Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1473

The Great Leap Generation F Needs to Make

Imagine a towering, sheer cliff. Imagine a deep canyon below, full of ruined cities. Now imagine, on the canyon’s other side, a bountiful plain, rippling in the breeze, stretching into the sunset.

Welcome to the economy of the twenty-first century.

For young people today, the economy basically feels something like the portrait above, and they’re the ones stuck at the bottom of the ravine.

Consider the following:

1. The global economy is broken. I’ve suggested for many years that we are living through a zombieconomy – where the economy seems to stagger forward in a lifelike fashion, but it’s really just a reanimated corpse. I’ve attributed this mismatch to “growthism” – the blind pursuit of growth empty of real improvements in living standards. Another way to look at it is what both Tyler Cowen and I have called a “Great Stagnation.” But don’t take my word for it. No less an august personage than Larry Summers has finally pronounced this an era of “secular stagnation.” If Larry Summers, former treasury secretary and president of Harvard, is agreeing with the puny likes of me, I think it’s safe to say the phenomenon is real.

Stagnation means, in plain English, that living standards in many rich nations are going to fall for young people. That’s a fancy way of saying that life is going to get shorter, harder, nastier, dumber, and bleaker. No, sorry, just because you can buy a gigantic 4D plasma TV on 4000% APR credit and a bag of Doritos the size of an Escalade for 99 cents doesn’t mean you will live longer, be healthier or happier, or be able to afford an education for yourself or your children.

2. Our debts are overwhelming. Young people in many nations, especially rich ones, have unprecedented economic burdens to shoulder. There’s the small matter of paying for the planet not to melt down. Not to mention the massive debts so kindly passed on to us by bailed-out bankers. Or the massive debts racked up by the public sector. And that’s before we even talk about fixing our aging healthcare, transport, energy, and education systems; that’s before we even get into investing in new stuff we need that we don’t have. Think you’re going to retire? Think again. At this rate, you’ll still be busy paying off the debts of your parents and grandparents before you’ve even paid off your own student debt.

3. We can’t get jobs—much less careers. Opportunities for young people in many nations are somewhere between LOL and nonexistent. Globally, the unemployment rate is 4.5%, according to recent data from the World Economic Forum – but for workers under 24, it’s 12.5%. Crunch the numbers a different way and you get the same maddening result: 40% of the world’s unemployed are under the age of 25. In the Middle East and North Africa, more than 1 in 4 young people can’t find work. It’s roughly one in five in Europe, and it’s getting worse, not better: youth unemployment rates reached record highs in 2013 in Greece (65%) and Spain (56.1%).

4. The jobs we can get are awful. What few opportunities there are are underwhelming—and unfair. Guess what the largest employer in the USA is? Walmart. Guess what the second largest employer in the USA is? McDonald’s. Guess what the average income at a McJob is? Around $15.5K. Guess where the poverty line is? Around $22k. Think you’re gonna save up for that palatial summer home one day? Think again. You’re probably going to be cleaning it…for an aging billionaire…who owns twenty seven of them.

Even in economies where the “talent wars” still rage, is it really such a triumph that young people in China and India can finally aspire to…spend eighteen hours a day working in call-centers and factories? Because while those jobs are a step “up” the rusty ladder of material success, the brutal truth is that they don’t pay nearly what they should. Wages (Hi, I’m the ghost of capitalism—it’s very nice to meet you! Hey—look!! It’s a Kardashian!! Now hold on while I pick your pocket!!!) haven’t kept track with productivity. Even if you want to concede the weak point that the best the world can do is creating soul-sucking McJobs for the poorest, then the problem is that even the lucky “winners” of this game that our not-quite-leaders call an “economy” are getting the bad end of a worse deal.

Forget Generation X, Y, Z. Welcome to Generation F. If you’re under the age of 35ish, you’re getting (pardon my French) screwed.  We are all put here to live lives that matter—but the life you should be living is circling down the drain of history. We are all here, in every moment, to make the most of our limitless potential—but your human potential is being squandered, wasted, thrown away.

What does it feel like to be a member of Generation F? It feels like purgatory.

Like you could send out a billion CVs and never land a job. Like you could work a billion jobs and never earn a living. Like you could earn a living, but never quite reach the same level of stability your parents knew. Like if you can’t hope for stability…what shot is there at prosperity? At, security, solvency—much less fulfillment, happiness, purpose? A life of lasting prosperity becomes something like $40,000 Birkins on the arm of a billionaire’s latest trophy wife: a super-luxury that is so far out of reach, we look at it with mockery and contempt rather than aspiration or hope.

Generation F is getting a deal so raw that no one but a politician or a serial killer could offer it with a straight face. So let’s call it what it is. Not just unfair—but unconscionable. The world’s so-called leaders have more or less abandoned this generation. Think that’s unkind—maybe even unfair? Then here’s a more generous take. The world’s leaders have coolly, calmly, rationally, senselessly decided that bankers, CEOs, lobbyists, billionaires, the astrologers formerly known as economists, corporate “people”, robots, and hedge funds are worth more to society than…the young.

