Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1467

Setting Consecutive Difficult Goals Has a Dark Side

Consecutive high-performance goals deplete employees’ cognitive resources and tend to exacerbate unethical behavior over time, say David T. Welsh of the University of Washington and Lisa D. Ordóñez of the University of Arizona. For example, research participants who were given the most difficult goals in a series of arithmetic tasks cheated 84% more than the average. Although tough goals can increase performance, managers should be aware that consecutive difficult goals may generate negative consequences for organizations, the researchers say.

A/B Testing and the Benefits of an Experimentation Culture

Modern tech companies have figured out that data is their product. Whether you sell a service, a product, or content, what you really do is create value for your customer base — and every interaction with your product is a measurable amount of value. But the best data-driven companies don’t just passively store and analyze data, they actively generate actionable data by running experiments. The secret to getting value from data is testing, and if you’re looking to grow your online business, implementing well-executed, consistent A/B testing is a necessity.

At Shutterstock, where I work, we test everything: copy and link colors, relevance algorithms that rank our search results, language-detection functions, usability in downloading, pricing, video-playback design, and anything else you can see on our site (plus a lot you can’t see).

Shutterstock is the world’s largest creative marketplace, serving photography, illustrations, and video to more than 750,000 customers. And those customers have heavy image needs; we serve over three downloads per second. That’s a ton of data.

This means that we know more about our customers, statistically, than anyone else in our market. It also means that we can run more experiments with statistical significance faster than businesses with less user data. It’s one of our most important competitive advantages.

A/B Testing in Action

Search results are among the highest-trafficked pages on our site. A few years back, we started experimenting with a mosaic-display search-results page in our Labs area — an experimentation platform we use to try things quickly and get user feedback. In qualitative testing, customers really liked the design of the mosaic search grid, so we A/B tested it within the core Shutterstock experience. For those unfamiliar with A/B testing, it involves, at its core, showing different user experiences to different users to measure the impact of those differences. You can read more about it here.

Here are some of the details of the experiment, and what we learned:

Image sizes: We tested different image sizes to get just the right number of pixels on the screen.
New customers: We watched to see if new customers to our site would increase conversion. New customers act differently than existing ones, so you need to account for that. Sometimes existing customers suffer from change aversion.
Viewport size: Tracking the viewport size (the size of the screen customers used) was an important measure of understanding.
Watermarks: Image watermark vs. no watermark: Was the watermark inclusion distracting?
Hover: We experimented with the behavior of the hover when a user pauses on a particular image.

Before the test, we were convinced that removing the Watermark on our images would increase conversion because there would be less visual clutter on the page, but in testing we learned that removing the watermark created the opposite effect, disproving our gut instinct.

We ran enough tests to find two different designs that increased conversion, so we iterated on those designs and re-tested them before deciding on one. And we continue to test this search grid and make improvements for our customers on a regular basis.

Experimentation Culture

The most obvious benefit of a test like this is the ability to improve our product and increase our revenue. But there are indirect benefits of testing too, ones that manifest themselves once testing becomes ingrained in company culture.

First off, in an experimentation culture you kill off the HiPPOs. (That’s an acronym for the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.) A/B testing is a sure way to get to the bottom of a decision without relying on anyone’s gut instinct. At Shutterstock, if a senior executive has an idea in a meeting, the response is simply “Let’s test it.”

Secondly, more of your ideas will see daylight in the form of tests, instead of being killed off on whiteboards and in presentations. When it’s easy to try your ideas, your team can stop speaking in the abstract about things that haven’t happened yet, and instead speak about results and next steps. Lastly, co-workers will be highly motivated, because they get to see their ideas live in the real world.

It’s not all roses, of course. Experimentation culture has some downsides, too. One of the big ones is that experimentation teams sometimes miss the next big innovation because they’re constantly making incremental improvements that show quickly in test results. Remember, some test results will show a negative outcome in the short term, but be better in the long term due to user change aversion. Also, testing strategy is hard, and there’s still a place for strategic thinking that moves your organization in new directions.

Define your experimentation culture along a vector of Brand vs. Optimization — your current status vs. your aspiration. On the Brand side of that spectrum are tight visual brand guidelines, consistency between offline and online marketing, and similar styles throughout the experience. On the Optimization end of the spectrum, anything goes: test the logo, test the header, try any color or copy, never trust your gut, and allow your product to have some inconsistency if it means conversion is higher. Your culture will fall somewhere in between.

We ran a helpful exercise with our product and marketing teams where we each put our favorite company on this spectrum, then debated where we thought Shutterstock was, and where it wanted to be. We came out of that meeting very far to the Optimization end of the spectrum.

Putting Experimentation Into Practice

Here are some helpful tips that can set you on your way to creating growth through experimentation. (For a longer list, check out this blog post.)

1. Keep the team small. All you need to perform tests is a 3-4 person team made up of an engineer, a designer/front-end developer, and a business analyst (or product owner). Make sure your designer can think iteratively and conduct tests, and that your product person has the skills to analyze tests as they happen, to avoid going to another department for test results.

2. Metrics: choose one, view many. The metric you tried to move probably won’t tell the whole story. Plenty of very smart people have been puzzled by A/B test results. You’ll need to look at lots of different metrics to figure out what change really happened, and more often than not, you’ll be incorrect. When a test fails, don’t give up. Instead, learn what happened (figure out, for example, which metric did move), and use that to inform future iterations.

3. De-averaging. Often a test doesn’t perform better on average, but does for particular customer segments, such as new vs. existing customers. The test may also be performing better for a particular geo, language, or even user persona. You won’t find these insights without looking beyond averages by digging into different segments.

4. Test small changes. Don’t spend months building a test just to throw it away when it doesn’t work. If you have to spend a long time creating it, then you’re doing it wrong. Find the smallest amount of development you can do to create a test based on your hypothesis; one variable at a time is best.

5. Re-test ideas. Tests can often fail because of seasonality, or because you missed one tiny nuance. That doesn’t mean you should throw away the test; keep a backlog of previously run tests, and try re-running a few later. You might be surprised what you find.

