Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1447

How One Company Contained Health Care Costs and Improved Morale

Instead of simply providing health insurance, savvy employers are tackling health care costs by supporting the whole employee—everything from their finances to their career development to physical health. This is not just good for individuals; it’s good for business.

The health of the American workforce is declining, reducing both productivity and company earnings. In response, more and more employers are providing Employee Assistance Programs (74% in 2012, up from 46% in 2005) and wellness programs (63% in 2012, up from 47% in 2005). But these programs rely on individuals to change their behavior — and often don’t significantly affect the bottom line when it comes to health care costs.

In 2008, TURCK, a leading manufacturer in industrial automation with 500 employees in the U.S., had robust health benefits and even offered a discount when employees completed a health assessment. But CEO Dave Lagerstrom realized, “I didn’t feel this approach was helping me become more healthy, so it probably wasn’t helping our employees either.”  Instead, Lagerstrom decided to explore how TURCK could create a work culture that supports employee well-being, encompassing five dimensions: 1) career development, 2) work-life fit, 3) financial security, 4) community involvement, and 5) physical health.

Today, each participating employee (and his or her spouse or partner if covered by TURCK) still completes a health assessment and screening, but each employee also attends a one-on-one session with a coach (provided by TURCK) to set well-being goals for the year. To achieve these goals, each employee commits to three activities from a menu of options that includes everything from a phone consultation with a financial planner to volunteering for a favorite charity to participating in a 10,000 Steps Program. Employees are rewarded for following through on their goals with either a reduction in premiums or paid time off. Employees get to choose which.

This strategy has helped the company both flat-line health care costs and book record profits. In 2008, TURCK’s health care claim costs were $280.52 per member per month. Based on the rate of inflation for health care spending in the Minnesota market where the company headquarters are based, it was projected that TURCK’s cost would have risen from $280.52 to $387.20 per member per month. Yet, they have remained constant, amounting to a total cost avoidance of $4,680,000.

Not only has the company contained health care costs, it has also increased engagement and reduced turnover. Turnover at TURCK is around 2%, while the industry average is about 11% to 13%. Results from the most recent employee survey also reflect a strong sense of engagement—88% to 93% of employees agree or strongly agree with the following statements:

I give my best efforts each day.
I put in extra time and effort as needed to do my work effectively.
I intend and would like to stay at this organization for a year or longer.
I strive to exceed expectations for those I impact each day.

Interestingly, TURCK did not launch this program primarily to reduce costs. As Lagerstrom explains, “As CEO, it is my responsibility to create a culture where people flourish. If companies enter into a well-being initiative only to save money, I believe they will fail because it won’t feel real to employees. That culture—the ‘feeling’ employees have about how the company treats them—is the key to reaping the benefits of this approach in the long term.”

Here are four things companies should keep in mind when creating a well-being strategy:

Lead with values. “This process has to start at the top and has to be about the employees first,” says CEO Lagerstrom. “Well-being has to be woven into the very fabric of the company.” 100% of TURCK’s executive team and 75% of its extended management team participated in a leadership and well-being development track, called Lead by Example. This initiative encouraged leaders at all levels to focus on their own well-being and that of their teams.
Keep it convenient. Many of the activities are located right at the plant, making it very convenient to sign up. TURCK also has an onsite health center staffed by a physician assistant. Since the onsite clinic was opened in 2007, employees have saved over 6,000 hours in paid time off (PTO) hours by using the clinic on company time. Employees have also saved over $100,000 in clinic copayments. TURCK has benefited, too, with over $263,000 in productivity savings and $480,000 in direct medical savings through use of the clinic in 2012 alone.
Make it personal. When TURCK shifted its focus to well-being at the end of 2008, it was partially a response to the emotional turmoil of the economic downturn. “Rather than just focus on physical health,” Lora Geiger, who was an HR leader at TURCK says, “we asked people to consider setting a personal well-being goal on anything that was meaningful to them. One mom from our Inside Sales Team made a calendar each week for the special things she was going to do each day with her five-year-old daughter, and she fulfilled on her commitment.”
Share success stories and make it communal. TURCK highlights employees’ personal success stories — like achieving a fitness or weight-loss goal, leading a community initiative, or how a preventive health screening saved their life — in the annual open enrollment meetings and monthly newsletters. These “Well-Being in Action” stories not only inspire employees to set personal goals, they have also helped TURCK go from 42% to 77% of employees up to date on their preventative screenings in one year. Similarly, while each employee has a personal action plan, employees at all levels are involved in helping each other achieve their goals. Physical well-being is encouraged on a walking path through the plant, by exercise breaks that are led by peers, and by organized games of wallyball or racquetball at their free gym. These group activities promote physical health and social well-being because they are a fun way for coworkers to interact.

