Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1446

How to Improve Yelp’s Top 100 Restaurant Rankings

Last month Yelp unveiled its list of its Top 100 Places to Eat in the U.S., and an unlikely restaurant claimed the top spot: Da Poke Shack, a local Hawaiian Ahi Poke place with average prices under $10. Alinea, perhaps the flagship haute cuisine restaurant in Chicago with a much higher price tag, was ranked #7.

The rankings caused a debate between the two of us: Could this list possibly be right?

As it happens, one of us (Eddie) was born and raised in Hawaii, and he’d just eaten at Da Poke Shack last summer. He agrees with the ranking.

But we both live in Chicago, and the other of us (Jim) insists the data is overwhelmingly in favor of Alinea, a Michelin three-star restaurant with widespread critical acclaim.

The reality is that context is king. Different consumers, seeking different benefits, for different need states rated Da Poke Shack and Alinea very high. And for the distinct jobs those restaurants were hired for, Da Poke Shack did a wee bit better. The missing ingredients to make online reviews really relevant is not more algorithms and super computers, but adding anthropology and Super Consumers.

Yelp is a go to app many people, but we want sortable online reviews by consumer context. Trip Advisor does this nicely with their hotel filters by business vs. leisure vs. family. For e-commerce, we wish we could sort reviews by Super Consumers—high passion and high profit consumers. Wouldn’t you weigh the reviews of someone who read 200 books last year higher than someone who read 2? For Chinese restaurant reviews, wouldn’t you want to see the reviews by folks who grew up with authentic Chinese food vs. folks who like the Americanized version?

The issue with online reviews is a broader one, as many companies have an approach to growth and innovation that is technology for technology sake, with little regard to the consumer context or emerging or latent demand. And the risk in missing the consumer context is huge. In mobile phones, was the right consumer context making calls from Antarctica or being able to play Angry Birds? The difference was losing billions with Iridium versus making hundreds of billions with the iPhone. Who would have guessed that one of the most successful commercial applications of nanotechnology would be wrinkle-free, stain-resistant khakis? Part of the initial success of energy drinks was the consumer context in bars and mixed drinks. Olestra was not successful as it anchored itself in snack foods, where consuming too much Olestra had some unpleasant side effects.

There are a few ways to fix this. First, you have to acknowledge the importance of the consumer context and start a dialogue with Super Consumers to understand it. Second, capture better consumer context data with the reviews themselves. You can do it prospectively with new reviews by allowing consumers to add context when writing reviews. You can do it retroactively by using key word search for distinct benefits (e.g., great price, awesome selection, delicious and tasty, healthy and fresh) in past reviews to identify what benefits matter. You can also fuse review data with big data on consumer spending from sources like the Nielsen Homescan panel or Prizm. Finally, create sortable tools to allow consumers to pick the reviews that are most helpful to them (e.g., Supers vs. Casual users, filtering for folks who rated the same two brands for the best heads up comparison). Those who get this right will ultimately change traffic to review sites, as precision will become more important than scale.

Our belief is that empathy and emotion found in the right consumer context is perhaps the single biggest under-utilized lever for success in Silicon Valley. We hope more companies will embrace consumer context, as we are eagerly awaiting online reviews 2.0.

But until then, we have proof that that an $8 Ahi meal outdid Alinea, that a fresh fish rice bowl surpassed French Laundry and Poke trumps Per Se.

The Future of Prototyping Is Now Live

Those tasked with developing new products and experiences have long valued prototyping as a way to fuel creativity, explore options, and test assumptions. By making concepts real, we can more intimately understand the underlying mechanics and make informed judgments. There are two main ways that organizations prototype new products and services: rapid prototyping and piloting. However, we’ve discovered the need for an approach that falls somewhere between the two—to explore the customer value proposition and market appeal of a concept in the more turbulent and distracting context of the live market, but without full investment in a pilot. We call this approach “live prototyping.”

To better understand the value of live prototyping, it’s helpful to put it in the context of the two dominant types of prototyping. Rapid prototyping aims for quantity over quality. Dozens of sketches, wireframes, enacted service scenarios, and Play-Doh models are created quickly to get a feel for ideas. On the other end of the spectrum are pilots and technical prototypes, which generally aim to get as close to the “right” answer as possible and therefore cut few corners in delivering on the full experience. Pilots are used to prove economic viability, while technical prototypes are sometimes built to prove technical feasibility and to evaluate the merits of different technical approaches. They require a high degree of investment and are expected to be very close to the final version, because they’re generally precursors to launching at scale.

