Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1451

Tech Firms’ Investments in Workers Often End Up Benefiting Competitors

When they change jobs, high-tech employees bring a lot of previously acquired know-how with them, boosting their new companies’ productivity. A study of hundreds of thousands of workers over 20 years by Prasanna Tambe of New York University and Lorin M. Hitt of The Wharton School suggests that the productivity-growth effect of this flow of workers is 20% to 30% as large as that of the companies’ own IT investments. The finding at least partially explains why many firms consider it advantageous to locate in places like Silicon Valley, the researchers say.

Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List

Do you leave emails in your inbox so that you remember to read or tackle them? If so, you’re using your email to manage your tasks—and those are actually two very different things. Using a separate task manager, one that ties in closely with your email, can help you spend less time sifting through your inbox, and more time getting your most important work done.

Why do you need to separate these activities out? If you’re conflating email and task management, then the job of simply communicating–reading and replying to your messages–gets bogged down by all the emails you leave sitting in your inbox simply so you won’t forget to address them. (And there are probably a few to-do reminders in there that you sent to yourself!) This approach also makes managing your to-do-list problematic: when you need to quickly identify the right task to take on next, nothing slows you down like diving into your inbox to scroll through old messages.

The reason so many of us fall into the trap of conflating email and task management is that email is inextricable from much of what we do in work and in life: many of our tasks arrive in the form of email messages, and many other tasks require reading or sending emails as part of getting that work done.

Luckily, there are many fantastic task managers that recognize the inextricability of email and task management without lumping the two in together. The best task managers not only provide you with a single place to capture the tasks you need to get done; they also make it easy for you to add tasks by email. But unlike email they can also track things like what is complete or incomplete, when each task needs to get done, what project a task is related to, or where you need to be in order to do it.

While there are those who solve this problem by simply tracking their to-dos using the task manager within Outlook (or another email platform), that approach comes at too steep a cost. Keeping your tasks in your email program means you can’t close that program (and its attendant distractions) when you want to plow through your task list. Having both activities as part of one application also means that you’ll still have to flip from one view to the other; even if you open a separate window for your task list, you risk losing sight of it in a sea of open emails. Most crucially, defaulting to the task manager that is built into your email client means you don’t get to choose the particular task manager that works best for your particular kind of work, or work style.

There are many task management systems available, each aimed at users with different needs and work styles. Here are some of the best candidates to consider as you search for the one that’s right for you – as well as advice on how to integrate each one with your email system:

Remember the Milk. For those who need a task manager that will work for both their personal to-do lists and team collaboration, RTM is a slick & snappy web-based task management tool with loads of great features that syncs across a large number of other devices, operating systems and web applications. Whether you depend on an iOS, Windows or Android phone; Google Calendar or Outlook; Evernote or Twitter: RTM has an app or extension for you.

And you can add tasks to Remember the Milk via email easily once you get the hang of formatting the messages.

Things. Apple loyalists who place a premium on the aesthetics of their software will like this well-designed task manager, which keeps tasks neatly in sync across all Apple-made devices (though you have to buy separate versions for Mac, iPhone and iPad, which adds up). Options to view tasks by project, context or timeline make it very easy to see what you need to do at any given moment in your day.

Things also provides a handy feature that’s one step up from emailing yourself tasks: quick entry with autofill lets you highlight an email in your inbox and then use a single keystroke to create a new Things task that is pre-filled with the selected email text. There is also a very useful (if geeky) workaround that gives you even more control over creating tasks directly from Apple’s Mail.app.

OmniFocus. Mac users who use David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to productivity may take to OmniFocus, which bakes Allen’s methodology right into the software. It encourages you to attach contexts to each task (like noting whether this is a task to be done by phone or on the computer, during the workday or on your commute home) so that you take on the task that is most feasible whenever you turn to your list.

OmniFocus users can use a simple and elegant service called Mail Drop to email tasks directly to OF. There’s no special formatting to learn, and as an added bonus, it’s easy for OF users to take advantage of some really cool IFTTT recipes!

Toodledo. If you’re looking for something really powerful and flexible, Toodledo’s web-based task manager allows you to add tasks and sub-tasks to lists, which can be organized into folders, goals, contexts or outlines, each of which offers different ways to parse the tasks. There are collaborative features available to paid subscribers, and TD syncs to popular calendar applications. One of the neat things about Toodledo is that they partner with Carbonfund.org to offset the electricity used in their operations. As far as I know, they’re the only task manager that can claim to be running a carbon-neutral operation.

