Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1446

Mindfulness for People Who Are Too Busy to Meditate

Mindfulness has become almost a buzz-word. But what is it, really? Mindfulness is, quite simply, the skill of being present and aware, moment by moment, regardless of circumstances.

For instance, researchers have found that mindfulness can reprogram the brain to be more rational and less emotional. When faced with a decision, meditators showed increased activity in the posterior insula of the brain, which has been linked to rational decision making. This allowed them to make decisions based more on fact than emotion. This is good news since other research has found that reasoning is actually suffused with emotion. Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive and negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds. We push threatening information away and hold friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators but to data itself.

In order to reap the benefits of mindfulness, there are specific techniques that you can practice to improve your skills. You may have heard about a mindfulness-enhancing technique where you sit in stillness and practice meditating for a period of time before going about the rest of your day. This is definitely valuable. But I have a bias for being able to practice mindfulness all day, in every circumstance. In essence, you start living all of life mindfully and over time there is no distinction between your formal practice and making a presentation, negotiating a deal, driving your car, working out, or playing a round of golf.

Try a technique I call “micro meditations.” These are meditations that can be done several times a day for 1-3 minutes at a time. Periodically throughout the day, become aware of your breath. It could be when you feel yourself beginning to become stressed or overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time, or perhaps when you feel yourself becoming increasingly distracted and agitated.

In becoming aware of the breath, notice how you are breathing. Is it shallow or deep? Are you holding your breath and in so doing perhaps also holding your stomach? Or hunching your shoulders?

The next step is to start breathing so that you are bringing the breath into the belly. Do not strain. If it feels too unnatural to breathe into the belly, then perhaps bring the breath down to the lower chest. If the mind wanders, gently come back to the breath — without judging yourself for momentarily losing focus.

You will notice that by regularly practicing this micro-meditation you will become more aware and more calm. By practicing this regularly you will train yourself to be more and more mindful, and increasingly calm and focused. You can create reminders for yourself to practice these meditations two-to-four times a day; every hour or so; or before you go to a meeting — whatever is feasible. You can also use them on an ad-hoc basis to prepare for a meeting or a presentation, when you are stressed, or when multi-tasking is eroding your concentration.  Micro-meditations can put you back on track, an help you develop your mindfulness muscle.

A second technique I use is “mindfulness in action.” Instead of adding a new routine to your day, you just experience your day a little differently by paying attention in a particular way, for seconds at a time.

For instance, if you have ever found yourself in a meeting and suddenly noticed that you missed what was just said or that you were “somewhere else” for the last few minutes, chances are you stopped listening. You could have been thinking about your next meeting or everything on your to do list, or perhaps you just zoned out or were focused on an incoming text message. This is incredibly common. Unfortunately, it is the cause of huge misunderstandings, missed opportunities and wasted time.

When in a meeting, try, to the best of your ability, to only listen for seconds at a time. This is harder than it sounds, but with practice you will be able to do listen  continuously, without a break in concentration. Whenever you notice that your mind has wandered, come right back to listening to the voice that is speaking. You may have to come back dozens of times in a single meeting. That is extremely common; we don’t actually realize how often the mind wanders. Always bring yourself back gently and with patience. All you are doing is training the mind to be right here, right now.

These techniques quite literally train the mind and rewire the brain. And as a result, three critical things happen. First, your ability to concentrate increases. Second, you see things with increasing clarity, which improves your judgment. And third, you develop equanimity. Equanimity enables you to reduce your physiological and emotional stress and enhances the chances that you may find a creative solution.

Practicing mindfulness – and reaping its benefits – doesn’t need to be a large time commitment or require special training. You can start right now – this moment.

The Mortgage-Interest Deduction Mainly Helps the Rich Buy Bigger Homes

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

Go to Where the Actual Work Is Being Done

Do you often feel reactive instead of proactive? Do people complain that decisions at the top take too long to percolate down to the frontlines? If so, you probably manage your organization and your direct reports through weekly meetings and email. You should instead consider “leader standard work.”

Leader standard work is a term often used in lean manufacturing. However, it needn’t be confined to the factory floor — it’s equally valuable anywhere in the organization. In its simplest form, leader standard work is a regular cadence of activities and questions that bring leadership into physical contact with managers and frontline employees. It gets leaders out of their offices and onto the company floor where the actual work is being done.