Live prototyping replaces techniques like surveys, bases testing, and focus groups. It involves releasing still-rough concepts into the context where consumers would eventually encounter them during the course of their daily routines—for example, on a store shelf, at a hotel check-in counter, or in an app store—with all the associated distractions and competing choices. Like all good market research, live prototyping is ideally both qualitative and quantitative in nature. We start by observing behavior naturally unfold before conducting intercepts and interviews with consumers to probe deeper. We also make sure to have enough consumer engagement to observe quantitative patterns with pre-selected metrics.

The table below explains where live prototyping lies within the process of bringing an idea to market.

We’ve used live prototyping in a variety of contexts and industries. We’ve used it to explore new brands for major food and beverage companies and start-ups like Koudai, an internet retailer in China; to gauge customer interest in workplace solutions for Steelcase; to test the waters for enterprise software packages for Salesforce; and even to explore ways to engage the live crowds at the “TODAY” show.

Of course, live prototyping has advantages ­and disadvantages, which you should understand before you add it to your product-development toolkit. Among its advantages, live prototyping:

Conserves capital: By “cutting corners” relative to a full pilot, we can evaluate market appeal without the capital investment that a pilot requires. Usually, we can do several iterations of live prototyping for the price of a single pilot.
Considers context: Since live prototyping occurs in context, it helps generate an understanding of how environmental and situational factors affect the appeal or visibility of a solution. In this way, live prototyping allows us to observe what people do, not just what they say they’ll do.
Improves forecasting: Forecasting sales for new-to-the-world solutions is exceedingly difficult and predicting consumer uptake is often the most arbitrary part of the exercise. Seeing a solution succeed next to the competition, before it is formally launched can make forecasting much less of a guessing game.
Provides qualitative and quantitative feedback: Live prototyping allows us to capture many different types of feedback, including consumer behavior data, rich qualitative observations and insights from consumer interviews, which help us unpack choices and behavior. Taken in aggregate, this basket of feedback allows us to better iterate our solutions.

Live prototyping has three main areas of disadvantage:

Longitudinal feedback: Since live prototyping usually addresses the resonance of a value proposition in context, we generally invest more on the fidelity of initial packaging and associated marketing materials, and less on the features that deliver value over time. Hence, it is usually more difficult to use live prototyping to evaluate retention and engagement over time. While we have done this in the past, the effort to do so gets close to that of a pilot, and so the speed benefits of live prototyping are not as easily realized.
Exploring broad options: Since it takes significant effort to build a channel-specific solution during live prototyping—arranging testing locations, building displays, for example—it can be challenging to explore a diverse set of concepts. For example, live prototyping can work well to test a number of different food brand options, even across different retailers, but if some concepts require completely different channels, for example vending machines, then the process becomes unwieldy.
Cultural norms: While American consumers have shown a hunger to co-create solutions with companies and tend to celebrate brands that embrace experimentation and that are “always in beta”, this is not always true in global markets. It’s important to calibrate what degree of “roughness” is going to be acceptable based on the market in which you’re operating.

Consistently using live prototyping as part of a product-development process helps negate risks associated with the messiness and unpredictability of the market. For example, it reduces the chances of getting blindsided because people behave differently than they stated they would in a survey, or that a product that popped in a focus group gets lost in the retail environment, or that a new value proposition was just a bit too complex for consumers to learn about on a busy shopping trip. Ultimately, by testing more ideas in market, with lower investment, and only piloting the most promising ideas, a company can radically improve its return on invested capital for new products and experiences.

Can Design Save Silicon Valley?

The tech titans of Silicon Valley are actively circling the strategic value of design. I didn’t take their interest seriously until I saw the news in December that John Maeda, the former President of the Rhode Island School of Design, joined venerable VC firm Kleiner Perkins. He’s the Valley’s first-ever Design Partner.  That’s a serious step into the mover-shaker circle for the design profession.

The reasons for an investor focus on design are not all that hard to understand. “Great design” has helped drive Apple’s valuation to $475 billion, while AirBnB, Square and Pinterest all demonstrate how superb user experience design attracts both rabid fans and VC investment (over $1 billion between them, to date). Last, but far from least, is Google’s $3.2 Billion acquisition of the design-centric Nest, maker of a smart thermostat.

Appreciation for design in the tech world didn’t come overnight; it has been on the rise for some time. As the first industrial designer to graduate from Harvard Business School, I thought design had hit the big time a few years ago, when the students at my alma mater created a Design club. By contrast, when I was an MBA there our case studies (and those at every b-school) presented new products as originating from some kind of immaculate conception. Design was not an actor in the business dramas we studied. The school’s appreciation for design’s strategic importance has come a long, long way since those days.

But when I hit the road in 2008 raising capital for our fairly design-centric venture, The Grommet, I noticed that no investor ever remarked on my industrial design credentials. Venture capitalists were far more accustomed to the expertise of a software developer or even a mechanical engineer than to a person who could create the overarching user experience. This lack of familiarity with design was bizarre, but also deeply familiar to me. When I first told my own father the name of my college major, he thought that industrial design meant creating factories.