The world’s leaders are letting the future crash and burn.

That’s right, burn. Because the damage that’s being done is permanent and irreversible. Basic math tells us this much. A lack of opportunity, especially when one is young, puts people on lower earnings and wealth trajectories for life. They’re not unlike prison sentences in that regard.

So what should Generation F do about all the above?

Create the future. The one that we’re not being allowed to live. And to do that, we’re going to have to break a few rules—so that the rules don’t break us.

We’re going to have take great leaps. Not baby steps. We’re taking too many of the latter, and we’re barely learning to walk. We’re going to have to stop wasting our time on pleasant, meaningless trivialities like minigames, dating apps, tacocopters, reality TV, and asymmetrical haircuts (OK, I admit it. I have one too).

Great leaps. Over the rubble of failed societies and broken economies. Or else we will remain trapped in the ruins, massed against the cliffs; a generation going nowhere.

Great leaps. In every aspect of work, life, and play that you can think of—and then more. We’re going to have to create, among other things: new ways to measure progress (like the Social Progress Index); new political parties (like the Pirate Party); new methods of governance (like Holacracy); new kinds of financial institutions and financial instruments (like Square), so money can get to useful places, instead of lining the pockets of econocidal maniacs in handmade suits; ways to provide healthcare, food, education, and transport, that actually have a hope in hell of working for everyone over the long haul, instead of breaking down all the time before they work for anyone—not to mention reinventing institutions like “schools,” “jobs,” “corporations,” “economies,” “governments,” and “banks,” and “pensions” so we can actually do all the above. We are going to have to literally take the giant plate of steaming, tasteless gruel we’re being so kindly, generously offered, carefully extract magic beans from it—and build a ladder right past the clouds and into the wide blue sky.

It’s not going not be easy. And it doesn’t feel fair. But every generation has a challenge. And that challenge must be faced, with courage, with dignity, with grace—if they are to grow into the people they may become. This is ours.

And so. The “F” in Generation F doesn’t stand for probably what you think it does. It stands for fixing the world. It stands for going further. And it stands for creating the future.

Building the Agile Workforce

Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of ManpowerGroup, on finding the talent you need in an unpredictable world.

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Use Email Auto-Analytics to Tame Your Inbox

What percent of your work day do you spend on email?

If you guessed 10% or 20%, sorry: Studies of office workers peg the average at 28%.

Maybe that’s average but that’s not me, you say? No need to guess. These days there are a number of auto-analytics tools that not only help you quantify how much time you spend on email, but also analyze other email behaviors to help you work more productively. Which of those tools offer the most potential? To find out we went to a scientist, founder and CEO of WolframAlpha, Stephen Wolfram. He’s undertaken a thorough “personal analytics” of his work routines. He told us about four analytical techniques that are relatively easy to use but provide new views into your mail habits that can help him tame the inbox.

1. Project Timeflow Analysis.  In this scenario, Wolfram isolates emails related to a single project by searching for a project name, and then he visualizes the volume of mail over time using the email timestamps. The visual helps him determine how long ago a project started and whether it is progressing smoothly or instead is “running kind of slowly then has a bunch of activity.” For instance, on the day we talked, Wolfram pointed out that he had just contributed to a project that had been running for three years, “although it wasn’t super obvious it had been running that long”  until he analyzed his email archives.

You probably have a decent sense of the various groups and projects you’re managing and tracking. But do you have a clear idea of how all these projects are progressing over time?  Have you been paying enough attention to the right ones? Have some fallen off your radar? This technique could help you. Don’t know how to visualize this kind of data? Try this hack: simply search for emails that mention some keyword and put them all in a folder. Then use the time stamps to look at how long that keyword has been in play and whether the volume is smooth or tends to come in bursts. You may notice some project seems to always pop up at the end of the month, for example, and adjust accordingly. 

2. Backlog Analysis. Periodically, Wolfram evaluates the total volume of his unread emails and his needs-a-reply emails. Wolfram points out this is “quite a useful thing” as it gives him insight into how the past few weeks have evolved in terms of his busyness and work responsibilities. “Right now, for example, I have a whole bunch of projects that are coming to a head and I can see in my email that I am really behind and I’ve been behind,” he says. Armed with real data, he can proactively manage his attention and direct those that help him plan his day.  For instance, he makes his backlog visible to assistants who help schedule his calls and meetings.  This allows his staff to be more analytical in forecasting the effects of scheduling decisions on his productivity. “If they schedule back-to-back meetings throughout some period of time, then [they] can immediately predict how much larger of an email backlog I will have at the end of it.”

You may not have assistants, but it’s worth analyzing your backlog as academic research shows that it’s a significant predictor of stress in the workplace. Consider  quantifying your overall or weekly volume of unread or “still-needs-a-reply” email, and setting a target ceiling of such messages.

