Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1487

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

Nomadic Leaders Need Roots

Gianpiero Petriglieri, professor at INSEAD, on the new global elite.

Download this podcast

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.

Use Language to Shape a Creative Culture

Language is the crystallization of thought. But the words we choose do more than just reflect our thought patterns—they shape them. What we say—and how we say it—can deeply affect a company’s culture. To change attitudes and behaviors, it helps to first change the vernacular. To spark innovation, it helps to influence the dialogue around new ideas.

Several years ago, IDEO hosted a visit from Jim Wiltens, an outdoorsman, author, adventure traveler, and speaker, who also teaches a program of  his  own design for gifted and talented children in Northern California schools. In his programs, Jim emphasizes the power of a positive vocabulary. And he leads by example. You will literally never hear him say, “I can’t.” He uses more constructive versions of that sentiment that emphasize the possible, such as “I could if I…” He actually promises to pay his young students a $100 if they ever catch him saying, “I can’t.”

Think Jim’s approach sounds a bit simplistic for adults? Don’t be too sure. When Cathie Black took over as president of Hearst Magazines, she noticed that negative speech patterns had cre­ated an environment hostile to new ideas. One person close to the company reported that the naysaying had become a cynical mantra for the executives. So Black told her senior team that every time they said things like, “We’ve tried that already” or “That will never work,” she would fine them $10. (Note the difference be­tween business executives and teachers: they levy the fine on others, not themselves.) Of course, $10 was a trivial amount for the Hearst managers, but no one wants to be embarrassed in front of his or her colleagues.

After enforcing her rule just a few times, Black effectively wiped those expressions from the office vocabulary. Did the shift to more positive words have a broader effect beyond changing the tone of meetings? During Black’s ten­ure, Hearst kept its flagship brands like Cosmopolitan healthy through an extremely tough period for the publishing industry and launched new mega-successes like Oprah’s O magazine. Meanwhile, Black rose to become one of the most powerful women in American business.

IDEO’s favorite antidote to negative speech patterns is the phrase “How might we…?”  It was introduced to us by Charles Warren, now salesforce.com’s senior vice president of product design, as an op­timistic way of seeking out new possibilities in the world. In a matter of weeks, it went viral at our firm and it’s stuck ever since. In three disarmingly simple words, it captures much of our perspective on creative groups. The “how” suggests that improvement is always possible. The only question remain­ing is how we will find success. The word “might” temporarily lowers the bar a little. It allows us to consider wild or improbable ideas instead of self-editing from the very beginning, giving us more chance of a breakthrough. And the “we” establishes own­ership of the challenge, making it clear that not only will it be a group effort, but it will be our group. Anyone who has worked with IDEO in the past decade or participated in OpenIDEO’s social innovation challenges has undoubtedly heard the phrase.

We’re also careful about how we critique ideas. As we explained in this HBR article, our feedback typically starts with “I like…” and moves on to “I wish…”. We refrain from passing judgment with a simple thumbs up or thumbs down. When you open with the positives, then use the first person for suggestions, it signals to everyone that you’re offering your opinion in an effort to help, which makes them more receptive to your ideas.

As adults, we sometimes forget the simple power of words. Try fine-tuning your group’s vocabulary, and see the positive effect it has on your culture.

This post is adapted from our book Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us (Crown Business, 2013). 

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

The Dangerous Myth of Reinvention

Gary Maxworthy spent three decades in business until a personal tragedy prompted him to reexamine his priorities. He left the corporate world behind, set off to find his true calling, and in the process discovered both a new identity and the path to accomplishing his most important work fighting hunger.

In this telling, Maxworthy is an archetypal example of the reinvention mythology that seems omnipresent today, especially when it comes to those in the second half of life. Self-help columns are packed with reinvention tips. Financial services ads depict beaming boomers opening B&Bs and vineyards. More magazine, that bastion of midlife uplift for women over 40, even sponsored a series of reinvention conventions.

Retirement itself, we’re advised, is being reinvented.

There’s no denying the heroic appeal of the reinvention narrative, especially to 50- and 60-somethings confronting uncharted territory and the imperative to forge ahead with a new chapter. And this notion surely beats the counter-narrative that says you’re washed up at some arbitrary age, your best work behind you with two choices: hanging on or the abyss.

Yet for all its can-do spirit, I’ve come to believe the reinvention fantasy — the whole romance with radical transformation unmoored from the past — is both unrealistic and misleading. I’ll even go further: I think it is pernicious, the enemy of actual midlife renewal.

For the vast majority of us, reinvention is not practical — or even desirable. On a very basic level, it’s too daunting. How many people have, Houdini-like, escaped the past, started from scratch, and forged a whole new identity and life? Sure, it happens — but not often, at least outside of Hollywood.

