Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1486

Entrepreneurs’ Brains are Wired Differently

Windows of entrepreneurial opportunity can open unexpectedly and briefly, typically under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Founder entrepreneurs must therefore be alert, tolerant of ambiguity and able to respond quickly when opportunity knocks. But does this mean that founders´ brains work differently, compared to other people, when detecting and choosing opportunities? Our research suggests that they do.

To learn more about the way founders think, we conducted a laboratory experiment that measured brain activity during a simple decision-making task. A group of 30 founder entrepreneurs, as well as 30 non-entrepreneurs, participated in a classic experiment called the Stroop Test. In this experiment, people are shown a series of images on which the names of colors are spelled in discordant colors. For example, the word red may be written in a blue color. Participants must then distinguish between the word itself and the color used to print it.

We measured brain activity over multiple cycles of the task, each cycle lasting one second. The brain activity of founder entrepreneurs was significantly different, compared to the non-entrepreneurs. In the initial stage of brain activation, when people first recognize the problem, founders were quicker to respond and were less inhibited. They quickly absorbed and embraced the problem, despite its ambiguity, In contrast, the non-entrepreneurs were slower during this initial phase. They tried to resolve more of the ambiguity before continuing.

In the later stages of problem processing, also within a split second, the founder entrepreneurs were different again. They dedicated more brain resources—in terms of information processing and speed—to resolve residual ambiguities. In other words, the entrepreneurs thought more intensely about the problem after they had already embraced it. In contrast, the non-entrepreneurs used less brain resources during this latter phase, presumably because they had resolved more ambiguity during the initial stage of the process.

These results are surprising and novel from the perspective of neuroscience. But does split-second decision-making in a lab say anything about how entrepreneurs really think? Evidence suggests it does. Quick responses matter. Imagine a potential founder who is scanning for opportunities — maybe there are early signs of new customer needs in the mobile e-commerce market. If she or he is not ready to embrace and explore this ambiguous problem, the opportunity will go undetected. Or consider a founder who is confronted with an urgent problem that must be tackled immediately. There is no time to resolve ambiguity and uncertainty. In fact, it may not be possible to do so. Instead, the founder must embrace the problem and move forward. In practice, we observe this kind of behavior often. Entrepreneurs frequently dive into a challenge without fully analyzing it. Deeper understanding evolves over time as they experiment and discover more about the market and customer, as in the Lean Startup approach to venture creation: embrace the problem, discover the customer, experiment and prototype, be ready to pivot and if necessary fail fast. We believe we are seeing this process sped up. And for the first time, we show that the brain is fundamentally involved.

Another study confirmed our thinking. This time we interviewed founder entrepreneurs about their decision-making processes. Founders were clearly more inclined to quickly grasp an opportunity, using a set of simple tests: did the opportunity fit their core strategy; did they already know the market; could they trust the other parties involved; did they have a good gut feeling; and finally, was the worst case scenario not too bad. A negative answer to any question could be a reason to stop. In this fashion, the entrepreneurs used simple criteria to rapidly embrace or reject opportunities. As one entrepreneur explained: “I think often I’ll make a tentative decision on gut, and I could do that almost immediately. I might within two minutes have the information that I’ll think, yes, this is worthwhile. Then I’ll go and hunt around for information that will help me to decide if that’s the right decision.” Just as in the first experiment, this entrepreneur responded quickly to the problem and was happy to delay the resolution of ambiguity and uncertainty until later stages of decision-making.

When combined, our studies add new evidence to support the view that founders think differently in decision-making, especially about problems and opportunities. Similar to the Lean Startup approach, founders embrace ambiguous problems more quickly, using simple rules to move forward, then dedicate more effort to resolve ambiguity and uncertainty during later stages of decision-making. In these respects, it appears that founders´ brains are wired differently. We expect this difference will be explained by a combination of factors: a genetic component, early development and learning, and adult experience in problem resolution and decision-making. The brain is not hard wired, it is richly complex. For us, this is good news. Change and variety are part of being human, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that entrepreneurs’ brains are a little bit different.

The Management Myths Hurting Your Business

Freek Vermeulen of London Business School explains how best practices become bad practices. He is the author of Business Exposed: The Naked Truth About What Really Goes on in the World of Business.

