Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1496

The Pope’s “War on Capitalism” and Why Rich Kids Stay Rich

“How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?”

Pope Francis made headlines last week when he took a few sharp jabs at modern capitalism and free market economic policies in his first “apostolic exhortation”—the rough equivalent of a new CEO’s formal unveiling of his or her vision and corporate strategy.

His thoughts on economic policy were not based on faith alone. He hinted at available evidence, or lack thereof, and left many of his conservative supporters squirming:

“Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”

Such a firm political stance against right-leaning free-market economic policies, and the specific reference to “trickle-down” economics, suggests that the papal finger is pointing at the United States and Europe, and an economic theory most closely associated with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

His slam against free-market capitalism is historical and bold, and, according to some commentators, overdue. Occupy Wall Street brought discussion of income inequality into the mainstream, but when the movement fizzled so did much of the public debate. Yet, as economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty show, income inequality in the United States has only continued to grow — and is now nearly as bad as it was just before the Great Depression nearly 100 years ago.  Last year, the wealthiest top 10 percent took home more than half of the total income in the country.

I applaud the Pope for his efforts to put inequality back on the agenda — but I wonder if he is introducing a political divide when one is not needed.

The most important message in Pope Francis’ manifesto is not his view about economic theory and the data that supports it — although he pulls no punches there — but the ethic and ideology that underlie that theory and the free-market economies built on it.  It is a message about equality of opportunity — a nuance that most commentators have missed.

“Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape.”

Equality of opportunity is something everyone cares about, regardless of political stripes. Although Americans are generally not troubled by income disparities, most people care a lot about social mobility: whether kids from different backgrounds get onto the ladder at similar places and, given talent and effort, are equally likely to climb it.  The American mindset is built on the belief that anything is possible, and that it is up to each individual to claw their way up on the income ladder. If Steve Jobs did it, you can do it, too.

Historically, America has coupled greater inequality of income with greater social mobility. But social mobility has stagnated.  Today, about two-thirds of children raised in the richest fifth of families stay in the top two-fifths.  And despite the belief that America is a classless society, two-fifths of children born into the poorest fifth of families remain at the bottom of the income ladder as adults.

The mobility statistics are searing but the future looks even grimmer when we look at equality of opportunities among children. For the last two years, my collaborators and I have been studying growing class gaps in various precursors of life success. And the findings are alarming. The children of college-educated parents and those of less-educated parents are raised in very different ways and are launched on very different trajectories in life.

Not more than a few decades ago, college-educated parents and high school-educated parents spent roughly the same amount of time with their kids.  Today, middle class parents not only spend four times as much time playing Scrabble and reading books compared with working class parents, they also invest more money in their kids.

Sociologists Neeraj Kaushal, Katherine Magnuson, and Jane Waldfogel show that over the last four decades, middle class parents have increased their spending on enrichment activities, such as music lessons, summer camps, and travel, while working class families have struggled to keep up.  In the 1970s, high-income families spent about $2,700 more per year on child enrichment than did low-income families. Today, the gap has nearly tripled to $7,500.

As a result, children from middle class and working class families have sharply diverged on factors that prepare them for future. Children with wealthy, educated parents are more likely to engage in activities that broaden their outlook, deepen their social connections, and teach them important teamwork and leadership skills. They are more likely to participate in the school band or the debate team or to join the high school swim team. They are more than twice as likely to be elected as club presidents or team captains. They are also more likely to go to church and do volunteer work.

In contrast, working class kids have become less trusting of other people are more disconnected from major social institutions of life, such as family, school, church, and the community. These trends coincide with growing class gaps in math and reading tests, college admission, and college graduation.

Today’s young people are not going to show up in standard mobility studies for a long time but the fact that working class youth are increasingly more disconnected from social institutions suggests that mobility is poised to plunge dramatically. In other words, we have every reason to be worried.

The Pope points the finger at free-market capitalism and “a lifestyle which excludes others” and calls for more compassion:

“Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own. The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us.”

