Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1445

The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century is Tedious, and that Needs to Change

As organizations collect increasingly large and diverse data sets, the demand for skilled data scientists will continue to rise. In fact, it was dubbed “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” by HBR.

Unfortunately, the day-to-day reality of the role doesn’t quite match the romanticized version.

Starting in 2012, my colleagues and I began taking a closer look at the hands-on experience of data scientists. At Stanford, I conducted 35 interviews of data analysts from 25 organizations across a variety of sectors, including health care, retail, marketing, and finance. Since then I’ve spoken with another 200-300 analysts. What we found was that the bulk of their time was spent manipulating data − a mix of data discovery, data structuring, and creating context.

In other words, most of their time was spent turning data into a usable form rather than looking for insights.

Granted, this stems from a positive shift in analytics. Whereas companies once maintained tight control over data warehouses, they are now shifting toward more agile analytic environments because the drive for data-driven decision-making has catalyzed the need for a different type of work. Today, data quality is no longer about a central truth but is instead dependent on the goal of the analytic tasks. Exploratory analysis and visualization require that analysts can fluidly access disparate sources of data in various formats.

The problem is that most organizations aren’t set up to do this. In traditional data warehousing environments, IT teams structure data and design schemas when the data is loaded into the warehouse,and are then largely responsible for ensuring strict data quality rules. While this upfront design and structuring is costly, it worked fairly well for years. Now that companies are dealing with larger and more complex data sets, however, this old way of managing data is impractical.

To keep pace, most organizations are currently storing raw data and structuring on demand. Schemas and relationships between datasets are now derived at time of use instead of at the time of load. This shift gives data analysts more flexibility to find unexpected insights, but also places the time-consuming onus of discovery, structuring, and cleaning solely on them.

Indeed, in our 2012 study of data analysts, we characterized the process of data science as five high-level tasks: discovery, wrangling, profiling, modeling, and reporting. Most analytic and visualization tools focus on the last two phases of this workflow. Unfortunately, most of a data scientist’s time is spent on the first three stages.

These three involve finding data relevant for a given analysis tasks, formatting and validating data to make it palatable for databases and visualization tools, diagnosing data for quality issues, and understanding features across fields in the data. In these phases, data scientists encounter numerous challenges, including data sets that may contain missing and erroneous or extreme values. These tasks often require writing idiosyncratic scripts in programming languages such as Python and Perl, or extensive manual editing using tools like Microsoft Excel. But if not caught, this can cause any assumptions made to be wrong or misleading – poor data quality is the primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve their targeted benefits.

Because of this, the skills of talented data scientists are often wasted as they become bogged down in low-level data cleansing tasks or encumbered when they cannot quickly access the data they need. This creates a huge bottleneck, stalling the progression of data as it moves from data stores like Hadoop to analytic tools that allow for greater insights. Data cleansing and preparation tasks can take 50-80% of the development time and cost in data warehousing and analytics projects.

Instead of solving these problems, organizations are often adding to the amount of data that require a data scientist’s attention. Through activity and system logs, 3rd-party APIs and vendors, and other publicly available data, companies have access to an increasingly large and diverse set of data sources. But without the right systems in place, the prohibitive cost of data manipulation leaves much of this data dormant in “data lakes.”

And by making data analysis a core business function for many departments, skilled analysts and members of IT are spending large chunks of time helping others access the data they need via low-level programming instead of doing any analysis themselves.

According to Gartner, 64% of large enterprises plan to implement a big data project in 2014, but 85% of the Fortune 500 will be unsuccessful in doing so. These time-consuming data preparation tasks are largely to blame. Not only do they throttle individual data scientists, but they greatly decrease the probability of success for big data initiatives.

If we can ever hope to take full advantage of big data, data preparation is going to need to be elevated out of the manual, cumbersome tasks that currently make up the process. Data scientists must be enabled to transform data with greater agility, not just manually prepare data for analysis. Domain experts will need to be able to explore deeper relationships between data sets without data being diluted by prolonged IT programmer or data analyst involvement.

Ultimately, the goal of data analysis is not simply insight but improved business process. Successful analytics can lead to product and operational advancements that drive value for organizations, but not if the people charged with working with data aren’t able to spend more of their time finding insights. If data analysis ever hopes to scale at the rate of technologies for storing and processing data, the lives of data scientists are going to need to get a lot more interesting.

Seven Things Great Employers Do (that Others Don’t)

For most people, paid work is unsettling and energy-sapping. Despite employee engagement racing up the priority list of CEOs (see, for example, The Conference Board’s CEO Challenge 2014), our research into workplaces all over the world reveals a sorry state of affairs: workers who are actively disengaged outnumber their engaged colleagues by an overwhelming factor of 2:1. The good news is that there are companies out there bucking the trend, and we’ve discovered how.