3. Action Analysis. Wolfram moved from intuition to analytics to understand what he really was doing with incoming email. He charted how he responded to specific senders and discovered a correlation: if there is almost no time lag between opening an email and either forwarding or deleting it, he knows the sender’s emails are of lower importance. “After one of these analyses, the main result was taking myself off a bunch of internal mailing lists,” he says. The savings in simply not having to acknowledge, read, or delete these bulk messages significantly decreased Wolfram’s email load, and because he analyzed the data, he knew he was getting rid of the ones that he would be least likely to miss.

Action analysis for you starts with an acknowledgement that there are only about six things you can do with an email: open, delete, file, forward, reply, or ignore. Research at Carnegie-Mellon and elsewhere shows that the perceived importance of a message (and the messenger) plays a significant role in determining which of the six tacks one takes. So, prioritize senders and subjects and remove yourself from lists that you don’t need to be part of. If you can’t bring yourself to decline incoming mail, consider automated filing so you never have to acknowledge certain emails in the daily stream and can instead set aside time later to rip through them.

4. Response Time Analysis. Wolfram used to answer email continuously throughout the day, but surmised the approach was “kind of silly because email needs responses on very different time scales—very little of it needs a response in 5 minutes.” As an experiment, he began a very different approach: waiting until a specific time late in the day before reading and responding to non-urgent messages.

Paradoxically, he discovered that this Bartleby-like approach of waiting outperformed active involvement in most email conversations. His analysis showed that “it’s much more efficient to let certain kinds of [problems and questions] mature…and resolve themselves,” he says. So, by not responding right away, he often created a situation in which he wouldn’t have to respond at all. This is classic email management advice, but Wolfram’s analytics have shown just how smart it is to get out of the constantly surging stream of correspondence and instead make email a daily task, at a certain time.

The future potential of email auto-analytics on productivity is huge.  Find yourself writing paragraphs when a few sentences would do?  Track word count.  Co-workers complain you are too verbose and jargon-heavy?  Track reading level.  Procrastinate or dither too much on replies to important people?  Track your response time to specific individuals.  Too much back-and-forth via email when a phone call would be quicker?  Track thread length.  The possibilities are endless.

For most of us, our email archives represent the largest repository of personal data we have about how we manage others and get our work done. Google makes billions by analyzing the email and inbox behaviors of their Gmail users, and using those insights to sell more, better-targeted advertising. Why not adopt a similar approach to improve our own productivity and leadership effectiveness?

Maybe the real, future potential of “Big Data” isn’t only out there with customers and distributors, but inside our own laptops.

The Secret to Lean Innovation Is Making Learning a Priority

Lean innovation is being embraced by everyone — from the smallest start-ups to the largest global organizations. But in most cases, it’s still falling well short of its full potential because it either lacks or fails to tightly integrate with the mechanisms needed to systematically capture lessons learned and share them outside the team. And that’s where the money is in innovation.

Lean innovation embraces a philosophy of not letting progress get in the way of perfection. It leverages the Pareto principle that 20% of a product’s features (what’s distilled down into the minimal viable product) will most likely deliver 80% of the benefits sought by customers.

As an approach, lean innovation lends itself especially well to corporate cultures, often engineering ones and others strongly focused on process-improvement programs such as Six Sigma. Its straightforward, step-by-step methodology makes it relatively easy to explain and to implement:

Identify the minimal viable product.
Develop a version rapidly and test it with customers, ideally in a real-world competitive situation.
Repeat the process until the core product is competitive or pivot to explore a new approach.

Lean innovation stands in stark contrast to conventional approaches to product development in which teams expend enormous effort trying to create a perfected, many-featured product over an extended period without sufficient in-market customer feedback. The resulting new products are often too expensive, too complicated, too different from what customers want, and too late to market.

But an exclusively process-driven view of lean innovation obscures the underlying reason for its power. And without a deeper understanding, we limit our ability to fully benefit from its potential.

When I worked at Nielsen, I led a study of innovation best practices in the consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) industry with companies like Procter & Gamble and Kraft that revealed why top-performing companies average 600 times more revenue from their new products than the lowest performers. The research tied variations in new product revenue at almost 30 global companies to differences in processes, culture, organizational structure, senior executive leadership roles, and investment.

One of the key findings was that learning has far and away the single greatest impact on revenue from new products. And creating a better environment for learning is what lean innovation does so well. Its focus on the most important product attributes and rapid cycling of trial and error — ideally in the real-life competitive environment — accumulates critical knowledge at a rapid clip.

In other words, lean innovation is not a better innovation process; rather it’s a more efficient learning process. And by combining the lean perspective with innovation research from CPG companies, we can vastly improve the effectiveness of the lean innovation approach. Here is what the research tells us:

Companies with mandatory formal debriefs of both success and failure following new product launches average about 100% more revenue from new products in comparison to companies that don’t formally debrief.
When debriefs are led by an outside third party, the revenue increases substantially more.
And when the learnings are captured in a knowledge management system, revenue jumps again.
Companies that apply these learnings to creating, continuously improving, and strictly following decision-making criteria for the evaluation of potential new products average about 130% more revenue from new products.