Download this podcast

Women Will Tolerate Sexually Explicit Ads — at the Right Price

Kathleen D. Vohs, the Land O’Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and her colleagues set up a study in which men and women viewed advertisements for wristwatches. One of the watches was priced low, at $10; the other ran for $1250. The subjects viewed each watch against both a simple mountain backdrop and a sexually explicit scene.

So do women ever think sex sells? Professor Vohs, defend your research.

When men and women view sex-based ads featuring a cheap watch versus an expensive one, their reactions differ. Men’s reactions don’t vary much, regardless of how much the watch costs. Women, in contrast, strongly dislike the sexual ad when it’s selling a very cheap watch, but they tolerate it when it’s selling a watch that’s expensive.

Is this surprising?

We were working from a theory that woman have a vested interest in seeing sex portrayed in a certain manner, including advertising, because sex is much costlier for them from a biological perspective and socio-cultural perspective. In society, women can get into a whole lot of trouble if they behave sexually in a manner that’s not going to lead them to good long-term consequences. Biologically, they could have to carry a child. Socio-culturally, they could become stigmatized. There are a whole host of things in between.

We posited that, because of this, women are choosy about the way that they want sex to be portrayed, and they want it to align with their basic core values about the when and under what conditions sex should take place.

So we wanted to find a good way to communicate the idea that sex should be rare, valuable, and special, from an advertising perspective. What a better way to do that than by creating an implicit association between sex and a product that’s rare, valuable, and special?

What types of sexual imagery are you testing? What are your parameters for deciding that’s considered sexual or not?

In our study, we pilot tested a scene that’s highly sexual. It’s a woman who’s naked and pressed up against a wall, and then a man, also naked, pressing into her. His body is between her thighs. Her breast is showing, but he’s covering her other breast and her pubic region, and you see his buttocks. And her face shows an unmistakably erotic expression.

We pre-tested it so that men and women both think it’s super sexy, but nobody thinks that he’s dominating her. Nobody thinks she’s dominating him. And nobody really reports feeling like someone is being objectified. It’s just sexy.

But it can be difficult to talk about sex — or at least talk about it openly and honestly. How do you get people to talk about whether using sex in advertising is appealing or persuasive so know that they’re being authentic?

There’s actually some really interesting research on this from my colleagues Jaideep Sengupta and Darren Dahl. They basically figured out that, uniformly, women and men just say, hey, sexually-charged advertising doesn’t work on me; it’s disgusting and degrading. But that’s not actually what we think happens in the real world.

So people are lying to themselves? How can you tell?

When people view ads, they mostly do it in this really quick, heuristic way. They’re walking to the subway, and on the side of the wall is a very sexy scene. Or they’re flipping through a magazine or doing something online. For the most part, people are not devoting a ton of time to pondering how they really feel about ads when they actually see them.

And so we used a methodology that researchers use when they want to know people’s spontaneous gut reactions. We had participants view the advertisements while rehearsing a really lengthy number in their head. This kind of dual-task situation takes up people’s conscious cognitive capacity and allows their spontaneous reactions to emerge.

So we’re having them flip through several ads while rehearsing the lengthy number. And the sexual one is one of them. Then we ask the participants to report the number they were thinking of. So now they have their cognitive faculties back. Then they answer a bunch of questions: In particular, what about this one about the watches? People report their thoughts and feelings about the watch ads and that is how we gauged their reactions.

How do you determine what an “expensive” product is versus a “cheap” one? Where’s the line? 

We didn’t determine the price in any systematic way, but rather wanted to choose prices that were believable but clearly indicated cheap vs. expensive.

What if sex doesn’t have anything to do with your results? What if women just like expensive things more than cheap things?

We thought of that, we tested that by using a mountain scene. If we had just used sexual scenes, and some advertised high-priced products and some low-priced products, and women liked the former, you’d be like, so what? Maybe women just like expensive things.

But what you see is that when a mountainscape advertises an expensive watch versus an inexpensive watch, women’s reactions are essentially the same. They’re not sensitive to the price of the watch. That’s key.

In large part due to the diamond industry’s marketing efforts to make diamonds seem rare , jewelry ads have long used romantic and sexual imagery to pitch their products.