Over a five-year timeframe, we studied 32 exemplary companies (collectively employing 600,000 people) across seven industries including hospitality, banking, manufacturing, and hospitals. At these companies, the engaged workers outnumber the actively disengaged ones by a 9:1 ratio. To understand what drives that tremendous advantage, we looked for contrasts between them and a much larger set of companies we know to be struggling to turn around bland and uninspiring workplaces.

We found seven elements in place at the companies with spirited employees which are notably lacking in the others. Are all of the seven causes of high performance?   No doubt at least some of them involve virtuous circles. But as a recipe for an engaged workforce, these are ingredients we feel confident in recommending:

Have involved and curious leaders who want to improve. Leaders’ own attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors have powerful trickle-down effects on their organizations’ cultures. Leaders of great workplaces don’t just talk about what they want to see in the management ranks – they model it and keep practicing to get better at it every day with their own teams. By displaying a little vulnerability and visibly working on improving themselves, they signal that such engagement is how one gets ahead.

Have cracking HR functions. The best HR people have a gift for influencing, teaching, and holding executives accountable – this is important because many executives rise through the ranks despite not being very good managers. HR experts teach leaders and managers to stretch and develop employees in accordance with their natural capabilities. By the way, when you find cracking HR leaders, hold on to them for dear life: they are as rare as hen’s teeth.

Ensure the basic engagement requirements are met before expecting an inspiring mission to matter. When employees know what is expected of them, have what they need to do their jobs, are good fits for their roles, and feel their managers have their backs, they will commit to almost anything the company is trying to accomplish. Conversely, if these basic needs are not met, even the most exalted mission may not engage them. People simply don’t connect with proclamations of mission or values– no matter how inspiring these might sound in the head office.

Never use a downturn as an excuse. The excuse we hear the most to explain away a lousy workplace is the state of the economy; in periods of belt-tightening, engagement inevitably takes a hit. The experience of the 32 exemplary companies we studied calls this rationalization into question. With few exceptions, they have also had to respond to flat or declining top lines – with structural changes, redundancies, and declining real pay and benefits – and yet not only have they maintained their strong cultures, they’ve improved them. They have achieved this by being open, making changes swiftly, communicating constantly, and providing hope. The truth is that employee engagement is one of the few things managers and leaders can influence in times when so much else is out of their control. Great employers recognize this and they go about managing it in the right way.

Trust, hold accountable, and relentlessly support their managers and teams. The experiences that inspire and encourage employees are local. Strong teams are built when teams themselves size up the problems facing them and take a hands-on approach to solving them. Exemplary companies lavish support upon their managers, build their capability and resilience, and then hold them and their teams accountable for the micro-cultures they create. (There is an important corollary here: the good intentions of a CEO can backfire if he or she charges all over the company trying to fix things personally.)

Have a straightforward and decisive approach to performance management. The companies in our study with the highest engagement levels know how to use recognition as a powerful incentive currency. Indeed, a hallmark of these great workplaces is that they are filled with recognition junkies. These companies see recognition as a powerful means to develop and stretch employees to new levels of capability. Meanwhile, they see tolerance of mediocrity as the enemy. Any action or inaction that doesn’t produce appropriate consequences adds to workplace disillusionment and corrodes commitment.

Do not pursue engagement for its own sake. As it becomes increasingly possible to measure and track engagement accurately, some companies start “managing to the metric.” Great employers keep their eyes on the outcomes they need greater engagement to achieve. One of the best examples we can cite is the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan. Ranked number one in the U.S. for orthopaedic surgery by U.S. News & World Report, this hospital needs a high-octane culture to meet patients’ demands. Senior Vice President of Patient Care and Chief Nursing Officer, Stephanie Goldberg, told us that patients expect miracles and her nurses would struggle to get through a single day if they themselves did not feel that they mattered to the hospital. HSS’s nurse turnover is lower than the industry average, let alone the average in hospital-rich New York.

There they are, then: the magnificent seven. Now note how different the list is from the tactics most companies are pursuing as they try to create great working environments. Many make the mistake of prioritizing the easy, shiny stuff – hip office space, remote work arrangements, and inventive benefits – over the elements that will strengthen emotional ties and connect employees more deeply to their managers, teams, and companies. Pity them: If they manage to survive and compete, it will be despite their miserable and confused staff.

Pity their employees more. Our research into a representative sample of nearly all the world’s adults shows that a job has the potential to be at the heart of a great life, but only if its holder is engaged at work. Copious amounts of prose has been devoted to how to make this happen – by making work more fun, funky, and even meaningful – but companies still fail. The exemplary companies we studied have figured out how to establish emotional connections with their staff. It isn’t easy, but if you focus on the magnificent seven, you too can create a company where people love their work.

If the Board Monitors the Company, Who Monitors the Board?