The trade-off for all that power and complexity is that adding tasks to TD via email can be somewhat onerous. Like the application itself, Toodledo’s email interface offers very powerful options, but it’s got a steep learning curve.

Basecamp. While I wouldn’t recommend Basecamp for someone those seeking to manage just their personal tasks, if you’re already working in an organization that uses Basecamp to manage collaboration it’s a good option. Then you can set up your personal task list as a project named something like “My Tasks” rather than using completely separate applications for your personal and team-based tasks. The many tools that sync with Basecamp give you easy access to your task list when you’re on your phone or offline.

Turning an email into a Basecamp task is just as easy: just follow their simple instructions to forward it to your account.

What I use now: Evernote + Reminders + Followup.cc. For those who tend to get lost in the sea of their own overgrown task lists, consider dividing that list up to make it easier to deal with. First make a weekly list that contains only your most crucial tasks or deliverables for the next five days. If you use a note-taking tool like Evernote, keep your task list a click away by placing all these tasks in a separate “Tasks” notebook or folder and creating a prominently-placed shortcut to it in your Evernote sidebar.

As with more traditional task management tools, you can forward your emails to Evernote; it then becomes a note and when you need to refer to it, you can do a quick Evernote search–or if you’ve filed it, click on the relevant notebook.

In addition to the big things that go on your weekly list, you probably have a lot of smaller tasks to keep track of: an email you need to remember to write or a card you need to send. Use simple timed reminder tools for these smaller items. You can use Evernote’s own reminders feature for that purpose, but it may be easier to use a separate reminders tool like the default Reminders app that syncs across all Apple products.

And if the thing you’re trying not to forget is an email – maybe one you need to reply to later, or one you’ll need to follow up on – you can get that email out of your inbox by forwarding the email to followup.cc. It will come back to you at the time you specify, when you are actually in a position to act on it.

This particular combination of Evernote, timed reminders and followup.cc is what I use now. Using reminders and followup.cc to not forget the little stuff has allowed me to keep a very minimal list of my major tasks; and because I’m not getting bogged down in an inbox that’s overflowing with a list of implicit, tiny to-dos, I have more time to get those major tasks accomplished.

But I won’t pretend that this system is going to be my Ultimate Task-Fighting Champion for the next decade: if there’s one thing I’ve learned from trying dozens of task and project management tools, it’s that the best choice of tools varies as much from year to year as it does from person to person. Experiment with a few different email-friendly task managers to find the one that’s right for you now, and recognize that your needs, preferences and toolkit will almost certainly change over time.

My new ebook from Harvard Business Review Press, Work Smarter, Rule Your Email , gives more advice on how to use email to support your work – instead of letting it crowd out the tasks and projects on your plate.

Is Work-Family Conflict Reaching a Tipping Point?

Stewart D. Friedman, Wharton professor and author of Baby Bust, presents new research.

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60-Second Drills Can Sharpen Your Business Reflexes

After exiting the crowded auditorium where Colts quarterback Andrew Luck publicly wished that the NFL would develop “a football equivalent of pitch count” to reduce injury at his position, I headed left toward a series of large posters mounted on display easels in the hallway.

Each display showed complex statistical formulas, data visualizations, and excerpts from research papers presented at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Groups of three or four attendees clustered around each poster as if at an art gallery, nodding appreciatively to convey understanding or pointing to ask, “What does this mean?”

This year, more than 300 papers were submitted by researchers from the world’s leading academic institutions and corporate R&D groups, but only 13 were accepted for the conference. I’ve studied the posters and scanned the papers and am struck by how temporally exacting the leading edge of sports analytics has become. Thanks to new wearable technology and video analytics techniques, each minute (or less) of a game offers researchers increasingly precise modes of analysis and insight.

This new world also offers fresh ideas for managers in non-sports businesses. Here are four challenges analytics can help solve, each with a 60-second drill. There’s a lot to be learned in minute.

Spot faulty decision-making patterns. You might think you are fairly reliable when making spur-of-the-moment decisions during meetings or sales calls. But is it possible that your decisions are consistently off-base compared to routine decisions made by others in your organization or profession?

Using video of nearly every game over the last two NBA seasons, this paper analyzes the split-second call tendencies of referees. It found that many refs call violations at rates significantly higher or lower than the professional average; thus, understanding a decisions-maker’s tendencies can be “leveraged” as an advantage.