Success can skyrocket by simply adding the above steps to a lean innovation process.

But this research also points to a cautionary note regarding lean innovation. Given that lean innovation teams move so quickly, the learnings are less likely to be captured than in traditional, slower approaches to product development. Secondly, given that lean innovation teams often exist in parallel with conventional product development teams, valuable learnings from lean teams are not always transferred to the development side.

We need to think of lean innovation as a process that drives more efficient learning. But to maximize success, lean innovation must be married to practices that effectively capture these rich lessons and make them readily available to everyone within the organization.

Five Questions Every Leader Should Ask About Organizational Design

A few years ago Dave Ulrich, a management thought leader from the University of Michigan, made a comment I found both insightful and profound: “Every leader needs to have a model of organization design.” Typically a graphic depiction of the organizational components to be addressed in a redesign (for example, McKinsey’s 7S model, which includes strategy, structure, systems, staff, skills, and so on), every consultant and his brother flogs an organization design model. Dave didn’t advocate any particular design model, just one the leader knows how to employ and one flexible enough to be applied to the range of organizational situations a leader faces in the course of a career.

Once upon a time, “organization design” meant bringing in a slew of consultants to oversee a large-scale organizational restructuring, most often intended to take out big chunks of cost during an economic downturn. Although that kind of redesign is still required periodically, leaders today are more typically confronted with the challenge of how to find cost efficiencies in certain parts of their organization to invest in other parts of the organization that drive growth. As a result, organization design is no longer just a big bang event. Rather it’s an on-going nipping and tucking of organizational resources to achieve both growth and efficiency at multiple levels: the company overall, the operating group level, and even within functional groups like human resources and information technology. So leaders at many different levels need to get in on the act.

If, as Dave suggests, there isn’t any ideal design model, then how does one choose an approach to designing an organization that is robust enough to address the dual goals of achieving efficiency and investing in growth at multiple levels of the organization?

The fundamental task of organization design is, as it always has been, helping a leader move from defining strategy to putting in place an organization that enables the strategy to be executed predictably. An effective organization design model guides a manager in answering five fundamental questions in a thoughtful and well-integrated way.

What is the business’s value proposition and it sources of competitive advantage? Business strategies are lofty, typically long-term oriented, and often aspirational. By contrast a compelling value proposition describes succinctly how the company will compete successfully against its competition—and implies the critical activities around which the organization should be designed. Are you competing on the basis of on-going product or technological innovation? Through low-cost sourcing and manufacturing?  By creating highly customized solutions for target customers? A clear, straightforward answer to this question provides a foundation on which you can design an organization.

Which organizational activities directly deliver on that value proposition—and, by contrast, which activities can the company afford to perform in a way equivalent to competition? When faced with an organization design challenge, many managers rush to grab a cocktail napkin—long the instrument of choice for reorganizing—and sketch out a high-level diagram of boxes and reporting relationships. In doing so, they implicitly accept the way organizational resources and costs are currently deployed and miss opportunities for more creative, effective design. A better course is devoting time to considering what organizational functions truly bring the value proposition to life. As Kreig Smith, founder of design consultancy AlignOrg Solutions, has pointed out, not all work is created equal. Certain activities are crucial to delivering on the value proposition. As a result, they should be owned by the company and given the greatest possible resources.

Conversely, there are functions and activities where an extra dollar of investment doesn’t help the company win in the marketplace. What’s important is to realize that both sets of activities vary with a company’s business strategy. For example, new product development may be the lifeblood of a consumer products company—and thus need to be cultivated and resourced carefully—while in a low-cost producer, or fast follower company, product development may be only a nice-to-have activity. “Get the wash out the door” activities, that is, those where being at par with competition is sufficient, are candidates for cost reduction whether by centralization, automation, outsourcing, or a shared service approach.

Which organization structure should we choose, and how do we overcome its inherent downsides? Many leaders fall in love with the organization structure they’re most familiar with, whether it’s organized according to function, geographic location, customer segment, or through a matrix. In the process they neglect to appreciate the pros and inherent cons of the structure and thus fail to take steps to mitigate the downsides. While a structure organized around customer groups is great for getting close to them and catering to their needs, for instance, it can be costly, and over time interest in product innovation may wane. What’s more, organization structures by definition create boundaries between one part of the organization and others. A successful organization design therefore, as Jay Galbraith of the Center for Effective Organizations pointed out years ago, includes linking or integrating mechanisms, such as an account management function to coordinate activities—creative, design, brand management, and so forth—on behalf of the client within an advertising agency.