6. Don’t forget performance. Performance testing should be considered part of your design and optimization. Even a small page-load increase can foul what would otherwise be a winning design. Page weight and load should be tested alongside other tests. I’ve seen winning tests lose on performance issues alone.

For more on getting started, take a look at these slides.

How to Write a Cover Letter

No one likes job hunting. Scouring through online jobs boards, spiffing up your résumé, prepping for grueling interviews — none of it’s fun. But perhaps the most challenging part of the process is writing an effective cover letter. There’s so much conflicting advice out there, it’s hard to know where to start. Indeed, in an age of digital communication, many might question whether you even need a cover letter anymore.

What the Experts Say

The answer is yes. “Not sending a cover letter is a sign of laziness. It’s akin to making spelling and grammar mistakes in your résumé. You just don’t do it,” says Jodi Glickman, a communications expert and author of Great on the Job. John Lees, a UK-based career strategist and author of Knockout CV, agrees. Even if only one in two cover letters gets read, that’s still a 50% chance that including one could help you, he explains. “It’s an opportunity to distinguish yourself,” Glickman adds. Still, as anyone who’s ever written a cover letter knows, it’s not easy to do well. Here’s how to give hiring managers what they’re looking for.

Do your research first

Before you start writing, find out more about the company and the specific job you want. Look at the company’s website, its executives’ Twitter feeds, and employee profiles on LinkedIn. “Do some research beyond reading the job description,” says Lees. Find out what challenges the company is facing and how your role would help address those. Knowing the company better also helps you decide on the right tone to use in your cover letter. “Think about the culture of the organization you’re applying to,” advises Glickman. “If it’s a creative agency, like a design shop, you might take more risks but if it’s a more conservative organization, like a bank, you may hold back.”

Open strong

“People typically write themselves into the letter with ‘I’m applying for X job that I saw in Y place.’ That’s a waste of text,” says Lees. Instead, lead with a strong opening sentence. “Start with the punch line — why this job is exciting to you and why you’re right for it,” says Glickman. For example, you might write, “I’m an environmental fundraising professional with more than 15 years of experience and I’d love to bring my expertise and enthusiasm to your growing development team.” Chances are the hiring manager or recruiter is reading a stack of these, so you want to catch their attention. But don’t try to be funny. “Humor can often fall flat or sound self-regarding,” says Lees. Stay away from common platitudes, too. “Say something direct and dynamic, such as ‘Before you read any further, let me draw your attention to two reasons why you might want to hire me….’

If you have a personal connection with the company or someone who works there, also mention it in the first sentence or two. And always address your letter to someone directly. “With social media, there’s no excuse to not be able to find the name of a hiring manager,” says Glickman.

Emphasize your personal value

Hiring managers are looking for people who can help them solve  problems. Drawing on the research you did earlier, show that you know what the company does and some of the challenges it faces. These don’t need to be specific but you might mention a trend that’s affected the industry. For example, you might write, “A lot of healthcare companies are grappling with how the changing laws will affect their ability to provide high-quality care.” Then talk about how your experience has equipped you to meet those needs; perhaps explain how you solved a similar problem in the past or share a relevant accomplishment.

Convey enthusiasm

Make it clear why you want the position. “In today’s economy, a lot of people have the right skills, so employers want someone who really wants the job,” says Glickman. “Enthusiasm conveys personality,” Lees adds. He suggests writing something like “I’d love to work for your company. Who wouldn’t? You’re the industry leader, setting standards that others only follow.” Don’t bother applying if you’re not excited about some aspect of the company or role. “Sending out 100 résumés is a waste of time. Find the 10 companies you want to work for and put some heart and soul into it,” Glickman says. At the same time, don’t go overboard with the flattery or say anything you don’t mean. Authenticity is crucial. “You don’t want to sound like a gushing teenager,” Glickman warns. Be professional and mature. Lees notes that in some industries, like fashion or technology, it’s more appropriate to say how much you love a company’s product or services. A good rule of thumb  is to “use only the kind of language that the hiring manager would use with one of his customers.”

Keep it short

Much of the advice out there tells you to keep it under a page. But both Glickman and Lees say even shorter is better. “Most cover letters I see are too long,” says Lees. “It should be brief enough that someone can read it at a glance.” You do have to cover a lot of ground—but you should do it succinctly.

When you can’t submit a cover letter

“In the black hole of an online system, the rules may be different,” Glickman concedes. Many companies now use online application systems that don’t allow for a cover letter. You may be able to figure out how to include one in the same document as your résumé but that’s not a guarantee, especially because some systems only allow for data to be entered into specific boxes. In these cases, use the format you’re given to demonstrate your ability to do the job and your enthusiasm for the role. If possible, you may try to find someone who you can send a brief follow-up email highlighting a few key points about your application.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Have a strong opening statement that makes clear why you want the job and why you’re right for it.
Be succinct — a hiring manager should be able to read it at a glance.
Share an accomplishment that shows you can address the challenges the employer faces.

Don’t:

Try to be funny — too often it falls flat.
Send a generic cover letter — customize each one for the specific job
Go overboard with flattery — be professional and mature

Case study #1: Demonstrate an understanding of what the company needs

Michele Sommers, the vice president of HR for the Boys & Girls Village, a nonprofit in Connecticut, recently posted a job for a recruiting and training specialist. “I was looking for someone with a strong recruiting background who could do everything from sourcing candidates to onboarding new hires,” she says. She also wanted the person to hit the ground running. “We’re a small team and I can’t afford to train someone,” she says.

More than 100 candidates applied for the job. The organization’s online application system doesn’t allow for cover letter attachments but one of the applicants, Heidi (not her real name), sent a follow-up email after submitting her résumé. “And it’s a good thing she did because she would’ve been weeded out otherwise,” Michele says.

Heidi’s résumé made her look like a “job hopper”— very short stints at each previous employer. Michele assumed she was a poor performer who kept getting fired. She was also the only candidate who didn’t have a four-year college degree.

But Heidi’s email caught Michele’s eye. First off, it was professional. Heidi stated clearly that she was writing to double-check that her application had been received. She went on to explain how she had gotten Michele’s name and information (through her husband’s boss who was on the board) and  her personal connection to Boys & Girls Village  (her father-in-law had done some work with the organization).