Our studies show that focusing on well-being, as TURCK is doing, can lead to an improved work culture, healthier employees, higher levels of engagement, lower costs, and even higher profits. It’s time for companies to move from a focus on wellness to a broader and more holistic focus on well-being.

Gauge Which Activities Aren’t in Sync with Your Strategy

Take this brief assessment for feedback on how to improve strategic alignment in eight key areas.

Most organizational leaders struggle to align day-to-day activities with strategy, even though they know it’s important to do. Almost 80% of the more than 1,200 senior executives recently surveyed by PricewaterhouseCoopers believe that their organizations have the right strategic intent — but only 54% think they’re executing that strategy well.

Why the gap? Let’s compare two fictional companies to see what’s involved.

The first — which we’ll call Company A — focuses on translating its strategy into action as quickly as possible. Right away, the senior management team converts its PowerPoint decks into a road show that explains the strategy, develops a comprehensive implementation plan, sets up a program management office, establishes steering committees, assigns roles, and even starts restructuring. But after six months the plan starts to falter. Leaders and their teams are strapped — and competing — for resources. Distracted by pet initiatives that have little to do with the new strategy, they revert to old habits. They struggle to manage tensions between units and to realize value across them.

Company B takes a different approach. Before rewiring operations, leaders:

wrestle with the nuances of the strategy
diagnose how well the organization’s activities are currently aligned with it
cease any strategically unimportant activities
identify capabilities vital to the strategy
establish decision rights
begin modeling behaviors that support the strategy
gauge performance and risks with leading and lagging metrics that reflect the company’s priorities.

This whole process puts leaders in a more constructive mind-set and tends to defuse political jockeying, defensiveness, excuses, and blame.

Company A’s leaders have intellectually bought into their strategy and execution plan, but through their discipline and hard work, Company B’s leaders have built emotional commitment, as well, which will give their efforts more staying power. As Company B’s leaders turn their attention to operations, they make sure all the elements — processes, people, capital and organizational structure, and technology — are in lockstep with what the strategy demands. Leaders help engage the rest of the organization by clearly articulating people’s roles and modeling the actions required to deliver results.

That’s what alignment looks like. It’s not easy, and it never goes off without a hitch. But in the end it’s actually much more efficient than diving right into a reactive, short-term operational overhaul.

Do you work for Company A or Company B? This brief assessment will help you gauge whether misalignment is holding your organization back. 

Asking Whether Leaders Are Born or Made Is the Wrong Question

Are leaders born or made?  When I pose this question to executives or HR professionals, the vast majority say that leaders are made; that is, leadership is something one can learn. Yet researchers have found traits, such as extraversion and intelligence, which differentiate leaders from others.  This seems to imply that we can identify future leaders by looking at their traits – but we must be cautious when drawing such conclusions.

By failing to differentiate between leadership effectiveness (performance as a leader) and leadership emergence (being tapped for a leadership role), this research is often misunderstood and misused.  In fact, inborn traits are more strongly associated with leadership emergence. That is, within a group of peers, those who are more extraverted or more intelligent tend to have more influence on the group. Does this mean that these same people perform better than others when placed in a formal position of leadership? Not necessarily.

Let’s look at the relationship between extraversion and leadership effectiveness.  Some studies have found a relationship, but it is so weak that it is difficult to draw conclusions from it.  A much stronger relationship has been found when looking only at particular types of jobs: extraversion predicts performance in jobs with a competitive social component; for example, sales.  And if we look at extraversion in more depth, it can also predict other less desirable outcomes such as absenteeism.

What about intelligence and leadership effectiveness?  Again, the relationship is surprisingly weak and can be disrupted easily.  For example, if the leader is under stress, then it is no longer possible to predict the leader’s performance by looking at his/her intelligence.  It seems that stress makes people behave in unpredictable – and perhaps less intelligent – ways.  Interestingly, there is a far stronger relationship between leaders’ perceived intelligence (how intelligent they look to others) and how likely they are to be chosen as a leader than there is between actual intelligence and leadership.  Apparently, when it comes to leadership, appearances are everything.