While I long ago stopped worrying about when design would be invited to sit at the grownups’ table, I couldn’t help but be excited by the news that Maeda was joining Kleiner Perkins. He has blogged about his early observations at Kleiner, arguing for design’s potential in the tech world:

The marginal excitement generated by more memory or faster processor speeds has lost its allure in recent years because there’s generally enough computing horsepower to do everything we might want to do. So we don’t yearn for the bigger, brighter or even cheaper as much anymore. We now choose based upon design – the answer to “how it feels” versus “how fast it is.”

I reached out to Maeda to ask about how he was finding the position, and he responded that in week four on the job he had given an hour-long presentation on design and tech to all of Kleiner’s partners. “Given the strong, positive response after my presentation, it’s clear that there’s a there-there,” he wrote.

I’m sure I speak for design-oriented entrepreneurs everywhere when I say that it’s about time.

In Search of a Less Sexist Hiring Process

The hard truth is that the gender balance at the top of the business world won’t change until the gentlemen currently in power want it to — and learn how to do it. The challenge is that both men and women seem to buy into the mistaken notion that business today is built on meritocracy.  A recent study by three business school professors illustrates why this is so rarely true.

Several managers were asked to recruit people to run some mathematical tasks. The talent offered to them was an equal mix of men and women, with equivalent skills. The researchers found four things that exactly echo what I have seen in countless companies:

• Male and female managers were twice as likely to recruit men, based on paper applications.

• When interviewed, the male candidates inflated their abilities while the women downplayed theirs. But recruiting managers failed to compensate for that difference, and were still twice as likely to choose the man.

• Even when provided with data that the women were just as capable, the managers still preferred men (who were 1.5 times as likely to be hired).

• When managers knowingly chose a candidate who had performed worse on the test, they were two-thirds more likely to choose a male candidate.

Until hiring and promotion practices change, women can “lean in” all they like, graduate in record numbers from top universities, and dominate buying decisions — but they still are much less likely to make it to the top. The corporate world is led by men confident that they are identifying talent objectively and effectively. The reality, underlined by this and many other reports, is that decision-making about talent is rife with unconscious assumptions and personal biases.

Leaders are routinely identified based on perceived ambition, self-confidence and charisma. Yet they are doing little more than self-replicating a masculine, Anglo-Saxon management style that may have outlived its utility in today’s highly complex, global and multi-cultural business world.  Consider: Ambition is usually laced with hubris (hasn’t the financial crisis taught us this?). Self-confidence is a poor proxy for competence. And charisma is often a polite way of saying “loud” and “dominant” – something many of our Asian colleagues are happy to quietly point out.

In Western companies, a preference for a masculine style of leadership is deeply ingrained, largely unconscious and reliably self-reinforcing. The only hope of overcoming anything unconscious is to make it conscious. So self-awareness and understanding is the key challenge for any organization that really wants to change its very human and natural preference to reproduce itself in its own image. This is just as true for shifting away from the dominance of any group in power – whether it’s all men, all engineers or all people born in the home country of your corporate headquarters.

This kind of change takes leadership, and lots of it. This requires a number of steps, mostly to do with getting the majority in power to be responsible and accountable for leading the change. They are the only ones that can do it. Expecting women to be responsible for gender balancing organizations — either by setting up a corporate “women’s network” or asking them to try harder — is a set-up-to-fail design error. Instead, corporations need to take several steps to redesign how they’re hiring and promoting talent. I discuss this in detail in my latest book, Seven Steps to Leading a Gender Balanced Business, but here is the short version of the steps that apply to hiring:

• Reframe the issue so that it is seen as a business issue and not a women’s issue. If managers are choosing less qualified men over more qualified women, the company is clearly losing valuable talent. Even if hiring managers are choosing equally qualified men, if they’re doing it in dramatically greater numbers (as the study above shows they do), the company is still missing an opportunity to build the kind of balanced workforce that we know produces more creative results.

• Build the skills of the majority, rather than the minority. Most companies spend more effort “fixing” women than on educating managers. You can expect all your women to suddenly change their behavior and start over-selling their skills, as the men in the study above did — but frankly, do you really want them to? Research also shows that when they do, they are judged negatively for it. Instead, get leaders to understand their own unconscious preferences in gender issues and learn how to achieve the balance they say they want. Educate all managers – both male and female – using studies like this one to make sure they understand well-researched behavioral differences between genders and can manage effectively across them.