What really stood out to Michele, though, was Heidi’s understanding of the group and the challenges it was facing. She’d done her research and “listed some things she would do or already had done that would help us address those needs,” says Michele.

“The personality and passion she conveyed in the cover letter came through during her phone screening,” Michele says. Heidi ended up being more than qualified for the job. “I wanted this role to be bigger from the get-go but I didn’t think that was possible. When I met her, I knew we could expand it.” Three weeks later Michele offered Heidi the job and she accepted.

Case study #2: Catch their attention

Over the past four years, Emily Sernaker applied for multiple positions at the International Rescue Committee (IRC). She never gave up. With each application, she sent a personalized cover letter. “I wanted my cover letter to highlight my qualifications, creative thinking, and genuine respect for the organization,” she says.

Sarah Vania, the organization’s regional HR director, says that Emily’s letters caught her attention, especially because they included several video links that showed the results of Emily’s advocacy and fundraising work at other organizations. Emily explains, “I had prior experience advocating for former child soldiers, human trafficking survivors, vulnerable women, and displaced persons. It’s one thing to make statements in a cover letter, like ‘I can make a pitch, I am a creative person, I am thoughtful,’ but showing these qualities seemed like a better way of convincing the recruiter that the statements were true.”

This is what Emily wrote to Sarah about the video:

Here is a short video about my story with activism. The nonprofit organization Invisible Children made it for a youth conference I spoke at this year. It is about four minutes.

As you’ll see from the video, I’ve had a lot of success as a student fundraiser, raising over $200,000 for Invisible Children. I’ve since gone on to work as a consultant for Wellspring International and have recently concluded my studies as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar.

In each of the cover letters, Emily also made clear how much she wanted to work for IRC. “To convey enthusiasm is a vulnerable thing to do and can come off as naiveté, but, when it came down to it, my enthusiasm for the organization was genuine and expressing it felt right,” she says.

This is how Emily conveyed her interest in working for IRC:

You should also know that I have a sincere appreciation of the IRC. I have enjoyed learning about your programs and have personally visited your New York headquarters, the San Diego New Roots farm, the We Can Be Heroes exhibit, and the Half the Sky exhibit in Los Angeles. The IRC is my top choice and I believe I would be a valuable addition to your fundraising team.

Emily learned throughout the process that the organization had hundreds of applicants for each position and it was extremely competitive. “I appreciated that I wouldn’t be the best for every opening but also remained firm that I did have a significant contribution to make,” she says. Eventually, Emily’s persistence paid off. Last June, she was hired as a temporary external relations coordinator and, in October, she moved into a permanent role.

Storytelling Lessons from World Wrestling Entertainment

2014 is a crucial year for Stamford, Conn.-based World Wrestling Entertainment. It could arguably be the biggest year in the company’s history, in which the organization makes a major play to negotiate major new TV rights for its first-run cable and network TV programming and changes its core model from the pay-per-view live event to a monthly digital network subscription that will (or should) have the whole media industry watching.

But, in this crucial month leading up to the official launch of the digital WWE Network and in the middle of negotiations with NBCU and other conglomerates regarding WWE’s flagship TV shows, the company finds itself in the midst of a revolt from fans and talent alike. One of its top wrestlers, C.M. Punk, reportedly left the company last Monday and flew home for undisclosed reasons. WWE legend and company ambassador Mick Foley went on a Twitter and Facebook rant about his frustration with the direction of the company. And its fans are protesting that one of their favorite characters is being pushed from the top of the card.

In true WWE fashion, it could be brilliant storytelling that drives dedicated and lapsed fans alike to the millions of subscribers WWE is hoping for with the new digital service, or it could be a stubborn standoff between the will of the family that runs the organization and the core of its fan base. And, like any well-written wrestling match, I have no idea what the outcome is going to be.

The storyline on and behind the stage, which will play out over the next few weeks, is one that we should all be watching closely—the WWE will either demonstrate what happens when it plays off the passions of its fan base to give them “a big swerve” or else reveals there is no swerve at all and rolls into its biggest business year with a significant portion of its most passionate and dedicated audience disappointed.

For anyone in entertainment, marketing, or storytelling trying to understand the way a company should (or should not) interact with its fan base, this is the bout for you.

For those unfamiliar with WWE, let me give you some background. Pro wrestling is perhaps the only 24/7, 365-day-a-year fictional storytelling machine alive. The “story world” of the WWE is the real world. Some of the wrestlers compete under their real names, or—even if they don’t—often incorporate various aspects of their real lives into their characters. Because their TV episodes play out on live television—and the full-time WWE wrestlers tour several days out of each week—they are “in character” all the time. The wrestlers run their own Twitter accounts, which become a fascinating blend of their “real lives” and their fictional ones. In short, pro wrestling is the world’s largest “alternate reality game.”

To further set that immersive story world apart from other fictional properties, the WWE makes the fans part of the fictional universe as well, not only through online interaction but especially through the fans’ own performance in the arena. Despite the classic stereotype, this is a fan base who knows that pro wrestling isn’t legitimate sport but show up to the arena to play their part in the role of “sports fans.” And any wrestler can tell you that the reaction of the crowd can make or break any show.

WWE writers, when they are at the top of the craft, can put themselves in the shoes of the fan base, know how fans are going to respond to something, and write the show accordingly. But the fan base is the one character that the WWE writers can’t completely script. Fans can do unpredictable things.

And that’s where the WWE finds itself today. The WWE created a storyline where character Daniel Bryan, overwhelmingly a favorite of the dedicated wrestling fans who provide the base of support to its business, was deemed unsuited to be the heavyweight champion by Vince McMahon, his daughter Stephanie, and her husband, famed semi-retired wrestler “Triple H.” This storyline, that “The Authority” (as they have come to be called) don’t want Bryan as champion, played off real-life rumors and fan frustration that the WWE was keeping Bryan out of the main event, despite his popularity, because of a feeling that the performer portraying him doesn’t have what it takes to be champ.