With equity holdings of major firms now in the hands of a relatively small set of mega-holders, big investors have helped rejuvenate the boardroom. The board’s independent monitoring function had always been there in name, but now it has become more widespread in fact:

The boards of more than nine out of ten of the S&P 500 companies have a lead or presiding director, up from none a decade earlier.
Poison pills have declined during the past fifteen years from 59 percent of the S&P 500 to just 7 percent.
More than 90 percent of the firms now elect all directors annually, up from 39 percent in 1998.
The CEO is the only non-independent director on 60 percent of the boards, up from 23 percent.
Executive pay has morphed from fixed to contingent. In 1982, a manufacturing executive arriving at work on the first day of the new year could expect at least three-fifths of the pay package by the end of the year, regardless of company performance. By 2013, that fixed portion had dropped from 63 to 16 percent while the incentive fraction soared from 17 to 66 percent.

With institutional investor prodding, boards have thus become far more effective monitors of management than they were a decade ago. Yet in doing so they have strengthened the board’s leadership hand as well.  Chief executives still run the corporation, but directors at many are now increasingly stepping forward to lead the corporation in partnership with management.

This, as a result, brings a whole new frontier to investor vigilance:  Appraising whether company directors are indeed effectively leading, not just monitoring the firm. And that can make an enormous difference.  Even a company with the best monitoring practices is a worrisome bet if the lead director is not able, if directors do not bring business leadership to the boardroom, and if directors are not all pulling in the same direction. Without a board that can lead, everything from the tone at the top and pay for performance to executive succession and strategic direction may lack the stoking they require.

Consider Blackstone, a publicly traded private equity firm that has a long history of acquiring, strengthening, and then profitably selling companies. It evaluates a thousand investment targets a year, vets a hundred, and invests in just a handful. An important filter has become the quality of the board’s leadership, and to help appraise it, Blackstone brought in Sandy Ogg who had served as the chief human resource officer for Unilever.

When Blackstone takes a major stake in a company, Sandy Ogg then works actively with directors at the new firms to maximize their leadership value. He presses the directors “to be active” with management — but at the same time “not too active.” He has worked to force too-active directors off their boards, but he also warns directors against too little engagement, reminding them that they have been asked to serve for their business experience and professional judgment, not for their résumé or renown.

Or consider the experience of Irvine O. Hockaday Jr., former CEO of Hallmark Cards, Inc., who had served as lead director for four companies, including Ford Motor and Estée Lauder. At all he had to become, in his own words, “the connecting rod to the rest of the board,” where he helped define its modus operandi, bridge the divide between the board and management, and encourage and insure coordination of the board’s audit, compensation, and governance committees. He served as a sounding board for both directors and executives, and, when conflicts inevitably emerged, as reconciler. Personal connections were vital to such service: “So much about being an effective lead director” is a result, he reported, of “your ability to establish relationships and work well in the context of the DNA of a particular board.” In sum, he said, “I look at the lead director as a conductor, like a symphony director, working to ensure maximum collaboration among directors and maximum support of management.”

In an era when boards can and should both monitor and lead, institutional investors will want evidence that the lead director can indeed lead. And among the questions to appraise that leadership function: Has the board picked the right lead director and established a procedure to identify the next? Does the lead director conduct effective executive sessions and make sure that the CEO is receiving true feedback from the directors? Is the lead director able to work well with top executives—but also ready to ensure that a faltering CEO is either mentored or removed? Has the lead director arranged a way for directors to communicate directly with investors? Does the board annually evaluate the performance of the lead director? Has the lead director arranged for the best prepared directors to serve as chairs of the key committees? Does the lead director regularly consult off-line with the other directors?  Is the lead director focusing the directors on the company’s greatest challenges?  And most important of all, are the directors actively leading the company on key decisions in partnership with the executives, not just monitoring them?

Though extracting information on those factors may be hard, we believe it can be well worth the time.  James G. Cullen, who had served as lead director at Johnson & Johnson for a decade, summed up what many lead directors have repeatedly told us:  “A skilled board leader can wring a lot out” of the board’s deliberations, and that can be vital to the “successful strategic momentum of the business.”

Investors have long been concerned with the monitoring function of the board, and what is needed now is an equal focus of whether it is also a well-led board, with

a leader who organizes and directs the board
a strong governance and nominating committee
a working partnership with top management
active directors who bring extensive leadership experience of their own
an absence of dysfunctional directors
an annual evaluation of both individual directors and the whole board
a set of protocols for making or delegating decisions
a commitment to lead, not just monitor, the company.

Though vital, much of this is not public, and investors will want to sit with lead directors and their chief executives both to learn about it and to advocate it. For their part, lead directors and their CEOs will want to offer a compelling story about not only the company’s strategy but also about their board’s leadership.

Ram Charan, Dennis Carey, and Michael Useem are offering a two-day program on “Boards That Lead” at Wharton Executive Education on June 16-17, 2014.