• Get hiring systems to match. The biases shown in the above study are also at work within many systemic HR processes. For instance, it’s common practice in large companies to have “ambition” be an explicit criteria for leadership. Many studies have shown that men tend to over-promote themselves and women tend to do the contrary. So leadership selection and assessment panels (that are often neither gender balanced nor gender aware) naturally give preference to the classic existing profile, convinced that they are objectively evaluating the “best.” This does not make room to develop the majority of today’s talent for tomorrow’s world. Nor allow a variety of leadership styles to co-exist.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the same result. Companies that continue to use biased talent management systems — unwittingly or not — will continue to get exactly the same results. Equally competent women will learn from the system that others are considered better – and believe it.  “People don’t even learn that they are equally capable,” as one of the study’s coauthors, Luigi Zingales of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times. Research pointing to women’s supposed “lack of self-confidence” overlooks this point: Men and women are born with similar ambitions, talents and ideas. Then we teach them bias.

Companies get the women – and leaders – they design. Ignoring our biases simply lets the dominant group continue to dominate. The only way out is embracing our unconscious judgements. Learn to lead, and don’t let your bias get the better of your talent.

Give Impact Investing Time and Space to Develop

Impact investing has captured the world’s imagination. Just six years after the Rockefeller Foundation coined the term, the sector is booming. An estimated 250 funds are actively raising capital in a market that the Global Impact Investing Network estimates at $25 billion. Giving Pledge members described impact investing as the “hottest topic” at their May 2012 meeting, and Prime Minister David Cameron extolled the potential of the sector at the most recent G8 summit.  Sir Ronald Cohen and HBS Professor William A. Sahlman describe impact investing as the new venture capital, implying that it will, in the next 5 to 10 years, make its way into mainstream financial portfolios, unlocking billions or trillions of dollars in new capital.

As this sector moves from the margins to the mainstream, it’s important to consider: What will it take for impact investing to reach its full potential?  This question is hard to answer because, in the midst of all of this excitement, there aren’t clear success markers for the sector.  Without those, the institutions managing the billions of sector dollars won’t be able accurately to assess the risks they are taking and, more important, the returns, both financial and social, they hope to generate.

Impact investing is not just a new, undiscovered corner of the investing world. It has the potential to join traditional investing and government aid and philanthropy as a third way to deploy capital to address social and environmental issues. A fully developed impact investing sector will incorporate the best features of markets—rigor and speed; quickly evolving business models; strong revenue models; and access to capital as ventures show signs of success—with the best features of government aid and philanthropy—serving unmet needs; reaching populations that are bypassed or exploited by the markets; investing in goods with positive externalities; and leveraging public subsidy to extend the reach of an intervention—to solve social problems.

Because impact investing really is something new, the old ways of assessing risk and return are not enough.  And yet, like a moth to a flame, those in the sector are endlessly drawn to discussions around what constitutes the “right” level of expected financial returns.  There is no single right answer to this question.  Under the broad umbrella of impact investments lie myriad sectors, asset types, and investment products, most of which still need to be developed and understood.  It looks something like this:

Impact Investing in 2014 : Colorful, full of potential, and highly disorganized

Note: Each circle represents a business and each color represents a business vertical (e.g. sanitation, housing, mobile banking).

To make sense of this kaleidoscope, three things need to happen.

First, impact investing needs time to develop. This is a nascent sector where entrepreneurs and investors are still figuring out business models, developing new financial products, and proving exit strategies and exit multiples, and only a handful of players are using agreed-upon metrics for assessing social impact.  Whether it’s solar lighting, mobile authentication, micro-insurance, mobile banking, drinking water, urban sanitation, low-income housing or primary health care, entrepreneurs need time to test, modify, and refine business models.  These entrepreneurs are looking for support from risk-seeking investors who have an appetite for failure, are willing to be pioneers, and who value the social returns they’re creating.

As the sector grows through this period of creative destruction, models that don’t work will die out, models that survive will attract copycats, operating costs will go down, and winners will rise to the top.  The sector will organize itself across the spectrum from philanthropy to investing, and the resulting clusters will demonstrate the differences in risk, financial returns, target customer, and social impact across the various sub-sectors of impact investing.

Impact Investing in the Future: Developed clusters across the spectrum

Second, in addition to time, the sector needs a framework to measure success, one that makes sense of the sector’s inherent diversity.  Akin to the Morningstar Style Box, such a framework would allow an investor to easily identify best-in-class social and financial performance across and within the various sub-sectors of impact investing.

Third, the sector needs practical, widely-adopted, and standardized tools to measure social impact.  This is easier to describe than it is to do.  Although investors value both financial and social return today, the sector only measures financial return well. The big, unspoken risk is that we’ll end up ranking and sorting impact funds by the only thing they can be ranked and sorted by – money – without assessing or valuing the different levels of social impact these funds have.

