Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1490

Increase the Odds of Your Start-Up’s Success

While traveling between India and the U.S. these past few months, I spent some of the long hours in the air looking back at my professional life and the lessons I learned along the way.  Each phase of my career offered different challenges, successes, and lessons, but my most exhilarating moments were undoubtedly during the start-up phases.

As some of you will remember, I headed a start-up called HCL Comnet in 1993, which incubated the idea of remote infrastructure management services.  It’s a $1.4 billion business today, with 20,000 employees, and boasts some of the best people I’ve ever worked with.

People often ask me why HCL Comnet has been successful while so many new ventures are not, and what leaders can do to increase the probability of success in a start-up.  I don’t have all the answers, but there are five essentials to remember when leading a start-up:

Create a sense of purpose. More than an idea or a vision, a start-up must be driven by purpose.  People like working for start-ups not because of the salaries or designations they offer, but because of the excitement involved in pursuing a purpose — one that challenges the status quo and promises to change the world.  That often creates the feeling that a start-up will succeed irrespective of what it does; it will survive because of the way  it does things.

Put people first, always. Start-ups make for terrific training grounds because they provide the most important management lesson: People make companies, not the other way around, and only start-ups that realize that will be left standing.  That’s why implementation of ideas such as employee first, customer second increase the probability of success.

Jog fleetfootedly. The most important demand on the leaders of a start-up is flexibility — a flexible hierarchy, flexible markets, flexible solutions…  Many start-ups begin with one idea, shift to a second, and then, move to a third or fourth before they succeed.  For instance, PayPal started in encryption and Flickr in gaming.  HCL Comnet began with building communications networks but moved on to IT infrastructure management.  If it had been married to the idea of building networks, it might never have succeeded.

What’s important is the willingness to evolve by learning more about customers.  The evolution takes place in small steps, with the organization pivoting from one plan to another, leaving one foot firmly planted in what it knows.  If you’re climbing Mount Everest, which is pretty much what you’re doing when you launch a start-up, you won’t be able to see the peak from base camp.  You navigate your way one step at a time, focusing on how to climb the mountain facing you, thinking and rethinking your strategy at each cliff along the way.

Develop a sense of timing.  Waiting for the right moment to take a decision, and holding off until then, often makes the difference between success and failure.  A farmer knows when to sow and when to harvest.  When he plants rice, he doesn’t think about the price he may get, but when the crop is ripening, he will negotiate the price.

Be patient; try not to maximize your gains at every step.  The longer you wait, the higher the value you will create.  It can be frustrating but patience is sometimes your best friend; at other times, speed is important.  Knowing the difference is critical for success.

Create governance mechanisms. It isn’t necessary to define roles and responsibilities in a start-up; everyone must be prepared to do anything for success.  People usually get excited by that. It’s like the adrenalin that pumps when you go white river rafting; you don’t know what challenges you’re going to be hit with.  You certainly don’t know who would need to do what in advance.

To navigate through the turbulence, governance mechanisms are necessary.  They don’t create rigidity, but maintain financial discipline, with quarterly and monthly reporting.  It’s akin to laying down the railway tracks to channelize the momentum of speeding trains.  They may seem superfluous when revenues are hard to come by, but it’s imperative to have them in place in order to get funding and to stay capital efficient.

These five fundamentals can provide the fuel for any start-up, but I’d love to hear your ideas on what leaders can do to make start-ups succeed. Let me know.

New Research: Rituals Make Us Value Things More

Rituals in the workplace can reinforce the behaviors we want, create focus and a sense of belonging, and make change stick.  I have gone on and on in the past about the benefits of established rituals and routines for personal productivity – how they capitalize on our brains’ ability to direct our behavior on autopilot, allowing us to reach our goals even when we are distracted or preoccupied with other things. And there are plenty of companies who’ve been smart enough to harness this power. At Google, for example, new employees have a ritual now made famous by the Vince Vaughn/ Owen Wilson film The Internship­ – they wear beanie hats in the Google logo colors with propellers on top that say “Noogler.”  Far from feeling ridiculous, Google employees feel that the ritual of the Noogler hat marks them as part of an exclusive group.

But new research demonstrates that the power of rituals goes even further – they can increase our perception of value, too.  In other words, if employees perform rituals as part of their jobs, they are likely to find their jobs more rewarding.  And if consumers use a ritual to experience your product, they are likely to enjoy it more and be willing to pay more for it.

Kathleen Vohs and Yajin Wang of the Carlson School of Management at University of Minnesota, along with Francesa Gino and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, conducted a series of studies looking at how ritual changed the experience of consuming a variety of foods.

