Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1479
January 3, 2014
Life After the Death of a Colleague
Six things, according to Michael Hobbes in this thoughtful essay about something we hope never happens (but most likely will). First, at least in Hobbes's office, someone tells you that Colin, the guy in communications, died. It's an awkward and difficult conversation. Second, "We are terrible." By that Hobbes means that people gossip and speculate: How did it happen? Why? Did departmental restructuring cause too much stress? And what about the coworker's private life? Third, there's mourning: in this case, an uncomfortable tribute video in which coworkers discuss saying "hi" in the halls and engaging in small talk while warming up lunches, and they share laments about not getting to know the deceased. "He seemed nice," reports Colin's boss, a testament to how much we don't know about the people we spend most of our waking hours with.
Fourth, everyone talks about experiences with death, and the stories bring people momentarily closer. Fifth, it's over. Work beckons; Colin becomes a $40,000 salary surplus in the budget. Sixth, a coworker quits, realizing that she'd rather be closer to her real family — that is, to people who are important to her, realizing she'll never have that kind of bond with the people she sits with every day. In the meantime, everyone goes about his or her business warming up lunches in the microwave.
It's Risky NOT to Take It The Risky Business of Paternity LeaveThe Atlantic
We know that women's wages take a hit when they take time off to care for new babies. Do men's wages do something similar if they decide to stay home for a period of time? Yup, according to research from family sociologist Scott Coltrane and his colleagues. While the loss isn't as big as the one women face, men will likely earn less over a lifetime if they take family time off. So if you’re a man, why would you want to stay home? Because it's better for your spouse, your kids, and yourself — just not in the masculine workaholic way. Sure, you won't make as much money as your colleagues who go the traditional route. But when fathers are involved in child care, women "enjoy more wealth, power, and authority in society at large." Kids grow up with worldviews that are more gender-balanced and, research indicates, with social and cognitive advantages. A recent Swedish study even found that men who take paternity leave live longer than men who don't.
There Are No Boring Products, Only Boring DesignersHow Home Depot Copied Apple to Build an Ingenious New Bucket Wired
Home Depot may look like a big-box retailer, but in the days before Bob Nardelli tried to make it into one by dramatically cutting costs, it was actually an innovator, competing not on price against the neighborhood hardware store but by making formerly exotic tools and hard-to-find building materials available to anyone with a pickup truck. After forcing Nardelli out in 2007, founder Bernie Marcus got the company back on the competing-by-boosting-margins-through-innovation road. But this time, his competition was Amazon, which was even better at making the widest possible selection of high-margin merchandise (notably power tools) available to everyone (and customers didn’t even need the truck).
To lure people back into the stores, Marcus recruited hot-shot design firm Herbst Produkt (which numbers Facebook among its clients) to reconceive humble products as radically more useful, exclusive Home Depot merchandise (that you can’t get on Amazon). First out of the gate probably couldn’t be humbler (or more ubiquitous): the five-gallon bucket, shrunk to 3.5 gallons and redesigned to be easier to lift and pour (with a patented grip at its base). Take a look at the video here and you can judge for yourself how revolutionary it might be. But can the “Big Gripper” turn Home Depot into the next Apple Store (without the huge PR campaigns that Apple uses to introduce its products)? Stay tuned. —Andrea Ovans
Drive and Happenstance Holiday Party Dress Central: How We Started Rent the Runway Fortune
I'm not sure why I read every entrepreneur story that comes along, given that I'll never be an entrepreneur myself. It must be that I like the combination of happenstance and drive that seem to be part of each start-up's creation myth. The two young women who founded Rent the Runway a few years ago met (by happenstance) at B-school (Harvard Business School — that's the drive part), and one of them heard her sister say she craved dresses that were way beyond her budget (another happenstance). The founders figured there must be a way to solve this problem, so they came up with a business that rents dresses, Daniel Roberts writes in this excerpt from his book Zoom. The idea was to help customers feel beautiful, affordably. Clothing designers fought the concept, but our two heroes persevered (more drive), and today the company has more than 3 million members and is growing at nearly 100% year-over-year. Rent the Runway has been compared to Netflix, but cofounder Jennifer Hyman says there's a big difference, and it has to do with emotions: "Netflix is a very rational business,” she says, “and everything that we are doing is about delivering an emotional experience." —Andy O'Connell