By using sexual imagery for a similar product — a watch — could it just be that women are more familiar with sex in this context? And that they would react differently if you showed, say, an expensive crystal bowl or a Lexus?

We would never say that our results apply to everything. That’s not tenable. But again, you’d be surprised at the range of products that use sex to sell.

For example, there’s this ad for Scrabble that features a naked woman. She’s all oiled up, and the Scrabble game is on her crotch. I’m not kidding. Now, whether that’s effective, who knows?

I would say that companies trying to attract male consumers seem to act as if the product category doesn’t seem to matter. For female consumers, I would bet it does. For example, I think you want the product to be something that women find appealing at some level. An expensive vacuum cleaner might hark back too much to the ‘50s, for instance.

The ads you used were based on heterosexual couple. But what about people who aren’t heterosexual?

The model we used in this study applies to heterosexual sexual relations only, but we’d really like to investigate that further.

So in the end, does your research mean that women are using consumerism — what they will or will not be inclined to buy — as a way to control how sex should be viewed?

That women want to alter how sexual images should be used and understood in the marketplace makes sense. But as long as marketers get the response they are looking for out of some segment (e.g., men), then women’s reactions to sex-based ads won’t have much influence on the way that sex is portrayed.

So what should advertisers change in light of your findings?

Our research suggests that what’s currently happening from a marketing perspective isn’t as effective as it could be. In general, advertisers simply skew their sex-based ads then towards their target market — men — who generally appreciate it.

We’re trying to say to marketers: You are missing out on a huge segment you could be appealing to. Women will tolerate sex-based ads. I want to be clear: we don’t find that women in general like sex-based ads outright. In the best of conditions, women’s reactions to the sex-based ad are equivalent to a neutral (nonsex) ad. But marketers can set up the right associations to up the odds that women won’t reject a sex-based ad outright.

If your product is appealing to women, or if you want to cut through the clutter, marketers should think about ways that to leverage sex-based ads in a way that women would find appealing.

Never Say Goodbye to a Great Employee

So-called “boomerang” employees — those who leave and then return — will become an increasingly valuable source of talent over the years ahead. In what’s perhaps the most frequently discussed example, some women chose to off ramp for several years sometime in their career, and many are eager for opportunities to return. Older workers may present boomerang possibilities as well.  Sixty percent of workers age 60-plus say they will look for a new job after they retire – possibly back in your organization.

But it would be a mistake to only focus on these two groups; there are also those who left initially due to personal issues, other job opportunities, or even a round of layoffs.

Former employees, of course, offer many advantages: they are familiar with your operations and culture, know many of your current employees and clients, and may require little or no training to start making contributions.  Often they are cheaper to hire, particularly if former managers have maintained contact while the employee is away.

So how do you make it so these boomerang employees actually want to return to your company?

The biggest challenge to leveraging boomerang talent for most organizations is the nature of the “out” process itself.  For most of us, departures, whether initiated by the employee or the company, are negative events.  They are weighed down with feelings of guilt and failure, often on both sides. This negativity occurs because conventional “outs” are shaped by the expectations we convey about the relationship from the beginning — that we want unconditional loyalty and that it will be rewarded (perhaps, “wink, wink”) with a steady career and comfortable retirement.  When these expectations are not borne out, due to either parties’ initiative, bad feelings are the inevitable result.

Setting the stage for positive “outs” and creating the possibility of happy returns requires redefining the relationship from the very beginning — setting different expectations during the hiring process.  Today more than 25 percent of the working population goes through career transitions every year and half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days, according to research conducted by Talya N. Bauer of SHRM Foundation; clearly the “employee for life” model has run its course.

Rather than implying that you expect indefinite tenure and unconditional loyalty, ask for the employee’s full discretionary effort for the time they will be here.  And rather than signaling that you will provide opportunities for life (something few hires actually trust anyway), make it clear that you are offering interesting and challenging work, coupled with fair arrangements, while it is available.

Reducing the implied promise of long-term protection and care sets the expectation that departures will naturally occur when that interesting and challenging work comes to an end. It conveys the expectation that departures can be mutually positive and facilitates multiple employment stints (off-ramps on-ramps, boomerangs, and retiree returns) as the company’s work load warrants.  This philosophy focuses on matching relevant skills and capabilities in the moment and recognizes, where appropriate, the legitimacy of concurrent employment arrangements.