So are leaders born or made?  What is this question really asking?  If it is asking whether someone will emerge as a leader among a group of peers, then those types of leaders are born.  But if it is asking whether someone will perform effectively in a leadership position, then that is dependent on the context, the type of job, and the person’s ability to develop leadership skills. This cannot be predicted by their traits.

Unfortunately, we often choose our leaders based on traits such as extraversion, charisma, and intelligence (or perceived intelligence). And then we wonder why their performance does not live up to our expectations.

Reporters Compare Ride-Sharing Apps to Taxis

To compare ride-sharing services with one another and with taxis, Wall Street Journal reporters used UberX, Lyft, Sidecar, and cabs to get to work for a week in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. Over the course of more than 30 rides, prices on UberX averaged about 20% more than taxi fare, in part because of “surge” pricing during rush hours. Lyft came in second, costing a little more than taxis. Sidecar cost about 10% less than taxis. Cabs were fastest at getting passengers to their destinations, followed by UberX drivers. Sidecar and Lyft drivers took about 20% longer than cabbies.

Why the Greek Yogurt Craze Should be a Wake-Up Call to Big Food

In 2005, Hamdi Ulukaya purchased a yogurt factory in upstate New York that had been shuttered by Kraft Foods. He wanted to use it to produce a line of strained, or “Greek,” yogurt called Chobani. If you’ve been in a grocery store lately, you probably know the rest — the brand caught on quickly. But for years, as Chobani gobbled up market share, the major food companies stuck to their regular lines of yogurt. Chobani went on to become the second largest yogurt seller in the U.S. and cost General Mills, Dannon, and other established players billions of dollars in sales. And new reports say that Chobani is talking with investors about a deal that would value the company at $5 billion.

Food fads develop quickly in today’s marketplace. Consumers are more tightly connected now and are more likely to follow word-of-mouth (or word-of-keystroke) advice than in the past. Amid this changing environment, you’ll find rows and rows of marketing teams at the Mid-Western headquarters of America’s largest food companies — in no industry does marketing appear to play a more prominent role. But despite this manpower, “Big Food” missed Greek yogurt. As the dynamics of the American food market have changed, the industry that essentially invented the modern marketer has been slow to notice.

As the Chobani story shows, Big Food needs to make some changes, particularly to a customer-centric, as opposed to marketer-centric, marketing approach. This transformation holds lessons for all consumer-goods companies. And it requires companies to consider steps like these:

Give up some control and get nimble. Big Food has a proven formula for its products that involves controlling the message and the channel. Companies build consumer awareness through paid media and get products in front of customers by offering promotional dollars to supermarkets to display products prominently in the aisles. But entities such as social media, online grocers, and word-of-mouth marketing are adding a whole new dimension beyond traditional paid media. Companies need to experiment with other means of going to market, including launching products with specialty retailers and using social media and other tools to drive word-of-mouth (and keystroke) marketing.
Remember the difference between “good taste” and “tastes good.” Controlled experiments involving consumer taste preferences have taken food companies down a path of continuously fatter, sweeter, and saltier products. By the time Chobani entered the market, a single pot of traditional yogurt had come to contain as much sugar per serving as many desserts. Ulukaya has said he launched Chobani with almost no money available for promotion or advertising because “deep down I knew I had something very good.” To unleash food fads, companies need to have the same confidence and choose products that they can believe in.
End your obsession with ingredient cost. Big Food favors products with big gross margins — in part so that they have more to spend on needed marketing and promotion. One of the reasons that Big Food didn’t like Greek yogurt early on is because it costs more to make and contains less water than regular yogurt. Food companies should distribute their gaze more evenly across their value chain. Instead of focusing primarily on downstream activities such as packaging and promotion, they should also look upstream to identify promising natural ingredients. Great products can command premiums, and become popular with very little marketing spend. Kale, quinoa, or chia anyone?
Put the product ahead of the brand. Brand management has hijacked the most important part about food: the product. Food companies constantly narrow their focus on how to convey what the product means rather than what the product is. The fact that, for example, a suburban housewife is the center of a certain brand’s universe is important knowledge, but that insight can never trump creating a product consumers actually want to eat. Branded food companies should invest more in innovation and less on brand marketing.
Learn the art of “small ball.” Giant companies like P&G and Unilever tend not to be interested in product launches unless they offer hundreds of millions in potential revenue. It’s possible that had an established food company attempted to compete with Chobani from the start, they would have withdrawn the product because it didn’t meet initial sales goals. There are two ways to solve a “swing-for-the fences” bias. One is through M&A. PepsiCo is a leader at this inorganic approach — their partnership with Sabra unleashed a hummus craze that shows no signs of abating. Another is to put semi-autonomous incubator groups in charge of smaller and softer launches. General Mills’ Small Planet Foods, for example, operates semi-autonomously from the company’s mother ship in Minnesota, and has recently added several successful brands.
Shorten your development cycle. Alternative food companies use co-packers so they don’t require long-run investments in factories. They start by launching products online and in specialty channels instead of through traditional grocers. They dispense with large consumer surveys and test products directly with networks of loyal customers. All of these contribute to shorter development cycles and much lower costs for new product launches.