The future of impact investing depends on our ability to embrace what we’ve learned over the course of economic history: solving social issues requires both private and public capital, a combination of risk-seeking investors and incentives and subsidies from public actors to make it easier and more attractive to reach underserved segments of the population.  Hospitals, parks, educational systems, sanitation infrastructure, low-income housing — globally, risk-seeking investors build these solutions in partnership with the public sector, which plays its part to adjust incentives, act as a major customer, and provide subsidy where needed.

What the sector needs is enthusiasm about the future and patience around the time it will take to get there.  In traditional investing there is a premium on liquidity, low beta, and lower risk, all of which justify higher or lower returns. In impact investing, we need to find a way to place that same premium on social impact by valuing the public good being created – just like we do in early stage R&D in science, IT, health, and biotechnology. We allowed microfinance and the venture capital industry the time and space to develop over a few decades. Surely we can do the same for impact investing.

A Presentation Isn’t Always the Right Way to Communicate

We rarely think about whether presentations are the best way to express our ideas; we just blindly create and deliver them. By some estimates, 350 presentations, on average, are delivered every second of every day.

Unfortunately, presentations can’t be the Swiss Army knife of communication. Though they’re one of the most powerful tools we have for moving an audience, even the most carefully crafted talks won’t be effective if they’re not delivered in the right context. Sometimes, a conversation is much more appropriate and effective.

How do you know when that’s the case? Ask yourself what you want to get out of the time you have with the group. Do you need to simultaneously inform, entertain, and persuade your audience to adopt a line of thinking or to take action? Or do you need to gather more information, have a discussion, or drive the group toward consensus to get to your desired next step? Generally, if your idea would be best served by more interaction with your audience, you should probably have a conversation instead of delivering a presentation.

The best conversations will happen when you’ve briefed everyone ahead of time on the information you’re going to discuss. (Otherwise, you waste valuable meeting time playing catch-up instead of working toward your goal.) To get everyone up to speed, create a visual document in presentation software — what I call a slidedoc – and circulate it before the meeting.

Of course, it’s common practice to circulate decks of slides before meetings, but often they’re too opaque to be understood without guidance from a presenter — or they’re so packed with “teleprompter” text that people have a hard time digesting them. Asking everyone to decode your cryptic bullets or plow through a lot of verbiage before you meet is setting yourself up for disappointment. Nobody has the time, and your ideas could get lost in translation. So give people a document that’s meant to be read, not presented. One they’ll grasp quickly and easily on their own.

You can create a slidedoc by re-chunking your message into key points and illustrating them with pictures or diagrams, along these lines:

Studies show that this combination — concise text paired with visuals — helps people understand and retain concepts more easily. As clinical psychologist and author Haig Kouyoumdjian points out, “Our brain is mainly an image processor (much of our sensory cortex is devoted to vision), not a word processor. In fact, the part of the brain used to process words is quite small in comparison to the part that processes visual images.” So, pare down the wording, but leave enough context to allow your deck to live on its own without your voiceover.

Slidedocs can serve not only as prereading for conversations but also as emissaries and follow-up material. For example, when people in positions of influence say, “Send me your slides,” before they’ll book a meeting with you, you can e-mail them a slidedoc with all the relevant information. Slidedocs can also outline what people can do to give your idea traction after you’ve sold them on its value in a presentation.

But why use presentation software for these types of communication? Because it allows you to create modular content that’s easy to share, and it’s much easier for the layperson to use when combining visuals and prose than, say, professional design software. For both reasons, it will extend the reach of your ideas — which is, after all, the point.

When Women Take Over Family Firms, Profitability Increases

A study of thousands of family-owned firms in Italy reveals that, on average, replacing a male CEO with a woman improves a company’s profitability, an effect that becomes more pronounced as the proportion of women on the board of directors increases, says a team led by Mario Daniele Amore of Bocconi University in Milan. Overall, the more women on the board of a female-led firm, the more profitable it is likely to be. The presence of women directors may make female CEOs feel more comfortable, improving cooperation and facilitating information exchange, the researchers say.

How Companies Can Attract the Best College Talent

Over the past year, my firm Collegefeed met with more than 300 companies to understand their college hiring strategies and tactics — from employers with large university hiring infrastructures to recently funded start-ups looking to hire fresh grads, interns, and young alum.

Not surprisingly, 84% understand that college hiring is important. Yet almost all agree that it’s really hard to attract good college talent. In fact, 92% believe they have a “brand problem” when it comes to their efforts; this problem is often expressed as the fact that “not everyone can be an employer like Facebook.” In other words, large, well-established companies feel they simply can’t be the newest thing out there generating buzz with Millennials.

To understand more about this underlying “brand problem,” and what employers can do about it, we polled 15,000 Millennials — 60 percent still in college and 40 percent recent graduates.* We asked them:

What are the top three companies you want to work for?
What are the top three things you look for when considering an employer?
How do you generally discover companies and create an impression about them (social media, product usage, campus events, other ways)?