 

Does Your Company Have Enough Sales Managers?

A healthcare industry sales executive recently told us that as part of a continued effort to cut costs, her company had reduced the number of first-line sales managers from 66 down to 30 over a period of several years. This meant that management span of control had more than doubled from an average of 5-6 salespeople per manager up to 12-15 per manager. Certainly, the move saved costs, but was it a good idea?

The average span of control for U.S. sales forces is 10-12 salespeople per manager, but there is wide variation around this average. At an energy company that sells to large utilities and industrial organizations, sales teams work with customers to deliver technically complex, custom solutions; sales managers each supervise an average of 6-8 strategic account managers. At the other end of the spectrum, at a consumer packaged goods company, part-time merchandisers perform activities such as stocking shelves, setting up displays, and conducting inventories in retail stores. The merchandising force operates with an unusually high span of control of 50 merchandisers per manager.

Span of control decisions affect sales management efficiency and effectiveness. If sales managers oversee too few salespeople, the sales force incurs high costs and underutilizes management talent. Managers may micromanage their people. They may get overly-involved in customer management tasks that salespeople should do themselves. And they may spend too much time doing low-value administrative work. Sales management is inefficient. Alternatively, if sales managers have too many people reporting to them, they can’t spend enough time coaching and supervising each person. Salespeople will have unequal skill and quality, and will execute the sales process with varied success. Managers won’t have enough time to spend with key customers or to develop strategies for driving long-term business success. Sales management is ineffective.

The best way to figure out the right span of control is to first understand what sales managers do, what they should do, and how much time it takes to execute the responsibilities that can’t be delegated. Management tasks fall into three categories.

People management.  This includes hiring, coaching, supervising, and conducting performance reviews. Our recent survey of sales leaders indicates that most sales managers spend 30-55% of their time with people management, but the percentage varies with the span of control as well as with the amount of time it takes to manage each salesperson. Time per salesperson depends on the specific people management tasks, as well as on the complexity of the sales process, the knowledge and experience of salespeople, the quality of sales support (e.g. information systems, onboarding, and training), and the extent to which salespeople are empowered to act without close management supervision.


Customer management. Thisincludes account planning, customer visits, and assisting salespeople appropriately with important sales process steps and key customers. Our survey indicates that most sales managers spend 25-40% of their time with customer management, but this percentage varies with the number of customers managers are responsible for, as well as with the nature of manager selling responsibilities and the size and needs of each customer.
Business management. This includes sales meetings, budgeting, complying with administrative requirements, and other activities that keep information flowing between headquarters and the field. Our survey indicates that most sales managers spend 20-35% of their time with business management. The percentage does not vary significantly with the number of salespeople or customers that managers are responsible for, but it does vary by situation. For example, business management time is often greater when sales managers control local budgets and resources, or when they must adapt sales strategies to local needs.

Understanding how sales managers spend their time often highlights productivity improvement opportunities. Additional findings from our survey include:

Too often work with low value to customers and the company creeps into the sales manager’s job. This includes many easy but time-consuming administrative tasks. The urgent nature of these tasks prevents managers from performing higher impact (and usually more difficult) duties.
Although some business management activities are important for long-term success (sharing market insight, developing local business plans), the business management role is too often a manager time trap. Most managers spend too much time on administrative business management and too little time on people management. The sales leaders we surveyed indicated that on average, sales managers should shift a half day each week from business management to people management.
By eliminating low-value work, or delegating it to less-expensive resources, some sales forces have opportunity to increase span of control while focusing managers’ attention on higher-value activities.

So was the healthcare company better off operating with 5-6 salespeople per manager or with 12-15 per manager? The answer is not driven by costs alone; it also depends on management effectiveness. A company needs enough sales managers to ensure that all key people, customer, and business management tasks get executed well. At the same time, a company must ensure that non-critical, administrative tasks aren’t polluting the sales managers’ role.  Finally, a company must understand how the role is changing so it can build a sales management team that can drive success today and in the future.

The Price of Popularity: Lower Ratings

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

Tell Your Whole Story in an Interview

I start job interviews with the same question every time: “Tell me about your path leading up to today. Why is this role the right fit for you now?”

What happens next is predictable:

“My first job out of college was at an international aid organization…”

“I worked for a number of years in publishing before I…”

“I started out in finance but then…”

I typically wait for a pause and ask candidates to start earlier. I tell them that I want to hear the details from their story that illustrate what drives them — their purpose. They often raise eyebrows, giggle nervously, or cross their arms.

“How far back do you want me go?”

“As far as you can,” I invite them.

Few candidates have rehearsed a response.

This is because we typically tell our professional stories beginning with our first job. After all, that’s what’s on our resumes and so it’s the narrative we tell ourselves and others about our work life. But that’s not when our stories begin.