Big Food has become “big” as a result of a terrific success: their traditional marketing departments have helped generate billions in profits. But relying on one approach to marketing has left these players exposed in today’s fast-moving climate. If a company has only one way to go to market and think about its business, it limits its opportunity to respond quickly, flexibly, and to enter and exit fast-changing food categories in a timely manner. And that’s true for any consumer goods company.

Our Bizarre Fascination with Stories of Doom

Andrew O’Connell, HBR editor, explains why we find tales of disaster so compelling. For more, read his article, Why We Love Disaster Stories.

Download this podcast

Why Is Ukraine’s Economy Such a Mess?

When Ukraine became an independent nation in 1991, it was on more or less the same economic footing as its neighbors. Look what’s happened since:

I did leave off Moldova, which shares a border with Ukraine and is even poorer. But Moldova is a landlocked little country of 3.5 million. Ukraine has 45 million inhabitants, is the second-largest European country by land area (after the European parts of Russia and not counting the Asian parts of Turkey) and by all rights ought to be one of the continent’s major economic powers.

It isn’t. Instead, Ukraine was deeply in debt and looking for bailouts from West and East when an uprising ousted president Viktor Yanukovych in February, then a Russian invasion of the Crimean peninsula made the country the focus of global political attention. I was curious about the economic roots of this turmoil, so I talked to Chrystia Freeland.

Freeland is a new Liberal Party member of the Canadian Parliament representing downtown Toronto. She also grew up speaking Ukrainian. Her late mother was a child of Ukrainian refugees, born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany right after World War II and raised in Canada, who returned to Ukraine in the early 1990s to help craft the country’s Constitution, among other things. Chrystia Freeland was in Ukraine in those days too, working as a stringer for several Western publications. She went onto a journalism career at the Financial Times, Globe and Mail, and Reuters, and wrote books on Russia’s transition to capitalism and the rise of the global plutocracy. She spent last week in Ukraine, and wrote an essay on the political situation there for last Sunday’s New York Times.

What initially made us think of calling you was that news a week or so ago that the new government in Ukraine was asking a few oligarchs to help out by becoming governors of Eastern provinces. What’s up with that?

I also was really struck by that news. I think the people of Ukraine should have some medium-term concerns about that — one of the reasons that you had this uprising against Yanukovych was because there was too much crony capitalism.

But in the short-term, particularly given the subsequent Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is turning out to be a rather prescient action. What is not fully apparent if you’re outside Ukraine is the extent to which Yanukovych compromised the entire structure of government. State institutions were incredibly compromised, incredibly corrupt.  The result was, following the overthrow of Yanukovych, in parts of the country the government just melted away. What the Eastern Ukrainian oligarchs have been able to do because they are very, very wealthy and have their own strong local organizations and contacts, is rebuild some sort of government presence really fast.

The other consequence of putting them in charge of Eastern Ukraine is it shows the extent to which this image of the country as being divided along ethnic lines, of this being a Yugoslav-style ethnocultural conflict, just isn’t true. As it happens, many of these oligarchs are not ethnically Ukrainian.

Who are these oligarchs? We’re familiar with the Russian variety, what’s the same and what’s different about the Ukrainian ones?

In general they’ve made their money in heavy industry, so that’s quite different from most of the Russian oligarchs. That’s why they’re not quite as rich, because there wasn’t quite as much money to be made. There were a lot of Soviet-era machine-bulding plants in Eastern Ukraine, machine-building and metals. There is also some banking, and media interests.

The East has this old industrial base. What does the Ukrainian economy consist of on the whole? Is it heavily agricultural?