In one study, participants tasted chocolate, either ritualistically (i.e., with the instruction to break the bar in half without unwrapping it, unwrap half the bar and eat it, and then unwrap the other half and eat it), or as they normally would.

Those who performed the ritual reported finding the chocolate more flavorful and enjoying it more.  They also took more time to savor it, and were willing to pay nearly twice as much for more of it.

In another study, the researchers found the same pattern of results for a decidedly less glamorous food: the carrot.  This time, participants used their knuckles to rap on the table, took deep breaths, and then closed their eyes before eating the carrot.  And yes, that is weird.  But it still made them like the carrots more.

How does ritual increase value?  Vohs and her colleagues found evidence to suggest that personal involvement is the real driver of these effects. In other words, rituals help people to feel more deeply involved in their consumption experience, which in turn heightens its perceived value.

This makes a lot of intuitive sense when you consider the success of some iconic brands.  Oreos, for instance, aren’t just two chocolate cookies with some vanilla cream inside – the way you eat an Oreo matters, too.  As everyone knows, you twist it, lick it, and dunk it.

The Oreo ritual is as famous as the cookie itself  – and no small part of why it is the world’s best selling-cookie.

Then there’s Guinness – the best-selling drink in Ireland and a global powerhouse available in 100 countries, with nearly two billion Guinness pints consumed annually.  And it all starts with the proper Guinness pour – at an angle, allowing it to settle for two minutes when only three-quarters of the way full, then gently topping off.  Guinness fans will fervently swear that a proper pour elevates the stout to heavenly heights and will riot when the pour is botched.

So when you’re thinking about how to market a product, consider how you might add a bit of ritual to the experience.  For instance, if you’re selling a state-of-the-art tablet or smartphone with a new high-resolution display, try packaging it with some screen-wipes and make giving the screen “a nightly rubdown to maintain the dazzling display” part of your ad campaign.  Customers who are ritually cleaning and caring for your tablet will value it more, and are more likely to become loyal fans of your brand.

Or think about how this might change the way you use incentives, since these results should also apply to how employees value rewards. For instance, if you’re giving them a bonus, don’t just leave the check in their mailbox — find a way to give it to them that involves some formality. The ritual doesn’t even have to make sense – after all, what does knuckle-rapping have to do with carrots?  So when doling out rewards or celebrating milestones, get creative.  Bang a gong, do an end-zone dance, hand out your own version of the green “Masters” jacket that the employee wears for a week.

Simple rituals like these will make whatever you have to offer – to your customers or to your team – look and feel like more.  Wrap it in a ritual, and you will have created added value right out of thin air.

Civil War Boundary in U.S. Affects Trade to This Day

The line separating what used to be the Union and the Confederacy in America reduces trade between states of the former North and South by 13% to 14%, an effect that is strongest in food, manufacturing, and chemicals, say Gabriel Felbermayr and Jasmin Gröschl of the University of Munich in Germany. Possible reasons: The South’s secession 150 years ago may have had long-term effects on business-to-business trust and consumer preferences for goods, the researchers say. By comparison, the former border between East and West Germany restricts trade by about 26% to 30%.

We Can Now Automate Hiring. Is that Good?

One of the things that is different since the recession is the approach that most companies are taking to hiring—where virtually everything about the process is automated or outsourced.  As with all major trends, this one has been underway for a while, but it has been given a push by five years of relentless cost-cutting. Unfortunately, the emphasis on cost-cutting has shifted managers’ attention away from the value they should be creating from these new latest hiring practices—and this is where the future of hiring lies.

Ironically, these approaches did not start out as cost-cutting measures. Recruiting—the gathering of candidates—was long ago turned over to websites and software to simplify the process for finding good candidates in a tight labor market. Starting in the late 1990s, employers facing what was then a shortfall in candidates tried to make it easy for candidates to apply by putting simplified applications online and then managing them with applicant tracking software.  Then, as the labor market changed, automation was simply the most efficient way of dealing with a deluge of candidates.  When the economy turned down first in the recession of 2001 and then massively so in the Great Recession starting in 2008, unemployed candidates flooded employers with applications, and companies had no choice but to use software to process and screen them.

The idea behind applicant tracking software was to provide a simple first cut of applicants to see if they had the basic attributes the jobs required.  The pool that survived that cut would then be turned over to recruiters who would then consider them carefully for hiring.  But during the Great Recession those recruiters themselves lost their jobs—why keep them when there was no hiring? As hiring starts to come back, companies are trying to do it without hiring back recruiters and, as a cost-savings effort, in some cases trying to do it with no recruiters at all.

How is that possible?  One bad way has been to screw down the requirements on the existing applicant tracking system to screen out all but a few candidates.  It’s almost impossible to do that with any precision, and a likely consequence is overreliance on credentials or experience that are not all that relevant to the job.