No Job Titles, No Managers, No HierarchyZappos Is Going HolacraticQuartz
At Zappos’s Q4 meeting, in addition to an employee-performed Lion King event, there was a presentation by CEO Tony Hsieh in which he announced that the company is going Holacratic, adopting "a radical, 'self-governing' operating system where there are no job titles and no managers." The goal, writes Aimee Groth, is "radical transparency" in which employees "have the flexibility to pursue what they're passionate about." While Hsieh will have to give up some power in order to make the system work, the upside is that he'll get to see his company completely differently, without the barriers of titles and hierarchy. This doesn't mean that it won't be a challenge. While companies like Medium have adopted the approach, Zappos will be the largest company to give Holacracy a try (Medium has 50 employees; Zappos has 1,500).
So why is Hsieh making this move? He says that companies have three org charts: the org chart on paper, the real org chart, and the org chart it would like to have in order to operate more efficiently. Holacracy, he says, can "process tensions so that the three org charts are pretty close together.”
BONUS BITSHiring Decisions
Attention, Job Hunters: Do You Live With Your Mom? (The Wall Street Journal)
Japan's Homeless Recruited for Murky Fukushima Clean-Up (Reuters)
On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China's Elite (The New York Times)
Who Will Create the Future?
Who will offer the world more than a dead end?
Consider: Walmart is the biggest employer in America.
The typical Walmart “associate” (sorry—I meant Highly Exploited and Vulnerable Person With No Access to Healthcare, Job Security, Or Other Benefits, All of Which Are Subsidized By the Public Purse, Who’s Sometimes Locked in the Store Overnight) earns the princely sum of about fifteen and a half thousand dollars a year.
Fifteen thousand five hundred dollars is less than the average income…in Botswana. Other countries with higher average income than the typical Walmart employee earns? Lebanon, Malaysia, Gabon, and Barbados.
Perhaps, you protest: but not everyone in the US works at Walmart! Why, the nation’s full of super brainiac quantum rocket scientists! Who—justifiably deserving of their riches—are cracking tough, vexing problems, tackling noble, grand endeavors! Undertaking world-changing work! Like…like…ah, inventing highly leveraged synthetic financial products, finding better ways to deny healthcare to the elderly, creating the next housing bubble, making gigantic talking billboards, creating “sympathize” buttons for those awkward occasions you have to display real human emotion, and dreaming up reality TV shows that are even more stomach-churningly grody than the fast not-quite-food advertised in them.
No wonder heading to the office instills most of us with a heady, spine-tingling sense of dread, horror, resignation, and regret.
What’s happening to us?
Yesterday’s noble paragon of prosperity—the USA—isn’t finished. But what you might call its model of growth—its how and why of prosperity; what it means; why it counts; and where it is found—sure is.
America’s Way—or at least what it’s devolved to in the last decade or three—is a dead end. It’s a cul de sac—one that we’re driving around and around in…endlessly.
You know the endless “debates” the talking heads have had on cable news, every night…for the last thirty years…about the same topics…taking the same sides…offering the same failed ideas…over and over and over and over again…until most of us would rather eat our own socks than turn on CNN? You know how you know exactly what every major newspaper columnist is going to write…before you even read it…before you even open your laptop…before you stopped bothering to read the paper? You know how both “left” and “right” at this point seem like deviously not-quite-different brand names for two treacly flavours of high-fructose-corn-syrup-society-substitute that are actually marketed by the same McGovernment-Lobbying-Complex? You know how middle class incomes haven’t risen in decades…while people are working harder than ever…while their kids are deeper in debt, their prospects less stable, their opportunities quietly winking out?