Creating an environment that leverages the power of positive “outs” is greatly enhanced by forward thinking work arrangements that are designed to let people connect and reconnect with your organization in a variety of ways.  For example:

Flexible time: Flexible shifts, compressed workweeks, and individualized work schedules.
Reduced time: Part-time options, job sharing, self-scheduling, leave-of-absence programs, and cyclic or project-based work.
Flexible place: Mobile work and telecommuting.
Tasks, not time: Requirements to put in only as much time as it actually takes to get the work done, removing restrictions around a prescribed time or place.
Decelerating roles: Career path options that go ‘down’ (to lower levels of responsibility).

In addition to setting the right tone at the beginning, structure the exit process to facilitate re-entry and build a flexible network of talent possibilities. Invite them to join your network, build your own flexible talent pool, and create a residual knowledge bank. Regardless of whether their departure is voluntary or involuntary, it’s never wise to say goodbye to a good employee.

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




How an Auction Can Identify Your Best Talent
The American Way of Hiring Is Making Long-Term Unemployment Worse
We Can Now Automate Hiring. Is that Good?
Learn How to Spot Portable Talent

Seats Get Wider in Theaters and Stadiums, but Smaller on Planes

A number of businesses are accommodating consumers’ increasing size: The average seat width in performing-arts theaters has increased by 1 inch since 1990, and seats in the new Yankee Stadium in New York are 1 to 2 inches wider than in the old stadium, which was torn down in 2010. But airlines are moving in the opposite direction: For example, coach seats in American Airlines’ new Boeing 777-300s are about 1 inch narrower than those in its existing 777-200s, says the Wall Street Journal.

The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture

A company’s culture can have a powerful impact on its performance. Culture is the glue that binds an organization together and it’s the hardest thing for competitors to copy. As a result, it can be a lasting source of competitive advantage. Take these examples: 

Kent Thiry builds a values-focused culture at DaVita and transforms the company from a laggard to the world’s leading provider of kidney dialysis services


Alan Mulally creates a “working–together” spirit at Ford Motor Company that focuses and re-energizes the automaker, reversing a decades-long slide in market share


Herb Kelleher fosters a culture of employee empowerment and cost containment at Southwest, enabling the airline to become one of the world’s most admired and profitable carriers


Steve Jobs builds a challenging culture at Apple — one where ”reality is suspended” and ”anything is possible”’ — and the company becomes the most valuable on the planet 

But culture doesn’t always produce great results. In fact, when my colleagues at Bain & Company surveyed more than 400 senior executives from large, global companies last year, they found that fewer than one in four felt that culture was very effective in supporting business performance at their company. The majority felt that their organization’s culture was largely disconnected from what it took to win.

Why this disconnect? In our experience, too many companies think of culture as a way to make people feel good about where they work and not as a way to help employees — hence the organization — perform better. High-performing companies think about culture differently. They know that winning cultures aren’t just about affiliation; they are also unashamedly about results.

Our research suggests that winning cultures are comprised of two interrelated and reinforcing elements. First, every high-performing company has a unique identity — distinctive characteristics that set it apart from other organizations. These characteristics give employees a sense of meaning just from being part of the company. They also create passion for what the company does.

Southwest Airlines is the classic example. Under Herb Kelleher’s leadership, the company became known for its sense of humor, irreverence, and focus on the employee. This unique identity not only made flying Southwest fun for passengers, it made its labor force more productive. Flight attendants, not cleaning crews, cleaned aircraft between flights, reducing time at the gate and improving on-time performance. Maintenance workers routinely devised better ways to maintain Southwest’s fleet of 737 aircrafts, lowering costs and improving up-time. The company’s unique identity reinforced many of the elements that were critical to Southwest’s strategy, such as keeping costs low. As a result, Southwest is the world’s largest low-cost carrier and is consistently among the most profitable airlines in the world.