An obvious way to get by without recruiters is to outsource the entire recruiting and selection process to a third party.  The growth of these Recruitment Process Outsourcers (RPO’s) has been spectacular.

Another reasonable approach is to automate even more and to use technology to handle some of the more standardized tasks associated with selecting the best candidates.  Think of every time you’ve been hired for a job and all the steps you went through involved after you submitted your application.  Every one of those can now be done by computers.

Consider, for example, the process of checking references.  That can be done now online by companies like SkillSurvey.com, who standardize the process and push it to the referees to do on their own schedule.  Bringing candidates in for interviews can also be eliminated with tools like Hirevue.com, who conduct standardized, video interviews that are scored and that employers can then review on their own time.  HireIQ.com moves the interview process to automated telephone interviews that are taped and assessed for personality and other attributes. What’s the appropriate salary to pay? Vendors like salary.com or payscale.com can tell you what market wages are for jobs like yours in your community and what benefits competitors are offering.

Is this automated approach a good thing?  One scenario the automated approaches eliminate is where the unusual but plucky candidate who doesn’t fit the mold has the opportunity to persuade the recruiter to give them a chance. No doubt there are many nice examples where that scenario plays out well for all sides, but there are far, far more stories where the candidate who doesn’t meet the requirements is going to cost the business a lot of time and money if they are hired only to prove in the end that they were not a good choice.  The alternative to standardized, data-driven practices is unfortunately not a wise, experienced, recruiter with an open mind.  It is more likely to be a hiring manager who has no training in selection who “goes with their gut,” which means they hire someone who looks like them.  It is hard to argue with approaches that rely on data and standard practices to bring rigor to the hiring process.  But whether that is actually what’s going on is not so obvious.

Beyond the potential cost-savings and rigor of these new hiring processes, lie a host of reasons why companies need to think more deeply about their potential costs (are you just transferring the costs from hiring and recruiting to the costs of managing a poor employee, for example) and the potential benefits (such as getting better talent).  Yes, this automated approach is a good thing; but only if companies are actually creating value with it.

It’s difficult to think of any decision that is more important to an organization than determining who it hires.  One reason why hiring is even more important now than in the past is because employers do it so frequently: High turnover means continual hiring, and most companies now look outside to fill vacancies for all jobs, not just for those we used to call “entry-level.” Using vendors who have expertise in hiring to aid the process could make perfect sense as a way to get better candidates —and create value.

But companies aren’t there yet.  When one talks to these vendors and to the RPO’s, the story they tell overwhelmingly is that clients are interested in their services to cut hiring costs.  That’s not a bad thing per se.  What is bad is when hiring costs become the only objective.

Evidence that cutting costs is the main objective comes where we see these hiring vendors being managed not by the client’s HR department but by the vendor management department.   A cheap approach to hiring that leads to poor hires is one of the worst decisions one could possibly make given all the possible costs associated with making a bad hire and the benefits of good hires.

Why would an employer possibly take such risks just to save a few bucks up front?  It happens when the people in charge see data on the costs of hiring but no data on the outcomes of hiring.  We manage what we can measure, and without evidence that hiring practices matter, we just squeeze the costs down.  It can be difficult to generate such evidence, and few companies these days still have the capability in the HR departments to do so.

So, the answer is to press the vendors for evidence that what they are doing pays off by giving you better hires.  If they don’t have it, ask them to get it.  More important, when you engage them, ask them to help you asses the value they are creating for you so that you can sell the case for better hires to company leaders.   If they can’t do that, get another vendor.

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




Learn How to Spot Portable Talent
Why Japan’s Talent Wars Now Hinge on Women
Research: Recession Grads May Wind Up Happier in the Long Run
Ten Essential Tips for Hiring Your Next CEO

An Unexpected Lesson from Mandela: Why Context Matters

During this time of global contemplation on the deep legacy of Nelson Mandela, I realized I have my own connection to this “giant of history,” which traces back to those heady days of South Africa in 1994. What did I learn from him? Business cannot be left alone to be just business, and, as I learned in Pretoria nearly 20 years ago, leaders ignore this bigger picture at their peril.

From 1994 to 1995, I was traveling across Africa, exploring interest among various governments and telecommunications service companies in investment in the continent’s first undersea fiber-optic network. This would be a breakthrough communication technology, with the power of connecting an excluded and fragmented continent with itself, with the world, and to this newly emerging phenomenon — that none of us quite understood at the time — called the Internet.

Given its economic heft, South Africa was among my first ports of call. Those were exciting times for the country. The ANC had just assumed power and Mandela had made history as the country’s first black president. The world was suddenly considering how to connect to this hitherto isolated country and embracing a potential economic and political powerhouse.