You know how you probably wake up, blearily punch your alarm clock, curse your stars…and head to a “job” that—if you’re lucky enough to have one—makes you want to gnaw your own leg off, beat your boss over the head with it, and do a victory dance, because you can’t bear the thought of even another microsecond of another totally pointless meeting about a utterly useless product whose only purpose is to earn yet a few more pennies for brainless robo-shareholder-bots …every single day, over and over and over again?
That’s what I mean by a cul de sac. That’s what I mean by a dead end. America used to set an example for the world. But that example today? It’s a nowheresville of prosperity. A Potemkin Town of plenitude. A twilight zone of human possibility.
And nations today should be mortally, lethally afraid of getting stuck in it. More worried, in fact, about getting stuck in it than they are about marveling at how pretty the tree-lined boulevards approaching it are.
Many, it seems, are choosing to bypass the neighborhood entirely. China’s “capitalism”—more properly, a kind of mercantilism—seems designed to thumb its nose at America’s failed model entirely. Dubai’s a neofeudal kingdom built on modern-day indentured servitude, brushed under the glittering spires like so much worthless sand. Singapore? A benevolent technocracy, which bears little resemblance to a liberal democracy. And so on.
The point isn’t that these nations are, as though the global economy were a horse race, “surging ahead”. Indeed, they may not be at all. But the economy isn’t a race. It is an act of exploration—and then, of creation. And so: their erstwhile paths forward may equally well prove to dead ends—and I’d bet many already are.
And so the great question this decade, for the smallest of all human concerns, at least—the political economy—is this: who will offer the world more than a dead end? Who will pioneer a way forward—past the barren exurbs America’s stuck in? Who will offer the world—its teeming billions, its hungry slums, it’s crowded, surging masses—a future?
Are we—yes, you and I, each one of us—up to that challenge? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know.
I wouldn’t pay someone fifteen and a half thousand bucks to shove boxes of disposable junk around a warehouse. It wouldn’t free them. It would shackle them; and obligate us to jealously guard the key. And so it would not just be unfair to them—it would be unfair to the people both of us could and should be, at our fullest, truest, noblest, worthiest, highest.
And if that’s all America can offer to the world’s billions, then, well, they can—and rightly should—stop looking to America as the globe’s shining flame of prosperity.
The future’s made of us. And so, from now, until the end of time; it is nothing less than the only power we—fragile, small, brief—might be said to have.
The power to laugh at fate. And create the future.
Overcome the Eight Barriers to Confidence
To get a more confident You in the new year — or a more confident company, community, family, or team — first know what gets in the way. The best resolutions will go nowhere without the confidence to stick with them.
Confidence is an expectation of a positive outcome. It is not a personality trait; it is an assessment of a situation that sparks motivation. If you have confidence, you’re motivated to put in the effort, to invest the time and resources, and to persist in reaching the goal. It’s not confidence itself that produces success; it’s the investment and the effort. Without enough confidence, it’s too easy to give up prematurely or not get started at all. Hopelessness and despair prevent positive action.
To muster the confidence to work toward your goals, avoid these eight traps:
Self-defeating assumptions. You think you can’t, so you don’t. A British Olympic runner is so rattled by a misstep that cost her a contest that she dropped out of the next. A company team decides that a popular world leader is so far out of their league that they don’t issue an invitation to speak at their customer event. Talented women sometimes “leave before they leave,” as Sheryl Sandberg puts it, assuming that they won’t be promoted (or succeed when they have children) so they start behaving like they’re departing years before departure, thus foreclosing their options. It’s one thing to be realistic, it’s another to behave like a loser before entering the game.