In fact, your early years are critical to shaping your core values and authentic, untarnished self. Your natural interests, how you spent unstructured time, and the activities and ideas you were drawn to provide clues to your purpose. Your story didn’t start with your first paycheck. Recently, New York Times columnist David Brooks reflected on Sting’s talk at the 2014 TED conference, in which he revisited his childhood as a middle-aged man, seeking inspiration from some of his earliest experiences. His talk highlights that even those of us living a clear path need to look backward for inspiration and guidance to move our work forward.

As the senior vice president of Echoing Green, a global nonprofit responsible for seeding over 500 innovative social change organizations, I’ve reviewed thousands of resumes. Between evaluating over a decade’s worth of Echoing Green Fellowship applications and interviewing hundreds of candidates for roles within my fast-growing organization, I’ve read my share of career objectives, acronyms summing up years of intensive studies (from MBAs to MDs to MSWs), and quirky identifiers (haiku master, flash mob frequenter, tropical fish expert).

When I pick up a resume, I scan to the earliest years. I’ve found that the older a candidate is, the more likely she is to gloss over those experiences. We become expert at explaining job transitions, major career pivots, and even our school-to-career path. But most people fail to include their full story — the one that started much earlier in life.

So, what if you backdated your resume?

What if you let the critical first influences weave through your professional experiences? What if, instead of casting aside early pivotal experiences, you used them as the foundation of your narrative, to illustrate what really drives you? What if, in addition to continually adding new roles to your resume, you surfaced stories hidden in family albums that help explain why you do what you do?

Through Echoing Green’s Work on Purpose program, I lead a workshop dedicated to this very concept. Participants receive a handout with three headings: Education, Work & Volunteer Experience, and Skills & Abilities. The twist is that I ask them to populate these categories based on their experiences from birth to age 10, and then ages 11-17. I ask them to reflect back on a time when work and play were not always distinguishable. What clubs were they a part of? How did they spend their time before they were inundated with work emails and responsible for bill-paying? What were they drawn toward before they, their family or teachers started put boxes around their identity?

Looking that far back isn’t easy. It helps to interview a parent, a teacher, or an early mentor to draw out the interests and skills from your earliest years. You might hear a story that surprises you or helps to explain an element of your personality. Often participants rediscover interests and unearth predispositions. I then ask them to use the answers to connect what they rediscovered about themselves with the work that they pursue today. As John Dewey said, “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

You can backdate your resume today. Start by interviewing someone who knew you well in your youth, or asking yourself these questions:

What did I gravitate toward naturally?
What activities did I lose myself in?
What did I talk about all the time?
What did I love to read?

See what themes you can extract to further your understanding of yourself. Connect these discoveries with what you do now or want to do. Seek out professional development opportunities that reconnect you to these early tendencies. Look at job postings through a new lens. And even be bold—tell a story from your youth in a job interview that explains why you think you’ll thrive in a new role.

Much of our thinking about our careers and our purpose in the world is about looking forward, thinking about how to make progress toward our ultimate goals. The beauty of uncovering your past is that you are afforded the chance to create a sturdier, truer road map for where you want to be. Backdating your resume lets you look forward and back so you can tap into your full story to inform your career choices.

I’m not suggesting you include your lemonade stand venture under “work experience.” But I do hope that the practice of rediscovering your early years will help unleash the why behind the titles on your resume, and help you find your purpose.

Senior Managers Won’t Always Get Along

It’s virtually impossible to like everyone you meet. It’s even more unlikely that you will get along with everyone at work. People have different personalities, biases, values, ambitions, and interests, all of which affect the chemistry of their relationships. And if you throw in the pressures of the workplace, it’s hardly surprising that tensions arise between colleagues and co-workers. But when members of a senior management team don’t get along, the negative impacts can cascade through an organization. Those conflicts have the potential to reduce productivity and morale for dozens or hundreds of people.

Let’s look at a two (disguised, but real) examples:

In a manufacturing organization, three members of the senior team were told that they were on the short-list to become the next CEO. The ensuing competition exacerbated already strained relationships between them, such that they barely talked with each other outside of formal meetings. Taking cues from their bosses, the people that worked for them began to form “camps” and reduced their levels of cross-functional discussion and collaboration as well.


In a financial services firm with a history of fairly autonomous business units, one senior manager was charged with creating a common approach to product development. After several of the business leaders pushed back on the standardized approach, she wrote them off and thereafter only worked with friendly and receptive areas.

It would be easy to say in both of these cases that the CEO should have intervened and forced people to work together more effectively. The reality is that in many organizations the CEO is either unaware of these dynamics, doesn’t know what to do, or chooses to ignore them, thinking that senior managers should be able to work these things out on their own. In other cases, like the first example here, the CEO might even foster the competition, almost like a lab experiment to see what happens.