As the months went by, fans were hopeful because Bryan found himself in the main event of several big WWE shows, in the role of “rebelling” against The Authority. In one event, he won the title, only to have it taken from him minutes later. In the next, he won the title, only to have the decision reversed because of a controversy with the referee the next night. In the next big show, he was cheated out of the title. Soon, he was out of the championship matches altogether, and fans who thought the “Daniel Bryan is underserving of the championship” line was just a story started to believe once again that this was “real.”

Fast-forward to last week and one of the WWE’s biggest events of the year: the Royal Rumble. Daniel Bryan is put in the opener of the show and loses the match. The vocal, dedicated WWE fans in Pittsburgh then hijack the rest of the show. They chant Bryan’s name during other matches. And, when they came to realize that Bryan was not going to return to even be part of the 30-man main event “battle royal” in which the winner would get a championship match at the WWE’s biggest event of the year, Wrestlemania, the fans started booing the event as a whole and chanting Bryan’s name.

It remains to be seen what WWE will do. We don’t yet know how the WWE will respond. Fans were shocked when retired wrestler Mick Foley, a longtime face of the company, wrote about his disgust with the WWE’s creative direction and his plans to throw a brick through his TV after watching the way the WWE was actively defying its dedicated fans after the Royal Rumble.

And, when word circulated last week that the performer who plays C.M. Punk—a character also fighting against “The Authority” of the McMahon family and whose popularity with dedicated WWE fans rivals Bryan—walked out on the company and flew home before WWE’s live Monday Night RAW program, fans were even more shocked … or curious whether this could all be part of the story.

After all, wrestling fans are still talking about a 2011 storyline in which Punk—who legitimately was planning to leave the company—turned that departure into a storyline in which he won the WWE championship on his last night with the company and “took the belt with him” out of the company. He returned a few weeks later and cemented his place in the process as one of the company’s top stars.

Now, fans are scouring the internet for backstage rumors, seeking news on whether the McMahons are pulling a storyline “swerve” — if WWE impresario Vince McMahon will, as fans often feel he does, “dig in his heels” and stick with the status quo; or if an all-fronts press from WWE fans can help change the course of storylines. After all, it’s Vince himself who has said that the fans in his arena are his focus groups.

If this all culminates in some big storyline payoff, with Punk back in WWE rings and Daniel Bryan in the main event of WWE Wrestlemania 30, fans may remember this as a stroke of creative genius. If this all turns out to be all “for real,” WWE may find itself with a public relations headache on its head and its most ardent fans threatening to boycott its new network.

Until then, though, WWE most ardent and vocal fans might well be hijacking some upcoming WWE live events by chanting Daniel Bryan’s characteristic “YES!,” and booing much else. A WhiteHouse.gov petition to get President Obama to intervene in putting Daniel Bryan in the main event of Wrestlemania was taken down after nearing 100,000 signatures. Even the fans at last night’s Monday Night RAW in Omaha (whose arena was not nearly as rowdy as the Pittsburgh crowd) reached the television audience at home loud and clear with momentary chants various times throughout the night for C.M. Punk and likewise called for Daniel Bryan at times when the performer was not on stage.

At least up to this point, the WWE hasn’t discouraged publicity about Bryan’s being “held back.” (See, for instance, last week’s BBC story, “Royal Rumble: Daniel Bryan Blames WWE for Exclusion.”) And they regularly encourage their fans to speak up at events and tweet what they think. (Coincidentally, “C.M. Punk” was “trending worldwide!” on Twitter last week, as WWE commentator Michael Cole might brag on the air.) And that raises the question: is this very piece here in HBR playing into “the ruse” to a degree?

After the fan response , Stephanie McMahon and HHH teased the fans at the beginning of last night’s Monday Night RAW TV show by asking whether Bryan should be “the face of the WWE,” and HHH led the arena in a “YES!” chant…only to have a corporate henchman beat Bryan down after beating the WWE champion in a non-title match by the night’s end. Once again, the main event storyline appears to be “The Authority” not wanting Bryan to be champion. At the last pay-per-view event (later this month) before the WWE Network launches, Bryan is one of five people challenging for the WWE title inside a cage. Is this a sign that the company does indeed plan to finally give dedicated WWE fans their payoff and see Bryan defy “The Authority” and main event Wrestlemania? Or will Bryan’s attempt to be champion once again fail, which has been the storyline for the past several months?

Elsewhere here at HBR, I’ve written about how organizations need to truly listen to their audiences, to put the company in the audience’s shoes, and to focus on managing long-term relationships with customers. The most fascinating part of this situation is that it’s unclear whether WWE is doing this especially well or especially poorly.

In part, that’s because the story’s still being written…which is what, for now, makes this so powerful for fans.

Three Questions to Advance Your Career

In most organizations, professionals who want to move up get lots of feedback. Did you hit your numbers? Make your budget? How did you perform in managing a major project? Many companies provide you with so-called 360-degree feedback based on anonymous surveys from your boss, peers, and direct reports. And there is also, of course, your annual performance review. In reality, for managers seeking promotion, such feedback is of only marginal benefit because its frame of reference is how you’re doing in your current job, at your current level. To maximize your career progress, you need answers to three questions that focus on upward mobility — the answers to which are elusive in the vast majority of organizations.

What are the factors that govern who does — and doesn’t — advance to the senior level?
How am I currently viewed in terms of those promotional criteria, and what skills and abilities do I need to demonstrate to move ahead?
How does one navigate the “political thicket” in the company to get things done at the senior level?

In order to tease out answers to these questions, you need to know why they aren’t communicated more explicitly in most companies, who to ask, and how to listen to the responses.

In an attempt to address the first question, many companies publish leadership competency models comprised of a laundry list of skills and behaviors, such as external perspective, customer focus, collaboration, and teamwork. These are all useful, but the models typically apply to a number of different management levels, and they lose credibility when people see managers promoted to senior levels who noticeably lack some of the enumerated skills. As a result, your task is to gain access to the people who make decisions about senior-level promotions to find out what factors truly come into play when such decisions are made.