60-Second Drill: Conduct a data-gathering exercise of your own personal inclinations during your next meeting. Track a few key suggestions and who made them. Look at your tracking notes later on, asking yourself whether you have default feelings about the types of solutions mentioned (“I can’t stand new technology”) or who made them  (“I really like this guy!”). Are these defaults resulting in predictably off-kilter decisions?  

Recognize and quantify bias in new ways.  Situational biases, like the fear of failure in some moments more than others, change how routine decisions get made. For instance, are you more likely to feel pressure to veto the standard 5% increase to the R&D budget just after your stock price took a hit?

By analyzing more than 1 million pitches from 2009-2011, this paper uncovers each MLB umpire’s aversions to miscalling strikes in certain situations. It found that for more pressure-packed decisions, such as calling a third strike, an umpire needs to be 64% sure it’s actually a strike half the time.  By comparison, “if an umpire is unbiased, he would only need to be 50% sure that a pitch is a strike in order to call a strike half the time.”

60-Second Drill: Before your next decision, ask yourself whether and how an increased sense of pressure might bias the way you see a given situation; look carefully at your judgment of the facts, for example, or the data at hand.

Deconstruct a skill. Let’s say your boss just asked you to lead a critical new initiative, requesting a shortlist of people you’d like on the team. To assess needs and skills, you might be inclined to think in terms of generic notions of expertise. You might put a “coder” or “marketer” on your list, for example.

But imagine that you could get a totally new kind of granular insight on skills, grounded in data drawn from real-life practice rather than conventional categories.  In basketball, for instance, generic skills are now being deconstructed in real time, allowing for more effective analysis of skills and assessment of performance. For instance, using tracking technology, researchers in this paper determined that the generic skill of rebounding in basketball is actually three distinctive skills: positioning, hustle, and conversion.

60-Second Drill: Identify your number one skill, the one you’re known for. Are there hidden or tacit sub-skills that underlie its successful application and outcomes? Jot down ways you could market these newly uncovered sub-skills to clients.  

Track decisions in real time. During an important meeting, you and your colleagues might make dozens of small decisions that culminate in one big decision, like taking a shot at entering a new market with an existing product.

Imagine if you could quantify the contribution that each decision makes to the final outcome. Using optical tracking data to identify every small decision players make during a game — “whether it is to pass, dribble, or shoot” — this paper describes how real-time analysis of decisions can allow us to assess the value of an individual’s contribution in fundamentally new ways.

60-Second Drill: After your next meeting, identify a small decision that was made toward the beginning. Reflect on the ways it might have influenced later decisions, created value, and influenced the final outcome.  

Why Are Some People So Critical?

Harsh critics are often talented, intelligent, and productive people. Unfortunately, they have a flaw that compels them to disparage others – almost, at times, as though they are diagnosing an illness in need of eradication. It seems they’re living according to the famous quip by Mark Twain: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

In the language of the self-help and recovery movements, these folks are often suffering from a disorder known as, “If You Spot It, You Got It [IYSIYGI].” It works like this: You notice that colleague X has what is, in your mind, is an affliction. You then take it upon yourself to castigate him for his affliction — irrespective of whether or not it impairs his on-the-job performance or has a negative effect on group morale.

What makes this dynamic so ugly is that unbeknownst to the person under attack, the critic is being driven to criticize by a repressed-and-intolerable feeling that he’s “got” what he deplores in others.

For instance, years ago a client of mine and I were having dinner when he asked if I could help with a dilemma: “Diane, my comptroller, a woman 100% dedicated to the business, is also nastier than a junkyard dog. She doesn’t just monitor spending; she beats people up for what she sees as waste, failure to stick to protocol, issues with record-keeping… nothing major, but stuff that is technically wrong. If she assumes you are fudging parts of expense reports — say, claiming a lunch that’s not 100% business-related — she’ll attack you like Muhammad Ali in his prime. She assaults my EVP of sales so regularly, he vows to quit if I don’t fire her.”

My client was not prepared for my response: “I’m willing to bet Diane’s cooking the books so she can pocket cash.”

After catching his breath, my client took my bet. “Diane’s so honest, she could be a priest if the Pope allowed women to serve in that role,” he said.

But within a year, he was obligated to buy me a rare box of Cuban cigars after losing our bet: it turned out that Diane had been embezzling funds for 20 years.