But equality of opportunity is not just a matter of individual kindness or compassion — although it can never hurt to have more of either. We need to make it a collective responsibility and come up with an agenda that addresses the problem. We need policies and programs that benefit the working class, such as earned-income tax credits or early childhood education programs.

Working class parents don’t just need “compassion” for their plight. They need stable jobs that pay enough, so that they can spend less time worrying about paying the rent and more time playing with their children. We need neighborhood organizations that can provide a social safety net for the children who need it, like the Catholic Church used to do a few decades ago.

To achieve this, liberals and conservatives will have to work together. Instead of alienating the conservatives and declaring a war against capitalism, the Pope could use his position to bridge the political chasm.

Don’t Make Your Innovation Proposal into a Hitchcock Movie

One of my favorite movies is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho, an elegant story with gripping suspense and one of the best twist endings you still will ever see. It’s also one of the absolute worst inspirations for presenting ideas inside companies.

This thought crossed my mind (once again) as I listened to a pitch from a young entrepreneur. He was brimming with energy as the story slowly built through page after page of facts and figures and graphs and pictures and profiles of interesting companies around the globe that were attacking the market he planned to target. Then, the twist! The entrepreneur wasn’t going to do what everyone else was doing. No! He and his team were going to go in a different direction and try to disrupt the market.

Having the big reveal come late in the story works in the movie theater. It rarely works if you’re trying to pitch an idea to a venture capitalist or to senior executives where you work. These gatekeepers are bombarded by information, and in many cases have very short attention spans. You simply cannot leave them waiting and wondering about what you want to do and what you need.

One of the first pieces of advice I got when I began writing holds true: Tell them, with some degree of precision, what you are going to tell them — from the start.

Invest to create a good executive summary or elevator pitch. Your goal should be to describe the essence of your idea in no more than 2 minutes – what it is, why it’s is good for your company, what your next steps need to be, and what specific decisions or resources you need from the people in the room.

Yes, a crisp summary of the plot followed by supporting details makes for a fairly boring Hollywood movie. But it allows you to firmly plant your idea in your audience’s mind early, build the case, and make sure there is no ambiguity about what you said or what you need. You will win fewer Oscars, but I’m willing to bet you will make a whole lot more progress.

When Will China’s Internet Transition Come?

The Great Firewall of China has been a jackpot for many Chinese internet companies, shielding them from fierce outside competition. Weibo, Renren, Baidu, and several video websites in China function as virtual replacements for blocked sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google and YouTube. Thanks to their protection by the government, these websites have reaped phenomenal profits. Tencent is the largest comprehensive company and includes calling, chatting, and gaming, and recently reported that third-quarter revenue of $2.6 billion, up 34% over last year.

News websites are also tightly controlled. Print and broadcast media, as well as the state-owned Xinhuanet.com, China.com.cn, and People.com.cn, are regarded by officials as the only genuine news outlets.  Their journalists are authorized to conduct interviews and original reports, while the larger and more influential non-state web portals are not granted such freedom, and are only left to link to or summarize others’ news reports on their websites.

Despite the other major transitions happening in China, there is little reason to expect its control over the internet to change any time soon. In less than twenty years, the Chinese internet has experienced unprecedented growth, yet all too often has fallen prey to the control from government agencies such as the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the Communist Propaganda Department, the State Office for Information, the Ministry of Culture, and the Ministries of both Public Security and State Security at large. A newly proposed KGB-style National Security Council (NSC), initiated in the just closed Third Plenary Session of CPC 18th Central Committee, will combine all the state machinery to control internet in the name of political stability.

And yet despite their lack of originality in both content and products, China’s major websites have all managed to rise up by providing summarized news, online games, and entertainment. (For instance, Tencent’s largest source of revenue is its online game service.)