The technique I recommend is — with your boss’s knowledge — to schedule career discussions over a period of several months with as many mentors and senior people as possible who know your work. Start with your boss’s boss if you have worked with him or her, and target other leaders at that level (and above if possible) who are likely to be involved in placement decisions for jobs you’d like to be considered for in the future. Ask them what skills were most helpful to them in moving up the ranks and what abilities were critical to their success. In all likelihood, you’ll hear some common themes about the ability to chart a direction for a group versus helping implement someone else’s strategic vision, or the ability to initiate fundamental change to work processes versus improving existing ways of doing business. Listen carefully for behaviors related to these skills, such as the ability to make decisions in situations of uncertainty or the courage to go against the organizational grain and push the organization out of its comfort zone in the interest of innovation. Piece together the common themes you hear in these discussions, and stay alert to what isn’t mentioned, since these are usually the nice-to-have skills that aren’t central to promotional decisions.

Next comes the hard part: Actively solicit feedback on how you are viewed in terms of those senior-level promotional criteria. You need to ask the tough questions — the answers to which may be hard to hear. Understand that most people, including senior leaders, are uncomfortable providing this feedback. By definition, leadership capabilities have a subjective element and are open to varying interpretation by different people. And there’s always the risk of demotivating a talented manager the company doesn’t want to lose. So avoid any hint of defensiveness since that will tend to shut down a mentor or leader’s feedback. Instead, try to convey a sincere desire to learn what you need to advance over the long haul of your career — and dispel any sense that you’re simply angling for a promotion. At the end of a productive career discussion, ask one useful summary question: “What one or two things — above all others — would most help build others’ confidence in my ability to succeed at higher levels in the organization?” Assuming the leader has leveled with you, this question tends to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of the capabilities you most need to display to senior leaders.

When many managers hear the term “organization politics,” they run for cover and think of a blood sport with winners, losers, and collateral damage. In most companies, however, political skills have to do with how decisions get made at the executive level: who the key decision makers are, who the trusted lieutenants are who influence their opinions, what trust-based relationships one needs to be built within the executive ranks — and what the expectations are for how proposed initiatives should be vetted and advanced to ensure ultimate endorsement. These are topics that are not typically discussed openly in most companies, so once you have developed a close mentor relationship with a senior person who’s prepared to discuss them, you’ve been afforded a rare luxury. Keep in mind that a senior person generally does not want to be quoted about such behind-the-scenes machinations or the predilections of his or her colleagues, so treat this information with the utmost discretion.

It’s clear that as the top of the organizational pyramid, promotional opportunities are few and far between. However, if you are skillful in researching the answers to these three golden questions with the right mentors and leaders, you’re likely to separate yourself from the competition and be richly rewarded.

This is the first post in a blog series on using mentorship to advance your career. John Beeson is a contributor to the HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need.

How Liberal Arts Colleges Can Stop Fueling the “Skills Gap”

There is a growing consensus among students, parents and employers that today’s young liberal arts graduates lack the skills needed to succeed in the post-Recession job market. Stories about this skills gap abound, such as the recent New York Times essay “Opening an Employment Door to the Young”.

This belief is growing stronger despite studies by higher education leaders arguing that a liberal arts degree is still a good investment today. Smart people may disagree on the value of a liberal arts degree, but no matter which side you are on, things must change. Schools can’t continue to deliver an expensive credential that is not seen as delivering a viable path to a career—no matter what the long-term value. Here are four things higher education leaders and students must do differently to make liberal arts education economically sustainable—for all.

1. Stop the hand wringing about the real value of a liberal arts education.

Higher education leaders are frustrated by what they see as unfair treatment in the media, and overreaction by parents to the declining value of the liberal arts degree. But any strategy to counter the public’s negative perceptions with long-term data and rational arguments is doomed to fail.

One college junior last week confessed to me she had changed her major from microbiology to English, even though she sees her new major as “dangerous” in terms of future employment. Parents, students and the press have all heard too many first hand stories about the challenges of today’s job market.  Trying to convince them otherwise only sounds like whining. Stop it now! It’s not the value of liberal arts that needs to be debated. It’s how skills acquired with the degree are recognized by students and communicated to employers.

2. Use the entire school community to create an employable graduate.

With tuition discount rates climbing, as more colleges and universities struggle to attract good students, the current revenue model is unsustainable for all but the most elite and well-endowed colleges and universities. To prosper in the new competitive environment, institutions must engage the whole school system in supporting the personal and career development of their students.

I recently worked with a leading research university to align the efforts of its huge, decentralized staff to transform the career support infrastructure. This type of collaboration to improve support for liberal arts students means aligning the activities of administrators, faculty, academic and career advisors, as well as alumni, parents, fund raising staff, and students themselves. This is no easy task. But savvy higher education leaders recognize that increasing the employability of their grads requires major culture change that involves the whole system.

3. Attack the job search “skills gap” head on.

A major reason so many liberal arts students struggle after graduation is they have no clue about the real skills needed to pursue and land a job in today’s hyper-competitive job market.  A lot of schools need to reinvent their traditional career services function so it provides leading edge tools and tutoring to prepare students for the “real world.”

Updated networking techniques, ready access to helpful alumni, education about technologies like applicant tracking systems, and intensive coaching for Skype and in-person interviews must become standard offerings to make liberal arts students more competitive.

4. Increase student engagement with personal and career development activities.

When it comes to improving the employment prospects of college students, the elephant in the room is the difficulty of convincing young adults to fully engage with the activities needed to effectively launch their career. In the research for my book Graduate to a Great Job, more than 50% of “successful” grads I studied didn’t know what they wanted to do when they graduated.

Even students who express angst about future employment seem unwilling to invest sufficient time to master the skills needed for success, such as extensive networking, in-depth industry research, resume writing and interviewing. My research indicates this is partly due to other demands of student life, as well as an emotional resistance to “growing up.” But another factor is not understanding how much they have to learn, and how little students—and their parents—know about what it takes to land a great job today.

Motivating students to engage early and often in the career development process may be the greatest challenge facing higher education leaders today. This will be particularly problematic for large public universities with more limited resources. Private schools, like Wake Forest and Reed College, with reputations for proactively addressing career development with their students, are committed to starting this conversation freshman year.

To increase the real and perceived value of the liberal arts degree, schools must stop debating this issue and start investing in infrastructure and culture changes that align the entire school behind efforts to prepare graduates for the future. This can be done without compromising the ideals that make a liberal arts education worth fighting for.