That’s an extreme example of IYSIYGI behavior, but whether it’s a strong or a mild case, it’s a form of what psychologist call projection: A psychological defense mechanism that enables a person to deny their own issues by attributing those traits to others. Projection lets us condemn the traits or we find distasteful, repugnant, or worthy of punishment. IYSIYGI behaviors are, at times, benign –like me chiding my wife for leaving countless pairs of shoes around the house while my bonsai workbench looks like an earthquake hit it— but typically it is not. Ongoing IYSIYGI assaults can become significant threats to company morale.

When I bet my client that Diane was engaged in criminal behavior I was behaving “criminally” as well: Stealing candy from a baby. After studying IYSIYGI defensive tactics for years I knew that anyone who evinced hyper-rigid moralism –coupled with an intense bias against transgressors— was likely to terribly flawed.

In a very real way, Diane and all who condemn others owing to IYSIYGI drives are caught up in Shakespearean “doth protest too much” defensiveness. The anxiety that your own component parts are out of order –not the flaws of someone else— is the emotional pain that prompts an IYSIYGI attack.

IYSIYGI behavior is a fairly deep-seated problem that needs a clinician, not a coach, to resolve. That said, there is much that managers can do to minimize this dynamic on their teams.

The first step is to ignore faultfinders and instead reward problem solvers. In my opinion, we have become a nation obsessed with reproach: quick to jump to conclusions, take offense, and chide each other. The effect on our politics is bad enough, but it’s also been costly to our companies – and our relationships. Rather than assume that a problem has been caused by somebody’s ill-will, take a “stuff happens” attitude and simply ask the person or people closest to the damage to address it.

The second step is to encourage transparency – and forgiveness. The simple act of confessing your foibles can be incredibly beneficial. And learning from your confessor that you are not alone, that you are more “normal” than you assumed, is a major stress reducer. Finally, learning to be more patient with your own flaws will help you be more patient with those of others.

Finally, make sure that negative feedback is always given in the context of what can be done about it.  Arguably, the worst thing IYSIGYI critics do is metaphorically curse the darkness while refusing to light a candle.

One executive who I was hired to coach, a man universally disliked by his direct reports, kept asking me, as a rhetorical rationale for his department’s under-performance, “How can I soar with the eagles while surrounded by turkeys?” I soon tired of this defense and recall snapping at him, “To hell with soaring… why don’t you just fly out of the barnyard so we can look at how you can do your job without justifying failure by fault-finding?” As bad as this intervention was, it served its purpose in that the executive admitted that he struggled to relate to his staff — and needed to learn to do so.

Still, in hindsight I wish I’d told that man, “Why not try to free yourself to soar by adopting the wisdom of Mahatma Gandhi: ‘Hate the sin, love the sinner.’ If you do, you’ll be amazed at how rarely your direct reports interfere with your flight plans.”

How GE Gives Leaders Time to Mentor and Reflect

It is 6:00 a.m. David is starting his first day as the “leader in residence” at Crotonville, GE’s global leadership institute, with a jog around the running trail with a couple of twenty-somethings who are half his age and might be five levels below him on an org chart. Their run is companionable; their discussion, candid. It is a serendipitous moment of connection that the three will always share.

David is one of our top executives, and he has stepped out of his day job as the head of a major GE business to make another kind of investment in the future of the company: He will spend this entire week teaching, coaching, mentoring, and learning with about 250 participants — high-performing managers and individual contributors who have come to campus from around the world. David and others who rotate through the position are helping to achieve the purpose of Crotonville: to inspire, connect, and develop GE’s talent.

The leader in residence position epitomizes our belief that a great leader is a great learner. It models both our cultural value of expertise, which encourages a deep knowledge base as well as a passion to develop others, and the GE leadership philosophy, which holds that when one person grows we all grow, and together, we all rise. And it allows David and other senior managers to take the time to reflect on their own leadership styles — an opportunity that they rarely get in the regular rhythm of their jobs.

After his run, David rushes off to a breakfast meeting where he talks to a group of first-time managers. At 8:30, he attends a session on the neuroscience of success with a group of mid-career high-performers. At 10:30, he hosts one-on-one coaching sessions, each about 30 minutes long. In the afternoon, he teaches a class on values, offering his take on the blueprint for leadership at GE. He then conducts “speed coaching” sessions with about 10 early career leaders:  intense, five-minute discussions centered on a few focus areas such as personal brand and navigating the organizational matrix. By late afternoon, he is involved in brainstorming about next year’s curriculum, providing the faculty with a unique view into future business requirements. He tops off the evening with a live video meeting on customer focus with a group of leaders in a training program in Singapore. At the end of the day, he heads to the campus bar, where he spends the next hour chatting with all the participants.