The industrial base is important, particularly in eastern Ukraine. We all know about Ukraine as the breadbasket of Europe, and it is indeed an incredibly fertile country. There’s been a lot of Chinese investment in that part of the Ukrainian economy. There is also a technology outsourcing industry. And then finally, in some parts of Ukraine, tourism has been becoming more important.

Why is the economy such a mess?

Because of very bad, kleptocratic governments. That is 90% of the reason. In terms of the economy, Ukraine only accomplished maybe half of the things that you need to do, when the Soviet Union collapsed and they moved to a market economy. They did do privatization. There are now a lot of private companies, and there is a market. It’s important for us to remember that not so long ago even selling a pair of jeans was illegal.

But what they failed to do was build an effective rule of law and government institutions. Corruption, in the Yanukovych era at least, was absolutely rampant. And some important reforms of state finances haven’t happened. In particular, energy prices are still subsidized. Of course, when you move to free-market prices that’s a huge shock to the society. But Ukraine’s failure to liberalize energy prices is part of the reason that it has this great dependency on Russia.

Having said all of that, and having been in Kyiv* last week, I think there’s a bit of an Italian phenomenon going on, where you actually have a highly educated, very entrepreneurial population, but because you had this incredibly corrupt state, a lot of the Ukrainian economy has gone underground. Walking through the streets of many Ukrainian cities — Kyiv, Lviv in Western Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk in the East — you feel yourself to be in a much more prosperous society than the official data reflect.

The official data is incredible. Poland on the one side and Russia on the other are both in the low twenty-thousands in GDP per capita, and Ukraine is officially at $7,298.

There is no doubt that Ukraine has fared much, much worse than Poland. That is a testament to how important government decisions are. These countries were not so far apart in 1991 when Ukraine became independent, and the Poles by and large have done the right things, and the Ukrainian government has not.

The sense I get is that pretty much every government since independence has had big issues with corruption, but under Yanukovych it went from being this thing that the government did on the side to the entire reason the government existed. Is that fair?

One of the founders of the Maidan movement is this former investigative journalist named Yegor Sobolev. He said what drove him crazy was you couldn’t even call it corruption anymore. It was like a marauding horde. Corruption stopped being something that poorly paid government officials did on the side and became the main reason for the government’s existence.

Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister who has been playing a very good and important role in Ukraine, said that before the Yanukovych regime fell he went into one meeting with Ukrainian officials and they laughed at him for having a regular watch. He said everyone in that room had a wristwatch worth $30,000. That’s the sign of a really corrupt government.

With this new regime do you see potential for Ukraine moving in the right direction?

I think this government has a better chance than any previous Ukrainian government has had. A lot will depend of course on the presidential elections, and then there will be a need for new parliamentary elections. But so far it’s a group of people who understand what they need to do. They’ve seen Central Europe and the Baltic republics walk that path. It’s pretty clear what needs to be done.

What was quite impressive to me was that the government immediately took some steps last week to be more transparent and less entitled. All the ministries had these huge fleets of cars, and they cut them back to just one car per ministry. When Yatsenyuk, the prime minister, traveled to Brussels last week, he demonstratively flew commercial. These are gestures absolutely, but they symbolize something important.

Having said all of that, economic reform, urgent though it is for Ukraine, falls by the wayside when you’re being invaded, and that is the state of the country right now.

* When Freeland said it, it sounded like “Kayiv,” so I went with this spelling instead of the old-fashioned “Kiev.”

The Crisis In Ukraine Shows Why Strategy Is No Longer A Game Of Chess

As the crisis in Ukraine spreads through Crimea—and possibly to Eastern Ukraine as well—it is not conventional measures of power we should be paying attention to. Commentators have expended a lot of ink and pixels on scale — the size of various armies and economies — but are still underplaying the importance of networked power. It’s these connections that really matter.

It is, of course, Russia’s connections to a large segment of the Crimean population that Putin used as a pretext for his invasion.  It was also fear of connections (ethnic Ukrainians to the mainland, Crimean Tatars to Turkey), which led him to shut down television stations and other channels of communication.

And it is through deepening and severing connections that the West intends to combat Putin’s aggression, by uniting with Western and Eastern European allies to apply sanctions that will deny the economic and cultural ties that Russians have come to rely on.

Strategy is no longer a game of chess because power no longer depends on nodes, but on networks.