Breakthrough Projects Require Bold Dreamers

If you live in a big city, subways are a piece of the urban infrastructure you probably take for granted—until a strike or a mechanical problem reminds you that without these subterranean trains, getting anywhere can be next-to-impossible. In “The Race Underground: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry that Build America’s First Subway,” author Doug Most chronicles the political, technical, and societal challenges that engineers, and the little-known sandhogs who dug these massive tunnels in Boston and New York, had to overcome to bring the first trains online more than a century ago. Most, a deputy managing editor at The Boston Globe, told HBR.org what lessons managers can learn from this history. Excerpts:

How did you get interested in this story?

I used to be a reporter who covered transit and transportation issues. Boston’s subway was the first in America, and I was surprised no one had ever dived deep into how it came to be. As I started to research it, I learned that New York was building its subway around the same time. (Boston’s subway opened in 1897, and New York’s opened in 1904.) There were two brothers from Massachusetts, both powerful businessmen, and one of them was instrumental to the Boston project and the other to New York’s. So there was this amazing family link between the two cities, in addition to the massive cultural and physical changes the subways brought.

HBR has run articles about the overwhelming odds that big projects—say, the Big Dig, or the Boeing Dreamliner—will be more challenging and costly than anyone ever expects. Was this the case with the subways?

Boston’s original subway was very short, and it actually came in under budget at $4.2 million. But both projects faced big technical challenges. The world’s first subway opened in London in 1863, and it used steam-powered locomotives. They were filthy, sooty, and smoky, which is why no other city adopted subways for more than 30 years. They waited until electrification was perfected: Eventually one of Thomas Edison’s protégés designed the electric motor that was critical to the development of subways. The second big challenge was deciding how to build the tunnels. One way to do it is to literally bore a hole underground, which is really dangerous and tricky to do. Both cities decided instead to use the “cut-and-cover” method, where you dig a big trench, build the tunnel, and cover it over. I’m walking in New York right now, and as I walk over grates I can see the trains just below me—that’s because they used the cut-and-cover method, which resulted in very shallow tunnels.

Big companies and start-ups often find themselves in a race to bring similar products to market. Sometimes that time pressure can help spur everyone along; sometimes it can lead to sloppiness and mistakes. How did the rivalry play out in this story?

Both cities paid very close attention to the other, and officials from each city visited the other frequently. When Boston opened its subway, there was some jealousy and envy in New York. The two cities also shared some resources. Their chief engineers became friendly, and they consulted closely on the decision to use the cut-and-cover method to dig the tunnels. When New York needed to hire an engineer to get the tracks electrified, the head of the Boston project told his brother in New York to hire the brilliant Tufts graduate who’d done the job in Boston.  The projects also left a legacy in the field of engineering. The chief engineer on the New York project was William Barclay Parsons, who went on to found Parsons Brinckerhoff, a giant engineering company that worked on Boston’s Big Dig and is now doing New York’s new Second Avenue subway line.

What can managers learn from the way these two projects unfolded?

The biggest lesson is that it’s important to dream really big. When people started talking about subways in the 1800s, many observers thought it was a crazy idea. So a guy in New York decided, in secret, to build his own private subway. The vehicle was powered by an air fan—like a big pneumatic tube–and it only went 300 feet. But when people tried it, they were amazed, and began to support the broader idea of underground trains. Giant projects like subways require dreamers, and sometimes those dreams may not work out. But we need people like Elon Musk and others who are thinking really big, and we should take them seriously.

Today there seems little political will to do ambitious, life-changing projects like this one. Why do you think that is?

It’s important to remember it wasn’t an easy political sell back then, either. The votes to build the subways were close—there was a vigorous and fierce debate. Today there are a lot of impediments, including the costs, the disruption projects like these can cause to residents’ day-to-day lives, as well as to local businesses. To pursue big projects like this, people have to be able to think beyond the short term, and to imagine how it will affect lives in the long term. That can be hard to do.

The Scaling Lesson from Facebook’s Miraculous 10-Year Rise

Today is Facebook’s 10th anniversary. On February 4th, 2004, Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook.” A story in the Harvard Crimson a few days later was headlined “Hundreds Register for the New Facebook Website.” The opening sentence was “When Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06 grew impatient with the creation of an official universal Harvard facebook, he decided to take matters into his own hands.” Some 650 people had already joined, and thus began the company’s wild ride toward becoming a social networking site with over a billion users, thousands of employees, and a market capitalization well north of $100 billion.

As it happens, today is also the official publication date for Scaling Up Excellence by Huggy Rao and me. The book is all about the challenge of finding something that works really well in some corner of your world, and getting it to spread much further (or, for shorthand, “the Problem of More”). We were tickled when we realized the coincidence, because it wasn’t long at all after we started thinking about scaling that we had our first conversations with someone from Facebook. In the years since, we’ve learned a lot from people at that crazy place.

In early 2006, Diego Rodriguez and I started teaching a class we called “Creating Infectious Action” at the Stanford d. school. Sitting in the back was a woman named Katie Geminder, who said that she was head of product at a company called Facebook, that she had a 21-year-old boss, and that they were growing so fast they couldn’t lease buildings in downtown Palo Alto fast enough. They were desperately looking for great engineers, designers, and business people – but were very picky about who they hired. It was, she said, a demanding and rather quirky place to work. Katie left Facebook a couple years later, but not before she and her team sponsored a challenge for the Creating Infectious Action class. (The point of it: get using Facebook to catch on in some demographic group that wasn’t using it much in those days, such as people over 40, small businesses owners, or people who lived in rural areas.)

Of course, Facebook’s organization kept growing, so we kept watching it for lessons that might apply to other situations. Here’s the main lesson we took away from its success: Effective scaling isn’t just about establishing the biggest footprint you can, and as fast as possible. It’s even more a challenge of spreading the mindset your great new solution requires.