Goals that are too big or too distant. I know how often leaders say they want to tackle BHAGs — “big hairy audacious goals.” But having only enormous goals can actually undermine confidence. The gap between a giant goal and today’s reality can be depressing and demotivating. Confidence comes from small wins that occur repeatedly, with each small step moving you closer to the big goal. But the small steps must be valued and turned into goals themselves. Winners think small as well as big.
Declaring victory too soon. This is the dieter’s dilemma: lose the first few pounds, and feel so good that you reward yourself with chocolate cake, and when the pounds go back on, you feel so discouraged that you have more cake to feel better. I saw this pattern in a college football team that was coming off a 9-year losing streak (yes, 9 years!). After winning the first game in nearly a decade, a team member shouted that now we’ll win the championship. First, of course, they had to win the next game — which they didn’t. Step-by-step discipline builds confidence.
Do-it-yourself-ing. It’s a trap to think you can go it alone, without a support system and without supporting others. Losing teams have stars, but they focus on their own records, not how well the whole team does; the resulting resentments and inequalities provoke internal battles that drag everyone down. To build your confidence, think about building the confidence of others and creating a culture in which everyone is more likely to succeed, whether through mentoring them or recognizing their strengths. Giving to others boosts happiness and self-esteem, as numerous research studies show. Supporting them makes it easier to ensure that they support you.
Blaming someone else. Confidence rests on taking responsibility for one’s own behavior. Even in difficult circumstances, we have choices about how to respond to adversity. Whining about past harms reduces confidence about future possibilities. When the blame game is carried out within companies, everyone loses confidence, including external stakeholders. Confidence is the art of moving on.
Defensiveness. It’s one thing to listen and respond to critics; it’s another to answer them before they’ve done anything. Don’t defend yourself if you’re not being attacked. Apologize for your mistakes, but don’t apologize for who or what you are. Instead, take pride in where you’ve come from and lead with your strengths.
Neglecting to anticipate setbacks. Confidence involves a dose of reality. It is not blind optimism, thinking that everything will be fine no matter what. Confidence stems from knowing that there will be mistakes, problems, and small losses en route to big wins. After all, even winning sports teams are often behind at some point in the game. Confidence grows when you look at what can go wrong, think through alternatives, and feel you are prepared for whatever might happen.
Over-confidence. Confidence is a sweet spot between despair and arrogance. Don’t let confidence slip over into the arrogant end. Over-confidence is the bane of economies (e.g., the irrational exuberance that preceded the global financial crisis), corrupt leaders (who assume they’re so necessary that they won’t get into trouble for a small expense account fudge), or individuals who swagger and feel entitled to success rather than working for it. Arrogance and complacency lead to neglect of the basics, deaf ears to critics, and blindness to the forces of change — a trap for companies as well as individuals. Sure enough, like the old proverb that “pride goeth before a fall,” the slide into a losing streak often begins with a winning streak. A little humility goes a long way to moderate arrogance and keep just the right amount of confidence.
Remember, it’s not enough just to feel confident. You have to do the work. But with an expectation of success, you can try new things, form new partnerships, contribute to shared success, and revel in small wins that move you toward bigger goals.
Africa’s Companies Need to Become More Like Training Schools
Youth unemployment is an issue that keeps many African politicians awake. Though data unavailability and informal economic activity make estimates difficult, youth unemployment rates in sub-Saharan Africa are believed to hover around 30-50% (and even higher in parts of North Africa). The World Bank puts the figure at 38% in Nigeria, while the Economist projects 55% for young black South Africans. This is set against the backdrop of a fast-growing youth population, expected to double from a base of 200 million by 2045. Africa’s youth are at a crossroads, and today’s decisions will determine whether they become a demographic dividend or a ticking time bomb.
Companies and entrepreneurs can bring a sustainable solution, while unlocking massive economic opportunity, but a change is required from today’s status quo.