I made what I thought was a brilliant presentation to senior bureaucrats and technologists. In my view, I had quite convincingly made the case for South Africa to be the key anchor for a fiber-optic ring that would encircle the continent with branches taking off toward other continents.

Turns out, my case wasn’t as rock solid as I had imagined. A senior minister took me aside the next day and asked if we could scrap the plans for a ring around Africa and just do a single cable that linked South Africa to …. Malaysia. That’s it. Just Malaysia. But that makes no business sense whatsoever, I protested. The minister explained that Mandela had visited Malaysia the previous year and had struck up a close friendship with Prime Minister Mahathir. The two had agreed on cooperation on many fronts. Most significantly, Malaysia had pledged help in providing voter education to South Africa, a country where nearly 18 million out of the 20 million citizens would cast their ballots for the first time, with half of the 18 million illiterate. And now, post-election, it was critical that the bonds be strengthened further.

“But consider the economics,” I continued. “A single link to Malaysia would be frightfully expensive and would not have the traffic to justify it. You would forgo the chance to connect with the rest of Africa.”

The minister politely, but firmly, let me know that while I seemed smart enough, I was not as clever as I thought I was. “You do not argue with Nelson Mandela,” he said.

Trained as an economist, this was my first small step toward an appreciation for contextual intelligence. The linear logic of business and all its analysis could not — and should not — ignore the momentum of emerging geopolitical alliances. Malaysia was already among the first of South Africa’s allies; there was a stronger relationship to be built. Mandela had personally asked for this cable as a symbol and a conduit.

Still frustrated, I walked the corridors of South Africa Telkom and ran into the old guard. These were engineers and network planners; surely, they understood economics and net present value analysis. I told them my story. They agreed that the Mandela proposal was nonsense. What was needed was a fiber-optic link directly connecting South Africa to Northern Europe. “What about the connectivity to rest of Africa?” I asked.

“Who cares about the rest of Africa?” was the universal opinion.

This was my second lesson in contextual intelligence. The old guard was all white. They were frightened about what was going to come next as their secluded reality had come to an end. While their argument was couched in business terms (after all, Northern Europe was where the business would be), their real reason was in history: They desperately wanted a conduit back to the old days and to some semblance of a world that they had known all their lives. They were ready to make a “business” argument that was, in reality, an agenda that harkened back to a colonial legacy.

Yes, I was there at a true inflection point, armed with the finest analysis possible, elaborate layers of spreadsheets, and well-crafted presentations. However, real decisions are based on a myriad other factors. In this case, there was, first, a big future envisioned by a master politician — and already a living legend — who could imagine the unimaginable. And second, there was a past that, while it had become politically irrelevant, still had the technocratic expertise to exert a pull in an opposite direction. If South Africa was to develop, it could not afford to ignore the technocrats entirely.

I re-did the analysis. We modeled-in the geo-political assumptions, accounted for different connectivity scenarios and their socio-political ramifications as well as economic impact. We resumed the debate in a more holistic manner. Context is, indeed, king. You should embrace it, understand it, and make it central to your business model analysis; most importantly, you should not ignore or fight it.

There is a larger lesson here for today’s business leader. With half the world’s output and two-thirds of the world’s growth coming out of countries that are still “emerging,” it is important to recognize the centrality of context. The context in these countries is complex and different from what we are familiar with in the industrialized west. It is bound to emerge at an even slower pace. We should factor-in how business decisions connect with non-business factors, such as politics, history, and the human condition.

I have taken this lesson to heart, so much that I now run an institute whose mission is to help tomorrow’s leaders make these connections. I now know the importance of contextual intelligence in a business leader. And it all started with an unexpected lesson from Mandela.

10 Charts from 2013 That Changed the Way We Think

1. Asian countries are overtaking European countries when it comes to prosperity:

2. The most common area of weakness for ineffective senior leaders is their ability to develop others, followed by their ability to collaborate (but research shows it’s entirely possible to reverse these bad habits):

3. Here are the areas CEOs are getting coached in — but priorities differ depending on who you ask:

4. Go ahead, expense that chicken:

5. Cubicles are the absolute worst, in part because they’re so darned noisy:

6. What percentage of U.S. mothers work 50 or more hours a week during the key years of career advancement? Most people say half — and they’re wrong:

7. Even though recent Wharton grads say that parenting still matters, fewer and fewer think they’ll end up having kids:

8. It may be a good time to invest in Africa, which is more stable than you’ve been led to believe:

9. You’re probably in good shape if you’re set to graduate from a top-tier business school. If not, there’s reason to worry due to these hiring patterns:

10. And, just in time for bonus season, you may want to forgo those involving cash if your goal is increasing productivity:

Case Study: When the Twitterverse Turns on You

Charlene Thompson reached for her phone on the nightstand. It was still before 6:00am, so the iPhone’s glow was the only light in the room. Her husband, James, turned over and groaned.