Facebook’s focus on spreading the right mindset became clear to us when, in late 2007 and early 2008, researcher and consultant Beth Benjamin and I had a series of conversations with Chris Cox, then Facebook’s 25 year-old head of Human Resources. Cox was employee number 30 and had joined Facebook as programmer; among other accomplishments, he helped create the “newsfeed” feature. But Mark Zuckerberg had asked him to take on the HR role (after trying a traditional HR head or two), because Cox embodied the priorities, skills, and beliefs he wanted to see take hold as the company grew. Watching Cox in new employee orientation meetings, we saw the wisdom of the move: given the scale that Facebook had the potential to attain, it was crucial that these early waves of hires share a set of beliefs and behaviors, and no outsider or non-technical person could instill them like he could. Cox’s HR leadership emphasized something that we later recognized elsewhere: It was essential to slow way down and find the right people, and to make sure that they learned to live the right mindset, in order to set the stage for speedy and effective scaling down the road.

Facebook’s method for spreading a shared mindset in new engineers and technical employees has become more systematic and exacting as the company has expanded. As Cox explained to Huggy and me in 2011, the company had figured out it needed to add an engineer for every 500,000 new users, so the pressure to make hires was relentless. Later, when we talked to Shona Brown, a former Google SVP who played a key role in growing Google from 2,000 to 30,000 people, we heard the exact same point. It came up again when we talked with Claudia Kotchka, who in her tenure at Procter & Gamble as vice president of design innovation and strategy, started with a tiny team and one innovation project and ended with over 300 innovation experts embedded in dozens of businesses

Facebook takes extreme measures to assure that newcomers live, understand, and commit to its distinct and shared beliefs about what is sacred and taboo. The people it hires, after rounds of grueling interviews, go through a six-week Bootcamp, which is led almost entirely by engineers (not HR). Bootcamp is designed so that newcomers immediately start living Facebook’s most sacred belief: “Move fast and break things.” Cox explained that the newbies start by working on actual Facebook software code knowing that their changes will be pushed live right away: “We tell them, put your hand on it. Grab it. Now bend it.” Cox said that a good definition of a successful first week at Facebook is that you’ve made a change to the site you can show your family and friends. For example, one new engineer reported that his dad called to say, “There’s a problem with this drop-down menu.” That engineer called back the next day: “I fixed it, Dad. Did you see that?”

Meanwhile, hesitating to act for fear of screwing something up is taboo. As engineer Sanjeev Singh explained, if you keep waiting for people to tell you what to do, and don’t ask for help when you get stuck, you aren’t going to last long at the company. Each newcomer is assigned a mentor—usually an engineer who isn’t a manager—to help him or her navigate Bootcamp. Pause to think of the investment being made here: in 2011, a new “class” of twenty to thirty hires was started roughly every two weeks—and seventy or eighty engineers at a time were pulled away from their jobs to be mentors. Obviously in a talent-hungry organization, those were brains that could have been deployed to pressing work. But leaders at Facebook are convinced that the time is better spent spreading the mindset that is essential to the company’s enduring success.

In short, the scaling lesson from Facebook and many other successful scaling efforts is that, to scale fastest and most effectively over the long haul, you can’t always be charging ahead at breakneck speed, grabbing up resources or territories and slapping your logo on them. There are times when you’ve got to slow things way down. You have to get the right people on board and make sure they share your mindset. This is especially true in early stages of scaling. The current struggles of Groupon, the once highflying “deal of the day” website, seem to prove the point in the negative. Our conversations with Silicon Valley insiders, as well as published reports and the former CEO’s letter to employees after he was fired, convince us that the mindset of focusing on customer needs failed to take hold throughout the company after it went public.

But it’s also true that, even in much later stages of scaling, you sometimes need to pause and regroup. Starbuck’s founder Howard Schultz lamented in a 2007 internal memo: “Over the past ten years, in order to achieve the growth, development, and scale necessary to go from less than 1,000 stores to 13,000 stores and beyond, we have had to make a series of decisions that, in retrospect, have led to the watering down of the Starbucks experience.” Schultz’s forthright book Onward details the steps his team took to “get their groove back” once he returned as CEO in 2008 and acknowledges how tough it was to reclaim and reinvent a once great mindset.

Finally, as much as we admire Facebook’s success in scaling, we don’t recommend that other leaders and organizations copy the particular mindset its leadership worked to spread. No one set of attitudes is right for every organization, or every part of the same organization. What is sacred in one place might best be considered taboo elsewhere. A VMware executive laughed when we asked if they lived by the philosophy of “move fast and break things.” His organization lives the opposite mindset in most parts of the company, especially the part that develops software for nuclear submarines!

Thoughts of Fast Food Hinder Your Ability to Derive Happiness from Small Pleasures

Research participants who had seen a picture of a fast-food burger and fries subsequently rated themselves less happy upon viewing 10 photographs of natural scenic beauty (4.86, on average, versus 5.45 on a seven-point scale), say Julian House and two colleagues from the University of Toronto. Exposure to the idea of “fast food” makes people more impatient and impairs their ability to derive happiness from pleasurable stimuli; this effect could have a long-term negative effect on people’s experienced happiness, the researchers say.

CMOs and CIOs Need to Get Along to Make Big Data Work

A global telecoms company recently decided to do what many companies are doing: figure out how to turn big data into big profits. They put together a preliminary budget and an RFP that asked vendors to take the data the company had — customer call and payments behavior, online searches, social network activity, billing, etc. — and identify opportunities.

Vendors salivated at what essentially was a blank check to collect and analyze everything. Two months later, the bids were coming in 400 percent over budget. The solution? Cut back the scope. But no one was sure what to cut and what to keep because the goals had not been clearly enough defined. Months of wasted time and money later, the company is no closer to a big data plan.

Variations of this Big Data story line are being played out in executive offices around the world, with CMOs and CIOs in the thick of it. CMOs, tasked with driving growth, are pounding the table demanding that the surfeit of customer data their companies are accumulating be turned into increased revenue. CIOs, tasked with turning technology into revenue, are themselves pounding the table demanding better requirements for Big Data initiatives.

In all this table-pounding is a central truth in today’s Big Data world: both the CMO and CIO are on the hook for turning all that data into above-market growth. Call it a shotgun marriage, but it’s one that CMOs and CIOs both need to make work―especially given that worldwide, data is growing at 40 percent per year. To do that, both executives will need to change how they work―and how they work together.