What type of leadership and culture are required to achieve the value proposition? For all the table pounding that managers do about culture change, few fully consider the type of leadership and culture required to put a new organization design into gear. Clearly, a low-cost producer strategy demands a ruthless focus on controlling costs while a customer-focused organization needs to encourage deep customer knowledge and internal coordination aimed at creating customer-specific products and services. When a company adopts a significantly different organization design, a critical part of the implementation process needs to include putting in place leaders who lead in a way consistent with the new value proposition and who will take steps to strengthen corresponding cultural norms. For example, when a company moves from an efficiency-based strategy to a customer-focused one, members of the leadership team need to introduce a new reward system to promote a do-whatever-it-takes mentality in responding to customer needs throughout the organization.

Which organizational practices are required to reinforce the organizational intent? Many managers introduce a new strategy and organization structure and declare victory—often at their peril. The reason that cultures are so difficult to change is that cultural values are deeply woven into the policies and practices that govern how people work. As a result, when leaders launch a significantly new organization design, it’s imperative that they revise such practices — how performance objectives are set, the metrics and scorecards that signal success or failure, the type of people to be recruited, and how they are trained. Otherwise, they’ll put in place a shiny new organization structure — but find that people are behaving exactly as they did under the old regime.

As organization structures have become more fluid and organic, organization design is no longer the purview of a handful of senior executives supported by high-priced consultants. Leaders at many levels of the organization are increasingly called on to reallocate organizational resources and redesign their organizations to support more frequent shifts in company strategy. As a result, they need to have a trusty organization design model in their wallets—and know how to use it.

If You’re Not Helping People Develop, You’re Not Management Material

Skilled managers have never been more critical to the success of firms than they are today.  Not because employees can’t function without direction, but because managers play a vital role in talent management. Gone are the comprehensive career management systems and expectations of long-term employment that once functioned as the glue in the employer-employee contract.  In their place, the manager-employee dyad is the new building block of learning and development in firms.

Good managers attract candidates, drive performance, engagement and retention, and play a key role in maximizing employees’ contribution to the firm. Poor managers, by contrast, are a drag on all of the above.  They cost your firm a ton of money in turnover costs and missed opportunities for employee contribution, and they do more damage than you realize.

Job seekers from entry-level to executive are more concerned with opportunities for learning and development than any other aspect of a prospective job.  This makes perfect sense, since continuous learning is a key strategy for crafting a sustainable career.  The vast majority (some sources say as much as 90%) of learning and development takes place not in formal training programs, but rather on the job—through new challenges and developmental assignments, developmental feedback, conversations and mentoring.  Thus, employees’ direct managers are often their most important developers.  Consequently, job candidates’ top criterion is to work with people they respect and can learn from. From the candidate’s viewpoint, his or her prospective boss is the single most important individual in the firm.

Managers also have a big impact on turnover and retention. The number one reason employees quit their jobs is because of a poor quality relationship with their direct manager.  No one wants to work for a boss who doesn’t take an interest in their development, doesn’t help them deepen their skills and learn new ones, and doesn’t validate their contributions. This isn’t what departing employees tell HR during their exit interviews, of course.  After all, who wants to burn a bridge to a previous employer? Instead, they say they’re leaving because of a better opportunity elsewhere.  And so what happens is that organizations remain in the dark regarding how much damage their inept managers are doing.

Regardless of what else you expect from your managers, facilitating employee learning and development should be a non-negotiable competency.  Google’s famous people analytics team examined data from thousands of employee surveys and performance reviews to find out which behaviors characterize its most effective managers.  Coaching topped a list that also included helping with career development.  Research by Gallup has yielded similar results.  Work groups in which employees report that their supervisor (or someone else at work) cares about them as a person, talks to them about their career progress, encourages their development, and provides opportunities to learn and grow have lower turnover, higher sales growth, better productivity, and better customer loyalty than work groups in which employees report that these developmental elements are scarce.   

Remember the Peter Principle?  The phrase refers to a process in which employees receive promotions as a reward for being competent in their current jobs, and they continue to rise through an organization’s ranks until they reach a level at which they are incompetent.  The predictable consequence of this pattern is that over time, an organization becomes heavily staffed by managers who are bad at their jobs.  Your organization cannot afford to let this happen.

Becoming a great developer of employees requires managers to expand their focus from “How can I get excellent performance out of my team members?” to “How can I get excellent performance out of my team members while helping them grow?”  Savvy managers know that doing well on the second part of the last question helps to answer the first. 

The best managers ask, “How can we harness employee strengths, interests and passions to create greater value for the firm?”  Systematically linking organizational performance and individual development goals in the search for learning opportunities and better ways to work is a hallmark of organizations where sustainable careers flourish. And this is not a question managers try to answer by themselves; instead, they discuss it regularly with their team members.