Launched in 2010, the Leader in Residence program is emblematic of a broader shift from prescriptive to collaborative learning taking place at Crotonville and elsewhere. In a complex environment, learning comes from a combination of discovery, dialogue, experience, reflection, and application. At Crotonville, we bring people from all over the world and from different businesses and contexts. We have to create the opportunity for each person to teach and learn, simultaneously, enhancing everyone’s perspective. David, like other leaders, uses this as a listening post — a venue to capture what’s happening around the company and the world in an encapsulated way…with Crotonville providing the opportunity to listen, test, validate, and absorb on the one hand, and to share, push, elaborate, and support the students on the other.

In all, the program has enabled some 75 of our top leaders and thousands of participants to connect on a human level and to reflect on work, self, and career in a way that would never be possible in either a traditional classroom or office setting. By giving leaders access to deeper levels across the organization, and, in turn, providing participants access to senior leadership, we have created greater cohesiveness throughout the company. We have never had a problem filling out classes even during the most trying of times. Based on the success of the program, as measured through participant surveys and feedback, we recently launched a global version (74% of Crotonville experiences are delivered outside the United States currently).

In fostering a learning culture and deepening connections among leaders at all levels, we have found that we can drive better outcomes that accelerate individual growth and strengthen the talent pipeline.

Thriving at the Top

An HBR Insight Center




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Five Questions to Identify Key Stakeholders

Suppose you’re meeting with a group of managers and staff members to determine who your key stakeholders are. (It’s an important task, because with limited resources, your organization or unit can’t do everything for everyone.) People will submit their ideas, and in no time at all you’ll have a large list — and potentially a nightmare. If you don’t focus on the relationships that matter most, management and staff will be running in all directions, not meeting anyone’s needs very well.

So how do you produce a shorter, more coherent list? Answer the following questions about each contender you’ve identified in your brainstorming session. They’ll help you direct your organization’s energy and resources to the right relationships and activities. The questions and examples are drawn from my years of experience working with a large variety of organizations and management teams.

1. Does the stakeholder have a fundamental impact on your organization’s performance? (Required response: yes.)

Example: A manufacturer of trusses and frames for houses decided, on reflection, that a local council wasn’t a key stakeholder. Though the council set regulations that the company had to follow, those rules didn’t have much of an effect on sales or profits the way, for instance, customers did.

2. Can you clearly identify what you want from the stakeholder? (Required response: yes.)

Example: Members of a law firm’s strategic-planning team knew they wanted revenue from clients, productivity and innovation from employees, and continued funding from partners — yet they couldn’t specify what they wanted from the community, so that relationship wasn’t deemed key.

3. Is the relationship dynamic — that is, do you want it to grow? (Required response: yes.)

Example: A company that ran 17 retirement villages had a dynamic, strategic relationship with current and potential residents.  It wanted increased occupancy and more fees for services used.  The company’s relationship with a university, by contrast, was static and operationally focused. It involved a fixed amount of research funding and co-branding each year.  That’s all that was needed. Though the co-branding generated broader awareness and may have indirectly yielded more residents and revenue, the university itself didn’t achieve key stakeholder status.

4. Can you exist without or easily replace the stakeholder? (Required response: no.)

Example: A professional services firm in HR that had taken out a loan initially listed the bank as a stakeholder. But ultimately, that relationship didn’t qualify as key, because the loan could be easily refinanced with another source.

5. Has the stakeholder already been identified through another relationship? (Required response: no.)

Example: A government department involved in planning and infrastructure listed both employees and unions as key stakeholders. But this amounted to double counting: The unions represented employees’ interests, and the organization’s primary relationship was with its employees.

After you’ve applied the above criteria, your list will certainly be shorter, but it may still feel a bit unwieldy. If that’s the case, see if you can combine categories.