“That’s a horrible habit,” he said. “You should always have coffee before checking your inbox.”

“This is important, honey,” she whispered. “I need to see what’s happening with the contest.”

(Editor’s Note: This fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and e-mail address.)

Charlene was the head of public relations for Canadian Jet. Yesterday, with the help of the company’s PR firm, Wrigley & Walters, the airline had launched its first Twitter contest: The person who posted the most creative tweet using the hashtag #CanJetLuxury would win two round-trip tickets to any of the company’s destinations.

For Charlene, who had led the airline’s communications for 15 years, this campaign was critical. Six months before, a third of Canadian Jet’s fleet had been grounded for a week owing to some engine safety concerns, causing a slew of cancellations and delays. There had also been some negative press about the airline’s approach to labor relations following a threatened strike by the ground crews. The team at Wrigley & Walters had designed this campaign to restore Canadian Jet’s image as a preferred carrier.

“Shoot. This isn’t good,” Charlene said as she scrolled through an endless string of tweets.

“What? It’s not catching on?” James asked groggily.

“Just the opposite. But not in a good way.” She read a few of the tweets: “’Getting to my destination without the engine catching fire #CanJetLuxury’; ‘Being stranded 3,000 miles from my family for two days straight #CanJetLuxury’; #CanJetLuxury is getting away with not paying employees fairly.’”

 “Ouch,” James said.

This is completely backfiring, Charlene thought as she got out of bed.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“I need to call Jerry.”

7:30am

Jerry Schneider, Canadian Jet’s CEO, was tapping his fingers on his desk while he and Charlene waited for the others to arrive. He hadn’t said much yet, but Charlene could tell that he was feeling the stress, too.

Tim Powell, Charlene’s director of social media, showed up with Andrea Kemp, the company’s account manager from Wrigley & Walters. Both looked flustered.

“Sorry,” Tim said. “We had trouble getting Andrea’s pass.”

Andrea shook Jerry’s hand and started speaking before she sat down.

“OK, so we knew this was a risk going in, right? People love to complain on the internet, especially when they can essentially be anonymous like this.” Charlene knew Andrea’s fast talking wasn’t a sign of nerves. She was just the sort of person who was energized by a crisis. And she was right — throughout the planning process, she’d reminded Charlene and her team that critics could use social media campaigns like this one to bash the company. JPMorgan Chase had been a recent victim of hashtag backlash after launching a well-meaning Twitter Q&A, she told them, and she had sent around a Forbes.com article about how one of McDonald’s campaigns has resulted in a “bashtag.” She reminded them now of these other cases.

“I’m not sure knowing we’re in good company is any comfort right now,” Jerry said. He asked Tim for an update.

“They’re still coming in: 200 more tweets with the CanJetLuxury hashtag since 6am. The majority are fine — good, even — but there are some doozies.”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “I don’t even want to hear any more.”

“And we’ve started trending, which isn’t great, given the circumstances,” said Tim.

“How do we stop trending?” Jerry asked. The CEO was three decades removed from the Millennials, and although he did his best to keep up with social media, he wasn’t as savvy as Tim or Charlene.

“We could change the hashtag and get people to start using a new one,” Tim suggested. “Other companies have done that.”

“And it’s worked,” Andrea noted. “By focusing people on the new hashtag, you draw attention away from the one that was causing problems, and people are less inclined to throw in their own witty insults. It could take a few days for the old hashtag to peter out, though.”

“That sounds like a solution,” Jerry said. “That way we save the contest and let this whole mess blow over.”

“Or we could just end the contest altogether,” Charlene offered.

“Yes, you might remember that’s what JPMorgan did,” Andrea said. “When people hijacked the hashtag to tweet about ‘capitalist pigs,’ they canceled the Q&A.”

“And they came off looking like the arrogant jerks everyone was claiming them to be,” Tim said.

Andrea nodded. “Let’s not jump the gun here. Most of these tweets are positive. They say some lovely things about customers’ experiences with Canadian Jet. If you cancel, you may end up alienating the people who sent in genuine entries and are hoping for those round-trip tickets. It may be better to ignore the bashes and focus on the good publicity you’re getting.”

“And when the press starts calling?” Charlene asked. She worried it was just a matter of time before she would have to start fielding questions.

“You take the high road and say how pleased you are with the positive responses,” Andrea suggested.

“So far I’m not loving any of these options,” Jerry said.

