Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1449

Why You Should Stop Brainstorming

How many times have you been in a brainstorming session this week? Chances are the answer is, “More than I can count.” But no study has proven that brainstorming works well, even though it has been the go-to method for idea generation since 1953.

But there is an alternative. After researching why brainstorming inhibits creativity and innovation, my colleagues and I came up with a new process we call Brainswarming. Watch the video below for more information on what it is and how you can implement it:

Brainswarming is a trademark of Dr. Tony McCaffrey

Feeling Fear in the Presence of a Brand Makes You More Attached to It

People who were scared by clips from the movies The Ring and Salem’s Lot felt more emotionally attached to a brand of sparkling water that had been placed on their desks than did others who watched clips from exciting or sad movies or happiness-inducing scenes from the series Friends (3.70 versus 2.11, 2.54, and 2.28, respectively, on a 7-point emotional-attachment scale), say Lea Dunn of the University of Washington and JoAndrea Hoegg of the University of British Columbia. Fear makes people want to share their experience with others, and if a brand is present it can satisfy this desire, almost as though it were a person, the researchers say.

Google Flu Trends’ Failure Shows Good Data > Big Data

In their best-selling 2013 book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think, authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier selected Google Flu Trends (GFT) as the lede of chapter one. They explained how Google’s algorithm mined five years of web logs, containing hundreds of billions of searches, and created a predictive model utilizing 45 search terms that “proved to be a more useful and timely indicator [of flu] than government statistics with their natural reporting lags.”

Unfortunately, no. The first sign of trouble emerged in 2009, shortly after GFT launched, when it completely missed the swine flu pandemic. Last year, Nature reported that Flu Trends overestimated by 50% the peak Christmas season flu of 2012. Last week came the most damning evaluation yet.  In Science, a team of Harvard-affiliated researchers published their findings that GFT has over-estimated the prevalence of flu for 100 out of the last 108 weeks; it’s been wrong since August 2011. The Science article further points out that a simplistic forecasting model—a model as basic as one that predicts the temperature by looking at recent-past temperatures—would have forecasted flu better than GFT.

In short, you wouldn’t have needed big data at all to do better than Google Flu Trends. Ouch.

In fact, GFT’s poor track record is hardly a secret to big data and GFT followers like me, and it points to a little bit of a big problem in the big data business that many of us have been discussing: Data validity is being consistently overstated. As the Harvard researchers warn: “The core challenge is that most big data that have received popular attention are not the output of instruments designed to produce valid and reliable data amenable for scientific analysis.”

The amount of data still tends to dominate discussion of big data’s value. But more data in itself does not lead to better analysis, as amply demonstrated with Flu Trends. Large datasets don’t guarantee valid datasets. That’s a bad assumption, but one that’s used all the time to justify the use of and results from big data projects. I constantly hear variations on the “N=All therefore it’s good data” argument, from real data analyts: “Since Google has 80% of the search market, we can ignore the other search engines. They don’t matter.” Or, “Since Facebook has a billion accounts, it has substantively everyone.”

Poor assumptions are neither new nor unpredictable. When the mainstream economists collectively failed to predict the housing bubble: their neoclassical model is built upon several assumptions including the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which suggests that market prices incorporate all available information, and, as Paul Krugman says, leads to the “general belief that bubbles just don’t happen.”

In the wake of epic fails like these, the natural place to look for answers is in how things are being defined in the first place. In the business community, big data’s definition is often some variation on McKinsey’s widely-circulated big data report (PDF), which defines big data as “datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze.”

Can we do better? I started asking myself and other data analysts what are the key differences between datasets that underlie today’s GFT-like projects and the datasets we were using five to 10 years ago. This has led to what I call the OCCAM framework, a more honest assessment of the current state of big data and the assumptions lurking in it.

Big data is:

Observational: much of the new data come from sensors or tracking devices that monitor continuously and indiscriminately without design, as opposed to questionnaires, interviews, or experiments with purposeful design

Lacking Controls: controls are typically unavailable, making valid comparisons and analysis more difficult

Seemingly Complete: the availability of data for most measurable units and the sheer volume of data generated is unprecedented, but more data creates more false leads and blind alleys, complicating the search for meaningful, predictable structure

Adapted: third parties collect the data, often for a purposes unrelated to the data scientists’, presenting challenges of interpretation

Merged: different datasets are combined, exacerbating the problems relating to lack of definition and misaligned objectives

This is far less optimistic a definition, but a far more honest appraisal of the current state of big data.

The worst outcome from the Science article and the OCCAM framework, though, would be to use them as evidence that big data’s “not worth it.” Honest appraisals are meant to create honest progress, to advance the discipline rather than fuel the fad.

Progress will come when the companies involved in generating and crunching OCCAM datasets restrain themselves from overstating their capabilities without properly measuring their results. The authors of the Science article should be applauded for their bravery in raising this thorny issue. They did a further service to the science community by detailing the difficulty in assessing and replicating the algorithm developed by Google Flu Trends researchers. They discovered that the published information about the algorithm is both incomplete and inaccurate. Using the reserved language of academics, the authors noted: “Oddly, the few search terms offered in the papers [by Google researchers explaining their algorithm] do not seem to be strongly related with either GFT or the CDC data—we surmise that the authors felt an unarticulated need to cloak the actual search terms identified.” [emphasis added]

In other words, Google owes us an explanation as to whether it published doctored data without disclosure, or if its highly-touted predictive model is so inaccurate that the search terms found to be the most predictive a few years ago are no longer predictive. If companies want to participate in science, they need to behave like scientists.