Culture is more than just a unique identity, however. The best performing companies typically display a set of performance attributes that align with the company’s strategy and reinforce the right employee behaviors.  Our research revealed seven of these:

Honest. There is high integrity in all interactions, with employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders;
Performance-focused. Rewards, development, and other talent-management practices are in sync with the underlying drivers of performance;
Accountable and owner-like. Roles, responsibilities, and authority all reinforce ownership over work and results;
Collaborative. There’s a recognition that the best ideas come from the exchange and sharing of ideas between individuals and teams;
Agile and adaptive. The organization is able to turn on a dime when necessary and adapt to changes in the external environment;
Innovative. Employees push the envelope in terms of new ways of thinking; and
Oriented toward winning. There is strong ambition focused on objective measures of success, either versus the competition or against some absolute standard of excellence.

Few organizations exhibit all seven of these attributes. But high-performing organizations typically spike on the three or four that are most critical to their success.

Take Ford Motor Company. When Alan Mulally became CEO at Ford in 2006, the company operated in regional silos. As a result, the Ford Focus in Europe was different from the Ford Focus in the Americas. The company had too many brands, too many platforms, too many disparate parts, too many suppliers, and so on. To turn the automaker around, Mulally focused on building One Ford — a leadership model based on collaboration, innovation, and a desire to win (again). With time, leaders at the automaker started working together to simplify and streamline the company globally. They rationalized brands, consolidated automotive platforms, made options and parts more common and designs more innovative. In just three years, Ford went from losing share and money to gaining share and making money.

Culture plays a vital role in performance. Winning cultures treat performance as an explicit output and foster an environment that is conducive to generating the best possible results — not just for employees, but for customers, suppliers, and, yes, even shareholders.

Culture That Drives Performance

An HBR Insight Center




There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround
The Three Pillars of a Teaming Culture
Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture
If You’re Going to Change Your Culture, Do It Quickly

Make Sure Your Dream Company Can Find You

It used to be that if you wanted to work for a certain company, you went in for an informational interview or waited for a job opening and submitted your resume. These days, you may be better off liking the company on Facebook or joining their Google+ page. That’s because smart companies are no longer waiting for the right candidates to apply. They’re actively seeking them out on social media.

Managers acquiring talent have been using social media to research job applicants for several years now, but they’ve begun to source and engage potential job candidates from social networks as well. Given that over 1 billion people are connected to a social networking site, this is a clever move.

Here are three social media tools forward-looking companies are using to find you.

People Analytics  

New businesses are cropping up to reinvent the recruiting process, blending data from social media sites to create profiles of coders, programmers and software engineers so that companies hoping to hire can search for candidates that have the skills they desire. Companies such as Gild, TalentBin, and Entelo use people analytics to examine a candidate’s publicly available work to spot diamonds in the rough.

Take for example RackSpace, an open-source operating system for the cloud. The company, hoping to find potential recruits, partnered with Gild to scan open source networks such as Github and Twisted Matrix to identify candidates who meet certain criteria.  Gild created “social profiles” for candidates so that hiring managers at RackSpace could see the frequency with which other programmers adopt an individual’s code and the buzz the coders work generates in online forums.

This approach to recruitment is creating a new technical world order where job applicants are found and evaluated by their merits and contributions, rather than by how well they sell themselves in an interview. Using this approach, Rackspace has successfully identified a number of highly qualified engineers, many of whom were largely invisible on popular social media sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter.

While the focus on using people analytics is currently on hard-to-find technical talent such as programmers, coders, and software engineers, with a few tweaks this type of transparency in the recruiting process can be applied to finding candidates whose work is also publicly viewable such as graphic designers, customer call center operators, and perhaps even salespeople.

Mobile Recruiting Apps

Since early 2012, Sodexo, the 20th largest employer in the world, has turned its recruiting focus from job boards to mobile applications. The company wanted to be on the platforms that Millennials use every day so that younger candidates could easily find them. Given that a recent survey conducted by Glassdoor.com found that 43% of job candidates research their prospective employer and read the job description 15 minutes prior to the interview on their mobile devices, Sodexo also wanted to make it easy for applicants to quickly find the information they need.

Sodexo developed both a mobile-optimized career site and an app to pull together information about the company’s recruiting efforts into one easy-for-Millennials-to-access place. Job candidates can link from the mobile app to a landing page to search and apply for jobs, join a talent community, get job alerts, and get an insider’s view of what it’s like to work for Sodexo.