Tim cleared his throat. “We could apologize. It’s worked for us in the past.” Three years back, one of the operations VPs had come up with the idea to make buttons with “We’re sorry” in big black letters and have flight attendants, pilots, and airport staff wear them whenever a flight was delayed or canceled, even if it wasn’t the airline’s fault. Customer response to the tactic had been overwhelmingly positive. It had even helped win the airline an industry customer service award.

“But what exactly are you apologizing for here?” Andrea asked. “You just launched a contest. You didn’t exploit political events like Kenneth Cole did or pull a Home Depot and send out a picture that people thought was racist. It makes sense that those companies said they were sorry, but you haven’t done anything wrong.”

“That’s not what these people think,” Charlene said, pointing to her iPad. She read a few of the latest tweets. “’Arriving a day late to your daughter’s wedding #CanJetLuxury,’ ‘Screwing your workforce #CanJetLuxury.’”

“Enough,” groaned Jerry, holding his head in his hands. The room was silent.

“I’m willing to take a stab at an apology,” Charlene said. “I’m not sure exactly what it’s going to say, but give me an hour.”

8:30am

Charlene stared at the blank Word document on her screen. She typed:

“On behalf of Canadian Jet, I’d like to apologize for the feelings that this contest brought up.”

She deleted it.

“We at Canadian Jet are sorry for disappointing our customers. We’re committed to…”

“That doesn’t work, either,” she said out loud to her computer, pressing the backspace button. She tried a more direct approach.

“We’re sorry that our planes sometimes break, that you think we treat our employees unfairly, and that you don’t like our contest.”

Her assistant poked her head in the door, “I’ve got Carrie Schultz on the line.” This ought to be fun, Charlene thought as she picked up the phone.

Carrie, a blogger for PR News, explained that she was working on a piece about social media gaffes and wondered if Charlene wanted to comment on the crisis in progress.

“I wouldn’t call it a ‘crisis.’ A handful of people poking fun at your business doesn’t constitute a crisis.”

“Are you willing to explain on the record why you’re ignoring the responses? You keep sending out tweets as if everything is going smoothly.”

Charlene quickly pulled up the airline’s Twitter feed and saw that a tweet had gone out at 8:00am: “Keep the responses coming. At this rate, it’s going to take years to judge this contest!” She put her phone on mute and yelled to her assistant to get Tim.

She could hear him running down the hallway. He looked ashen reading the tweet on Charlene’s screen. Charlene pointed to the receiver and mouthed “Carrie Schultz.”

She took the phone off mute. “We’re not ready to comment just yet, Carrie.”

“You better get ready,” she responded. “You’re trending, you know.”

9:00am

“Never mind arrogant. We look completely tone deaf at this point,” said Jerry, his face completely red.

Tim was about to say something when Andrea cut in. “I’m sorry. This is our agency’s fault. We wrote the tweets yesterday and scheduled them to go out throughout the day. We were trying to save some time.”

“Jerry, we’ve turned off the automatic tweets,” Charlene assured him. “But still — we’ve got to figure out what we’re doing. And fast.”

“What about the apology?” Tim asked.

“Andrea was right,” Charlene sighed. “It’s hard to know exactly what we’re apologizing for. The only thing I can think to say is, ‘Sorry we’ve disappointed you in various ways over the past ten years.’”

“What’s wrong with that?” Tim asked. Charlene looked over at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t smiling.

“We look like chumps, that’s what,” Jerry said, his voice rising.

“So, are we pulling it?” Tim asked. They all looked at Jerry.

“What else have we got for this year?”

“This is our biggest social media campaign,” Charlene replied. “We’ve planned a few other things, but nothing on this scale.” She tried not to look at Andrea. Her agency was as much on the line as Canadian Jet.

“This is not a lost cause,” Andrea said, still utterly composed. “It’s been less than 24 hours. I’m telling you, this thing may die down as quickly as it heated up.”

“I understand why you want to save this, Andrea. But we need to be cautious here,” Charlene said. “Canadian Jet can’t suffer another PR problem.”

Jerry sat down heavily in his chair. “I know we normally take your firm’s advice on these things, Andrea. You’re the experts here, but you’re also the ones who got us into this mess.” He turned to Charlene. “As our spokesperson, I’d like you to make the call.”

Question: Should Canadian Jet cancel the contest?

Please remember to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and e-mail address.

Are We Networking, or Is This a Date?

I go out on a lot of “dates” with all people of all ages. Sometimes groups of them — lunch dates, “mind meld” dates, coffee dates. Couldn’t tell you what we’re melding; it’s mostly a brainstorm with more jargon thrown in. But it’s fair to say most of my “dates” are about work. Or so I think.

In this new economy of the personal brand and doing your own thing, everyone is constantly working the room. But it can get confusing as both a single woman and an entrepreneur who works in communications. There are times when I find myself getting drinks or dinner to “talk shop” – but I cannot, for the life of me, figure out: am I on a date?