The Canadian communication guru Marshall McLuhan once coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” however, the Chinese government apparently does not like to see the Internet circulate messages that are not in favor of their governing. So in order to survive and thrive, Chinese internet companies voluntarily surrender themselves to state censorship. Unfavorable messages and discontented comments on social media have been deleted from their websites. On different occasions，Ma Yun (Jack Ma), the owner of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce company, has pleasantly expressed his willingness for his company’s being nationalized if the government will do so.

So perhaps China’s internet is better described by another McLuhanism: The medium is the massage. The de facto prosperity of the Chinese internet market — protected from outside competition and information — contributes nothing to society but “amusement to death” with its excessive entertainment, gaming and shopping.

Yet there are still many who aspire for real, useful messages. There have been emerging appeals for political reform and the resolution of ethnic minority issues, as well as outcry against the rampant corruption in the Chinese online sphere.

But in China, the government has tightened its control of the Internet by purging those Big V’s — “verified” account holders who are often opinion leaders and social activists with enormous followers on social media. It has even come close to shutting down the internet at critical times and places,  just as they did in 2009 after riots in Xinjiang and just as Hosni Mubarak did in Egypt and Bashar al-Assad has done in Syria.

Chinese netizens, especially angry young people, have yearned for free expression for too long. If they cannot take to the internet, they will definitely take to the streets. Media functions not only as a “massage” for entertainment or a “message” for news, but also as a safety valve for people to vent their feelings and emotions. Without media’s safety valve, high-pressure societies become prone to explosion.

What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

In previous posts I praised Microsoft’s rejection of individual performance ratings as the building block for an effective performance management system, and described why rating people on a list of competencies is a flawed method for improving their performance.

Obviously we need a new system. And what can we say about the new system that would serve us better? Well, the specifics of the system will depend on the company, but we do know that it must have the following six characteristics, each of which follows logically from the one preceding.

First, it must be a real-time system that helps managers give “in the moment” coaching and course-correcting. The world we live in is unnervingly dynamic, where we are on one team one week and another the next, where goals that were fresh and exciting at the beginning of Q1 are irrelevant by the third week of Q1, and where the necessary skills, relationships, and even strategies have to be constantly recalibrated. In this real-time world, batched performance reviews delivered once or twice a year are obsolete before we’ve even sat down to write them.

We need much more frequent check-ins—weekly or, at most, monthly. Luckily, we now live in a world where most of us are armed with a device that knows exactly who we are, and into which we can record pretty much anything we want. This device—your mobile phone—will enable you, the employee, to input what you are doing this week and what help you need; and, because it knows you, it will be able to serve up to your manager coaching tips, insights, and prompts customized to your particular set of strengths and skills.

Second, it must be a system with a super light touch. If we expect our employees to share their weekly or monthly focus, and if we expect our managers to react to and adjust this focus as needed, then there can be no complicated forms to complete, no narrative sections requiring writing wizards to supply the right words, no conversation guides, no input required from a requisite number of peers. None of that. For this performance system to be as agile as it needs to be, it must be wonderfully simple. Just two questions answered by the employee—”What are you going to get done this week? And what help do you need from me?”—and a chance for the manager to speak into these answers. Counter-intuitively, the simpler the form, the richer the coaching.

Third, it must feel to the individual employee that it is a system “about me, designed for me.” Even if it is light-touch, managers will reject any real-time system that they have to initiate. Instead, the employee has to be the one to drive it. And the only way to achieve this is to make its starting point and ongoing focus: me, my strengths, where I am at my best, and how I can get better. At present, we don’t do this very well at all. For example, most companies’ employee profile pages are clearly a company tool and not a “me” tool, and as such are updated infrequently and inauthentically, and wind up reading like a computer-generated resume.

With a little creativity, there is every reason to believe that we can design for each employee a place to positively present her strengths, her skills, her accomplishments and her aspirations. Although current “profiles” are clinical, superficial, and out of date, it is entirely in the company’s interest that they not stay this way.