Consider how this crisis started. Until very recently, Viktor Yanukovych held nearly absolute power in Ukraine.  When confronted, he remained defiant, exercising every lever of authority he possessed, including his control over the media, political structures and finally, the use of force.

His rivals were almost comically ill-equipped.  They donned makeshift shields and helmets, burnt tires to obstruct snipers, and communicated via social media.  Yet still, they prevailed through a network of unseen linkages that proved to be decisive.

While Yanukovych was a man of uncommon ineptitude, we’ve seen similar scenes play out in Egypt and Tunisia—which had leaders reknown for their political savvy.   Never has it been more obvious that past notions of power are becoming obsolete, and with them, traditional notions of strategy.

The truth is that it’s not the “influentials” that the powerful have to worry about.  It’s when normal everyday people start linking themselves to the movement.  One of the things that surprised me when I was working in Ukraine during 2004’s Orange Revolution was how many of my colleagues I saw at the Maidan.  I noticed the same trend during last year’s protests in Turkey, where I have also lived.

Scenes like these are are exactly what network scientists predict:  A small group of passionate people can influence others that are slightly more reticent, still others take notice and also join in.

Make no mistake, the face of revolution today looks a lot more like The Good Wife than it does Homeland. It looks like everyday moms stepping up; not like government spies who have it all figured out.

The 20th century was driven by the power of scale.  The path to success was paved by tightly controlling integrated value chains to keep costs low, and the bigger you were, the more power you had.  

The 21st century is increasingly driven by semantic linkages, which increases with your number of connections and the strength of your networks. 

To wit: soon as Viktor Yanukovych entered office, he moved quickly to take firm hold on all the traditional levers of power.  He pushed a new constitution through Parliament that considerably strengthened his office, threw his chief political opponent, Yulia Tymoshenko in prison and took control of important media outlets (including, I’m sorry to say, my former company, which published Ukraine’s leading news magazine).

Yet, as it turned out, none of that did him much good.  As political scientist Moisés Naím explains in, The End of Power, overthrows are becoming the rule, rather than the exception.  He writes, “Power is easier to get, but harder to use or keep.”

Governments, religions, militaries — and yes, companies — are having to learn to live with diminished advantages to scale.  Superior capital, technology, and market share no longer confer the benefits they once did.  In fact, they might even blind us to dangers that lurk under the surface.

To understand better how power works today, we need to look beyond the nodes and start thinking in terms of networks.  With all of his access to power, it was easy for Yanukovych to dismiss the trouble when it started. With his country’s size and resources, it was easy for Putin to think he could scoop up Crimea without too much backlash.

Yet these seemingly small things are connected to larger ones. It was these unseen connections that proved to be Yanukovych’s downfall, and are giving Putin more headaches than he anticipated.

Leaders who fail to recognize the power of semantic networks of unseen connections, and instead rely on traditional notions of power and influence, are fighting a 20th century battle in a 21st century world. They will find their traditional chess pieces a bit useless.

What’s Holding Women Back in Science and Technology Industries

Virginia Rometty at IBM. Marillyn Hewson at Lockheed Martin. Meg Whitman at HP. Ellen Kullman at DuPont. Marissa Mayer at Yahoo. Phebe Novakovic at General Dynamics. The presence of these women would imply that science, engineering, and technology (SET) industries welcome women.

The fact is, senior female leaders in SET industries are still too few and far between. Even as these women blast open doors and blaze trails, new research (PDF) from the Center for Talent Innovation shows that U.S. women working in SET fields are 45% more likely than their male peers to leave the industry within the year.

Women in SET in the U.S., Brazil, China, and India are committed to their work and their careers. Over 80% of U.S. women love what they do; in Brazil, China, and India, the numbers are close to 90%. Over three-quarters (76%) of U.S. women consider themselves “very ambitious,” as do 92% of Chinese and 89% of Indian SET women. At the same time, a sizable percentage of SET women feel stalled, with young women feeling particularly frustrated.

Why are women turning off and tuning out? The study finds that powerful “antigens” (PDF) in SET corporate environments block them from contributing their full potential at work. Gender bias is the common denominator, manifesting in cultures hostile to women: the “lab-coat culture” in science that glorifies extreme hours spent toiling over experiments and penalizes people who need the flexibility to, say, pick up their kids from day care; engineering’s “hard-hat culture” whose pervasive maleness makes women do a “whistle-check” on their work clothes to avoid a barrage of catcalls; and tech’s “geek workplace culture” that women in our study often compared to a super-competitive fraternity of arrogant nerds. These cultures marginalize women, making them feel isolated: 21% of U.S. women in science say they experience “lab-coat cultures”; 25% in engineering face “hard-hat cultures”; and 31% in tech face “geek workplace cultures.”