Consider this list of stakeholders for a large practice of brain and spine surgeons:

Patients: individuals and families who use the services of the practice
Medical Referrers: general practitioners, other specialists, and emergency departments that send patients to the practice for examination
Third-Party Referrers: insurers and lawyers who send patients to the practice for an independent medical opinion
Hospitals: tertiary facilities that deliver surgical and medical services
Employees: persons other than surgeons who provide their skills to the practice
Surgeons: specialists who perform surgery within the practice
Shareholders: individuals, and related entities, who own the practice

Note that different types of medical referrers are grouped together. That’s because they all evaluate the medical practice with the same set of criteria: surgery success rate, range of treatment options, waiting time until the patient is treated, reputation among medical peers, proximity of practice to operating hospitals, and likely cost to the patient. But the third-party referrers, for instance, rely on different standards: accuracy of medical assessments, lead time before patient evaluation, amount charged for an expert opinion, professionalism of the practice, and compliance with report deadlines. And the patients look at quality of service (empathy, how clearly the options are explained, waiting time at reception), cost of medical service, payment terms, convenience of practice location to them, perceived surgical skill, and cleanliness and comfort of waiting rooms.

By clustering stakeholders according to common needs, you’ll whittle your list down to a more manageable length, increasing the efficiency and impact of your efforts to meet the right groups’ needs.

When Research Should Come with a Warning Label

In his sharp and engaging new book, The News: A User’s Manual, the philosopher Alain de Botton describes the experience of consuming news as if we are woken each morning by a frantic official armed with “a briefcase filled with a bewildering and then in the end tiring range of issues: ‘Five hospitals are predicted to breach their credit limits by the end of the month,’ ‘The central bank is worried about its ability to raise money on the bond markets,’ ‘A Chinese warship has just left the mainland en route for Vietnam’…What are we meant to think? Where should all this go in our minds?”

His answer is that in a news market overflowing with facts, facts by themselves go unsold; they require a story—and that story, he says mischievously, needs some kind of bias on the part of the author, “a pair of lenses that slide over reality and aim to bring it more clearly into focus.” You can see what he means: our capacity to produce data on everything requires packaging; otherwise, it is like finding oneself in a library where all the books have been disassembled into piles of paragraphs, sentences and words. Our consumption of information requires an algorithm of narrative and the perspective of bias in order to produce focus. The problem — the presiding problem of our knowledge economy — is whether we end up focusing on something that’s actually true.

Just how big a problem this is for industry — and for one industry in particular — is illustrated by a recent study, which, ironically, claimed to uncover the kind of bias we don’t want to see when it comes to assessing the validity of data.

The study, which appeared in PLoS Medicine, argues that industry funding has compromised the evidence on sugar. Systematic reviews of studies on sugared beverage consumption and weight gain — which is to say, reviews which try to sum up the state of the evidence — were five times more likely to conclude no relationship than systematic reviews that had no industry funding. As the headline on Forbes.com put it, succinctly, “Big Sugar Tips The Balance Of The Research Scale.”

This is a powerful indictment precisely because we have heard the same kind of story before: when an industry is in trouble, its first recourse will be to manufacture scientific doubt, or to refer to pre-made scientific doubt. Indeed, should this have not crossed your mind, the PLoS authors tie their findings to past behavior by the tobacco and pharmaceutical industries. Narrative, bias, and focus, provide an overwhelming rationale to file the story under “malfeasance” with a note to disregard the legitimacy of any data produced by that industry’s funding.

But only if the PLoS study is itself true.

The fascinating thing about how this information entered the realm of public debate is not just that no one asked this question, but that our system for producing and sharing such knowledge is poorly designed for asking such questions.

Here is the problem with the PLoS study: it cannot answer the question it claims to answer because of the way it was designed. The researchers looked at systematic reviews conducted between 2006 and 2013. But this period saw a significant change in the kind of research done on sugar and weight gain. At the beginning of the period, there were few randomized control trials and a lot of observational studies; at the end, more randomized control trials, which provide much better evidence of cause and effect. The effect sizes for these trials are still quite small, but when added together, there was more, and qualitatively better, evidence associating sugar consumption and increased weight gain the closer one got to 2013. In fact, the four systematic reviews from 2012 onwards all found mostly positive associations; none were funded by industry.

But can an “industry-funded” systematic review be called “biased” based on studies that didn’t exist when the review was originally carried out? Can a review in 2007 be criticized as biased for not including a study published in 2012?

Now, you might find it odd that this was ever an open debate. Surely we all know as a basic fact that sugar causes weight gain. This is why it is important to remember that the scientific question is not simple weight gain, but whether calorie for calorie sugar causes extra weight gain or whether the specific reduction or elimination of, say, soda, in a diet would lead to weight loss. As the expert panel commissioned to come up with the 2010 dietary guidelines for the US Department of Agriculture noted, the scientific evidence for something you would think would be critical to our understanding of obesity, was “disappointing.”