And besides, given that we live in a world where we expect all content, from our news, to our entertainment, to our healthcare, to be aware of our individual needs and desires, this “start with me” positioning is the least we will expect.

Fourth, and crucially, it must be a strengths-based system. Current systems are explicitly remedial, built on the belief that to help people get better you must measure them against a series of competency bars, point out where they fall short, and then challenge them to jump higher. While this feels practical, and rigorous – even “tough” – it is also depressingly inefficient. Although we label weaknesses “areas of opportunity,” brain science reveals that we do not learn and grow the most in our areas of weakness. In fact the opposite is true: we grow the most new synapses in those areas of our brain where we have the most pre-existing synapses. Our strengths, therefore, are our true areas of opportunity for growth.

More to the point, if we want employees to take responsibility for their own performance and development, what better place to start than with their particular strengths? The new performance system must find myriad ways to challenge employees to contribute their strengths more intelligently over time. (To be clear, this does not mean ignoring my weaknesses. It simply means acknowledging that my weaknesses are actually my “areas of least opportunity for growth.”)

Fifth, it must be a system focused on the future. Our current systems are fixated on feedback about the past. You are asked to write a review on yourself, then your manager writes his review. Often he will be required to sit with his peers to calibrate your review with others at your level; sometimes even your peers will be called upon to share their insights about your personality and performance. Your manager will be trained on how to deliver this feedback to you so that you will see it as “developmental” rather than overly “critical.”

The new performance system will dispense with all of this – on one level, simply because these feedback systems are plagued by a terrible signal-to-noise ratio. Managers are, and will always be, highly subjective providers of feedback; peer feedback when anonymous is just gossip, and when public is sugarcoated; your own self-ratings are more than likely generously distorted; and calibration sessions merely turn up the volume on the noise.

On another level, though, better performance management dispenses with all this because future-focused coaching is demonstrably a better use of time than past-focused feedback. To accelerate my performance tomorrow, don’t try to grade my personality with feedback from all sides—it will always be hard to give, hard to receive, and net a disproportionately small performance return. Instead, coach me on the few specific work-related activities that I could usefully add to my strengths repertoire tomorrow. Or tell me what skills I should go acquire next week. Or advise me which specific contacts I should seek out next month. None of these will necessarily be easy for me to do, but at least they will be something that I can do. They are in the future. In the new performance system, this is where most of our time and creativity will be focused.

Finally, it must be a local system. Current performance management systems are centralized. Their express purpose is to cascade the defined company strategies and values down through all levels. First, this flies in the face of the previous characteristics. Worse:  a fixed, cascaded strategy prevents the company from being agile (even if, ironically, one of the company values is “agility”); I care a great deal more about my own success and strengths than I do about “alignment”; and allocating each of my goals to one of the company’s values or strategies is inevitably both heavy-handed and retroactive. Any company with the courage to mine its HCM data will discover that many of us end up shoehorning our goals into one of the company’s categories only after the goals have been completed.

But more significantly, most of the company’s best intelligence about the future of its products, people, and customers can be found in each local team. So in place of cascading down, the new performance system must be designed to capture this local intelligence, and then aggregate it up. Goals should be set at the team level and aggregated up; compensation should be allocated by local leaders and then aggregated up; employee opinion surveys should be triggered by the local team leader and aggregated up. Only then will the company be agile enough to stay relevant.

So, that’s a blueprint for a better system. Lighter, more creative, more flexible, strengths-based, and ultimately more human – with current technologies available to you so you can start designing your version of this within your company.

And, frankly, you can do this even before your HR department has retired your existing human capital management system. Current systems are thankfully so infrequent, and a strengths-based system so light-touch, that the two can coexist for a while before the two start to get in each other’s way. With luck, by that time, HR will have taken a hard look at the performance of the old HCM system, and it will be on its way out.