In June 2013, some Harvard Business School classmates and I launched a social enterprise (WAVE: West Africa Vocational Education) targeted at the youth unemployment issue. We identified two sides to the problem: the jobs gap and the skills gap. On the one hand, decades of policy failures and stunted private sector growth have led to a shortage of formal jobs; on the other, many youths leave schools and universities wholly unprepared for employment. Our organization focuses mainly on plugging the ‘skills gap’: we identify, train, and place underprivileged youths in emerging industries like the hospitality sector. However, our experiences so far have highlighted opportunities for even broader impact through a different approach to in-house training at African companies.
A ‘Training-Heavy’ Strategy
Today many African companies employ a ‘Training-Light’ approach. In the hospitality sector, for example, they invest upfront into luxury real estate and equipment, but rarely into training programs. Some may have short onboarding programs for new employees; at best some multinational companies will budget similar training budgets as in their developed market businesses. But there is a marked lack of a holistic training strategy that over-invests in response to the challenging African environment, and prioritizes continuous learning and customer feedback.
Instead African companies need to adopt a ‘Training-Heavy’ strategy, which positions enterprises as remedial schools and emphasizes continuous, metric-based learning. There are many reasons for African companies to step back in 2014 and rethink their training approach:
The current system is broken. Many schools and universities pump out students who cannot string together coherent sentences. Companies that fail to take training seriously will face personnel issues sooner or later
A good training strategy is directly linked to reducing the unemployment problem. Companies who take the lead will find themselves on the right side of public policy momentum as government concern about the youth unemployment issue deepens
A good training strategy is a competitive advantage. In his work on interdependence vs. modularity (pdf, page 13), Harvard Professor Clay Christensen predicts that firms with integrated architectures perform very well in under-served markets with ‘not-good-enough’ products. Many emerging markets in Africa fall into this ‘not-good-enough’ category. In such an environment, companies should see training as an R&D investment – part of their secret sauce – rather than a distracting expense.
There are four essential elements of a ‘Training-Heavy’ strategy:
Train early and often. The inferior quality of many schools necessitates early access to youths through internships, short-term placements and even school-based training programs. By finding high potential candidates early, companies can develop them for many years before bringing them onboard. As soon as the new hire is made, companies should emphasize the employee’s position as an apprentice and present each day as a learning opportunity. Regular job functions should be topped up with frequent top-up training sessions, and continuous access to e-learning.
Use mentors and feedback. Mentorship is well-established within many African cultural norms, and exists in some form in many companies. However, companies should be careful to promote mentor-mentee relationships that are based on competence and company experience rather than external factors like age. Many companies also need to work hard to lower the cultural barriers towards giving and receiving feedback. Company executives can set a good example by being transparent in receiving feedback from subordinates.
Metrics are your best friend. Companies need to identify objective metrics to assess the progress of employees – without metrics any training strategy will be haphazard and unsuccessful. These metrics should be linked to value drivers for the company’s business: for example in the hospitality industry, companies need better metrics on customer satisfaction and how individual employees may have contributed or detracted from it. Today, many hotels and restaurants even lack simple feedback forms, and have absolutely no idea how their customers feel.
Align Culture and Incentives. Ultimately, most transformational initiatives will fail if the company’s culture is not aligned. Company leadership should frequently communicate training and development as priorities and promote objective measurements of employee progress. Compensation, promotions and other rewards should be tied to employees’ performance on the identified metrics.
Africa’s companies and entrepreneurs hold the key to making a real dent on the youth unemployment problem. But first, more companies must take training seriously and embrace a ‘Training-Heavy’ strategy. In my next post, I will address the status quo changes required for entrepreneurs.
If You Were a Poor Performer, You Wouldn’t Be Aware of It
In a logic test administered to people who had volunteered over the internet, a team of researchers found that the lowest scorers vastly overestimated their performance, believing, on average, that they had gotten 7 out of 10 items right, when the actual figure was 0, according to Thomas Schlösser of the University of Cologne in Germany. People who lack the skill to perform well also tend to lack the ability to judge performance (their own or others’); because of this “dual curse,” they fail to recognize how incompetent they truly are. But skills aren’t set in stone: Teaching poor performers to solve logic problems causes them to see their own errors and reduce their previous estimates of their performance.