Here’s how they responded:

Question 1:

Respondents had to type in and enter a name here, not select from a displayed list, which eliminates the pagination bias. That said, the top 10 in this list are not surprising at all: They are well-known brands that frequently appear in the “best places to work” lists.

But what’s noteworthy is the absence of well-known consumer brands such as Coca Cola. It’s also interesting that companies like Salesforce.com and Qualcomm, which most college students don’t use, appear so high.

Question 2:

Given the first chart, you might expect things like “company mission” or “market leadership” to be on top. However “people and culture fit” is number one, followed by “career potential.” We expected “compensation” to be within the top five, but were somewhat surprised that it was only ranked fourth.

This data leaves one key takeaway: It is imperative to focus on communicating your culture and career growth to potential employees. The two fundamental questions that young job seekers ask, and that companies need to answer are: “What is it like to work there?” and “What kind of growth can I expect?”

Question 3:

These results blew us away. Most companies (almost 100% of the large ones we spoke to) say that they have an on-campus recruiting plan and that is where they focus their sourcing and branding efforts. Many also have dedicated organizations to build relationships on campus. According to a 2013 NACE study, 98.1% of companies they polled believe that on-campus fairs are the number one avenue for them to brand themselves with students.

However, this may not be the case. “Friends” showed up as the number one way Millennials hear about companies, according to our research, followed by job boards. You might also expect to see “Use their products every day” among the top five, but it showed up sixth.

Clearly, branding — how a company is perceived year round, across media types — is more important than just being present on campus. If college students like something, they tell their friends on social media or face-to-face.

So whether you sell ads, insurance, food, or routers, building a brand among college grads is about getting your story out. Sure, some companies have the basic advantage of “being among the top products students use daily” or “building the next big mobile app,” but you can also attract great talent by telling your story right – using language that Millennials relate to at places they frequent.

Here are the four most critical things you should do to improve your brand and attract the best college talent:

1. Get Your Best People to Engage With Students

Even if you are a company whose products never really get used directly by end users (think Salesforce.com, Qualcomm, Ciena, Cisco) you can still show off your employees and organizational culture to send a simple but powerful message to students: “If you come work for us, you will get to work with awesome people like these.”

So if you go to campus, bring your best recent college hires along. Showcase the work interns, young alums, and others have done, and highlight the responsibilities they have been given. If scheduling the best people or alums is hard, or if you find the attendance of physical events is low, host virtual info sessions, another easy and scalable way to reach lots of great college talent.

In addition, some leading companies we spoke to set quarterly goals for managers to hire and spend time with potential hires from colleges, whether it’s attending career fairs or answering questions on Quora or blogging about their experiences. And this leads to another important thing you can do to attract college talent.

2. Go Where Students Are (and They’re Often Not at College Fairs)

Students are online all the time. Invest in a visually appealing, content rich site where students can go to and learn about your company. If you can, personalize the site to showcase the right alums, intern experiences, and the basic messages you want to deliver to potential hires. Done right, a good “brand page” can have the same effect as a great conversation at a career fair — it’s the story of your mission, your culture and why they should join you.

Next, use social media smartly. College students spend two to four hours daily on sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you can target them based on specific interests, who they follow, and what they are searching for or talking about, real-time engagement can be quite powerful. Depending on the type of talent you are targeting, sites like Quora and other more technical ones like Hacker News can be good places to establish your brand. Similarly, if targeting a broader audience, you can go far by using humor to engage students in entertainment properties like Reddit, BuzzFeed, and CollegeHumor — people share what they find funny.

One caveat across social media in general: most online communities don’t like being marketed to, so be authentic, add value to users, and be cautious of blatant self-promotion.

3. Make the Application Process Easy and Engaging

A complicated, multiple-page application form isn’t going to cut it anymore. For Millennials (and anyone else, really), the process should be easy and frictionless.

In addition, you can’t always wait for students to come to you. After connecting with a student at a career fair or online, it’s important to go back to them and encourage them to apply when they are ready.

Another engagement strategy leading companies have found is to pique student’s interests by holding online contests and activities that paint an interesting picture of their brand. Google, Microsoft and several other companies do this programmatically.

4. Prioritize Meaning Over Swag

Too many companies are focused on giving away swag, under the perception that free stuff gets eyeballs. But Millennials are more interested in identifying with your mission than they are in a free T-shirt. If you want their mindshare you have to go beyond swag, and that concept should extend beyond career fairs to everything they read and hear about you.

Are you securing people’s futures? Are you making the world green? Are you making life simpler for small and medium businesses? Whatever you do, you should be able to get the message out online — in a 20 or 30 second video. The U.S. Army’s age-old recruiting video is still a great example – it really makes you want to apply.