Standard work isn’t just for people at lower levels of the organization, or people doing repetitive jobs. Leaders need similar standards as well. Without them, managerial time and attention are ineffectually fragmented among the dozens of pressing issues that crop up each day. Leaders also lose visibility into the overall health of the company (or a department). Their exposure and involvement consists of firefighting, not fire prevention. Moreover, employees and managers lose the vital, trust-building connection with leadership that helps sustain culture and habits through tough times.

At its most basic level, leader standard work involves:

Walking the floor of the company at regular and predictable times. The business of the company doesn’t occur in conference rooms; it occurs where employees are creating the products and services your company provides. It’s therefore necessary to “go and see” what’s happening with your own eyes. You should have a posted list of what areas of the organization you’re going to visit and when you’re going to do it. Depending on the time of year or a particular strategic objective you’re working on, you may visit some areas daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Irrespective of the cadence, it must be regular and predictable.

Conducting structured conversations. Visiting people on the frontlines is neither a social call nor an interrogation — and it’s certainly not a performance review. It consists of repeatedly asking a set of questions, such as:

         What’s the target you’re trying to achieve?
         How are you doing versus the goal?
         What problems have happened recently?
         How do you plan on solving those problems?
         How can I help?

These questions are particularly powerful when they go up and down the chain of command — when CEO ask VPs, VPs ask managers, and managers ask frontline staff in a tightly scheduled series of meetings.

Structured conversations keep leadership abreast of organizational performance in real-time. They highlight problems and enable leadership to deploy resources to solve them before they metastasize.

Using simple visible tools to guide the conversation and make abnormalities visible. White boards with post-it notes or note cards showing project status are perfect examples. Without these tools, leader standard work becomes a social event — conversations rapidly lose focus, and deteriorate into vague, general discussions about “how things are going.” Grounding the conversation in the bedrock of actual work and other relevant data keeps the focus on performance and aberrations. At CapitalOne, for example, one of the procurement teams uses a board that shows where purchase requests are in the queue, how long they’ve been in the system, who’s working on them, and what problems might be slowing the process down. When managers and executives meet with the team, they can see at a glance what’s happening, and can focus their conversation on the current conditions and improvements that need to be made.

Equally important is a visible management board for leadership that shows whether they’ve followed their own standards: did they visit all areas they were supposed to? Did they perform the checks they planned? Did they spot any problems they want to be sure they address on their next visit? At Group Health in Seattle, leaders have a highly visible system that shows everyone the visits executives are supposed to make each day and if they’ve done so. This system creates predictability and two-way accountability.

It’s tempting for leaders to complain, “My work life is utterly chaotic and unpredictable. There’s no way that I could set — or follow — this kind of schedule.” Remember, though, that standard work comprises only a small percentage of your day. And when done consistently, will reduce the amount of firefighting that you have to do. Modeling this kind of behavior is the most powerful way to embed it in your culture.

Don’t Compare Virtual Reality to the Smartphone

“Over the next 10 years, virtual reality will become ubiquitous, affordable, and transformative.”

This was the justification for Facebook’s massive purchase of Oculus, makers of the Rift virtual reality headset. While Facebook is still working diligently on mobile applications, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went so far as to hint that the acquisition places the company on the cutting edge for the next pervasive platform: virtual reality.

Unfortunately, Zuckerberg’s “platform” reference has elicited many comparisons of Oculus to Google’s purchase of Android, the company that would provide Google with its own smartphone operating system. While Virtual Reality may one day be pervasive, the disruption of VR is nothing like disruption of mobility. And the strategists everywhere, who invest corporate capital in acquisitions, would do well to know why.

Disruption is an explanation of how small nimble companies unseat industry giants – but it is simultaneously a story of market expansion and the provision of ever cheaper and more accessible goods and services. The theory of disruption explains why incumbent businesses – with high fixed cost infrastructures and embedded beliefs about what the market wants – fail to adopt business models that lower the cost of their services and drive product accessibility to entirely new sets of users. For instance, when Henry Ford disrupted the automotive world by building a company that used process assembly at scale to drive down cost, he abandoned the industry held belief that variety was important. Others, with expectations that people needed variety, refused to play Ford’s scale game (or failed trying). When Legalzoom decided to attack the overpriced industry of law, they used software systems to automate the provisioning of legal documents. The company offered far less variety than actual lawyers, but were able to drive prices to a point that more people could consume those services.