Zappos’ CEO on Using Corporate Relocation to Preserve Customer-Led Culture
In the years since Zappos was founded, we’ve had to make some big decisions. One of the most significant came in early 2004 when we decided to relocate from San Francisco to Las Vegas.
Our biggest problem then was customer service—specifically, finding the right employees to staff our call center. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an internet company would be so focused on the telephone, when only about 5% of our sales happen through that channel. But we’ve found that on average, our customers call us at least once at some point, and if we handle the interaction well, we have an opportunity to create an emotional impact and a lasting memory. But that requires the right type of customer service reps—and our inability to find enough dedicated, high-caliber people near our Bay area headquarters was turning into a huge problem.
When we started to look at new locations for our call center operations, we initially considered outsourcing to India or the Philippines and met with a few potential providers. But we were reluctant to relinquish control of something that is one of Zappo’s core competencies. Our drive to achieve world-class service is what sets us apart from many of our competitors. We put our phone number at the top of every single page of our website because we actually want to talk to our customers. We staff our call center 24/7. We don’t have scripts because we want our reps to let their true personalities shine during every phone call. We don’t hold reps accountable for call times. And we don’t upsell—a practice that usually just annoys people. We care only whether the rep goes above and beyond for every customer.
Our belief is that as unsexy and low-tech as it may sound, the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there. You have the customer’s undivided attention for five or 10 minutes, and if you get the calll right, he or she remembers the experience for a very long time and tells friends about it. Usually when marketing departments do their ROI calculations, they assume that the lifetime value of a customer is fixed. We view it as something that can grow if we create positive emotional associations with our brand. We didn’t trust that a third party would care about our customers as much as we did. So we agreed that Zappos employees should staff the call center.
We settled on Las Vegas for a number of reasons. It’s an all-night city where employees are used to working at any hour, which would help us find people willing to take the overnight shift. And because so much of the city’s economy is focused on hospitality, the city has a customer service mentality—employees there are used to thinking of people as guests. We also thought it was the alternative that would make our current staff the happiest.
Two days after our executive team made the decision, we held a company meeting and announced the move. We explained that we would pay the relocation costs for any employees who came along, and we’d help them find new homes. We had about 90 employees in San Francisco at the time, and I had guessed that maybe half of them would decide to uproot with the company. A week later I was pleasantly surprised to learn that 70 were willing to give Vegas a shot. The move cost about $500,000 altogether, which was a significant amount of money for us at the time. We also lost some good people: Our star software developer loved San Francisco and decided not to leave. And our timing could certainly have been better: We moved at the height of the real estate boom in Las Vegas, and subsequently property values dropped across the board.
However, our decision to relocate paid off in several ways. When we arrived in Vegas, we had no one to lean on except one another. Our company culture, which had always been strong, became even more so. As we grew, we made sure we hired only people we would enjoy hanging out with after hours, and as it happened, many of our best ideas arose while we were having drinks at a local bar.
By 2008 we had hit $1 billion in gross merchandise sales. But the economic slowdown made for a crazy year. Even though we were still growing, we realized that our expenses were too high for the revenue we were bringing in. In 2009 we agreed to sell ownership of Zappos to Amazon.
Amazon has always described its goal as being the most customer-centric company in the world, but its approach is more high-tech than ours. Ours is more high-touch—we try to make a personal connection. Since the sale, we’ve learned from Amazon’s technology: We’ve started to track some metrics Amazon tracks, and we’re learning how it thinks about warehouse operations. We’ve also expanded far beyond shoes.
Today we have more than 1,800 employees. We offer starting pay for call center reps of around $11 an hour—but because Zappos is known as a great place to work, we have no shortage of applicants. Last year 25,000 people applied for jobs with us, and we hired only 250. Someone told me that statistically it’s harder to get a job at Zappos than it is to get admitted to Harvard, which says a lot about the strength of the culture we’ve created here.
