetic activity focused on unimportant things. Instead, we should do our best to make the most of our time left to live.

Rigid Gender Roles Can Take a Toll on Women’s Quality of Life

In countries with strict gender roles, women’s total work hours tend to increase as they perform more paid labor outside the home. In Spain, for example, women’s work at home (housework and child care) declined by only 6 hours per week as their workplace labor increased by 8 hours per week from 2002 through 2010, say Jose Ignacio Gimenez-Nadal of the University of Zaragoza in Spain and Almudena Sevilla of Queen Mary University of London in the UK. The result is that Spanish women lost 2 hours of weekly leisure time over that period. A decline in leisure hours suggests a declining quality of life.

Increase Workplace Flexibility and Boost Performance

The potential benefits of workplace variability are numerous — increased morale, motivation, and the ability to attract and retain talent — yet many managers don’t know where to start. Others are afraid that performance could suffer or something important could fall through the cracks.

Even the most employee-oriented managers have concerns about having employees work outside of normal work hours or at places other than the office. However, by taking a job design approach to workplace flexibility, managers can get the benefits of offering more flexibility while minimizing the downside. Here’s what you need to know:

Job Diagnosis

Not all jobs are conducive to time or place flexibility. However, most have certain duties that are amenable to being done at alternate times and places other than the office. If you look at the jobs you supervise and break them into their component parts, it is likely you’ll find that some tasks, maybe even up to a third of an entire job, lend themselves to time and place flexibility.

A marketing research specialist, for example, needs to collaborate with colleagues and clients. However, she also has tasks that are best done alone and undistracted. Someone in this job may be a good candidate for part-time telecommuting, perhaps one or two days from home. In this way, the specialist has uninterrupted time for deep study and analysis, without the distractions of the office (and saving time and money on a commute), while also being present enough of the workweek for collaboration, conversations and creativity.

Flexibility does not have to be all or nothing. In fact, it’s usually better when it’s not.

Person Diagnosis

Just like all jobs are not equally conducive to flexibility, some employees are better candidates for flexibility than others. If you have a high-performing employee who has proven he can self-manage well, you probably can entrust him with more flexibility. If you have a more unproven employee, or one whom you feel needs more structure and hands-on guidance, I’d talk to them about what they need to prove to you before they earn a more flexible arrangement.

In fact, I often advocate that workplace flexibility arrangements start on a part-time basis for an initial trial period. By doing so, you can better gauge how an employee either rises to the occasion or struggles with too much autonomy, and adjust accordingly.

Job Redesign

In her groundbreaking research, Harvard economist Claudia Goldin found that careers in which work is substitutable tend to have more flexibility and gender equity. That is, when the completion of work is not fully dependent on one individual employee, but rather when employees can coordinate actions to the point that many can competently satisfy client needs, employees are freer to work more flexibly.

Goldin noted that scientific, medical and technical fields tend to have substitutable work environments, while law, business and finance tend not to. There are obvious limits to redesigning work to create more substitutability, but many workplaces, maybe even yours, could benefit by doing so. You can increase substitutability in three ways:

Increased Teamwork. For example, you can give the responsibility for projects or for client accounts to a small team, rather than a single individual. When a team has sufficient interaction and overlapping duties, they can be well coordinated even if some team members occasionally work alternate schedules or partially from home. In fact, this is why most flextime arrangements mandate “core hours” for all employees. Further, a team-based approach also means that work can be completed and emergencies can be addressed without every member being present or on-call 24/7. This enables employees to put down the smartphone while at home, on weekends or on vacation, knowing that teammates can fill in seamlessly, reducing the negative effects of chronic overwork.

Mentoring and Development. One can generate similar benefits by pairing senior and junior employees on projects or client accounts. The junior staffer gains experience and exposure by working with someone more expert; the senior staffer can delegate tasks, freeing up time; the organization develops talent. This arrangement also means that, at times, the protégé can step in if needed, reducing the need for the mentor to be constantly present or on-call.

Coordination Technology. For example, pharmacists make extensive use of information technology to share work and coordinate patient care (Goldin calls pharmacy “the most egalitarian of professions”). Because information is compiled and shared readily, the pharmacist who begins an order and checks patient information for complications does not also have to be the same pharmacist who processes the order, prepares the doses, interacts with the patient, or works with that patient long-term. This approach allows pharmacists to work more humane and flexible schedules, while still performing effectively.