Meanwhile, SET women perceive a double standard in how they are perceived by colleagues and managers. Bias in performance evaluation is systemic: 72% of women in the U.S. and 78% in Brazil perceive bias in their performance evaluations. More than half of U.S. women and more in emerging markets work alongside colleagues who believe men have a genetic advantage in SET fields.

All of these elements sap ambition. Furthermore, a dearth of female role models and effective sponsors leaves many SET women unsure of what it takes to be a leader: 44% of U.S. women and 57% of Chinese women feel that in order to progress they have to behave like a man. “What does it take to be considered leadership material?” asks a former project manager at Microsoft. She glumly concludes, “I think you have to be a man.”

In fact, 46% of U.S. SET women believe senior management more readily sees men as “leadership material.” Stunningly, a sizable percentage of senior leaders agree, with nearly one-third of senior leaders in the U.S. and more than half in China and India believing that a woman would never achieve a top position at their company, no matter how able or high-performing.

The result: Because women don’t look, sound, or act like the alpha male, or because they lack senior-level support, women’s ideas and innovations hit a choke point. SET men are 27% more likely to see their innovative idea make it to market than women (PDF). Unable to contribute their full innovative potential, it’s not surprising that so many SET women have one foot out the door.

There are, however, promising levers for change. The most obvious solution: sponsorship. Sponsors help their protégés crack the unwritten code of executive presence, improving their chances of being perceived as leadership material. Most important to the companies employing them, sponsors help women get their ideas heard — one of the best ways to engender respect and open opportunities to promotion.

We’ve discussed the power of sponsorship in previous posts. It’s especially necessary in SET, where the misogynistic antigens are even more deeply rooted and concentrated than in other fields, making it difficult for some leaders to imagine women holding positions that for decades were dominated by white men. “A sponsor can break down the unspoken biases by advocating for someone in a nontraditional role or offering a different perspective,” explains Christopher Corsico, Boehringer Ingelheim’s global head of Medicine and QRPE.

However, the difficulties women encounter in finding a sponsor in other fields are magnified in SET. Sponsors tend to help people who remind them of themselves. However, senior SET leaders are overwhelmingly white males, making it that much harder for female scientists, engineers, and technologists to trigger that instinctive outreach. The SET fields are also made up of extraordinarily tight-knit networks — of graduates from a particular academic institution, of veterans of a famous project, or of colleagues from a specific lab. Not belonging to the right network makes it much harder to benefit from the close connections that spawn sponsorship. Furthermore, SET women overwhelmingly confuse supporters — mentors and role models — with sponsors. Consequently, they target the wrong people: people they like, rather than leaders with the power to get them where they want to go.

The demand for SET talent is intensifying: The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that SET jobs will increase by 17% between 2008 and 2018, a growth rate nearly twice that of non-SET employment. Meanwhile, demand far outstrips supply: Tech leaders like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple will need to fill more than 650,000 new jobs (PDF) by 2018 to meet their growth projections, and two-thirds of those new hires will be for SET roles. Other SET fields are also massively undersupplied: There were six health care openings for every qualified graduate and four for every engineering degree. And this is just in the United States. The situation is multiplied in Brazil, China, and India, where SET industries are the dynamos propelling these economies.

Given the global scramble for SET talent, companies simply cannot afford a drain, much less a hemorrhage, of capable women.

Should You Automate Your Life So that You Can Work Harder?

Would you pay someone in the Philippines to answer your email for you — even your personal messages? Or hire strangers on the internet to plan your spouse’s big birthday party? Or throw meat, vegetables, and butter into a blender and call it dinner?

These are just some of the actual “life-automating” techniques of busy entrepreneurs today.

Consider the case of Maneesh Sethi. Perhaps best known as the easily-distracted man who paid a woman to slap him in the face every time he checked Facebook, he is now working on a product that will let your Facebook friends zap you, via a wearable device not unlike a shock collar, if you don’t follow through on self-appointed goals. He spoke at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas about how he’s now hired a man in Manila (Caleb) to check his email for him. Caleb, who Sethi found through Staff.com, goes through Sethi’s email — both work and personal — every morning and flags important messages for follow-up, as well as categorizing and drafting responses for the rest. By the time Sethi wakes up, his email has already been sorted; and by the end of the day, every message has been answered. And Sethi never had to write a single response himself.