Looking back, I attribute most of our growth over the past few years to the fact that we invested time, money, and resources in three key areas: customer service, company culture, and employee training and development. The move to Las Vegas helped us make progress in each of the three.
If you’d like to hear what our telephone reps sound like, just pick up the phone and give us a call.
This is an excerpt from How I Did It: Zappo’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers from the July 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Culture That Drives Performance
An HBR Insight Center
The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture
There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround
The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture
Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture
January 2, 2014
White People Do Good Things for One Another, and That’s Bad for Hiring
At some point in your career, you were probably turned down for a job at a new organization in favor of an “internal” candidate. Most of us have had that experience. It’s even more likely (though you probably weren’t aware of it) that you’ve been rejected at times in favor of outside applicants who were known quantities to the hiring managers—candidates who were referred by other employees or recommended by friends of friends. That’s how the world works.
In fact, if you look back on your own checkered past, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll recall that a lot of the jobs you did get came through personal connections of some kind—associates, mentors, friends, family. You’re savvy about organizations, and savvy job-seekers rarely go in cold.
But what if you’re not a former associate of anyone in any employer that might need your skills? What if you’re not a mentee, a friend of a friend, a relative? What if you don’t come recommended by a trusted source—if you don’t have an “in” of any kind and are not a known quantity?
Then you’re out of luck, and that’s exactly why today’s corporate executives are missing the point about diversity: Whites don’t have to do bad things to minority groups in order to maintain a racial advantage in employment and wealth. They only have to do good things for one another. And they do good things for one another all the time.
In a study I conducted among white workers, I found that 70% of the participants’ jobs, past and present, had been landed with the help of friends or relatives who were in a position to provide inside information, exert influence on the candidates’ behalf, or directly offer job or promotion opportunities.
Yet virtually all of these employees, as well as white managers I’ve interviewed, maintain that they oppose racism and are in favor of equal opportunity.
In my work on diversity, I often meet CEOs who are genuinely concerned about disparities and are highly motivated to increase their organizations’ diversity. Yet they frame the issue in terms of discrimination and “bias against.” They don’t see the powerful locked-arms effect of the “bias for” that’s prevalent in hiring and promotion decisions. I once spoke to an executive whose company was being celebrated for its commitment to diversity, but over dinner I was told proudly by one of the key HR managers that the company relies on referrals from existing employees for many of their middle-management hires.
Which brings me to take an unpopular stand: Up with bureaucracy.
I don’t mean the kind of bureaucracy that drives people crazy. I mean the kind that provides minority candidates with protections from biases that are embedded in corporate decision-making. It’s perfectly logical for managers to want to interview and hire known quantities—résumés can be opaque and mendacious, and there’s no Angie’s List equivalent for finding highly recommended employees (at least not yet). But when it comes to hiring and promotion, I’m in favor of a systems approach that reduces reliance on the kinds of judgments that lead to bad decisions—an approach that is measured not on process but on outcomes with regard to the competency, race, ethnicity, and gender of hired or promoted employees.
I’ll be the first to acknowledge that a systems approach can feel inadequate; the “numbers” never tell a complete story. Neither companies nor universities rely solely on test scores, because they know that doing so wouldn’t lead to the best outcomes. So the trick is creating a systems approach that evaluates candidates in a holistic way. That means an array of metrics, from competency tests to psychological profiles regarding fit for the job. Companies need to establish specific criteria on what constitutes competence in any given job, and they need to collect data on those specific criteria rather than rely on assumptions or impressions. To be effective, metrics need to be specified in advance, and they need to be up to date and not based solely on managerial perceptions.