Hiring and Big Data: Those Who Could Be Left Behind

Recruiters, HR managers, and investors have always sought better ways of identifying who fits and has potential, and how to allocate opportunities to them. Big data holds the promise of not only vastly improved efficiencies but also bringing greater objectivity to our very unconsciously biased human decision-making.  And without a doubt, predictive “people analytics” are starting to transform how employers hire, fire, and promote.  As a recent Atlantic article argues, “What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  One of the developments that will undoubtedly cement the relationship between big data and talent processes is the rise of massive open online courses, or MOOCs.  Business schools are jumping into them whole hog.  Soon, your MOOC performance will be sold to online recruiters taking advantage of the kinds of information that big data allows—fine distinctions not only on content assimilation but also participation, contribution to, and status within associated online communities.  But what if these new possibilities—used by recruiters and managers to efficiently and objectively get the best talent—only bake in current inequities? Or create new ones?

Lauded as purveyors of equality, the data not only show that most MOOC-takers are well-educated, employed, young and male —but that most of the teachers, especially the “stars,” are men.  And as a recent article entitled “Masculine Open Online Courses” warns, MOOCs may be taking academe back “to the days of huge gender gaps, when senior scholars overwhelmingly were men.” Yet who teaches us is important in more ways than one. Look at any piece of research about the subtle, systemic or “second-generation bias” holding back women and minorities in business and you will find lack of role models at the top of the list.  After all, who are among our first role models (after the parents, if we’re lucky): Our teachers.  Speaking from experience, I know that I would not have ended up a Yale PhD if my department head at the University of Miami, Dr. Robert Tallerico, hadn’t personally encouraged and mentored me from day one.

Far from democratizing education, critics argue that MOOCs will only reinforce those with power and weaken those without it. Early evidence from MOOCs suggests huge falloff rates. After Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun’s very public defection from the MOOC church, he was lambasted for conducting a for-profit “experiment” at San Jose State without thought to whether completion rates might differ across racial and class lines.  I can’t help but wonder what would have happened to me if my first year at university was all MOOC.  Did Thrun and his colleagues consider the possibility that the issue might not have been a “difficult neighborhood without good access to computers” but lack of contact and identification with the faculty?

And let’s look more closely at those online games that Don Peck reports on in his Atlantic piece. As more recruiters use gaming data for hiring decisions, are they inadvertently ensuring a homogenous workforce?   Males rack up many more hours of practice at these kinds of games than females, a recent Sex Roles study demonstrates. Gaming is also associated with less time spent doing homework, i.e., working hard—the essential ingredient girls, minorities and immigrants (I know, I tick all 3) rely on to get ahead. I cannot imagine my parents saying “honey, put away those textbooks and work on your games or you’ll never get anywhere in life.”

And yet recruiters are taking this data seriously.  “How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems,” says one purveyor of workforce analytics, “all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality.”   Even after only twenty minutes of play, you will generate several megabytes of data that “compose a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.”

There’s more. The Sex Roles study’s co-author says another possible contributor to girls’ lack of interest in gaming is the scarcity of women working in the game-design industry. “88 percent of game developers are male,” Heeter says, adding that “games designed to optimally appeal to women might minimize in-game performance pressure, provide real-world benefits such as stress relief, brain exercise or more quality time with family and friends, and be playable in short chunks of time.”

Which leads to another question: What if “in-game performance pressure” triggers stereotype threat? Decades ago psychologist Claude Steele showed that women and African Americans underachieved academically, and on standardized tests, not due to incapacity but rather due to stereotype threat—the fear that they would be stereotyped and underestimated on the basis of their race and gender.  Steele also discovered that the dropout rate for African American students was much higher than for their white peers, even though they were good students and had received excellent SAT scores.  As forms of online learning and screening get more sophisticated, adding more elements of participation and linking more explicitly to career gatekeepers, will we be plugging leaks in the diversity pipeline—or adding more?