When you’re in business on your own and shilling your wares around town, the lines between work and play get blurred. Like the time I went out for what I thought were work drinks and the guy planted one on me as I got into a cab. Or the time I wanted, desperately, for a brilliant and handsome mutual friend to assume that our dinner was something more. He didn’t get the memo, and I got cold feet. The confusion swings the other way, too: I have friends who have met professional partners on the dating-app Tinder.

These blurred lines raise a lot of questions, such as: Am I going to this festival to run around half naked and watch burning things or am I here to meet and talk business with a Winklevoss if I can find him? Am I at this happy hour to express my enthusiasm for gin or to meet potential new clients and raise my Klout score?  Is this cute entrepreneur flirting with me or just being nice? Should I be giving my elevator pitch? Am I just really bad at signals?

When you’re one on one and the lighting is dim, I couldn’t tell you if we’re talking angel investing as friends or as something more. And how is one supposed to clarify? It would be a lot to presume that this person who wants to “grab drinks sometime” wants to take me on a date. But it looks like a date. It feels like a date. It walks like a date…so is it a date?

If you ask to clarify and it is a date, you’re OK. But if you ask and it’s not, it’s very awkward. Very, very awkward. I don’t want to act unprofessional. But what does “professional” mean any more in world where casual Fridays are more like casual Monday-through-Fridays, and beer carts and whiskey nights pervade office life? You log a lot of hours together, probably in a wall-less office, you’re friends on Facebook. Is making it clear you’d like a date really so bad?

The stigma against office dating may be fading — and in start-up land, many founders are also romantic partners – but there’s one taboo I’d like to keep firmly in place. That’s what I call the “ninja set-up. “Basically, a friend introduces two people under the guise that they will “have a lot to talk about” or “get along.” Then you are being ninja’d into a date. I promise. I’ve tried to find ways to clarify, and once I flat-out asked a guy after we went out a second time (that was definitely a date) about whether or not the first date was a date-date.

He told me he wasn’t sure either.

At least I’m not alone in my confusion. But perhaps the bottom line is this: chemistry is hard to find and shouldn’t be ignored. While we could all analyze body language or texts until we’re blue in the face, maybe we should all just grow up and ask for what we want. You know, like professionals.

Change Your Company with Better HR Analytics

You’re probably a little tired of hearing about Big Data. While you would expect online giants like Amazon and companies like Netflix to be early innovators in the use of data to recommend products or movies, you only care about the answer to one question: what does big data mean for the everyday employee and how can regular businesses extract real value from it?

The good news is that Big Data is making a difference in places and ways you might not expect, particularly in human resources. Companies are analyzing their employee data with workforce analytics to answer a variety of critical questions: Why does one sales person outperform his peers? What is the impact of learning programs on company results? How long does it take for new employees to be productive? Why do certain leaders succeed and others fail?

Black Hills Corp. is one of those companies. A 130-year-old energy conglomerate, Black Hills doubled its workforce to about 2,000 employees after an acquisition. Like many energy companies, a combination of challenges — an aging workforce, the need for specialized skills, and a lengthy timeline for getting employees to full competence — created a significant talent risk. In fact, forecasts showed that, within five years, the firm could lose 8,063 years of experience from its workforce.

To prevent a massive turnover catastrophe, the company used workforce analytics to calculate how many employees would retire per year, the types of workers needed to replace them, and where those new hires were most likely to come from. The result was a workforce planning summit that categorized and prioritized 89 action plans designed to address the potential talent shortage.

For other firms, more effectively using talent data is a key component of an HR transformation, one that seeks to improve the function’s role as a true business partner. In their 2012 book, Transformative HR authors John Boudreau and Ravin Jesuthasan detailed a case study of Ameriprise Financial, a diversified financial services company spun off from American Express in 2005.

When the newly-formed firm began delivering a set of HR activities such as onboarding, training and performance reviews, employee feedback rated the quality of these services as “poor.” Furthermore, Ameriprise Financial had no framework for allocating HR time to talent issues with highest impact.

To improve their HR functions, Ameriprise began to integrate workforce and financial data to align talent investments with business results, and more proactively develop data-driven insights used to predict turnover, reduce new hire failure rates, and manage persistent poor performers. Employee feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with HR transforming from “order taker” to “key business contributor.”

All of this goes back to a prescient observation Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel physicist, made in an interview with Harvard professor Howard Gardner in the 1970s. He predicted that the trait most valued in 21st century companies would be the capability for synthesizing information. The skill of synthesis is particularly crucial for corporate leaders, given that the decisions they make are fraught with big-picture complexity and the consequences of those decisions are often momentous.