While the Rift may prove transformative to the gaming or entertainment industries, its reach is narrower than Android. Virtual reality is not a disruption to the computing market, instead it stands poised to disrupt content consumption. That stands in contrast with Android and mobility which, by its very nature, made computing cheaper and more accessible to people everywhere. Smartphones offered the opportunity to extend the same disruptions related to process automation and software aided intelligence that was brought on by the PC revolution to billions of computing endpoints around the world. Mobility offered a chance to recreate the entire information technology industry, an industry far more expansive than entertainment and media – an industry that is foundational to every company’s value chain across the globe.

Virtual reality is a way of experiencing the content within a computing platform. It’s a new type of user interface that immerses its user fully in a software environment. VR may require similar dedicated visual hardware, but it is not synonymous with augmented reality (e.g., Google Glass) which overlays digital information on the physical world around us. Augmented reality further extends the reaches of the internet, tagging physical objects with optical recognition. VR is insular. It relies on the computing power we already have to transport users to a digital world that is stored in the computing devices we already own. It doesn’t push the reach of the microprocessor.

Certainly, if Oculus is successful, Facebook could end up owning the VR platform that everyone loves. It could find itself offering the platform that makes the experience of courtside basketball, front row theater, and summiting Everest available to users who couldn’t have imagined consuming those experiences before. It has the potential to begin disrupting the travel and entertainment markets and become a pillar of the high-end gaming industry. Facebook could have a very lucrative investment in its hands.

But by its nature, Oculus depends upon the computing infrastructure that is already in the world. It is not a platform that makes the consumption of all types of information cheaper and more accessible. Its system is more expensive and higher performing than a smartphone. VR might very well become a major platform for consuming content, but until we all decide to plug into the Matrix, the disruption of VR can’t be equated to the disruption of mobile computing.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Under 30)

When I'm 34Silicon Valley's Brutal AgeismThe New Republic

Silicon Valley is perhaps today's most polarizing business locale and topic, in the media at least. Noam Scheiber's investigation into the tech community's bias against older entrepreneurs and programmers (older = over 30ish) only fuels the persistent accusations of sexism, racism, and an overall beer-drenched culture. To be sure, there's a lot to find disturbing: The story of a 40-something Boston entrepreneur with a great product and no funding; hiring processes that emphasize "culture" and thus weed out anyone who seems like a grown-up; and an almost absurd story of a busy San Francisco plastic surgeon who has seen an uptick in male clients. Scheiber points out that it doesn’t have to be this way — there are places where innovation doesn’t rely so heavily on the industry-disrupting bets that draw hordes of young people. Germany, for one — German innovation is more focused on incremental improvements.



Other takes on the topic include a piece by Jon Nathanson, who proposes that the real problem isn't profiling or the pattern of celebrating the Zuckerbergs of the world, but the lack of a reliable data set proving that people in their twenties are the only ones capable of building the next Facebook. Or there's Ann Friedman's response: "While I empathize, I found myself stifling a yawn as I read the Botoxed bros' tales of woe. I’ve heard all of these stories before. It’s just that the storytellers are usually women."

Talking About the FutureThe Surprising Link Between Language and Corporate Responsibility Working Knowledge

The way in which a company articulates its vision of the future is related to how socially responsible it is — but we’re not talking about lists of 10-year goals. Recent research by a group of business scholars, including Christopher Marquis of Harvard Business School, found that it's the construction of language that really matters. Building on a previous finding that speakers of languages (such as English) with strong future tenses focus less on the future (because, in part, it seems so far away), the group tested the corporate social responsibility performance of companies in countries with both strong and weak future tenses. Corporations in countries with strong-future-tense languages scored 26% lower on CSR values than those with weak-future languages. But don't fret, all you people who speak English or Spanish! If your company has branches around the world, it's less likely that your language will affect the firm’s CSR performance.

One-Sheet StrategyInside Airbnb's Grand Hotel PlansFast Company

Maybe I'm less plugged into the sharing economy than I should be (I've decided that a pink Lyft mustache would look positively hideous on my foreign subcompact), but I do sometimes wonder how the heck the big-name companies in this field plan to sustain themselves. I got a partial answer about Uber thanks to this helpful article last December, and now there's an in-depth management profile about vacation-rental business Airbnb. The company is betting not on expansion of its sharing capabilities — what would amount to a horizontal move — but on how it can transform the hospitality industry. CEO Brian Chesky is leaning on a cadre of top advisers, a legendary manager from the boutique-hotel business, and a mysterious one-page strategy document to execute on an all-too-familiar (and yet potentially attainable) goal: "Apple has a consistent UI on every phone, but the content is unique every single time," Chesky says. "That's what we want."