The beauty (and danger) of big data is that it’s not limited to the tests a person takes voluntarily as part of the hiring process—it can also scour our digital traces to find leading indicators correlated with on-the job performance. The vast number of data points that miners marshall afford them surgical precision in discerning which attributes correlate best with success in different jobs. For instance, it turns out that what browser an applicant uses to take the online test matters a lot, especially for technical roles, because using the most sophisticated browsers requires “a measure of savvy and initiative to download them.” Other predictors are so troubling that companies don’t use them despite their power. One start-up that applies people analytics to screen job applicants found that distance between home and work is strongly associated with employee engagement and retention. Another finds that the strongest coders tend to be fans of a particular Japanese manga site.  What is the difference between the pattern recognition afforded by big data, and profiling on the basis of gender, race or class?

Even the person who’s never ventured beyond Statistics 101 knows that correlation is not causation, a truism acknowledged by the creators of the algorithms. Google, for example, stopped using puzzles and brainteasers in hiring after finding they did not predict work performance and leadership capacity. And, in many cases, unmeasured factors cause both the predictor variable and the outcome it is aiming to predict. What if what browser you use or what you read for fun in your spare time depends in part on your social network? It is well-documented, for example, that innovations diffuse via social networks that are notoriously “homophilous,” i.e., that connect people who are similar on demographics like class, race, and gender.  Will algorithms based on our social interactions not only digitally recreate but exponentially empower the “old (white) boys club?”

Big data offers the promise of greater predictability, but that should not be confused with objectivity.  As a researcher myself, I offer a word of caution: Before we go whole hog on our embrace of this evidence-based revolution, shouldn’t we follow its tenets by actually conducting some studies about the diversity dynamics of this brave new world of talent management?

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




How to Use Psychometric Testing in Hiring
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
Why HR Needs to Stop Passing Over the Long-Term Unemployed
The Job Market for MBAs is About to Take a Hit

How to Get the Answer You Want

You have a meeting or an important discussion coming up.  What is your real objective?  If it has anything to do with selling, how can you maximize the likelihood of success?

And just to be clear, your objective almost certainly does have something to do with selling. As Daniel Pink argues in his latest book, To Sell is Human, we’re constantly trying to influence behavior — a.k.a. selling. We may not be selling cars, but we are likely on a daily basis to be pushing ideas (e.g., a pitch for a campaign or strategic project), telling about our capabilities and track-record (e.g., for a job), or projecting our values (e.g., in everyday leadership and mentorship).

Whether you are selling something soft or hard, you need to start by understanding two basic things:

The buck stops where? Think hard about who the real decision-maker or set of decision-makers is, and who the influencers are.  We rarely are in front of a sole decision-maker who can make the call then and there — the person that Bill Bain, founder of the strategic advisory firm Bain and Company, used to call the “M.A.N,” in that he or she has the Money, the Authority, and the Need (please forgive any gender bias for the benefit of the mnemonic).  Instead, we more often find ourselves in a situation where multiple people have input into the decision and we need help getting to all of them. In sales parlance, your key point of contact at an organization is often referred to as your “champion” — the influencer who will sell your cause on your behalf. Even if there is a M.A.N., she’ll usually still want to get the “buy-in” of other stakeholders. So know where the buck stops, and who can bring the buck there.
What approval or validating process is required for a definitive decision? This can be as formal as extended due diligence (in the case of a company seeking funding) or as informal but equally critical as a conversation around the dinner table that evening with a spouse or family (in the case of a job opportunity). Understanding who your champion will speak to next is essential.  Knowing which pitch points will resonate most with that audience (what I call the “next audience”) will dramatically increase the chances of a positive outcome.  Try to map the influencer graph of each next audience and understand where they’ll come into play in the process, their level of influence, and what message points matter most to them.

Once you have a good idea of the chain of “whos” that matter in the decision process, it is time to focus on the “what.”  This is the fun part, and it’s easier because it just involves giving the answer you want, and packaging it for that next audience.