“Most CMOs have woken up to the fact that technology is fundamentally changing what marketers do and we can’t treat IT like a back-office function,” says Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP. “The CIO is becoming a strategic partner that is crucial to developing and executing marketing strategy.”

The pain of getting this relationship right is absolutely worth the gain. Companies that are more data-driven are five percent more productive and six percent more profitable than other companies. Given the $50 billion that marketers already spend Big Data and analytics capabilities, the pressure is on to show significant above-market returns for that investment.

The CMO and CIO are natural partners: the CMO has an unprecedented amount of customer data, from which s/he needs to extract insights to drive revenue and profits. The CIO has the talent and expertise in infrastructure development to create the company’s Big Data backbone and generate the necessary insights.

The relationship, however, has often been a fractious one. Marketing’s growing data demands of speed, availability, and agility in rapidly changing customer behaviors don’t align with IT’s modus operandi of developing and maintaining hard coded, legacy systems. The need for speed alone is a massive shift from “business as usual” for IT, which needs to develop new notions of data recency, availability and accessibility as they relate to helping the business improve its analytic decisions.

That impasse has led to expectations of the CMO’s IT budget outstripping the CIO’s by 2018, according to Gartner, a dangerous trend that can lead to duplicate spending and effort. Recent research also suggests that most CMOs today see marketing as the natural leader of big data efforts, while most CIOs see IT as the logical lead.

While the difficulties of the relationship between the CMO and CIO is a popular topic in trade journals and blogs, what’s needed is a more practical approach for addressing the issues.

One of the most important factors for success in Big Data and advanced analytics, for instance, is understanding what you want…precisely. When you’re looking for a needle in the haystack of big data, you really need to know what a needle looks like. A successful partnership, therefore, begins with the CMO being able to define business goals, use cases, and specific requirements of any data or analytics initiative. What the CIO needs to provide is feasibility and cost analytics around requirements based on use cases. That requires clearly articulating trade-offs and options in terms of cost, time, and priorities.

CMOs and CIOs can take other very practical steps to improve communication. At one company, the CMO and CIO have taken the step of having offices on the same floor. At Nationwide, a global insurance company, the CMO and CIO host a dinner for their leaders each quarter with the explicit goal of building camaraderie and trust within their teams.

Shared goals and proximity, however, cannot overcome the common the stumbling block: the lack of a shared vocabulary. “Marketers and technology people speak very different languages, so there’s a need on both sides to become bilingual,” says Becher. We have often seen two very intelligent people completely misunderstand each other. When it comes to defining use cases, for example, the CMO will often mean a few clear sentences. The CIO, on the other hand, is expecting 10 pages of single-lined details for each one. Frustration will quickly erupt unless both the CMO and CIO take the time to explicitly bridge the expectations gap.

In addition to clearly defined, goals, empathy, and a shared vocabulary there are five other imperatives necessary for CMOs and CIOs to make their partnership work:

1. Be clear on decision governance. An effective decision governance framework makes clear how the CIO and CMO, and other members of the leadership team, must work together and support each other. This is much more far-reaching than a data governance framework, as it covers every stage in the journey of translating data into value — from setting strategy, to the construction of use cases, to the deploying of budgets and capabilities. Teams need to be explicit about who will make what decisions, when. This can be a particular stretch for the CIO, as it gives a key business user — the CMO — a direct role in the design of data systems. Nationwide has developed a Business Transformation Council to explicitly tackle governance issues.

2. Build the right teams. The two executives must lead a common agenda for defining, building and acquiring the advanced analytics capabilities required to support the effort. In our experience, that often requires the creation of a Center of Excellence (COE) where both marketing and IT people work together. They must also agree where those critical capabilities will be located – in the COE or distributed across functions and locations — what the lines of reporting are, and whose budget will pay for them. To help make this decision, map out the stages of the “Big Data value chain” — from data architecting to delivering the message or product – and describe the necessary capabilities and responsibilities for each stage. Assign roles with the understanding that there may need to be multiple roles for a given stage and that each stage will often require someone from both IT and marketing. One important lesson that Nationwide has learned in bringing their marketing and IT organizations more closely together is that in analytically-oriented companies, skill sets become indistinguishable in business, marketing, and IT.

3. Bring complete transparency. The CMO and CIO (and potentially the CTO) must bring complete transparency to the process. Not only must they sit down at the start to define data use requirements with precision, but they must then meet regularly — bi-weekly or monthly — to review progress and keep the effort on track. Each quarter they need to sit down and have a frank discussion on the CMO-CIO “State of the Union” — and how to strengthen and sustain it as big data plays an ever greater role in business growth, and changes in technology create new opportunities to deliver more, faster. Develop a single scorecard that tracks progress and identifies breakdowns. Addressing these issues cannot be about assigning blame — that will quickly create a toxic work environment – but should be about having clear accountability and working collectively to fix the problems.

4. Hire marketing/IT “translators.” Goodwill, effort, and clarity will go a long way to bring the CIO and CMO together. But the reality is that few CMOs or CIOs have the right balance between business and tech. What each needs to do is hire “translators.” The CMO needs to hire someone who understands customers and business needs but “speaks geek.” The CIO needs to hire technical people with a strong grounding in marketing campaigns and the business. “Business solution architects,” for example, put all the discovered data together and organize it so that it’s ready to analyze. They structure the data to ensure it can be queried in meaningful ways and appropriate timeframes by all relevant users.

“At SAP, we have a Business Information Officer (BIO) for each business unit, including SAP Marketing,” says Becher. “The BIO must understand and translate business strategy into an IT enterprise architecture strategy and help guide technology investments.

5. Learn to drive before you fly. The CMO and CIO can’t hope to turn things around over night. In fact, that’s a recipe for disaster. Instead, they need to identify and focus on a few small pilot programs to test team compositions and new processes for collaboration. This approach allows teams to develop best practices and valuable lessons that can then be used to train other teams. Don’t be afraid to fail, but keep the projects and teams small enough at first to both fail and learn quickly.

Effective use of Big Data is already separating the winners from the losers across a wide range of industries. But there are no short cuts to getting it right―and the CMO and CIO share total responsibility for success or failure.