If you get meaning right, it won’t just be you doing the talking. Social referrals have incredible power in the college context, and we’re not talking about the “refer a friend, get $5” model. It comes down to whether a student genuinely likes who you are, what you do, and what you stand for.

*Of the responses received, 65 percent are in college and 35 percent recently graduated. 60 percent were male and 40 percent female. 50 percent were tech-oriented majors and 50 percent non-tech.

Two Ways to Reduce “Hurry Up and Wait” Syndrome

Have you ever been asked to drop everything to complete a seemingly urgent task, and then found that the task wasn’t so urgent after all?

Not long ago, one of our clients gave us three days to put together a proposal to help with a very large and complex reorganization. Although we had been talking about the possibility of working on this project for months, the client suddenly felt that it was time to get started. We didn’t want to miss the opportunity, so we put in some late nights and did what was needed to craft a reasonably good document. And then we waited.

Two weeks later, the client sent a note saying that she hadn’t yet had time to read the proposal but would get to it soon. And in the meantime, she was still trying to secure agreement on the reorganization with her boss and other key corporate function heads.

Obviously, something doesn’t add up with this picture. Why did the client give us only three days and convey such a sense of urgency if she wasn’t really ready to move forward? Was she being dishonest or was she deluding herself about the situation — or was something else going on?

Having seen many variations on this “hurry up and wait” dynamic over the past few years let me suggest a possible explanation.  I’ll also offer some ideas about what to do if you are falling into this trap, whether it’s as the perpetrator or the victim.

The starting point for understanding this issue is the dramatic acceleration of today’s business culture. Because we live in a world of continual, real-time communication from anywhere in the world, we’ve gotten used to assuming that everything happens instantaneously. As such, it’s almost unthinkable for managers today to give an assignment (whether to a consultant or subordinate) and say, “take your time” or “think about what it will take and let me know when you can get to it.” Instead, the almost unconscious default position is to push for rapid action.

Intersecting with this drive for speed is the reality that many organizations have slimmed down over the last few years. But while they have reduced costs and taken out layers of managers and staff, they often haven’t eliminated the work that those people were doing. So the surviving managers are expected to do more and more, and do it faster and faster.

The result of trying to drive more work through fewer people, and at greater speed, is a jamming of the queue.  There is simply no way to get everything done in the accelerated time frames that many managers expect.  So while their intentions are to move quickly on things, the reality is that you can only force so much work through the eye of the needle.

The problem is that some tasks or assignments really do need to be carried out quickly. But unless they are treated differently, they get caught up in the same bottleneck with everything else. It’s like the common phenomenon that happens in hospital laboratories:  Doctors want test results from their patients to be done right away, so they label them as “stat” (which means “immediate”).  When the lab gets too many stat requests however, everything is treated the same, which means that nothing is done immediately.

In our case, the manager really did want to move quickly with the reorganization. But then she was inundated with other tasks, requests, meetings, and priorities and had trouble finding the time to read our proposal. She also thought that she could get her boss and other executives aligned on the reorganization, but couldn’t find the time to get them all together, or even meet with many of them one-on-one. So while she genuinely intended rapid action, she just couldn’t pull it off.

Obviously there is no easy solution for dealing with “hurry up and wait” syndrome. But if you feel that this dynamic is affecting your team’s work, here are two suggestions:

First, put a premium on eliminating unnecessary or low value work. Are there repetitive activities that your team is doing that don’t make a difference, or could be done less often or with less effort? One overloaded manager, for example, got permission from her boss to report her team’s activities on a monthly, instead of weekly, basis. That change gave her team more bandwidth to handle urgent projects.

Second, inject more discipline into the prioritization of projects and tasks.  Work with your team to identify those few things (and not more than a few) that really do need to be done with speed. And when a new request comes in, make explicit decisions about where it fits in the list of priorities – and if necessary, challenge the assumption that it needs to be done right away.

Given the desire for speed that permeates today’s business culture, we’ll all probably experience hurry up and wait syndrome at one time or another. If we can do a better job of prioritizing, however, we might face it less often.

Could Target Have Prevented Its Security Breach?

How Target Blew ItMissed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card NumbersBusinessweek

Less than a year before the Thanksgiving security breach in which credit-card info for 40 million shoppers was stolen en masse, Target bumped up its security staff and brought in software from a top-notch firm, FireEye, whose customers include intelligence operations worldwide. FireEye’s sophisticated system worked: It triggered alerts that malware had entered Target’s computers. Because the attack was spotted early, the whole mess could have been avoided.

Except no one did anything. FireEye's automatic malware-deletion function wasn't enabled (which isn't uncommon, as many organizations want a person, rather than a machine, making the decisions), and the alerts were ignored. There may have been some skepticism about the system, because it was new to Target. In any case, the inaction allowed what's described as "absolutely unsophisticated and uninteresting" malicious code to wreak havoc on the company's reputation and customers' lives. In attempting to trace credit-card hackers and brokers throughout the world, the article's authors hint that this particular breach and others like it are likely far from over.