Yes, it should be you who is packaging that answer.  Because you know what you bring to the table more than any champion or next audience could, you want to make sure that your key message points are described accurately and in the best light.  Unfortunately, what usually happens is a bit like the childhood game telephone — in which messages get muddled and often completely turned around as they are whispered from ear to ear.  To avoid this, help the person who will champion your cause. Give them what they need, and package it for them!

This might mean anything from simply summarizing the meeting points in a quick follow-up note that they can forward (see below) to helping them craft a more formal memo or presentation. Determine which form factor fits the situation best. For example, will they be writing an investment memorandum or will it be a conversation about a job over drinks or dinner?  For the investment memo, provide the structure for the memo and key bullet points. If you’re trying to recruit someone for a job, help them help themselves and their spouse with a one-page side-by-side comparison of the current position and its pros and cons versus the new position — with a compensation comparison included, of course.  It’ll show that you care and that you are serious about them as a prospect or candidate.  Not to mention that when you provide a framework or materials for that next audience, it speeds up the decision process.

It’s crucial to package the answer simply and powerfully. One best practice already mentioned is the incredibly simple but powerful tactic of following up a meeting with an email along the lines of, “I appreciated our time together and thought that the following summary might be helpful for you to share with others that you want to bring into your decision-making process.”  Just this one practice alone can measurably increase your close rate.

But most important in packaging the answer is to keep in mind that the best summaries are simple and memorable. When you can explain something in a simple and memorable fashion it means you have internalized it. This should be your litmus test. Have you reduced the message to its simplest essence and most memorable form?  Can you explain it without any reference to materials?

Take again Bill Bain’s mnemonic of trying to get to the M.A.N.  — the money, the authority, and the need.  This was a “packaging” of common sense that everyone knows, but few would or could put so simply and so memorably.  There is power in memorable frameworks, which is why taking accountability for structuring your communication for that next audience is so  important.  Don’t oversell, but focus on framing the top two to three points and then being clear about the specific “ask.”

Do all of this in the way a great teacher thinks about imparting knowledge — going beyond just communicating information to finding ways to do so that she’s sure her students will get and remember.

The Dangers of Codependent Mentoring

Even the most talented, charismatic, and self-sufficient people need the help and cooperation of other people if they are to realize their true potential. For this reason, mentoring others in the organization to achieve ever-higher levels of performance is something we should all subscribe to. It is to our mutual benefit to help each other and this urge to do so is both natural and laudable.

But some of us are motivated less by a desire to benefit others and contribute to the common good, and more by a deeper emotional need within ourselves. If you fall into this category, you may be a “rescuer,” a person whose need to help is a self-serving addiction and who is unable to differentiate between their own needs and those of the people they are purporting to help.

The problem with rescuers is that they tend to build unnecessary, unhealthy, and sometimes inappropriate dependency relationships with the people they want to help. At best you make for a very ineffective helper; at worst, you harm others by attempting to co-opt the people you should be helping, in an attempt to fulfill your own compulsions.

I remember working with a leadership coach who would regularly call the office of one of her clients to tell them that he was sick and would be unable.  In fact, her client was a chronic alcoholic who was prone to frequent bouts of heavy drinking that rendered him incapable for days at a stretch.  Her “help” was entirely counter-productive. By protecting her client’s self-destructive lifestyle she only perpetuated his alcoholism.

When I asked the coach why she did this she explained that her client had repeatedly told her that he couldn’t manage without her, and that he always felt much better after she took control for him. The coach also said that this man was one of her best clients—and it’s not difficult to understand why: his dependency on her made her feel empowered and created for her the illusion that she was actually helping him. The reality, of course, is that the coach was simply satisfying her need to be needed while the client sank deeper into his cycle of binge drinking.

In this kind of co-dependent relationship, both parties inevitably suffer. The person being helped receives no real beneficial help, while the rescuer becomes overburdened with the dependency of the other. Instead of generating the positive results they both aspire to, the co-dependent relationship between the two becomes a debilitating energy-drain for all concerned.