So what can you do if you are part of a “frosty” management team, either as a direct contributor to the tension, or an observer of the dysfunction? Here are two suggestions:

First, get the issues out from under the rocks and into the light of day. Few things cripple a management team more than having elephants in the room — and in the organization — that no one acknowledges. Get beyond the conspiracy of silence by talking to the key parties, either individually, in small groups, or as a team, about what’s going on. This needs to be done delicately and sensitively, without blaming anyone or pointing fingers (which could make things worse), but the conversations need to get started with a goal of making the business better.

In the case of the competing executives cited above, for example, one of the managers initiated a lunch meeting for the three of them — and explicitly talked about the awkwardness of the situation and how it was affecting other people on their team and in the company. All three then agreed that, while the situation was not optimal, they should do everything possible to do what’s best for the company and not just their own ambitions — and they conveyed this to their teams. Although this didn’t end the tensions, it certainly made it easier to keep doing business until a new CEO was selected.

The second way to deal with situations like these is to gently force the contending people to work together on projects or issues that are important to the company. In other words, when senior managers need to put on “bigger hats,” it helps them to transcend the interpersonal rivalries and dislikes in order to achieve the broader objective. For example, in the financial services company mentioned earlier, the HR executive, concerned about the deteriorating relationships, quietly influenced the CEO to tackle a key strategic issue by setting up a few small cross-functional teams — and made sure that the executives who were not getting along were paired up.

There is nothing that says that members of a leadership team need to like each other. They do need to realize however that when they don’t “get along” their dysfunctional relationships can reverberate throughout the organization. Preventing this from happening is a responsibility of the whole team.

The Ultimate Productivity Hack Will Be Robot Assistants

Our current phase of technological evolution is turning science fiction concepts into scientific facts: driverless cars have driven hundreds of thousands of miles on roads in the United States and parts of Europe; thought-controlled robotic prosthetics are helping people who have lost limbs regain the ability to walk and ‘grasp’ every day items in their hands; machine learning — the ability of a software program to actively learn from previous texts and submit suggestions — in our smartphones and computer systems nudges us towards which movie to watch or book to buy.

There is another seemingly mundane but profoundly important application of this technology: to better managers ourselves and our time. The future of productivity is coming, and it will rely on Artificial Intelligence.

The underlying technology behind all of the advances in robotic technology mentioned above is Artificial Intelligence (A.I.).  A.I., often referred to as the ability of computers to think like humans, has been a main goal of many computer and cognitive scientists for the last sixty to eighty years. And one of the principle goals of A.I. developers has long been to help humans be more productive.

With the exception of commercial ventures such as Google’s search and related products, the largest known A.I. project to date was instigated by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2003, DARPA contracted SRI International to lead a reported $200 million, five-year project to build a virtual assistant. The project consisted of up to 500 experts in machine learning, natural language processing, knowledge representation, human–computer interaction, flexible planning, and behavioral studies who were tasked with building a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (CALO).

The goal of CALO was to become what the technology industry now calls a ‘cognitive assistant,’ – similar in function to what many of us think of as a personal assistant. This ambitious goal envisioned a software program that learns by ‘observing and learning from the past, acting in the present and anticipating the future.’ CALO would be able to assist its user with organizing and prioritizing information, mediating human communication, resource allocation, task management decisions, and scheduling and prioritizing.

In 2008, with the agreement of DARPA, a private company co-founded by three of the engineers from SRI International was spun out of the CALO project. The company was registered as SIRI Inc. and by 2010 was acquired by Apple and launched as part of the iPhone operating system in October 2011.

So disruptive was this realization of the cognitive assistant that at the time of Siri’s launch, then Google CEO Eric Schmidt called it a competitive threat to Google’s core search business. In other words, it had the potential to fundamentally reshape the way we interact with information.

Schmidt elaborated on this potential in his recent book: The New Digital Age – Reshaping the future of people, nations and business:

Centralizing the many moving parts of one’s life into an easy to use almost intuitive system of information management and decision-making will give all interactions with technology an effortless feel. These systems will free us of many small burdens, including errands to do list and assorted monitoring tasks – that today add stress and chip away at our mental focus throughout the day. By relying on these integrated systems, which will encompass both the professional and the personal sides of our lives, we’ll be able to use our time more effectively each day.

Suggestion engines that offer alternative terms to help a user find what she is looking for will be a particularly useful aid in efficiency by consistently stimulating our thinking process, ultimately enhancing our creativity, not preempting it. So there will be plenty of ways to procrastinate too but the point is that when you choose to be productive, you can do so with greater capacity…

…Other advances in the pipeline in areas like robotics, artificial intelligence and voice recognition will introduce efficiency into our lives by providing more seamless forms of engagement with the technology in our daily routines.

This technology will surely save many of us time in our daily affairs.