Here are several steps you can take to stimulate learning and development:

Share detailed information with your team about current operations across the firm.  Be transparent about the firm’s challenges and direction, including such things as changing customer expectations, new vendor relationships, early-stage strategic plans, and top leaders’ thinking regarding the potential impact of industry trends and economic conditions. Invite their questions, thinking and suggestions on these issues as well.
Support the development of internal social networks that span functions and divisions in order to give employees broader understanding of the organization and help them spot opportunities to learn and to add value.
Instead of a once-annual conversation about career goals at the time of the annual performance review, have frequent short conversations throughout the year regarding employees’ career goals and interests, which may not be self-evident. Regular career conversations help employees to refine their goals. With better understanding of their learning goals, you and your employees are in a better position to spot developmental opportunities.
When planning your team’s work, ask employees to identify both how they can contribute and what they would like to learn. This gives employees the primary responsibility for clarifying what they want to learn and for proposing ways to incorporate on-the-job learning. It also helps to avoid having employees volunteer to perform only the tasks that they are already highly skilled at.
Ask employees to report back periodically to you and fellow team members on what they have been learning and how they are using new skills and knowledge.

Keep in mind that in addition to helping employees develop and pursue meaningful learning goals, regular career conversations also help to mark progress in development. And they serve as a reminder of the organization’s commitment to employee learning, which in turn strengthens employee commitment.

Putting an End to Conferences Dominated by White Men

Many business conferences are notable not only for the prominent people on stage, but also for those who are missing. For instance, at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week, fewer than 18% of the speakers are women. Women’s under-representation at such events gets a lot of attention, but people of color are also relatively rare on conference stages. For conference hosts, however, past performance need not be an indicator of future results.

Since 2012, I’ve co-hosted The Lean Startup Conference with Eric Ries. Eric ran the event with another host for two years before that, and the speakers they drew, though good presenters, were almost all white men. When I began co-hosting, we put an emphasis on finding high-quality speakers who better represented the business world.  In 2012 and 2013, not only did our speaker rosters comprise more than 50% women and people of color, but the number of conference attendees doubled each year.

We use the same methods all conferences use to find speakers: We invite people we know or know of, and we have an open call for proposals. But because those processes reliably over-represent white male candidates, we approach them differently than most conference hosts. Below are nine key steps we’ve taken to reduce bias in our selection cycle, convince people we’re serious and thus draw a more diverse group of outstanding speakers. Our conference in December 2013 had roughly 43% as many speakers as Davos does this month, but these ideas apply to events of any size. They also apply to almost any gated decision with a pipeline of applicants, including hiring, venture capital funding, school admissions, and awards.

1. As a leader, commit yourself to improving your selection process. Studies show that bringing in decision-makers from under-represented groups will help your organization attract more similar people. While doing so will likely improve your team and undoubtedly sends a positive signal, it’s not a magic bullet. First, people from under-represented groups can have professional networks like yours and the same selection biases you do. Second, if you make it the job of the under-represented person to draw in others like them, you’ll ensure that person’s priorities for choosing candidates are different than yours—thus inviting conflict and likely marginalizing their work.

The top leaders of your event, regardless of their own identities, need to share a commitment to changing your systems. By way of example, Eric and I are both white, and we have successfully drawn dozens of people of color to give excellent talks at our conferences.

2. Be deeply transparent. Of course, you need to have a sentence saying that you welcome people from groups under-represented in your community. But that statement will do nothing to surface good speaking candidates. Because people can either see that you have a record of excluding speakers like them or will assume, if your event is new, that it will behave like most others, they’ll logically decide not to apply—and a single sentence is not going to convince them otherwise.

Go much further than the sentence, writing in depth about how you’ve contributed to the problem in the past (or if your event is new, showing your understanding of how imbalances arise), and concrete things you’re doing to make change.

3. Look beyond the usual suspects. And tell people that’s what you’re doing. Many potential candidates assume that they have to either know you personally or be on the speaking circuit for you to pick them. If they’re right, you’re simply tapping the existing pool of speakers, and you’re missing opportunities to introduce fresh perspectives to your event.

Most conferences need at least a few marquee names to spark attendee registration. But as a curator, you can provide unique value by finding sharp people that everyone doesn’t already know. To attract those candidates, advertise that you’re seeking new voices and use thoughtful language.

For instance, if you say that you’re looking for people with “advice and expertise to share” rather than “experts,” you avoid suggesting that you’re interested only in people already recognized in the field. (Anecdotally, women are less likely than men to refer to themselves as experts, so as a bonus, you also avoid accidentally excluding them.)

4. Offer speaker training.  If you’re trying to attract new speakers, you may well need to provide guidance to help them perform at the level your attendees expect. Even just offering it can draw proposals from strong candidates who are new to public speaking and can prompt managers to encourage promising stars to apply.  For efficiency, you can deliver the actual training online and in groups.  You can also pair experienced speakers with beginners for coaching sessions.