The PLoS researchers also did not include three reviews, two from 2006 and one from 2007 that did not find an association between sugared beverage consumption and weight and were not funded by industry. They had been included in at least one other systematic analysis of the systematic review literature. While including them doesn’t obviate the temporal flaw in the study’s design, they do show that more academics without industry funding found no effect when asking the same question of the evidence.

Moreover, the PLoS study design (conflict with industry? Yes/no; positive association? Yes/no) also suppresses the fact that the conclusions of systematic review can be mixed, with the authors of one review noting that there is suggestive evidence for a relationship between sugared beverage consumption and those who are overweight, and that such findings should be examined with more randomized control trials. This particular review is labeled as having a conflict with industry not because it was industry funded (it was funded by the National Institutes of Health) but because the authors had past industry funding from the food industry.

This may seem like nit picking. It’s not. But how many people would spot any of this? It certainly didn’t catch the eye of Forbes contributor Larry Huston, who’s an uncommonly good science writer, but then why would it? Why would he be familiar with the systematic review literature on this topic and the evolution of research on sugar and weight gain? (I only know about it because I spent months looking at the academic literature on soda and food taxes and got sucked into the methodological problems hounding the entire field of nutrition.) The New York Times also reported the study without any analysis.

In fact, the people who would immediately know why the PLoS study is misleading are relatively few. Most would not have access to or even an interest in engaging the media, while many would be from industry, the very people the PLoS study effectively warns you not to trust.

But what about peer review? If the past few years have taught us anything, it is that academic publishing is what the Internet was once called — the Wild West. Consider only the complaints aired by a National Institutes of Health workshop, which convened to deal with the problem of why so many findings from animal studies could not be replicated. There was, as the concluding paper, published in Nature said, “broad agreement” that “poor reporting, often associated with poor experimental design, is a significant issue across the life sciences…” In other words, the vices popularly associated with industry-funded studies — a lack of transparency in data, methods, and analysis leading to exaggerated results — were widely prevalent among those funded by government.

Stanford University’s John Ioannidis, who has become a figurehead for a growing movement to improve scientific rigor, warned last November that the state of nutrition research was bedeviled by small sample sizes, weak study design, and poor survey methods. “Almost every single nutrient,” he wrote, “has peer reviewed publications associating it with almost any out­come. . . . Many findings are entirely implausible.”

Even something as fundamental to nutrition research as how much food people consume, which the National Health and Nutrition Examination Sur­vey attempts to find out by questionnaire, was shown last year to be wildly inaccurate. Two-thirds of men, and almost 60 percent of women reported consuming less food than was physiologically plausible.

Peer review is valuable, but it is not a guarantor of reliable knowledge. And while the editor of PLoS Medicine defends the paper in a preface by arguing that industry has particular reasons to be biased (“increased sales of their products”) but that academic researchers don’t (because they are engaged in “the honest pursuit of knowledge”), the distinction has become meaningless in the face of publish or perish academic pressures, publication bias toward positive findings, and the growing awareness that poor statistical methods and weak experimental design undermine so much academic research in medicine and health.

Consider the finding published in Significance, the journal of the Royal Statistical Society, in which Stanley Young of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences tested 52 claims (about the effects of vitamins) from 12 observational studies against the results from randomized control trials. Not one observational finding could be replicated.

Imagine a product with a 100 percent failure rate. Or an airline in which the majority of flights crashed. This, we are reminded, is the nature of scientific inquiry: the path to truth is littered with false positives and null results. But we consume information just like any other product; we take flight on the reliability of data. And if there is no risk to taking risks with that data, from hyping research results to burying statistical data where the sun doesn’t shine, then — as we saw in the world of finance and mortgage backed securities — scientists will take risks, and news organizations will eagerly report their findings. The key difference between academic and industry produced data is that we currently treat the second skeptically. That asymmetry is the flaw in our knowledge economy; it leads to moral hazard — and worse.

The PLoS findings may well be used to delegitimize legitimate scientific perspectives in future debates over sugared drinks and food in general. A cohort of scientists has been impugned, and a younger cohort warned that such is their fate if they work for industry. Like a malign butterfly flapping its wings furiously, the storm damage that a biased finding can do in a dynamic system of knowledge is considerable. And repairing it with the truth is very, very difficult.