Sethi was on a panel called “Life Automation for Entrepreneurs” that also included podcaster Veronica Belmont, a Getting Things Done devotee. She uses productivity apps (like TripIt and Things) and virtual assistants (such as Fancy Hands) to stay organized and efficient. For instance, she hired temporary assistants on Fancy Hands to plan her husband’s recent birthday party. These “virtual assistants” brainstormed themes; found a venue; planned the party; even devised thoughtful extras she said she’d never have come up with.  “I thought I’d never need to outsource these kinds of actions,” she explained, “But frankly, none of us have the time we need.”

And yet perhaps the most radical life automator is Dave Asprey, whose website describes him as “a Silicon Valley investor and technology entrepreneur who spent 15 years and over $300,000 to hack his own biology.” He lost a hundred pounds and raised his IQ 20 points, among other achievements, and now runs a coaching firm called The Bulletproof Executive. His life-automating secret? “I have one API… and her name is Nikki.” Yep, that’s right: an old-fashioned personal assistant. And despite all the time she saves him, he’s the one who advocates blending your dinner so that “you can drink it while you’re doing something else.”

That might not sound healthy, but these workaholics were quick to point out that they don’t sacrifice their health for their work — because then, of course, they couldn’t work. All three entrepreneurs scheduled regular time for exercise and doctor’s visits, even the occasional massage. Belmont acknowledged that “this sounds like a luxury.” But, she argues, “If you don’t take time to take care of yourself, you will not function at the level you need to.” Asprey puts it more bluntly: “you need to take care of your meat.” (And he’s not talking about the kind that goes in the blender.)

We’re guilty of the same ROI-maximizing impulses at HBR, I readily admit — most of what we’ve published on getting enough sleep and exercise, and maintaining reasonable hours, has focused on the bottom-line benefits: greater creativity, fewer mistakes, improved communication and delegation, and so on. And yet I find myself a bit disturbed when this approach is taken to its logical extreme, where everything — taking a walk, even having kids  — becomes justifiable by virtue of increasing one’s economic output. We’re meant to be homo sapiens, not homo economicus.

The result of this extreme devotion to work is that we overwhelm ourselves, to the point where even the most trivial decisions become a source of stress. “Even small decisions like replying to an email or forwarding an email or returning a phone call, each of those stresses you out a little bit and wears you down,” argued Sethi. Asprey agreed: “There’s a stress for 40 different apps, choosing which one to use.” To a degree, they’re correct. Decisions do cause stress, and willpower does decline if you overtax it (this is why habits are so powerful — because they move important tasks out of the realm of conscious effort). And in truth, being a high-functioning executive has often required more than just a personal assistant to manage the complexity of work — it’s often also required a spouse who doesn’t work to manage the complexity of life.

But while I acknowledge that the pressure — both external and internal — to devote everything to work is real, I also think it’s vital to resist it. Isn’t making decisions (and dentist appointments) just part of being an adult? Part of living?  As Sethi reminded the crowd, “The word decision literally means ‘to cut off.’” While there is something freeing about delegating your decisions to others  — dropping those stressors like a hot-air balloon releasing its sandbags — if we pare back too far, we may find that we’re the ones who’ve gotten cut off.

We’ve all got different ideas about what’s reasonable. I think drinking a meat smoothie is a sign of the impending end of civilization, but I’m totally fine with wearing the same thing every day — a la Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or Barack Obama — in order to save time. And we’ve all got a different appetite for work, a different sense of where to draw the line. However, as James Allworth pointed out in our own SXSW panel on why men work so many hours, it’s tough to stick to those limits when the rewards of work are immediate, and the rewards of life accrue more slowly. (To some parents of teenagers, these rewards may seem practically glacial.) It becomes tempting to reserve the best of ourselves for the short-term gains of work and “automate” the long game of life.

Still, I do think each of us has a Rubicon — wherever it is, and whenever we find it. On crossing it, we may start to see luxury not as having a personal assistant or a weekly massage, but as doing something useless simply because we felt like doing it — not because it made us smarter, or thinner, or more productive.

So the next time your instincts are telling you to press on, to climb higher, to put one more piece of your life on autopilot, consider: even Sisyphus got to walk downhill half the time.