Give It UpHow to Become Productively Generous Psychology Today

Adam Grant of Wharton gives me something new to worry about: Am I "productively generous"? The term has such a nice ring to it that I shamelessly want it to apply to me, which probably means I’m automatically disqualified. People who are productively generous somehow manage to give to others without compromising their well-being or falling short on traditional measures of success. How do they do this? The trick is that they reject three common beliefs about giving: that it’s about being "nice," that it’s about being altruistic, and that it’s about refusing help from others. Thus they have the courage to give critical feedback that people don't always like to hear, they watch out for their own interests even when helping, and they accept aid when they need it. All of this enables them to make sure the assistance they provide is effective — that it truly matters to the people who are the object of their efforts. Productive generosity does wonders for the helper, Grant says, boosting his or her well-being by strengthening relationships and injecting meaning into the helper's life. —Andy O'Connell

Bridging the Gender GapHow One College Went from 10% Female Computer-Science Majors to 40%Quartz

Underrepresentation by women in tech fields is like the weather, as Mark Twain would say: Everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Now Harvey Mudd College is showing that something can in fact be done: Nearly a decade ago, the tech-focused California school hired a female computer scientist and mathematician, Maria Klawe, as president and began a concerted effort to increase the number of women majoring in computer science. The college did things like offering a summer of research between freshman and sophomore years so that students could put their knowledge to use. The result has been a quadrupling of female computer-science majors. The college also made a few strategic name changes, altering the title of one programming course to "Creative approaches to problem solving." —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITSHistory Lessons

The Cubicle Turns 50 (Men's Journal)
Going Viral in the Nineteenth Century (Lapham's Quarterly) The Fantastical Vision for the Original SeaWorld (The Atlantic)

Don’t Settle for Being an “-er Brand”

As a member of a start-up advisory program, I regularly hear pitches from aspiring technology entrepreneurs. My job is to sort out the companies with potential from those that need to go back to the drawing board. One way I do this is to use what I call the “-er brand” filter.

Er brands rely on other products or brands to explain their own. Hyundai is an -er brand. Its brand appeal is based on the assertion, “We’re just as good as Lexus but cheap-er.” Burger King is an –er brand, copying McDonald ’s smoothies and wraps with claims to be light-er and healthi-er. When Microsoft introduced Bing, its assertion of offering a fast-er search engine than Google sealed Bing’s fate as an Internet service step-child.

Red flags go up whenever I hear a pitch that explains how a new offering is just like another but is small-er, bigg-er, thinn-er, light-er, fast-er, sexi-er, whatev-er. Hearing “we’re just like X brand but we’re…” sets off warning signals about breakthrough ability and long-term viability.

An -er position is a dangerous one to adopt. It relegates your brand to subordinate status compared to the brand used as your reference point – and it tells customers that your brand possesses only comparative value, rather than having its own inherent value. It also puts your brand under constant pressure to introduce new products on Brand X’s time line, because now your brand value is tied to Brand X’s product. You have little basis for achieving meaningful and sustained differentiation.

Great brands never settle for being an -er brand. The brands that capture the imagination of customers and investors alike are those that have no reference point other than themselves. Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz says his venture company invests in companies that present a breakthrough idea. “By definition they are not obvious. In fact, they seem insane. If they didn’t seem insane at the time, they wouldn’t be breakthroughs.”

That sets the bar quite high, and I understand not every product can be truly new to the world. But even if an offering is somewhat derivative, the brand can – and must — be clearly different. You shouldn’t have to use an existing brand to explain yours. A well-conceived brand platform and positioning can relegate competitors to irrelevance.

There are several ways to position a brand as breakthrough. Instead of – or in addition to — differentiating on the what of your brand, use the why, who, and how.

1. Why — purpose and values. A distinctive mission and values can be a powerful – and inimitable — way to connect with people. Dove showed how to break through in a commoditized category like bath soap with a compelling purpose, to celebrate every woman’s unique and real beauty. In the tech space, Etsy became so popular so quickly not only because of its unique product selection but also because of its commitment to the humanity and authenticity of craft.