Even in less substitutable work environments, information technology can enable employees to remain connected when working remotely and help teams coordinate actions. Home-based Internet, smartphones, project management software, and helpful computer programs such as FreeConferenceCall, Google docs, gotomyPC, and JoinMe (to name a few) allow employees to remain accessible to clients/management and to share work. Before expanding workplace flexibility, you need to have the proper support systems in place.

So workplace flexibility is a key to attracting and retaining talent. If properly managed, with an eye towards effective job redesign, flexibility can also enhance performance.

Self-Promotion for Professionals from Countries Where Bragging Is Bad

In India, it’s crabs in a bucket — the one who tries to escape is pulled down by his compatriots. In Australia, it’s tall poppies — and the tallest one gets its head whacked off. In Japan, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Almost every culture has its own metaphor about what happens to people who are judged by their peers to be overreaching.

In the U.S., known for its embrace of assertive self-confidence, it’s a different story, however. Personal branding is seen as a positive way to differentiate oneself in the American workplace. But for foreign professionals who grew up with a vastly different set of cultural mores and who now need to succeed in the United States or other contexts where personal branding is important, this can be quite a difficult adjustment.

In our travels as professors and speakers, we’ve often heard the same refrain. “I understand that personal branding is important,” executives and managers often tell us. “But I just can’t bring myself to do it!” It’s no wonder. Andy’s research has indicated that personal branding, or self-promotion, is one of six major areas of cultural difference that cause discomfort for people around the world. One Indian manager in Andy’s research, for example, compared personal branding to “committing a sin” — perhaps an extreme reaction, but still indicative of how hard it can be to do personal branding, especially if you come from a country like China or India or Korea where modesty, composure, and self-control are more culturally valued characteristics than the ability to toot your own horn.

But the benefits of personal branding — including taking control of how you’re perceived by others, and making them understand the unique contribution you can make — are vast. So how can foreign professionals reconcile their values with personal branding? Here are a few points to keep in mind.

Rebrand the act of personal rebranding. Particularly if you grew up in a culture that emphasizes humility and modesty, the idea of drawing attention to yourself — especially to tout your accomplishments — may seem distasteful. However, a key way to mitigate these feelings is to “rebrand” the very act of personal branding itself. For example, instead of thinking of it as blatant self-promotion, think about who else, besides you, can benefit from your efforts. For example, university professors who write books end up promoting their university in the process.  And if you’re viewed as a sought-after expert in your field, clients will often hire your company just so they have access to your skills.

Authenticity matters. Part of the reason personal branding raises so many hackles is its association with salesmanship — the idea that you’re packaging yourself to appear attractive to “buyers,” and may be willing to sacrifice your true self to do so. But that’s not what personal branding is.  On the contrary, what we’re talking about is thoughtful, honest self-assessment, which many people genuinely believe in. If you have a clear picture of how you can contribute and make others aware of it, you’re actually taking a stand against being a finger-to-the-wind glad-hander. You’re demonstrating enough honesty and authenticity to be clear on where you excel, where you don’t, and the real value you can offer others. Being authentic is also a way to honor those who have helped you become who you are — your bosses and mentors, or even your teachers and parents. By thinking about personal branding as honoring the time and effort they put into your development, it can make the act itself feel more legitimate.

Strike a compromise with yourself. Although you may come from a culture that shuns self-promotion, chances are, there’s some part of you that sees the benefits.  So, strike a compromise with yourself and find a way to do personal branding that works for you.  In our work, we’ve seen a variety of different ways that professionals who were initially uncomfortable with the idea have ended up embracing personal branding by making a few simple adjustments and customizing or personalizing their approach. Andy recently met a young professional from Nepal who was very uncomfortable branding herself and her personal achievements in the U.S., since she came from a culture that emphasized the group over the individual. Her solution was to actually blend and combine these two perspectives.  She would emphasize her individual accomplishments but only in the context of what the group as a whole was able to achieve — and in the end, this blended solution was successful enough for her to find a job.

The adjustments go both ways: when Dorie visited Asia on a recent speaking tour, she had to reprogram some of her American habits. Stateside, she accepts compliments with a simple, appreciative “thank you” — any self-deprecating remarks (“oh, it wasn’t actually that good”) would be viewed as insulting the person making the compliment and indicative of a serious lack of self-esteem. In Asia, however, the mitigating remark is a closely-watched sign that determines whether or not you’re perceived as a jerk. It pains her to tamp down the self-confidence that’s so prized in American culture, but she makes a point to try.

Some people reject personal branding out of hand because they believe it conflicts with their most cherished values. But by keeping the principles above in mind — and reframing what it means to self-promote — you can ensure you maintain your integrity but still get noticed for all that you do.