Part of the solution is a new mind-set on executives’ part. There’s abundant evidence that just trying harder or wanting to do better doesn’t make a difference. What does matter is being conscious of the decisions we are making—we need to move these crucial decisions from the unconscious to the conscious realm. If we think about being accountable for the decisions we make, and if we stop believing that we can make truly unbiased or objective decisions, then we are less likely to make decisions that reflect implicit or unconscious bias in favor of people like ourselves—and more likely to end up with a workforce that is more diverse and better fits the needs of our organizations and their global clients.
Talent and the New World of Hiring
An HBR Insight Center
Make Sure Your Dream Company Can Find You
Never Say Goodbye to a Great Employee
What Boards Can Do About Brain Drain
How an Auction Can Identify Your Best Talent
Don’t Sit on Customer Feedback
When you are driving a car, you get a steady stream of feedback from the road, from other drivers, from the dashboard gauges, and from the car itself. You know how to interpret the feedback and respond to it in real time, such as slowing down when the road feels bumpy. You may also begin observing patterns — the car begins to shimmy when you hit 35, say — and the patterns may lead you to other actions, such as making an appointment for repairs.
Meanwhile, dealers and automakers are gathering feedback of their own from you and millions of others and are making plans for fixes, improvements in the next model, even recalls. Note the close connection here between feedback and action. Feedback that doesn’t lead to action is meaningless. They are inseparable aspects of the same system.
Customer-centric companies learn to connect customer feedback to action in just this way. Consider the experience of a manufacturer of premium kitchen and bathroom fixtures. At one point, the company’s customer surveys were indicating that its distributors, most of whom sold competitors’ products as well, needed more help communicating the competitive advantages of its products, such as innovative design and ease of installation.
Hearing the feedback, the company’s managers and frontline employees took action. Sales reps began sponsoring workshops in distributors’ showrooms to teach contractors how easy the products were to install. The reps created compelling new floor and window displays to showcase the products’ decorative appeal. Analysis of the feedback revealed other patterns, such as the fact that sales reps seemed to be visiting some distributors too frequently and others not frequently enough. The company cut back on the unproductive sales calls, freeing up an estimated 25% of selling capacity.
All such actions are like natural experiments. A company can act, observe the results, and modify the action as necessary. Often, of course, addressing feedback from customers requires an investment of resources — redesigning a product, say, or reengineering a process. A company then needs to compare the required cost with the likely benefit.
Take Carolina Biological Supply, a midsize family-owned company that Fred Reichheld and I featured in our book The Ultimate Question 2.0. The company sells math and science education products, mostly to high school teachers and college professors who need the products to fit into precise points in their curricula. At one point, customer feedback indicated that product availability was a major concern. The fill rate per line item stood at only 92% — and with an average of 2.5 lines per order, CEO Jim Parrish explained, “that means 20% of the time we didn’t have everything the customer wanted.” To mitigate the problem, the company increased its investment in inventory, raising the fill rate to 98% on top items and 95% on the rest. Analysis had shown that this was the appropriate balance point between costs and benefits.
Of course, the precise connection between feedback and action will differ, depending on what a particular group of employees or executives is responsible for, how that group receives feedback, and what the cost of proposed actions may be. But the framework is always the same. Whatever their level, people in a company that gets regular customer feedback instantly understand the goal when someone proposes an action designed to improve the customer experience. If the economics justify the move, support for it tends to be widespread.
In a car, the feedback you get and the actions you take help you arrive at your destination safely. Why should it be any different in a company?
A Bastion of Union Power: Backstage Broadway
Despite U.S. labor unions’ loss of membership and clout, the 125-year-old Local 1 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the New York City stagehands’ union, remains powerful enough to protect its members’ hourly rates and extend its reach into new theaters, says The New York Times. At a time when even the biggest nonprofit performing arts institutions must scrounge for dollars, stagehands earn high wages because of their unique skills in bringing theatrical effects to life. In 2011, the four top stagehands at the Metropolitan Opera earned more than $500,000 each in total compensation.
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