2. Who — target customers. Some brands distinguish themselves based on who they’re for – and in some cases, who they’re not for. In the height of the flash sale website craze, Zulily was started as a site for discriminating moms. By positioning the brand between value-oriented mass brands and exclusive boutiques, the company attracted the attention of a certain type of shopper — and its success (consistent double-digit growth and a $2.6 billion IPO valuation in 2013) can be attributed to its continued focus on that target.

3. How – personality. When a unique brand personality manifests itself in a unique customer experience, it enables a brand to rise above competitive comparison. Southwest Airlines exists in a class of its own in large part due to its fun personality. Harley-Davidson, Trader Joe’s, and The Honest Co. are other companies that have leveraged their personalities to become extraordinary brands. Using brand personality in this way is not simply about developing creative communications; it’s about infusing every aspect of your operations with your unique character.

Every company chooses whether it wants to be a great brand or an –er brand. Great brands don’t settle for riding someone else’s wave. They chart their own course and invite the world to navigate around them.

It’s Time for a New Discussion on “Women in Leadership”

The time has come to reframe the gender issue. The chancellor of Germany, the head of the IMF, and the chair of the US Federal Reserve are women. General Motors, IBM and Lockheed Martin are run by women. Sixty percent of the world’s university graduates are women, and women control the majority of consumer goods buying decisions. In the US, women under 30 out-earn their male peers and 40% of American households have women as the main breadwinner. In many companies and countries where I work, from Iran or Brazil to Russia, managers tell me that they recruit a majority of young women as they clearly outperform their male peers.

And yet women continue to be underrepresented in most businesses, especially at the senior levels. Given this split – women’s potential on the one hand, and their relative absence from the highest levels of business on the other – it is tempting to keep banging on about “fairness” and “equality” on the one hand, or to assume that surely the women who don’t make it to the top must be doing something wrong on the other.

In fact, it is time to shift the discussion away from a lingering women’s problem or an issue of equality and instead focus on this as a massive business opportunity. Instead of continuing to discuss the problem, we ought to present solutions: roadmaps to businesses that are better balanced, arguments that help companies and managers understand and benefit from shifting global gender balances. The shift is away from wondering what is wrong with women who don’t make it to the top, and towards analysing what is right with companies and leaders that do build gender balanced leadership teams – and tap into the resulting competitive edge.

Smart leaders have understood for a while now that gender balance delivers better and more sustainable performance. That companies with more gender-balanced leadership teams out-perform those with less. While the skeptics will spend another decade resisting this fact with demands to prove causality, the best leaders prefer leading the charge to following it. So it would now make sense to focus on the leadership competencies that enable certain leaders to build gender-balanced organizations. And to note those that don’t, and start calling them to account.

Building a gender-balanced organization takes skill, determination, and courage. It can be taught, encouraged, and rewarded. That’s what the best companies do. They put the focus and the accountability where change happens: on the front lines. As with other change management initiatives, the responsibility ultimately falls to leaders.

And yet today, many managers (both male and female) are totally uneducated in all things gender. Many business leaders around the world have no idea that women are now the majority of university graduates – from Sweden to Saudi Arabia. They aren’t aware of — or comfortable with — the differences between how men and women work. Executives have been raised to ignore gender differences (such as different communications styles or career cycles) rather than become skilled in managing them. For the same reason (“only competence counts” is the usual refrain), they aren’t used to thinking that balance itself may contribute to better performance, innovation and customer connections. So we must educate them. Stop creating internal, women-only networks — replace them with mixed-gender networks aimed at balancing management, rather than promoting women. Almost no one is against balancing, while many men and women alike are uncomfortable with targeted quotas for women. Men feel that they are deeply unfair, while women are insulted at the idea of being perceived as getting promotions only because of their gender.

I do think there is a role for advocates in this shift. External watchdog groups, focused on corporate performance and governance, can be powerful amplifiers of the kind of leadership that we are aiming for. They should be focused on measuring and celebrating what the best companies and CEOs do, and publicizing and shaming those that don’t deliver. They should be fun, relentless, and professional. They should also, I would argue, focus more on “balance” than on “women.” Include men who get it – and celebrate that fact. It’s time. Reframe, rebrand, and make leaders accountable for adapting to 21st century realities. That is the work that now lies ahead.