Do People Really Want Smarter Toothbrushes?

Recently, Procter & Gamble’s Oral-B announced the release of its first ever web-enabled toothbrush. Setting a new standard for dental hygiene, the next SmartSeries toothbrush will include a smartphone app, helping users to know if they are brushing too hard or if it’s time to brush another area of their mouth. If that’s not enough, the new Oral-B connected toothbrush experience also suggests nearby dentists for you, gamifies teeth cleaning, and even provides weather updates. Sounds exciting, but does it make sense for the customer?

Call them user needs, customer requirements, or jobs-to-be-done, understanding what a customer wants and is willing to pay for is more important that ever now that the Internet of Things is upon us. Decades ago, Harvard professor Theodore Levitt popularized the rationale behind why people buy quarter-inch drill bits: “People don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.” And the challenge now is that the actual drill might connect to the cloud, collect information about your drill usage, and tell your friends on Twitter that you just used your drill, too. Technology advancements are quickly outpacing traditional use cases, making the design and development of meaningful products harder than ever.

To create truly meaningful IoT-based products and experiences for customers, companies must understand their needs, which starts with three important questions.

Who is my growth customer?

As basic as it sounds, the first step in understanding customer needs is identifying your real customer. Although attracting early adopters is essential for early success and encouraging virality, growth customers—the people who are likely to buy the next generation of products—are crucial for building a sustainable business. Said differently: it’s easy to find a few hundred customers who will buy a new connected product; it’s much harder to find a few hundred thousand customers who will buy future iterations of said product. For some product categories like lighting and heating, evolving to a connected experience is a natural transition, and current customers will be the growth customers. But for other types of products, the growth customer for a connected experience is less clear.

Several years ago, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, wrote a famous post about the importance of product-market fit. Worth noting, he emphasizes, “In a great market—a market with lots of real potential customers—the market pulls product out of the startup.” Ultimately, knowing who the customer will be over time allows a company to build a truly differentiated product. And as the number of products and new market entrants rapidly increase in the IoT space, differentiation will be crucial for all parties involved.

What problem am I actually solving?

With the growth customer identified, the next step is to develop a strong understanding of the problem to solve, especially through exploratory research with potential users. Traditionally, designers have promoted ethnographic approaches with extreme users, while Lean Startup practitioners advocate for just “getting out of the building.” In either case, the general logic is the same: go talk to some real people. Understanding which problem is especially important in IoT: as advances are made in computing power, battery life, and network infrastructure over time, the problem a company is focused on solving provides a North Star for evolving the product roadmap and the overarching business, too.

As Thor Ernstsson, founder of Casual Corp and veteran of various healthcare and gaming startups, points out, “In the earliest days, customers buy into the aspirational vision of a company, even more so than its current products.” And as the customer base grows, a clear aspirational vision and direct customer feedback about problems help more established companies—including those in the connected space—“mediate the inherent tension between a focused value proposition and expanding feature lists.”

How is this better than analog?

Through sensors and the cloud, connected devices allow companies to build experiences that have a richer interaction and more meaningful connection with the customer, his or her devices, and the environment around them. But that direct relationship requires the voluntary exchange of personal data and some loss of anonymity – and the benefit of that exchange in value must be clear to users.

For example, Disney’s MyMagic+ allows Disney vacationers to use RFID-based MagicBands to enter parks without paper tickets, open hotel rooms without keys, and purchase souvenirs without taking out a credit card. And despite all of the amazing benefits, a large number of Disney visitors have expressed strong resistance to being tracked. Carla Diana, an IoT luminary and author of Leo the Maker Prince, has said, “For any connected experience, you have to answer the question, ‘Why is this better than analog for the customer?’ If you can’t answer that question, your desired customers won’t be able to either.”

Going back to Oral B, is the company being mindful of customer needs in introducing a smartphone-connected toothbrush? Maybe. In evolving its products, P&G should keep in mind the writings of Dieter Rams, the legendary designer who worked for Braun (which until recently was P&G’s brand for electric toothbrushes before Oral B). Among his 10 Principles of Good Design, Rams stated that, “Good design is as little design as possible” because it concentrates on the essential aspects and prevents products from being burdened with non-essentials. For P&G and other companies entering the connected space, balancing great technological features and “as little as possible” will be a major opportunity to shine and differentiate moving forward.

To Play or Not to Play? It’s a Management Question, Really

"Free" Time The Overprotected KidThe Atlantic

This week we're going to talk about play, in three takes. Seriously. 