5. Request help.  Once you have a call for proposals with a strong public statement about your process, you can point to it and ask other people to help you find great candidates. Indeed, simply asking people to recommend speakers from under-represented groups often turns up surprising candidates—including people your connectors wouldn’t have thought to mention if you hadn’t made a specific request. In addition, you can ask professional associations that have networks unlike yours to circulate your unusual call for proposals among their members. If your conference includes panels, require that panel organizers include at least one and preferably two people from your under-represented groups.

6. Approach individual people in your under-represented groups. Developing relationships with candidates is a long game, but it’s important, particularly because people who haven’t envisioned themselves at your event may realize they’re a fit only if you brainstorm talk ideas together. Be systematic and, for instance, every quarter, approach two people you want to get to know better and invite them for coffee.

7. Have a farm system. Hold more casual events where you can try out speakers you don’t already know and work with them to develop content and style appropriate for your audience. TEDx events have served this purpose for the flagship TED conference.

8. Save slots — as many as half — for people you find later in the process. The old ways of finding candidates generate good speakers more quickly than the new ways—but, as I noted above, the traditional methods will lead you to traditional candidates. So you have to sequence your decision-making, or you’ll inadvertently recreate the status quo.

One pitfall to avoid is announcing an initial, homogeneous list of speakers. Such an announcement can lead historically under-represented candidates to reasonably question your commitment to giving them fair review and prompt them to steer clear. Convincing people you’re committed is critical; don’t undermine yourself by asking them to trust you despite the evidence.

9. Take chances. Often speakers from under-represented groups don’t behave quite like the established pros you’re used to. They may seem less confident, which you interpret as less authoritative. Or they may use language differently, which you interpret as less professional.  In those cases, your gut will often tell you they aren’t a fit for your event. Override your gut.  Provide training and set them up to succeed.

After you’ve had a conference with a more diverse lineup of strong speakers, not only will you find it easier to repeat that success, you’ll also be in a better position to expand your attendee base. At Davos this year, just 15% of the participants are women. We can and should do better. Starting with your next event.

A Little Meditating Helps You Make Better Business Decisions

Research participants who had spent just 15 minutes in “mindfulness” meditation, focusing on their breathing, were 77% more likely than others to resist what’s known as the “sunk-cost bias,” the tendency to stick with a less-than-optimal strategy merely because a lot of money has been sunk into it, says a team led by Andrew C. Hafenbrack of Insead business school in France. In a fictional scenario, the participants had to decide whether to buy a highly efficient $10,000 machine shortly after spending $200,000 on equipment that was much less efficient (and couldn’t be sold). Meditation’s impact on the sunk-cost bias may have to do with its ability to improve mood and decrease people’s focus on the future and past, the researchers suggest.

Say “No” to Innovation-in-General

I had just arrived at a conference on entrepreneurship and the only panel I wanted to see was starting. I looked down at my watch and realized that I was already 5 minutes late so I dropped my bags and ran to the next building.

The subject was intrapreneurship and it seemed like the organizers had collected an all-star panel; two Googlers, an early Facebooker, one of the recent additions to the Paypal team, and one of the IBM leads on the Watson project. For over an hour, the panel discussed all of the innovative projects they’d worked on — spanning projects from Google Fiber to ad bidding technologies at Facebook.

Now, while I can’t speak for everyone else in the room, I found myself leaving the discussion disappointed.

Yes, all of the panelists were speaking broadly on innovative projects. But innovation is a word that means a wide variety of things to a wide variety of people. Without more specification, “innovation” is simply too broad to execute against. It’s like talking about creating art, without specifying between medium. Are you painting, sculpting, filmmaking, or rapping?

At its highest level, innovation is simply where ideation meets commercialization. Innovation is both the new color of Crayola crayon as well as the iPad app that completely replaces the need for Crayola crayons in the eyes of children everywhere. Because of the vast space between these, the astute manager shouldn’t simply aspire to innovation in general. It doesn’t give his team enough to go on. One employee might come back with a thousand different colors for new crayons, while another suggests strategic adjacencies with construction paper, while the final suggests a partnering with Adobe to deliver a drawing application. Yes all three are innovative. But simply claiming that they are innovative projects neglects the point that they really are entirely different in nature.

Without differentiating between things like sustaining and disruptive innovations, the conversation never directs managers to the nitty-gritty details where new products and services live or die.

It’s no wonder there is such widespread backlash against innovation today. Everyone from the Wall Street Journal to Techcrunch has an opinion on innovation overload. But I’d argue that the real problem with our innovation zeitgeist isn’t that the quality of ideas is diminishing, it’s that we’re talking about the bold audacious bets in the same way we’re talking about the unheralded incremental ones. We’re considering little league and Major League baseball the same, just because they’re both baseball.

In the research world, innovation is a term one rarely hears in a vacuum. Instead of rolling off the tongue by itself, academics modify the term innovation with all sorts of other words that specify exactly what phenomenon they’re talking about. And while not all lessons from academia do apply to the business world, this is certainly one place that hard-nosed managers and pointy-headed intellectuals should agree; because when it comes to innovation, our muddled-generic language represents muddled-generic thinking — not the clarity of thinking that should be driving multi-billion dollar investment decisions.