The world is living through one of its most historic and peaceful revolutions: the gradual rebalancing of the genders’ social, educational and economic power. We have never seen anything like it before – no wonder it has been a bit confusing. This rise, and its consequences, need to be better understood and managed by most businesses and managers. It has altered the life of every man, woman and child on the planet. It yields opportunities and competitive advantage to smart companies. Who would want to miss out on that?

 

The End of the Line for the Analog Phone Network

Right now, the FCC is working on the biggest transformation in over a century of profound technological progress in communications: shutting down the analog telephone network. It’s an end-game everyone needs to keep a close eye on. Whenever a major technology, especially one with a long history of regulation, approaches the end of its life, industry laggards are sure to resurface, eager to gum up the works with lawmakers.

Few would contest that the analog network, and the rules for regulating it, are obsolete. When the commercial Internet was launched, we discovered a network that proved flexible enough to handle not only data traffic but voice and video, too. Over the last twenty years, once-proprietary and technology-specific services have been migrating to the Internet in the form of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and digital television. These new services, offered interchangeably over copper, fiber, cable, satellite, and cellular networks, are both better and cheaper than the traditional analog offerings of the incumbent providers and their aging equipment.

As a result, both traditional circuit-switched telephone companies and over-the-air television broadcasters have seen their value propositions deteriorate, in Hemingway’s great phrase, gradually, then suddenly. It’s a perfect example of the phenomenon that Paul Nunes and I refer to as Big Bang Disruption.

Perhaps as few as 20% of U.S. homes still have a landline telephone connection. Half that many rely on over-the-air antenna television for video content. Until the Internet, both technologies boasted nearly 100% penetration. Such is the nature of disruptive innovation, whose impact across industries continues to accelerate thanks to exponential improvements in digital and other core technologies. Even in those sectors of the economy that have been the most stable for decades, we are now seeing fundamental business and technical assumptions become obsolete in just a few years.

When disruption is underway, it’s possible for incumbent firms to survive and even thrive. But only if they can adapt—and quickly. To their credit, the former giants of the telephone business saw the threats closing fast in their rearview mirrors and invested billions to accelerate into the future. Verizon, AT&T, and others have deployed some of the best mobile broadband networks in the world, and have built out much of a replacement all-digital network for wired services, getting into the video business (FiOS and U-Verse, respectively) in the process. It’s a whole new world of competition, giving consumers more choices and options all the time.

To complete the revolution in IP voice, however, we still need to untangle the remnants of profoundly complicated regulatory machinery that for decades carefully controlled the Bell System at the federal and state levels.

When local and long distance telephone service operated as a regulated monopoly, for example, it was up to the government to set prices, approve the introduction of new services, ensure interchange, and subsidize access for high-cost rural and low-income consumers. Some, but not all, of that regulation was retired with the breakup of the monopoly. Now it’s time for the law to play serious catch-up with a market that has continued moving quickly in unexpected directions.

Earlier this year, the Federal Communications Commission took a first but critical step toward retiring both the analog network and the obsolete rules for overseeing it. At the request of some of the remaining wireline companies, the FCC has invited carriers to submit proposals for technical and service experiments that will test how the retirement of the analog network can be completed as quickly as possible, without imposing undue cost on those who still rely on it.

In late February, AT&T proposed the first two trials, which if approved will take place in West Delray Beach, FL and Carbon Hill, AL. These will be voluntary, multi-year experiments, with existing customers able to switch to IP networks and report their experiences to both AT&T and the FCC. According to company releases, these communities were chosen to maximize a diverse range of factors that need to be tested — including size, density, and location.

Conducting limited and carefully managed trials will unearth the remaining engineering and policy obstacles to a smooth transition. We already know, for example, that there are a wide range of technologies attached to the phone network that were built for analog communications — older fax machines, security gate codes, credit card readers and the like. These must be cataloged, and then adapted or retired. Emergency services and other public safety systems, of course, must also be tested to ensure they function as well if not better on the all-IP network.

And remaining analog customers — many of them older, or living in remote areas of the country — need to be eased into digital voice services, preserving Congress’s long-standing commitment to ensure Universal Service at an affordable price, including subsidizing those who can’t afford basic connections. (The Universal Service Fund, which is paid for by all consumers in fees attached to their phone bills, is already in the process of being reconfigured to deal with the digital reality.)

Time is of the essence. The cost of maintaining the legacy network for a rapidly-dwindling number of customers is approaching as much as 50% of the carriers’ total expenses, a waste of capital and a diversion of money that would in every sense be better spent on the new wired and wireless digital infrastructure that consumers can’t get enough of. We need to figure out quickly the optimal path to the overdue end-of-life for our venerable phone system.