But because leaders sit atop more information sources than most people, there is an inherent risk of information overload. This is compounded by the traditional way in which data is often presented: voluminous spreadsheets containing hundreds of data-points that do little to connect talent metrics to the recipient’s business priorities or decisions.

As such, in the rush to deliver Big Data, organizations should also consider how they can provide better data to their managers to enable higher levels of utilization and faster synthesis of key insights. Consequently, your analytics must be:

Relevant. HR analysts need to apply data to the business issue (a top-down approach), rather than using an unnecessary amount of resources for bottom-up data mining.
Valid. The quality of data is important, along with the way leaders are educated about the credibility of talent metrics.
Compelling. Of the hundreds of HR leaders I speak with each year, one of the most common goals of analytics is to tell a better story with data. HR can’t just present raw numbers and expect the recipient to identify the correct message. Analysts need to understand their audience, create a plot of related storylines, and deliver conclusions that tie together the principal facts.
Transformative. Ultimately, actionable analytics have to change a leader’s behavior.  A leader should be able to change his or her thinking and make better, faster decisions as a result of talent data.

There are still obstacles to adopting workforce analytics: Less than half of the global companies use objective data when making workforce decisions, and fewer than 20 percent were satisfied with the ability of their current data management systems to manage talent data, according to an SHL global assessment report published in February. But armed with actionable analytics, leaders and managers have immense opportunities to use talent data in reducing workforce costs, identifying revenue streams, mitigating risks and executing business strategy. As David Crumley, Vice-President of HRIS at Coca-Cola Enterprises, says, “this is where it gets really exciting.”

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Just Adding a Chief Data Officer Isn’t Enough

The proliferation of C-suite roles is an indication of the increasing strategic and operational complexity organizations face. Heightened expectations of expertise are also part of the picture — for instance, GE’s recent transition from asking executives to focus on breadth to focus on depth.

One of the newest additions to the C-Suite is the Chief Data Officer. Thomas Redman wrote in October about the increasing value of a CDO and how to know whether such a role might be good for your organization. If you’ve decided to move ahead, then the next step is to effectively build that role into the rest of the top management team. To do so, you need clarity around how the CDO will work with the rest of the top management team as well as incentives that support collaboration across the top executives and senior managers — something that goes beyond equity compensation.

Research shows that you can’t just add a new member to a team without renegotiating the roles and relationships. Members need to know who already knows what, who should know what, and how to coordinate — and that all varies by the particular people in the team, not just their role. For instance, the person who was once the best at analytics may no longer hold that position if a Chief Data Officer is brought in. Brown, Court, and Willmott provide an excellent starter list for the issues to address: Establishing new mind-sets around the value of data; defining a data-analytics strategy; determining what to build, purchase, borrow, or rent; securing analytics expertise; mobilizing resources; and building frontline capabilities.

Brad Peters, CEO of Birst, a business intelligence company, raised the issue of incentives and structure with me in an interview at Saleforce.com’s Dreamforce conference. He said that without changes in incentives, as well as a change in the structure of the C-suite, broad-based roles like Chief Information Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, and Chief Data Officers are hampered in their effectiveness. Alignment with specific business goals is important to all senior executives, of course, but it’s especially true for those who may be in service roles to the business units of the organization.

David Aaker’s helps explain why in his book, Spanning Silos: The New CMO Imperative. Though he was writing about Chief Marketing Officers, his advice is equally valuable here. When incentives are focused on rewarding silo behavior and performance — as so many incentives are — it is a struggle to take advantage of a boundary-spanning executive position. Instead, organizations need cross-silo incentives and initiatives to support behaviors that leverage the skills of the new executive. (Chief Operating and Finance Officers side-step this issue given the broader power-base of their positions.)

The top management team should approach the role clarification and incentive alignment as a negotiation. While it is likely that the entire executive suite would be involved in a decision to bring in a Chief Data Officer, it is important that the process goes beyond involvement. Negotiation, with its norms of agreement to an explicit deal, means that the new role, its responsibilities, and its rewards, are fully integrated into those of the rest of the top management team.

Have this negotiation as part of the new Chief Data Officer on-boarding. Lay out major roles and responsibilities to highlight places where data and other roles intersect given the expertise of the particular people on the top management team. Use Brown, Court, and Willmott’s six tasks of data-focused activities to start developing the issues to have the on the table. Add incentives to the mix by setting goals around the collaborative activities. Morten Hansen argues that you don’t need to overhaul an entire incentive structure — you can focus on special incentives for silo-spanning collaborations.

The whole top management team must collaborate both in fact and incentives. There must be something that rewards cross-silo efforts. To effectively make use of data’s insights, executive teams need more than goodwill and a new hire.

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