First is the aforementioned Atlantic feature by Hanna Rosin that's less a diatribe about helicopter parenting (my fear, given the title) and more a historical and organizational look at how kids spend their free time. Rosin notes that even though women work more hours than in the ’70s, both mothers and fathers spend more time with their children today. Play is no longer a day-long reprieve from adults; rather, it's highly organized and supervised, and it takes place at the most aesthetically boring playgrounds imaginable, ostensibly to prepare our wee ones for modern middle-class life. 

This leads to the second article, from Quartz (disclosure: it's an excerpt of an HBR press book) which explains how Lego came to recognize that parents were staging their children's play — and that kids, when left to their own devices, carved out "pockets of oxygen, away from adult supervision" in the activities (and objects of those activities) that they valued most. This knowledge led to a new strategy for the struggling company. 

Last is this thickly worded essay from Heather Havrilesky about the cultural meaning of the word "play," how we enact it, and whether we've lost our way. In adultland, her examples range from the gamification fad in business and management to thirty-something kickball leagues. And when it comes to both adults and children, "play often boils down to hard work," which, frankly, it probably shouldn't. 

Name Dropping Interactive: How Influential Is Your School?Time

Speaking of play (no comment on what kind of play it is), here's Time's which-school-is-more-influential game: Enter the names of two schools, and an algorithm tells you which one has had greater impact, as measured by its graduates’ renown. Along with an influence score for each, you get a fun list of famous alums. Business schools are in the database, along with undergraduate schools, divinity schools, law schools, med schools — you name it. Just don't try crossing the border to, say, McGill, or the algorithm will draw a blank. 

And how expensive is all of this educating? Take a look at The Awl's tuition-inspired NCAA bracket for more on that. —Andy O'Connell

"Project Will Be" Better Phrasing for Online FundraisingFree Range Thinking

The Pebble smartwatch raised $10 million, making it Kickstarter’s most successful fundraising effort. The PC-based game Ninja Baseball, on the other hand, only got to a third of its $10,000 goal. Why was one a hit and the other a bust — was it something about how the pitches were phrased?

For a study entitled "The Language that Gets People to Give," Georgia Tech assistant professor Eric Gilbert and doctoral candidate Tanushree Mitra designed software to scrape the text from the thousands of Kickstarter projects launched since June 2012. After taking into account a number of variables like project duration, they found that of the 9 million phrases they had captured, 20,391 had predictive qualities. From these they isolated the top 100 phrases that, they say, correlated significantly with funded — and underfunded — projects. The most powerful phrase (by a wide margin): “Project will be.”

What? They don’t sound like magic words to you? Gilbert and Mitra suggest that what makes the phrase so powerful is that it evokes the persuasion principles of  authority — that is, by reading that "the project will be produced by…" you will be impressed by the professionalism behind the project and be more likely to give. Or not. In any case, it’s easier to imagine what’s wrong with the biggest turn-off phrase, which was "dressed up." —Andrea Ovans

And Everyone ElseYour Kindness Is Good for YouPacific Standard

Here at HBR, we think a lot about generosity and kindness within companies. And for good reason, as this gorgeous essay from Casey N. Cep reminds us. She weaves together a personal narrative, scholarly research, and a convocation speech from George Saunders to explore the benefits of kindness and how we can embrace it daily. She emphasizes that kindness isn't necessarily about what we say; our silence or invisible actions, particularly in our digitally driven lives, can be just as important. And when we're more mindful about this, the benefits to others — and to ourselves — can be truly outsized. 

Let's Hope SoCan Rebekka Bay Fix the Gap?Businessweek

A younger incarnation of myself treasured the Gap, the only clothing store in my local Maine mall that wasn't JC Penney or Sears. Today, even as a cardigan-clad adult with backward-facing style, I’ve become aware that there's nothing special about the store. The Gap has noticed the same thing, particularly since upstarts like H&M, Zara, and Uniqlo began offering more fashionable clothing at affordable prices. As one industry analyst notes, "They had made khakis cool, but then you could get khakis everywhere. They had become a victim of their own success. Their brand became meaningless." But the company may have a secret weapon: Rebekka Bay, a Danish fashion designer who is in charge of this spring's clothing line. She's charged not only with making distinctive-yet-simple garments — "I think we can do less, and do it so much better," she explains about her philosophy of bringing integrity back to the store's clothes — but with helping the Gap get its identity back. 