Last fall, I testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on the risks of moving too slowly in completing the transition. (For details about the hearing, see “The State of Wireline Communications.”) Not surprisingly, special interests are popping up, hoping to complicate the process in the interest of preserving a favored position under old laws. In my testimony, I urged Congress and the FCC to set a firm date for the transition, and to avoid being distracted by parochial interests disguised as consumer protections.

Subsidized local and rural carriers, for example, are in no hurry to see the old network go away. And public interest groups who don’t understand the engineering genius of IP networks are urging lawmakers to transplant the Frankenstein rules of analog network interconnection to the Internet’s elegant peering architecture, where agreements are so simple that nearly all of them are done on a handshake — not a morass of government filings and approved tariff schedules.

State and federal regulators are themselves challenged by the communications industry’s Big Bang moment. With literally hundreds of VoIP providers worldwide (many of them offering free digital voice connections), the need for close scrutiny of industry participants is greatly diminished. VoIP services are almost entirely unregulated, yet the result of that freedom has been not a diminution of consumer protections but rather its exact opposite. Regulators, too, must find a more appropriate role for themselves in the all-IP future, more as cheerleaders for market competition than as substitutes for it.

The FCC is now moving in the right direction, balancing a wide range of business, policy, and consumer interests. Let’s hope it does not succumb to the wishes of the foot-draggers, and their all-too-familiar kinds of pleas to slow the pace of progress.

Your Belief That the World Is “Just” Can Make You Cruel

People’s wish to see the world as just and orderly sometimes leads them to harm those who have already suffered injustice, according to Daniel P. Skarlicki and R. Anthony Turner of the University of British Columbia. In an experiment, managers with self-reported hiring experience provided lower ratings for fictitious job applicants whose only difference was that they had been mistreated by their former employers, such as by being laid off without notice. People derogate victims in this way to avoid the cognitive dissonance that comes from trying to understand how individuals can suffer injustice in a just world, the researchers say.

“Government Entrepreneur” is Not an Oxymoron

Entrepreneurship almost always involves pushing against the status quo to capture opportunities and create value. So it shouldn’t be surprising when a new business model, such as ridesharing, disrupts existing systems and causes friction between entrepreneurs and local government officials, right?

But imagine if the road that led to the Seattle City Council ridesharing hearings this month — with rulings that sharply curtail UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar’s operations there — had been a vastly different one.  Imagine that public leaders had conceived and built a platform to provide this new, shared model of transit.  Or at the very least, that instead of having a revolution of the current transit regime done to Seattle public leaders, it was done with them.  Amidst the acrimony, it seems hard to imagine that public leaders could envision and operate such a platform, or that private innovators could work with them more collaboratively on it — but it’s not impossible. What would it take? Answer: more public entrepreneurs.

The idea of ”public entrepreneurship” may sound to you like it belongs on a list of oxymorons right alongside “government intelligence.” But it doesn’t.  Public entrepreneurs around the world are improving our lives, inventing entirely new ways to serve the public.   They are using sensors to detect potholes; word pedometers to help students learn; harnessing behavioral economics to encourage organ donation; crowdsourcing patent review; and transforming Medellin, Colombia with cable cars. They are coding in civic hackathons and competing in the Bloomberg challenge.  They are partnering with an Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston or in Philadelphia, co-developing products in San Francisco’s Entrepreneurship-in-Residence program, or deploying some of the more than $430 million invested into civic-tech in the last two years.

There is, however, a big problem with public entrepreneurs: there just aren’t enough of them.  Without more public entrepreneurship, it’s hard to imagine meeting our public challenges or making the most of private innovation. One might argue that bungled healthcare website roll-outs or internet spying are evidence of too much activity on the part of public leaders, but I would argue that what they really show is too little entrepreneurial skill and judgment.

The solution to creating more public entrepreneurs is straightforward: train them. But, by and large, we don’t.  Consider Howard Stevenson’s definition of entrepreneurship: “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” We could teach that approach to people heading towards the public sector. But now consider the following list of terms: “acknowledgement of multiple constituencies,” “risk reduction,” “formal planning,” “coordination,” “efficiency measures,” “clearly defined responsibility,” and “organizational culture.” It reads like a list of the kinds of concepts we would want a new public official to know; like it might be drawn from an interview evaluation form or graduate school syllabus.  In fact, it’s from Stevenson’s list of pressures that pull managers away from entrepreneurship and towards administration.  Of course, that’s not all bad. We must have more great public administrators.  But with all our challenges and amidst all the dynamism, we are going to need more than analysts and strategists in the public sector, we need inventors and builders, too.