In response, Target acknowledged that its computer system had been alerted to suspicious activity. According to a spokesperson, "With the benefit of hindsight, we are investigating whether, if different judgments had been made, the outcome may have been different."

Ackman v. Herbalife After Big Bet, Hedge Fund Pulls the Levers of PowerThe New York Times

If you’re looking for the corporate-governance version of House of Cards, this is probably the closest you'll get (though there's no strategic murdering here, as far as I know). This breathtaking investigation into activist investor William Ackman's $1 billion bet against Herbalife has all the elements of a good drama: It pits the dietary-supplements company against the larger-than-life Ackman, who has said that he will "personally pursue the Herbalife matter to the end of the Earth." The pursuit has thus far entangled members of the government and community groups, cost huge amounts of money, and enlisted more lobbying firms that you can count (working tirelessly for both Herbalife and Ackman). The investor is famously patient; one of his biggest wins came after a seven-year battle. And while he steadfastly claims that Herbalife is a hugely damaging pyramid scheme, the only real certainty in his war is that he has the power, money, and determination to do whatever he wants, often without people knowing he's doing it.  

Watch Your MouthSheryl Sandberg and Anna Maria Chávez on 'Bossy,' the Other B-wordThe Wall Street Journal

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and her Lean In organization want to ban the word "bossy" when it's used to describe assertive girls and women. Sandberg and Girl Scouts of the USA CEO Anna Maria Chávez outline why the word needs eradication, pointing to its historically gendered use to put down and socially alienate girls. The duo explains that males are rarely described as bossy when they push to lead. They ask, "How are we supposed to level the playing field for girls and women if we discourage the very traits that get them there?"

Predictably, everyone has something to say about the "B" word. Sally Kohn tackles the issue from a parenting angle. Sayu Bhojwani argues that everyone, including men, should stop talking so much in the first place. Others, like Jessica Roy and Ann Friedman, smartly drill down into the interplay between feminism and semantics. As Friedman explains, "It’s so frustrating to watch Lean In try to expand girls’ options by restricting the way we talk about them. It’s counterintuitive, and it makes feminists look like thought police rather than the expansive forward-thinkers we really are." But the outpouring of opinions, argues Jena McGregor, may be a good thing: "As long as the argument persists about how to get more women at the top, it remains on everyone's minds — and hopefully, on more people's agendas."

What Really Goes Into Your Latte Inside The Barista ClassThe Awl

At a time when it seems as though everyone is down on retail and service work (see this recent piece, for example), Molly Osberg's essay on being a barista is refreshing not only because it places a more positive lens on type of employment — "serving can be deeply satisfying work, physically and emotionally" — but because of her insights into up-and-coming urban locations that are being built by "an ever-specializing transient workforce, an army of lifestyle brand ambassadors without business cards or the 401(k)." In other words, to satisfy both a cultural mystique and an eager clientele, baristas in non-chain city environments like Brooklyn are responsible for much more than making your latte; their job is to reflect the hippest aspects of the local atmosphere, with their tattoos and their ability to talk literature and tech, while being compensated at poverty levels and having no upward mobility. "The knowledge required to read a customer, to justify the processes and origins of that $12 cup of coffee, is just as specialized as knowing what a nut graph is," Osberg writes. She can only conclude: "These jobs are lesser because we made them this way." 

Turn On, Tune In, Get Stuff Done The Complete Guide to Listening to Music at WorkQuartz

Years ago, I listened to the Elton John classic "Philadelphia Freedom" on repeat for eight straight hours while in my cubicle. If you've made similarly concerning decisions, it's worth taking a detour through this fun article, which breaks down the basic neuroscience behind music in the office. While the tips may seem obvious at times, I know I’m at fault for trying to read complicated documents while listening to The Band's story-driven lyrics. So don't do that: Music is best when you're doing repetitive tasks. And if you want to listen while doing something that requires a lot of concentration, try songs with steady rhythms and few lyrics. You also shouldn't listen to music all the time — the cognitive benefits of music wear off when songs are played constantly. Lastly, it's sometimes a good idea to listen to pump-up music to trigger an emotional response before a big meeting or event. This excellent tune, for example, is what I used to listen to at a previous job when launching new web content. Worked like a charm.  

BONUS BITSUpdates on a Few Select Industries

This Is What a Job in the U.S.'s New Manufacturing Industry Looks Like (The Washington Post)
The Engineering of the Chain Restaurant Menu (The Atlantic)
Journalism Start-Ups Aren't a Revolution If They're Filled With All These White Men (The Guardian)