All of which suggests that today’s breakthroughs in A.I. are tomorrow’s breakthroughs in productivity. Google, Apple and others, such as Intel and IBM, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in A.I. research and development and patent applications as a means of providing a solution to help us manage our most precious resource – time — through the use of a personal interactive cognitive (robotic) assistant.

When I tell Siri or Google Now to remind me to contact a client about some matter next time I am in the office, it stores a reminder and its geo-location positioning device pings me as I sit at my desk. If I want to collect flowers on my way home it will notify me of the closest florists on the route . It can reserve restaurant tables and in some countries Google Now can even read a restaurant menu. Soon it will also check if it serves your dietary preferences before recommending the restaurant.

Through voice recognition I can dictate a text message or email and have it sent by my cognitive assistant. The more I use this technology the more it recognizes how I break down tasks and the times of day I am most productive, ensuring that I am most efficient on high priority tasks. The ability of today’s cognitive assistants is really quite remarkable, but it is just the beginning.

Thanks to continued progress by A.I. researchers, the long-imagined potential of cognitive assistants is finally arriving. As robots become increasingly intelligent, so too will we.

How to Improve Your Decision-Making Skills

We are faced with the need to make decisions every day.  Should we bring product A or B to market?  Which marketing strategy should we use?  Of the choices that we have available, who is the best person to hire or who would make the best partner? In each case, we try to rely on as many facts as we can so that we can make a reasonable estimation of the best path to follow.  At first glance, the approach of weighing the evidence rationally seems perfectly reasonable.  Yet, in so many instances, rational predictions fail.  Why is that? And what can we do about it?

Rational thinking is prone to several biases and problems. Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on cognitive biases, points out in an HBR article that a team that has fallen in love with its theories may unconsciously ignore or reject contradictory evidence, place too much weight on one piece of data, or make faulty comparisons to another business case that suits its bias. In this same article, he points out that a McKinsey study of more than 1,000 business investments showed that when companies worked to reduce the effects of bias, they raised their returns on investment by seven percentage points. He provides a checklist of 12 questions to detect and reduce bias, one of which is “Has the team involved fallen in love with their decision?” The first step, then, is to use a checklist to minimize decision biases, much like the one suggested by Kahneman.

And then there are psychological traps. John Hammond described these psychological traps in detail, pointing out how we may fall into the confirming evidence trap (seeking out evidence that justifies our choices rather than looking at the whole picture), the status quo trap (shifting deck chairs on the Titanic rather than jumping over while it is sinking) or the sunk cost trap (throwing good money after bad in the hope of recovering initial losses rather than simply cutting bait before we are completely drained).  A recent client of mine is a good example of the latter, having continued to invest his money in developing a technology despite being aware of a superior competitive product that reached the market before his development was complete.  Acting on your awareness is a critical step.   And acting sooner rather than later may actually save the day.

Another problem with rational thinking is that of “trial and error,” as suggested by Karl Popper.  He believed that no decision could be considered correct unless it is subject to testing and scrutiny in order to accept or reject it.  Once again, this would appear to be a rational and scientific approach to decision-making, but recent critiques point out that people making decisions are inherently subjective and decisions are influenced by each person’s own values, so that even how we implement a strategy may be influenced by what we believe.  You could, for example, choose to believe that most businesses fail (and that would be true), and as a result, never pursue success in business.  This would clearly not serve you if your business idea were more like one of the exceptions. For managing the subjective nature of people when making decisions, a recent article by R.J. Ormerod suggested that there are three things that you can do: (1) Use a two-tiered approach with a small group of core people who set the standards that a larger group can implement with autonomy but within those standards; (2) Tap into as much knowledge within the organization as you can, and (3) Ensure that those carrying out the decisions are involved in making them, and take into account a wide variety of views prior to setting the context (involving those responsible for taking the decision, those who have to implement it, those affected by it but are not involved, and those who can offer expertise on some aspect or other).  For example, key management, sales, customers and other experts should be involved.

Yet another example of “pseudo-rationalism” is induction, a commonly used “rational” technique of basing future decisions on the past, the problems of which have been outlined by David Hume. Just because two things always seem to occur at the same time does not imply that they always will. Our past experiences create brain patterns that unconsciously steer our attention to things selectively.  For example, you may think that your online marketing efforts always fail because they are not structured within a campaign, even if you observe this repeatedly.  However, it may simply be that your brain pattern of expected failure limits all future efforts.  In this case, you have to change your expectation, not your marketing strategy. Therefore, when faced with evidence from the past, try reversing your cause-and-effect thinking.  Is your marketing strategy impacting your success, or is your prior lack of success impacting your marketing savvy?

To remember this advice for making better decisions, I suggest the mnemonic TRICK:  Two-tiered approach, Rapport with strategic team and implementers, Involve all from management to customer, Cause and effect reversal, and use the Kahneman perspective.  This five-step approach can allow you to implement plans with a perspective that is much more aligned with how the brain really works than a simple “rational” (or “pseudo-rational”) approach.