BONUS BITSWhat the Numbers Say

Analyzing Babysitting Price & Gender Data (Priceonomics)
The Price of Music (Re/code)
Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors or Artists? (Planet Money)

What Great Corporate Wellness Programs Do

In a recent HBR post, “In Defense of Corporate Wellness Programs,” doctor and entrepreneur Rajiv Kumar took on the doubters about the value of workplace wellness programs. But as designers and researchers who have spent the better part of two years creating a system of healthy living for a huge national populace, we think he didn’t take his defense far enough. Not only are wellness programs valuable for the organizations and their employees, as his data states, they are our biggest hope for fixing a national health crisis.

Thanks to their reach and influence on employees, workplaces have a unique power to reframe the mindset around health itself — from one of sickness to wellness. “Companies are a microcosm of society and an important and unleveraged setting for health improvement and risk reduction,” says Dr. Ron Goetzel, a leading expert in the field of health and productivity management. With 150 million Americans going to work every day, corporate America is not only in the best position to change our nation’s health, but has a responsibility to do so.

As part of a project with the Department of Defense, we recently researched over 20 award-winning and recognized workplace wellness systems, at companies such as Johnson & Johnson, L.L. Bean, and Safeway. We saw these leading organizations owning the responsibility to change how people interact with healthcare, in a way that government or healthcare organizations have been unable to do.

The organizations with the greatest success are managing to shift people’s relationship with health from one where health is something thought about and “practiced” annually at the doctor’s office, to one where health is practiced daily through small lifestyle habits. The more proactive stance toward health they have established feeds off of itself and enhances employee lives, even while reducing future costs. For the organizations in our study, this translates into average annual health care cost increases of 1 to 2 percent compared to the 7 percent national average.

How have they done this? Here are three approaches we discovered that appear to be key.

Put it in Surround Sound

The best wellness programs bring the built environment, company policies, and leadership messaging under a single mission of wellness. When USAA’s Enterprise Medical Director Dr. Peter Wald joined the organization 12 years ago, he found many discrete resources for wellness — mini gyms, cafes, and health experts – already in place. Once he tied them under the mission of prevention, putting health in “surround sound,” as he likes to say, the program took hold within the organization. Safeway redefined its core business from “a grocery company with a wellness program,” to “a wellness company that happens to sell groceries,” and the program took off. The CEO, along with the leadership team, ensures that health and wellness are kept top of mind, and leaders work hard to tie all wellness activities back to a broader company strategy. Safeway made large capital investments in a state-of-the-art fitness center, a preventative-care health center, and health-focused cafeterias to support the organizational mission. Creating a seamless wellness experience has resulted in participation rates of over 80 percent.

Keep it Personal

When health is made personal and put in real-life terms, people discover the value that health can hold in their lives — and that provides the strong call to action. Johnson & Johnson, which has one of the longest-standing wellness programs in the country, understands that people don’t strive to get healthy because it’s the right thing to do in some abstract sense. “Health is usually a means to an end,” says Adam Glauberg, Director of Global Health Services at Johnson & Johnson. The individual wants to be there for family, to get off diabetes medication, to perform better at work. If the company can tap into those personal motivations, it can better communicate the value of health. J&J uses a platform called “Energy for Performance in Life,” a training program designed by the Human Performance Institute division of Wellness & Prevention, a Johnson & Johnson company, to teach employees how to maximize their energy to improve their performance both at work and at home. The program is designed to be less clinical and more lifestyle-oriented than many health-oriented interventions. Making the program more relevant to everyday life dramatically increased the number of people engaging in it; it has now reached 90 percent employee participation.

Make it a Collective Effort

Wellness needs to be done with employees, not to them, or the effects won’t last. When employees feel a system is their own, engagement increases. The best programs actively design for “grassroots” partnership and harness the power of shared accountability to sustain engagement. L.L. Bean empowers its employees in different locations to design their own wellness initiatives relevant to their department’s needs. If a worksite is able to get at least 15 people interested in a new program, it receives funding and support from corporate to run that program locally. This kind of empowerment encourages many employees to become health and wellness representatives in their location — initiating activities such as Zumba and yoga and recruiting other employees to join in their collective wellness efforts. Building such community health champions helps spread the message and ensures the program’s reach. It also keeps people accountable and gives them the support they need at those inevitable derailing moments.

So let’s stop challenging the validity of comprehensive wellness programs, and instead celebrate our most wellness-oriented organizations for stepping up to a national health care crisis. Our society depends on their reach and influence to help move practice forward, and to reframe the conversation from a focus on sick care to a focus on well care. Already, these programs have made deeper inroads into large, intractable health care problems than anyone else – and with the Affordable Care Act making new provisions for wellness programs, there is hope for greater support and incentives. Let’s give workplace wellness programs the support that will keep them, and the people in them, healthy.