More troublesome is the underlying assumption that the past — in other words, our accumulated life experience — is baggage to be disregarded and discarded. Isn’t there something to be said for racking up decades of know-how and lessons, from failures as well as triumphs? Shouldn’t we aspire to build on that wisdom and understanding?

After years studying social innovators in the second half of life — individuals who have done their greatest work after 50 —I’m convinced the most powerful pattern that emerges from their stories can be described as reintegration, not reinvention. These successful late-blooming entrepreneurs weave together accumulated knowledge with creativity, while balancing continuity with change, in crafting a new idea that’s almost always deeply rooted in earlier chapters and activities.

That’s a clear lesson inherent in the work of the 430 winners and fellows of the Purpose Prize, an annual award for social entrepreneurs and innovators in the second half of life (sponsored by my organization, Encore.org). In 2007, Gary Maxworthy was one of them.

As a young man, Maxworthy heard JFK’s call to service and aspired to join the Peace Corps. But practicality intervened: He had a family to support, and put his early dreams on hold to work.  And work he did, for 32 years in the for-profit food distribution business. Then his wife died of cancer. That tragedy forced him to reevaluate his life, particularly how he would spend the coming decades. Maxworthy then joined VISTA, the domestic sister organization of the Peace Corps, which in its wisdom placed Maxworthy in the San Francisco Food Bank.

The food bank, he quickly realized, was only set up to distribute canned and processed foods. Meanwhile, his years in the food business had taught him that an enormous amount of fresh food is discarded daily by growers throughout the state, simply because it is blemished. Drawing on his knowledge of how to distribute large quantities of food in ways that preserved freshness, he launched Farm to Family — which distributes nutritious food, that otherwise would have been thrown out, to food banks in California and elsewhere.

Maxworthy might have been able to do some good as an idealistic young Peace Corps volunteer, but after a significant body of midlife work, he was able to accomplish something truly remarkable, something at the intersection of experience and innovation — qualities long regarded as oxymoronic in nature. You could say Maxworthy put two and two together, except in this case common sense logic led to something larger: this year Farm to Family distributed over 100 million pounds of food.

I could recount a hundred other tales with essentially the same pattern, and fundamentally the same lessons — tales of reintegration that are not only more pragmatic than the reinvention fantasies but also, to my mind, far more heartening.  They affirm the value of what we’ve learned from life and remind that the seeds of change — even very big change — are often already within us.

Why, then, has the reinvention myth proved so persistent, even as it serves us poorly?  I think the answer lies deep in American character and history. Literary critic R. W. B. Lewis unearthed this cultural vein in his classic 1955 volume, The American Adam.  From the earliest days of the republic, Lewis wrote, Americans were enthralled with the ideal that they could fashion a future liberated from the past. One magazine of the 19th century movement known as Young America wrote, for example, in 1839: “Our national birth was the beginning of a new history … which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.”

D.H. Lawrence observed in 1923 that glorifying the new and jettisoning the old amounted to “the true myth of America.”  In this narrative, Lawrence writes, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin.  And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.”

That perspective has not only influenced our view of youth, but of later life.  The Golden Years retirement mythology was built around the dream of a second childhood, graying as playing. Retirement communities were age segregated not only to avoid school taxes, but somewhat paradoxically, to evade the idea of old age itself.  If everyone was old, then no one was old.

To me that’s the most damaging part of the reinvention mythology: the preoccupation not only with rebirth, but with youth itself, even as it is slipping away. Today 70 is upheld as the new 50, 60 the new 40 or even 30, and 50 practically adolescence.

So as we head into the resolution season, let’s think less about reinvention and more about forging ahead in ways that draw on our accumulated knowledge — what former Alvin Ailey star Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish describes as “all the things that life has put into you.”

And as the nation enters the year in which the youngest of the boomers will turn 50, and we take another sizable step into the graying century, let’s think about a new myth of America, one that breaks free from the notion of eternal youth, and that learns to appreciate the true value of experience.

Why Not Take a Year Off to Work in Government?

One year ago, Rahul Mewawalla was a senior executive building out the mobile arm of Nokia. Today, he is using his telecom industry expertise to help San Francisco’s Mayor Ed Lee launch the nation’s first entrepreneurship-in-residence (EIR) program for cities. The program pairs start-ups with government workers to improve government services in areas including transportation, energy, data services, and the environment. The selected start-ups are being challenged to come up with solutions that not only work for San Francisco but can also address similar problems in cities across the nation.