According to Arie Ball, the company’s vice president of talent acquisition, the app had 15,000 downloads in the first year and 17% of job traffic from potential new hires now comes from the mobile app versus just 2% in early 2012. Sodexo has identified over 2,000 new job candidates with 141 actual new hires, all while saving the company $300,000 in job board postings.

MOOCs  

Companies have been watching the rapid growth of MOOCs (massive open online courses) — two of the leading MOOC providers, Coursera and EdX, have tallied more than 7 million unique users since they launched in April 2012 and May 2012 respectively — and are now finding ways to offer their own free courses. Aquent, a global staffing firm that finds jobs for marketing, creative, and digital professionals is creating a MOOC to teach job candidates HTML5. So far, about 10,000 people have participated in the HTML5 MOOC and 300 of them then enlisted Aquent to help in their job search. Companies wanting to capitalize on the gamification movement are recruiting graduates of MakeGamesWith.us, an online MOOC that teaches aspiring game developers how to build an iPhone game. It will be only a matter of time before more companies get in on this and start launching MOOCs to recruit new hires and train them in skills needed for success at their company.

As companies move to actively seeking out prospective new hires, giving these targeted talent communities special access to webinars, announcements of new job openings, and email invitations to engage with the company, job seekers need to reciprocate.

We’ve all been warned about how our online behavior can negatively affect  job prospects, but now you also need to think about how to build your personal brand, publicize your skills, and connect with the companies you might want to work for.

The next time you’re on your favorite social networking site, seek out employers you hope to work for one day. Build an online relationship with them now so they can find you later. Visit the company blog, like its Facebook page, join its Google+ page, watch its videos on YouTube, and follow the firm on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Vine.

Make 2014 the year you become visible to your dream employer. After all, you may be just the person they’re looking for.

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




How an Auction Can Identify Your Best Talent
The American Way of Hiring Is Making Long-Term Unemployment Worse
We Can Now Automate Hiring. Is that Good?
Learn How to Spot Portable Talent

Seasonal Selling Strategies that Last All Year

‘Tis the season for seasonal SKUs! Consumers love and look forward to the plethora of pumpkin and eggnog everywhere. Retailers and manufacturers love the spike in sales and the extra buzz at the shelf. But usually when the holiday cheers and decorations disappear, so do the extra sales — and retailers and manufacturers are back at square one. But some are taking a different tack on seasonal strategies by leveraging holiday momentum to drive growth in ways that are both relevant for the holidays but also have year-round potential.

The beauty of the holidays is that for a little while, nearly every consumer becomes a highly engaged, heavy shopper – even if they usually avoid shopping. This gives retailers an opportunity to introduce more consumers to new products. And all of us usually give ourselves permission to indulge a bit more than usual, which increases our willingness to try something new.

There are at least three strategies to extend the benefits of the holiday season, which is key given this holiday season is particularly short.

First is helping consumers explore new varieties. Music is a great example. Our kids were eager to set up the Christmas tree and my wife wanted a playlist of Christmas music in the background. As I bought a bunch of holiday music, I found I was exposed to many new artists from all kinds of genres who had released their own version of holiday music. I ended up buying a lot more music beyond holiday tunes. I also ended up buying a video game that allows our family to use the xBox as a karaoke machine. Food is another example. Farmland Foods, an up and coming mega-brand in pork, is using holiday advertising to showcase its full line of fresh pork and bacon products, as consumers run out to buy holiday hams.

Second, the holidays are also a great opportunity to sell subscriptions. Often these have a barrier to trial—be it an upfront investment or the worry of starting a subscription and forgetting to cancel it. Gifting is a great way to overcome this hurdle. I gifted a year of Netflix to my brother in law over a decade ago for Christmas and he’s been a loyal customer ever since. The same logic holds for “blades and razors”-type bundles, which is why you see so many shaving ads during the holiday season; buy him the new razor now, and he’ll be purchasing the blades for years to come.