 

Invest in Tomorrow’s Workforce, and World

We all know that education is an investment — but it’s not solely a personal one. The prosperity of nations and the health of economies is linked to the educational attainment levels and size of a skilled workforce.

For businesses, the danger of underinvesting in skills can be great. This was a major theme at the Global Education & Skills Forum last week in Dubai. At the forum we were reminded that the global economy is facing a “talent time bomb.” Whichever way you look at it, the countries producing the majority of the next generation of workers are still the ones least able to help them develop.

For example, the UN informs us that over the course of the 21st century, Africa’s share of the world’s population will nearly double, from 13.1 to 24.9%. Collectively, the UN projects, the less developed regions of the world “will grow 58% over 50 years, as opposed to 2% for more developed regions. Less developed nations will account for 99% of the expected increment to world population in this period.” Nigeria, in particular (with a population projected to exceed that of the USA by 2050), will increase its workforce threefold in the next 50 years. Therefore we need to see significantly greater investment in the education systems of these parts of the world – and others. And not only for their own benefit, the economic fortunes of many other global regions depend on it.

As Sarah Brown, chair of the Global Business Coalition for Education, has said, “The evidence is clear for the business community that investing in education leads to a more relevant talent pool to drive societal and economic growth.”

Yet when we look at how corporate money is spent on social objectives, there is no evidence that education is being prioritized. On the contrary, healthcare spending by corporate donors is nearly 16 times higher than education spending. Given this, UNESCO’s recent call for 20% of global corporate philanthropic funding to be channeled to education projects is welcome.

But as good managers have discovered in so many realms of human need, pure philanthropy is not the only means for addressing social challenges. We need to remind ourselves that educating skilled workforces is an investment opportunity. And we need to focus on the aspect of the situation that surprises me the most: the lack of innovative financing mechanisms to allow investors (companies, individuals, or governments) to channel much needed funds to where we all know they will reap a reward.

For companies and other profit-motivated investors, investing in broad-based education presents some challenges. Developing talent is a long game, and skills gaps can take a generation to close. There is a “tragedy of the commons” problem, as well, whereby employers do not have to invest their own funds to enjoy the benefits of investments made by others. We generally see it as the duty of government to build schools, hire teachers, and provide access to education while businesses hire the best talent once it emerges. Where a business has engaged in “upstream” education, it has usually limited its involvement to short-term placements or CSR programs in the developing world.

But we can do better than simply throwing up our hands and leaving the hard investing to the public sector alone (an approach, by the way, that is costing governments $129 billion a year according to UNESCO).

But there is progress being made. For example, new instruments known as “Social Yield Notes” could allow the funding of development to move from a model of bilateral grants and aid to an equity framework, where the value of the equity is determined as a function of the delivery of social outcomes. A more detailed description of how a Social Yield Note could work, as well as broader discussion of what it will take to develop a new generation of talent, can be found in Investment in Global Education: A Strategic Business Imperative, a 2013 report compiled by Accenture Development Partnerships, the Center for Universal Education at Brookings, and Total Impact Advisors.) The broader point is that our finest financial minds are equal to this kind of investment challenge and could come up with increasingly sophisticated tools.

To be clear, this is not about privatizing state education systems. It is about mobilizing capital on a global scale to ensure that every child can have the right to a quality education. Delivered through education systems that are agnostic on the age-old debate of public vs private but with a singular focus on outcome and impact.

So what can the rest of us do to spur the development of better finance, and take investment and corporate involvement to the next level? At the very least, we should begin talking more about the investment opportunities presented by the education gap.

We can also point out how small changes can make very big differences. For example, when my colleagues and I looked at India, we noted that about two-thirds of children born there do not complete secondary education. But, according to the OECD, countries that are able to attain literacy scores even 1% higher than the international average will achieve 2.5% higher productivity rates and 1.5% higher GDP per capita than countries with average literacy scores. UNESCO research indicates that if only basic reading skills could be taught to the students in low-income countries, we would see 171 million people lifted out of poverty, which would constitute a 12% drop in the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day.

Finally, return on investment can be estimated and celebrated in various ways. Based on our data on Indian education costs, as well as revenues across industries, the case for private sector investment in education is strong. To take India as an example, as we do in our report, given an annual birth rate of 27 million, and a GDP per employed person of $8,939, it is simple math to calculate the “value gap” that results from that lack of access to quality education. It is over $100 billion (that’s over 5% of Indian GDP) each year. How many investment opportunities tap into such enormous potential value?

In conclusion: As some of us work on the kinds of financial instruments that will facilitate investment in global education, many more of us can work on shifting mind-sets. This is happening in many places, from Dubai to Davos (where it was discussed in several sessions this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum). Change is underway but we must speed things up. Our future progress depends on it.