Noelle Galperin was heading up her own strategy-consulting firm when she decided to engage in civic service by joining The Children’s Movement of California, an initiative by the nonprofit Children Now, which advocates for children’s issues. Using her private sector savvy and entrepreneurial mind-set, she was able to more than double the number of California companies that support policies for improving children’s health and education. She ultimately built a strong private-public sector coalition by convincing existing members to tap their networks and bring other organizations on board.

Rahul and Noelle both made the transition into public service through Fuse Corps—a social sector start-up launched in 2011 with the support of companies like McKinsey, GE, and Starbucks to provide a pathway for talented professionals who wish to contribute to the public sector but don’t know where to begin. Fuse Corps does this by matching business professionals and entrepreneurs who have an average of 15 years of experience with an innovative mayor, governor, or community leader in a one-year fellowship to help cities and states implement breakthrough projects.

Whether they’re developing the EIR program or building a large-scale movement to advocate for children, we have found that our fellows make progress by skillfully working across sectors and forging coalitions with local companies, community groups, and nonprofits.  We believe that leaders from the private and public sectors bring different skills and networks to bear, as well as a unique ability to navigate their own cultures.  Put them together and they can design solutions that align the incentives of a wide range of actors to solve our toughest challenges in healthcare, education, economic development, and the environment.

The Fuse Corps executive fellowship comprises one month of intense professional development and eleven months working on a public sector project. Certainly, these projects are worthwhile in themselves, but we think it’s fair to ask: Why would talented professionals want to leave well-established careers and well-paying jobs to work in government? When we asked our fellows, here are the reasons they shared with us:

The opportunity to explore something new and find new paths to leadership. After spending a decade and more building a practice as a lawyer, investment banker or other professional, many of our fellows wanted to solve new challenges and find new ways of being relevant. As one remarked, “After eight years, I had built the foundation and expertise in markets and finance. It was time for me to explore paths to leadership in other contexts.” 


The opportunity to regain a sense of purpose and passion about their work. Many fellows said that they were at a point in their careers where their personal achievements were not enough, and they wanted use their skills to make a difference in their communities. As one put it: “I was curious about finding a professional path that would tap into my energy, excitement, and motivation to make a difference and get things done.”


The opportunity to make a big impact. The public sector may appear to be slow moving and bureaucratic from the outside. But only governments, as a number of fellows pointed out, have the budgets to undertake the really big projects that can transform the lives of millions of people. Just think about the U.S. military’s investment in developing the internet or the National Institutes of Health’s role in developing life-saving drugs. “At over $140 billion, the U.S. government’s IT spending is much bigger than the R&D budget of the world’s most successful company,” Rahul points out. For tech-savvy entrepreneurs, that spells a huge opportunity.


The opportunity to get hands-on leadership training. At a time when resources for professional mentoring are limited in many organizations, our fellows are assigned a leadership coach who works with them throughout the entire year to lend support and help them devise strategies to tackle unfamiliar challenges. “I describe the fellowship as an inverse graduate program,” one fellow says. “As a Fuse Corps fellow you gain hands-on experience for a year while also learning the tools and strategies to apply beyond your placement.” 


The opportunity to make a connection to local communities and local government. Working in the public sector provides a connection with the local community that some fellows said they missed while working for big corporations.  When asked what motivated her to join Fuse Corps, for example, alumna Erika Dimmler said that after producing the news for 17 years at CNN, where she was covering the White House and national politics, she was eager to shift her focus to understanding “how local politics really works, because at the end of the day all politics is local.”


Opportunity to extend or apply their experience to new contexts. Fellows say they are excited by the opportunity to work across the government, business, and nonprofit sectors. As Fuse Corps fellow Christine Guardia pointed out: “In my work as a government consultant before joining Fuse Corps, I was removed from the policy side of government.  My fellowship now allows me to play a role in helping shape government policy.”

Cities and states are becoming the R&D engines of the U.S. economy, conducting large-scale experiments in economic development, environmental sustainability, and education. For talented senior executives and entrepreneurs who are curious about working in the public sector, these are exciting times. A one-year fellowship can be your path to conducting your own experiment in social change. We hope you will join us and spark a movement to innovate our cities and states across America.

Are Electric Utilities in a Death Spiral?

With Americans installing more solar panels, utilities are selling less electricity. But the utilities’ costs haven’t dropped, so prices per kilowatt hour are rising, which makes rooftop panels even more cost-competitive and further encourages the spread of solar power. The result of this and related trends, including increased energy efficiency nationwide, may be a “death spiral” for electric utilities, says the Wall Street Journal. U.S. electricity consumption in 2013 is expected to be 2% below the peak in 2007.