Finally, it’s a great window for brands to emotionally connect with consumers. Budweiser is famous for their Clydesdale commercials at the holidays, which put a healthy deposit into the emotional bank with consumers that has helped the brand maintain its pricing power. Many brands also do quite a bit of charity work (e.g., Avon and breast cancer), yet aren’t usually able to talk much about it for fear of coming across inappropriately. The holidays provide a pass to talk about the big investments brands make in issues like sustainability, education or poverty. Panera’s CEO recently did a wonderful public experiment where he did relied on a food stamp budget challenge for 7 days—trying to live on a food allowance of just $4.50 a day. His blog was amazing, as he talked about how his worldview completely changed as he realized he could not afford to eat in his own restaurants. He did this in September, but it would have probably gotten more attention for the cause if he had done it during the holidays when people are already thinking about charitable donations and helping others.

So don’t only look at holiday shopping as a time to sell candy canes and tinsel. Think about how you can create a deeper engagement with new shoppers, sell products that will bring in revenue all-year long, and draw attention to the issues you care about to forge a connection with consumers who share your values. Turn the seasonal shopping surge into growth that lasts all year long.

Use Your Data to Get a Holistic View of the Customer

A few years ago, at LiveNation Entertainment we were accumulating a lot of data from consumers but weren’t doing much with it—and we weren’t sure what could be done with it (a pretty common situation for companies these days).

After thinking about the data strategically, we figured out ways to put it to good use. Today, consumer information helps us benefit our clients and serves as an important differentiator in a competitive market.

The key to getting to this point was adding a new dimension to our concept of the company: We began treating data as an integral part of our live entertainment business, as important as the events we produce and promote.

The new approach to data began with a merger between LiveNation and Ticketmaster. We are now both a B2C and a B2B company: We own concert venues and are the leading promoter of live events in the world. Ticketmaster has B2B relationships with sports teams and producers of a variety of events across sports, concerts, family acts, and arts and theater. But like Live Nation, Ticketmaster has a B2C component as well, in that we sell tickets to consumers.

We saw that ideally, the data that had been collected from consumers could help us provide a holistic view of the music or sports fan for our business clients. We have transactional data about what consumers are buying, and we can enrich that with demographics and psychographics. We can also add web data—What are people looking at online?—and information from e-mail campaigns. This a tremendous amount of data.

We could provide a professional sports team, for example, with a rich view of its fan base, showing which fans buy tickets months ahead, which buy at the last minute, which pay for premium seats, and which are looking for discounts. That kind of information could help teams shape their communication to fans.

But there was a lot of work to be done. Because the information lived in disparate systems, an IT investment would be required in order to make sense of it and standardize it. Those six people with similar names in the combined databases—were they the same person? That all had to be sorted out. We’d have to make sure that everything was spelled and annotated the same way.

But this was not to be just another IT initiative: Analytics was given a clear charter to go above and beyond business as usual. We brought in experts who really understood the plumbing of the data. Then we hired statisticians and modelers to think about what was in the data and how it could be analyzed. And of course we needed businesspeople providing guidance on the business problems that the analytics group is trying to solve.

Now we’re able to deploy data in an ever-increasing number of ways. For example, a football team might ask us for advice on which artist it should bring in for a performance before an event, given the likes and dislikes of its season-ticket holders. We can do that.

We can also help clients find the best prospects for packages of season tickets or subscriptions to shows, and we can assist them in coming up with marketing messages that will resonate with these prospects.

We’ve found that it’s very helpful to have our statisticians and modelers speak directly with clients. That allows the clients to better understand the data, and it gives the statisticians a clear view of the clients’ needs.

The world of data is changing rapidly. In the next year, our big push is going to be figuring out what to do with the rising level of mobile activity. What’s the best way to collect data, and how can we best use it?

And then there’s social media—potentially a valuable means of communicating with consumers. But it’s a challenge to link Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts with basic customer-relationship-management data such as email addresses. Social is the pot of gold that no one has yet found.

One final word: It’s critical to treat consumers and their data with respect. If you’re going to use their data, you have to do it right. If consumers see that their data is going to third parties that aren’t relevant to them, you’ll lose their trust, and they’ll be quick to hit the “unsubscribe” button. Consumers’ information should be deployed to provide offerings that are relevant to them; if you do that, they’ll show their appreciation by continuing to allow you to use their data.