It’s easy to poke fun at the lengthening list of specific types of innovation, from Continuous to Reverse to Sustaining to Disruptive to Platform and beyond. But as we accept that leadership comes in many forms, from managing crises to coaching employees, we need to do the same when it comes to innovation.

Our lack of thoughtfulness on the subject has kept us from investing and concentrating on the innovations that matter most. Increased attention on innovation by businesspeople has led to millions more executives with “innovation” in their sights, but far fewer with a deep understanding of what the word means.

Innovation simply isn’t one thing. It’s a wide variety of things. It’s the sustaining innovations that will drive profitability across your core business units. It’s the continuous technological innovations that will exploit your fixed asset base. It’s the disruptive innovations that will help you drive your business into the next era of your industry’s evolution. It’s the reverse innovations to help you penetrate new markets and return lessons from different geographies.

And your business needs all of it. But each aspect of it needs to be managed distinctly. Build a shared language for innovation in your organization, set up the structures to pursue each type of innovation correctly, and invest in the team that can guide you through the process.

If you’re feeling burned out on innovation, don’t let your new years resolution be to say no to innovation… let it be to say no to innovation-in-general.

Cracking the Code That Stalls People of Color

It’s a topic which corporations once routinely ignored, then dismissed, and are only now beginning to discuss: the dearth of professionals of color in senior positions. Professionals of color hold only 11% of executive posts in corporate America. Among Fortune 500 CEOs, only six are black, eight are Asian, and eight are Hispanic.

Performance, hard work, and sponsors get top talent recognized and promoted, but “leadership potential” isn’t enough to lever men and women into the executive suite. Top jobs are given to those who also look and act the part, who manifest “executive presence” (EP). According to new CTI research (PDF), EP constitutes 26% of what senior leaders say it takes to get the next promotion. Yet because senior leaders are overwhelmingly Caucasian, professionals of color (African-American, Asian, and Hispanic individuals) find themselves at an immediate disadvantage in trying to look, sound, and act like a leader. And the feedback that might help them do so is markedly absent at all levels of management.

EP rests on three pillars: gravitas (the core characteristic, according to 67% of the 268 senior executives surveyed), an amalgam of behaviors that convey confidence, inspire trust, and bolster credibility; communication skills (according to 28%); and appearance, the filter through which communication skills and gravitas become more apparent. While they are aware of the importance of executive presence, men and women of color are nonetheless hard-pressed to interpret and embody aspects of a code written by and for white men.

CTI research finds that professionals of color, like their Caucasian counterparts, prioritize gravitas over communication, and communication over appearance. Yet, “cracking the code” of executive presence presents unique challenges for professionals of color because standards of appropriate behavior, speech, and attire demand they suppress or sacrifice aspects of their cultural identity in order to conform. They overwhelmingly feel that EP at their firm is based on white male standards — African Americans, especially, were 97% more likely than their Caucasian counterparts to agree with this assessment — and that conforming to these standards requires altering their authenticity, a new version of “bleached-out professionalism” that contributes to feelings of resentment and disengagement. People of color already feel they have to work harder than their Caucasian counterparts just to be perceived “on a par” with them; more than half (56%) of minority professionals also feel they are held to a stricter code of EP standards.

EP further eludes professionals of color because they’re not likely to get feedback on their “presentation of self.” Qualitative findings affirm that their superiors, most of whom are white, hesitate to call attention to gravitas shortfalls and/or communication blunders for fear of coming across as racially insensitive or discriminatory. While sponsors might close this gap, specifically addressing executive presence issues with their high-potentials, CTI’s 2012 research shows that professionals of color are much less likely to have a sponsor than Caucasians (8% versus 13%). When they do get feedback, they’re unclear as to how to act on it, particularly if they were born outside the U.S. — a serious problem for corporations who need local expertise to expand their influence in global markets.

In short, because feedback is either absent, overly vague, or contradictory, executive presence remains an inscrutable set of rules for professionals of color — rules they’re judged by but cannot interpret and embody except at considerable cost to their authenticity. Consequently, in a workplace where unconscious bias continues to permeate the corridors of power, and leadership is mostly white and male, professionals of color are measurably disadvantaged in their efforts to be perceived as leaders.

As America becomes more diverse at home and its companies are increasingly engaged in the global marketplace, winning in today’s fiercely competitive economy requires a diverse workforce that “matches the market.” Such individuals are better attuned to the unmet needs of consumers or clients like themselves. New research from CTI (PDF) shows, however, that their insights need a key ingredient to reach full-scale implementation: a cadre of equally diverse leaders. Yet the power of difference is missing at the top, just when it matters most.

Editor’s note: We updated the headline and body of this post January 23. The original post referred to professionals of color as “multicultural professionals.” We regret the error.