Like the Harvard researchers, I am excited by the promises of data analytics. But I’d like to see our industry practice what we preach, conducting honest assessment of our own successes and failures. In the meantime, outsiders should be attentive to the challenges of big data analysis, as summarized in the OCCAM framework, and apply considerable caution in interpreting such analyses.

The Heretic’s Guide to Getting More Done

Are you working endlessly but not accomplishing all you want? Mystified that continuous attention to work is not resulting in satisfactory progress toward your goals? So focused on work that you’re not thinking about or doing much else? If so, you may not be giving your brain the benefit of adequate downtime. A recent article in Scientific American, Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime, summarizes the evidence that “mental breaks increase productivity, replenish attention, solidify memories, and encourage creativity.”

How can hard-working business leaders get the downtime they need? In my executive coaching practice, I help clients reach peak performance by actually doing less work at key times—and by engaging in downtime activities that cutting-edge research shows to be effective in boosting productivity.

Here are five tips for getting downtime so that you can perform better than ever:

DAYDREAM AS OFTEN AS YOU WANT.  Letting your mind wander has significant benefits. Neuroscience research on the brain’s default mode network reveals that the brain is active and productive during states of daydreaming and mind wandering. In an article entitled Rest is Not Idleness, researchers describe evidence that a robust default mode network enhances perception, attention, and cognition. They argue that “constructive internal reflection”— the term they coin for daydreaming and related “rest” states—is essential for learning, problem solving, and goal setting. This may help to explain why some of our best ideas come when we’re in the shower, not sitting at a computer. We can create that shower effect in the workplace by intentionally paying less attention to work and letting our minds wander wherever they please.

STOP PREPARING FOR MEETINGS AND PRESENTATIONS.  Evidence that brain rest is beneficial should have practical implications for how we work. Many of my clients focus intensively (or obsessively) on meetings and presentations they believe can make or break their careers. Drawing on accumulating downtime research, I encourage them to spend less time attending to details of what they’re going to say or put on PowerPoint slides. Instead, I coach them to think about almost anything else as the meeting or presentation approaches. A senior biotech executive in my practice was initially wary of this advice, as he had always entered fits of anxiety as presentations to his executive team approached. When he began to pay less attention to upcoming presentations, his performance improved. And then he gave the presentation of a lifetime—one that was so powerful that it led to a major promotion and to a company-wide shift in how these kinds of presentations are made by everyone across the firm.

SPEND LESS TIME ON KEY DECISIONS.Research shows that we make sounder decisions when we analyze less and empower our subconscious minds to do the heavy lifting.  A 2006 study compared two groups of 40 people who were asked to make a decision about the optimal car to purchase based on specs of several different vehicles. One group spent 4 minutes concentrating exclusively on the task, while the other group spent 4 minutes with the specs while also distracted by solving anagrams. The distracted group made the wiser choices. The researchers observed that “it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious deliberation before choosing.” As long as the distracting task isn’t too complex, a “deliberation-without-attention” approach can be extremely effective. Always having a crossword puzzle, People magazine, Sudoko book, or other enjoyable distraction nearby can be surprisingly valuable.

BE MORE “MINDFUL” THAN FOCUSED. Research on daydreaming and distractions should prompt us to build such “mindfulness” activities into our work lives. How is that possible? Most of my clients can’t break away from the office and go to a yoga or meditation studio during the workday. But with coaching (plus disciplined practice on their own), they can make real progress in this area. Many of my clients, for example, benefit from periods of rhythmic, controlled breathing for short durations (even a minute or two) while at work. I encourage them to pay close attention to their breathing, purposely slow their respiratory rate, and take deeper and longer breaths. This is a form of “biofeedback,” which research shows is an effective self-management tool in high-stress workplaces.  Another mindfulness strategy is to have a “mantra,” a word or phrase that can foster a meditative state, diminish stress, and foster creativity by giving the brain the rest it craves.

SHORTEN YOUR WORKDAY. Research shows that top performers only work for stretches of 5 hours or less, taking restorative breaks at least every hour. Some employers recognize this fact and give employees adequate time away from narrowly focused work tasks (more should follow suit). In my coaching practice, I work with clients on rigorous “behavioral scheduling” of essential work and non-work tasks, so that they can obtain appropriate downtime. When this approach does not suffice, sometimes I advise my clients to take part or all of a workday off periodically. Under some circumstances, even a sick day may be justified to give the brain some rest. Most of us should reduce our time at work in order to work more effectively.

Compelling new research reveals that “less is more” for human brains—and that mental downtime should be among our highest priorities.  If you aren’t making progress on that to-do list or performing up to the level you need to, just give it a rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insurance Companies’ Untapped Digital Opportunity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special thanks to Jen Mathissen for contributing to this article.

What Military Service Could Teach MBAs

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

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

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

The answer, in short, is: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executives Must Face Their Own Mortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Increase Workplace Flexibility and Boost Performance

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

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

Job Diagnosis

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

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

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

Person Diagnosis

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

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

Job Redesign

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

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

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

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

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

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

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