The Peer Economy Will Transform Work (or at Least How We Think of It)

You can’t avoid peer-to-peer marketplaces. For transportation and housing, look no further than Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. Skillshare and TaskRabbit are tackling education and task completion. Etsy and Shapeways have created handmade and fabrication marketplaces. They all facilitate integration into the economy without the need to secure employment from a large company.

Instead, the growing peer economy enables people to monetize skills and assets they already have. Vendors and providers on these platforms choose when to work, what to do and where to do it, sidestepping traditional constraints of geography and scheduling. Investors, advocacy groups and companies tout its apparent advantages, including a greater sense of solidarity through peer-to-peer commerce and reduction in carbon footprint through access to products and services instead of ownership.

Dandy! Especially in light of our anemic economic recovery. So why is the peer economy causing such a stir? Critics ask whether micropreneurs get back enough economic security in exchange for their labor. These suppliers are hamsters in a wheel, they assert; if pay comes gig by gig, how can peer economy suppliers ever do more than just keep up?

Embedded in this concern are assumptions as to what constitutes a job: that it be full-time, offer benefits, and provide a livable income. These parameters make up a framework, one that is baked into our society. But this framework—which dominated 20th century work—has been on the decline since the late 1970s. IRS clarifications changed how companies approached benefits such as paid leave and retirement plans, transferring more risk to employees. And job losses have come in two forms: globalization that led to offshoring and technological displacement. Unemployment may have crested in 2008, but its roots are in the 1980s.

Though it may seem “timeless”, the 20th century framework for work is not the first such formulation and it will not be the last. There were other mainstream understandings before it—factory work, piece-meal work, craftsmanship and apprenticeship—and undergirding them were a mix of cultural and political factors. Regulations (or lack thereof) shaped industry structures, and existential quandaries about work played out in arts and media (think Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where the Little Tramp grapples with the dehumanization of mass production technology). And as the normative gender throughout history, these mainstream understandings of what work was followed men’s lives and patterns.

Today, safety nets are thin for everybody. People have little faith that corporate America cares about their needs or that government can address them before it is too late. Against this backdrop, the peer economy is well positioned to rival our popular understanding of work. The peer economy won’t take over where the framework of full-time employment once sat, but it does change our understanding of what “full work” could mean.

In fact, the peer economy is less new than it often appears. People have always made their own clothes, grown and preserved their own food, shared their houses and lent out their tools. At different points in different places, this was (and is) called “survival.” Trading is common, and helping out kin is natural. Peer economy platforms didn’t unearth a new type of commerce. These economic platforms further enable socio-economic activities that were always moving toward a more visible and centralized space—activities that have trickled up and are now given the market a face.

The real question is what it means and takes to achieve “full work,” the sort of work that enables one to exercise a greater range of independence. Just as many of the activities that make up the peer economy are not new, neither is this question.

Recently, nannies, cleaners, elder companions, members of a vulnerable work population known as domestic workers, testified at the Massachusetts state house to ask for a domestic workers’ bill of rights. As excluded laborers, domestic workers are the analog to peer economy workers in vulnerability: They are fragmented, with shifting workplaces and employers. They are not guaranteed minimum safety conditions in the workplace (38% of domestic workers suffered from work-related wrist, shoulder, elbow or hip pain in the past 12 months.). They aren’t protected from discrimination and cannot bargain collectively. Sound familiar?

American domestic work has a 200-year history and has always drawn its forces from the margins of society: women, minorities, immigrants, and now undocumented workers. This workforce has been denied every improvement to labor rights legislation, beginning with the 1934 Fair Labor Standards Act. There has been a string of failed organizing attempts throughout the 20th century, and domestic workers have remained invisible in society. In the 1990s, things began to change. Domestic workers came together under the lead of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. With new organizing tactics, they have collectively won domestic workers bills of rights in New York, California, Hawaii.

Peer economy providers are also vulnerable but with a crucial factor that makes all the difference: They are a visible workforce, able to make these collective interests heard.

The economy of the future will not be the economy as it is now. The challenge before us is to reimagine what full work means, not based simply on how we’re used to conceiving of it, but based on a consideration of what we deem most valuable (independence, security, connectedness, etc.).  Thanks to similar movements—from unions to vulnerable workers to urban and rural cooperatives—the threads for that conversation are already there. Let’s make something of it.