Public entrepreneurship is not simply innovation in the public sector (though it makes use of innovation), and it’s not just policy reform (though it can help drive reform).  Public entrepreneurs build something from nothing with resources — be they financial capital or human talent or new rules — they didn’t command. In Boston, I worked with many amazing public managers and a handful of outstanding public entrepreneurs.  Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob brought the country’s first major-city mobile 311 app to life, and they are public entrepreneurs.   They created Citizens Connect in 2009 by bringing together iPhones on loan together with a local coder and the most under-tapped resource in the public sector: the public.  They transformed the way basic neighborhood issues are reported and responded to (20% of all constituent cases in Boston are reported over smartphones now), and their model is now accessible to 40 towns in Massachusetts and cities across the country.  The Mayor’s team in Boston that started-up the One Fund in the days after the Marathon bombings were public entrepreneurs.  We built the organization from PayPal and a Post Office Box, and it went on to channel $61 million from donors to victims and survivors in just 75 days. It still operates today.

Public entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship. It’s the pursuit by public officials and their collaborators of opportunity without regard to resources controlled.  First year students at Harvard Business School are taught that entrepreneurs face substantial risk in pursuing a new opportunity and a basic Catch-22 that comes with it: that it’s difficult to reduce risk without resources and difficult to attract resources while risk is high. Public entrepreneurs face the same predicament.  The course teaches four tactics to cope with the challenge: lean experimentation, scaling, partnering, and storytelling.  We can create public entrepreneurs by teaching these skills, more often and jointly, to future public leaders and their partners. And we can teach them well if we recognize that public entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship, but that it also takes place in a different context and requires nuanced application of these tactics.

Lean experimentation and tests with something less than the final product can seem scary in the public sector, but special opportunities exist, too; public press and community engagement can sometimes serve as “smoke tests,” and even public betas can work well if they are managed right.
Scaling too fast — especially by adding too many personnel and too much hierarchy — can be a particular pressure for public sector officials who are accustomed to working in big institutions; scaling too slow can mean too little growth/commitment when political leadership changes over.
Partnering is de rigueur in the public sector today, but the officials must keep the power dynamic in mind and keep the “public” in the public entrepreneur; questions of profit and intellectual property are especially complex and dynamic. And where is the line between “partnering” with the public and outsourcing work to them that they likely expected government to do? The public entrepreneur needs to understand how the tools she uses — incentives, rewards, etc. — can change the feeling and ultimately the value of their partnership with the public.
Storytelling is an essential leadership tool and, if anything, this applies even more to public leaders, in whom press and public interest are especially acute.  How does the public entrepreneur effectively leverage the pressure to “announce stuff” in ways that will provide incentives to run lean (as a cash flow curve would for private entrepreneurs) without foreclosing pivots and changes?

If we start with the basics of entrepreneurship, then consider the special context and dynamics of the public sector and closely examine the decisions and actions of public entrepreneurs, we can learn what makes great public entrepreneurship, and we can generate more of it.

It’s worth noting that public entrepreneurship, perhaps newly buzzworthy, is not actually new. Elinor Ostrom (44 years before her Nobel Prize) observed public entrepreneurs inventing new models in the 1960s. Back when Ronald Reagan was president, Peter Drucker wrote that it was entrepreneurship that would keep public service “flexible and self-renewing.” And almost two decades have passed since David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s “Reinventing Government” (the then handbook for public officials) carried the promising subtitle: “How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector”.  Public entrepreneurship, though not nearly as widespread as its private complement, or perhaps as fashionable as its “social” counterpart (focussed on non-profits and their ecosystem), has been around for a while and so have those who practiced it.

But still today, we mostly train future public leaders to be public administrators. We school them in performance management and leave them too inclined to run from risk instead of managing it. And we communicate often, explicitly or not, to private entrepreneurs that government officials are failures and dinosaurs.  It’s easy to see how that road led to Seattle this month, but hard see how it empowers public officials to take on the enormous challenges that still lie ahead of us, or how it enables the public to help them.