In a Middle-School Study, Broadband Access Hurt Students’ Grades

The advent of broadband access in middle schools in Portugal led to a decline of 0.78 of a standard deviation in academic grades between 2005 and 2009, say Rodrigo Belo, Pedro Ferreira, and Rahul Telang of Carnegie Mellon University. The reasons are unclear; perhaps broadband access offers students greater distractions. The researchers say they found some evidence that internet use has a significantly greater adverse impact in schools that allow access to YouTube.

The CEO of Kimberly-Clark on Building a Sustainable Company

Companies across the globe are tackling some of the world’s greatest societal challenges — water scarcity, climate change, and even the rights of women and girls in the developing world. Tom Falk, the CEO of Kimberly-Clark Corporation since 2002, talks about how the paper company is taking on environmental issues and has been practicing sustainability for 140 years.

Did you ever have a moment where you said to yourself, “We as a company can be part of the solution to environmental problems”?

FALK: In 1996, I picked up responsibility for our Energy & Environment group. We had already made a lot of progress in reducing energy consumption and water usage, improving forestry policies, and limiting air and water emissions, but my predecessor thought we should set some stretch goals for 2000. Because of our merger with Scott, we were a much larger company and the year 2000 was coming fast. It was a great time to lay out a bigger vision in this area and rally our teams around it. This was the first time we really put something down on paper.

I also remember a meeting several years later with Mike Duke, who was then head of Wal-Mart’s international business. I shared our goals for 2005 with him. Mike impressed upon me how much our performance and reputation in sustainability mattered to Wal-Mart and was fully supportive of our efforts. When our largest customer expressed that level of interest and backing, it underscored for me the importance of our sustainability efforts.

How is your company integrating sustainability into how you do business every day?

Every five years we increase the robustness of our goals, further stretching them. We’ve made excellent progress but we still have work to do. For example, we used to think setting a good example was enough but now we know we need to be more explicit about what we expect from suppliers. We require all of our suppliers to abide by the social compliance standards that we set.

Where in your company do ideas for sustainability initiatives start?

Some of the best thinking on how to meet our goals have come from employees in our mills. We first introduced Neve Compacto, a low-energy paper product, in Italy, to help retailers save shelf space and moms save room in their storage closet. Our Brazilian team saw how well it was working there and adapted it for use in their market. It’s been a huge success there. The Compacto rolls reduce the average amount of packaging used by 13%, which is equivalent to just over 1.8 million empty plastic water bottles in one year.

If the ultimate goal is to create both economic value and social value, how do you strike the right balance? Are you willing to take an economic loss of some kind if the social return is unmatched?

This is the tough question in sustainability. We face trade-offs in every area of our business. We never say, “Let’s not spend the money to improve the safety of our machines because it’s cheaper to let employees get injured.” So, yes, we make investments today that have a future payoff and like any investment choice, we consider the risk and benefits to our company and to the world around us.

We believe that sustainability and corporate social responsibility create value for Kimberly-Clark, whether it’s direct value, like cost savings or risk avoidance, or indirect value, like enhanced reputation or the ability to recruit and retain top talent.

How do you decide which investments to make?

We use the following criteria:

We put our employees and the communities in which we do business first.
We support legitimate social and environmental issues that are globally relevant but also have a clear fit with our brands and business strategies.
We look for a connection to the business objectives for the target market.
The benefit must be measureable—we can clearly track the impact on our business and our ability to improve lives.

How much of your company’s move in this direction is consumer-driven vs. conscience-driven?

As a paper company, established 140 years ago, we started off practicing sustainable forestry: When we cut one tree down, we needed to plant two so we would always have the resource to support our business. It’s only been in the last 10 years or so that the term “sustainability” has come in to common usage. For the 130 years before that, Kimberly-Clark was just doing the right thing.

Sure, consumer interest in sustainable products is increasing in various markets around the world. However, the vast majority of consumers won’t trade off product performance or cost for a more sustainable solution. Our challenge as brand-builders and manufacturers is to develop products and solutions that are better for the environment and don’t force moms to make a trade off.

Customers, consumers, employees, investors, suppliers and communities all now expect more from corporations. Great companies will live up to these expectations and win in the marketplace.

This is part of an ongoing series from Harvard Business Review and the Skoll World Forum on how mega-corporations are integrating innovative ways to solve social and environmental problems into their core operations.