Sometimes, when ‘‘helping’’ becomes ‘‘rescuing,’’ the person being helped will react to the rescuer’s ministrations by backing away and making a pro-active attempt to resolve the issues they were struggling with on their own.  Although this is potentially a good outcome for the person being rescued, the rescuer will try to reassert her control in order to remain as instrumental in achieving success.

As the relationship between the two deteriorates, the subject of the rescue attempt becomes dispirited and confused at the rescuer’s persistent interference while the rescuer becomes increasingly frustrated with the standoffish behavior of the other. Eventually, the rescuer simply abandons the rescue attempt in search of another “victim.”  Although this is ultimately good news for the victim, the journey may be painful and his attempts to recover can be severely compromised.

But the rescuer is a victim too. People become rescuers because they have a need to be liked. Saying ‘‘no’’ to someone who has asked a favor is to let that person down and to court dislike. So when a rescuer sees a person in need, he or she will feel obliged to fulfill that person’s request however inconvenient, inappropriate or burdensome the task.

The result, of course, is that rescuers get overloaded with other people’s emotional baggage, which takes up time and drains energy. They become cynical, tired, and apathetic.  They lose their idealism and sense of purpose. Worse, they may even unconsciously contaminate the people they try to rescue with their own sense of failure and burnout.

How do you break this co-dependency?  Essentially, what’s needed on both sides is a dose of healthy selfishness.  The rescuer needs to stop thinking about the needs of others and focus more on their own dreams and aspirations.   So if you find yourself being emotionally and physically drained by a professional colleague you feel responsible for perhaps you should take a serious look at why you feel compelled to help that person.

By the same token, if you are a mentee or coachee and you find yourself turning more and more to a mentor or coach whose help seems to be increasingly essential then you might want to ask yourself if the mentor or coach isn’t part of your problem.  You should need less mentoring over time, not more.

Tackling the rescuer syndrome does not mean having to give up helping or mentoring other people. The urge to help others is a force for good, so long as it does not involve destructive co-dependency. Constructive mentors and coaches solve their own problems first and recognize that their role is to encourage others to make difficult decisions for themselves.

Getting People to Publicly Support a Cause Can Be Counterproductive

Nonprofits hope that getting people to publicly support a cause will plant the seed for deeper commitment later on, but research shows that inducing a private gesture of support can be much more effective. For example, in an experiment in a public space, people who accepted a free poppy “to wear right now” in support of war veterans subsequently contributed 60% less money to a veterans’ fund than those who had accepted a poppy simply “to take with you,” says a team led by Kirk Kristofferson, a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia. A public display of support often satisfies people’s need to present themselves in a positive light, and they subsequently lose interest in the cause.

Big Data Demands Big Context

When Microsoft built Windows 8, its goal was to move beyond operating-system conventions that were based on outdated user-behavior assumptions and create an OS for the way people really use computers today.

Microsoft’s engineers discovered that people were doing less of the time-consuming writing and creating that had once been the norm. Increasingly, users were socializing for short bursts.

The research also showed that people loved having “touch” functionality and were avidly consuming small pieces of live information.

Consequently, Microsoft decided that Windows 8 should feature navigation that enabled multitasking and quick interactions, and that it should also have touch and live tiles.

None of this was wrong. And yet these decisions, so carefully researched and thought through, all contributed to the failure of Windows 8.

How does this happen? When we entered the age of big data, many of us assumed we had left the age of big risk. We didn’t have to guess anymore. We didn’t have to go out on a limb. We’d follow the numbers, the “truths.”

But time and time again we’re finding that it’s not that simple. No matter how good the research is, big data is nothing without big context.

To keep context in mind, there are a few questions I ask myself while designing research, analyzing data, or, most important, making decisions.

What underlying assumptions am I making?

In Windows 8, I think Microsoft’s engineers made a fundamental assumption that led them astray: that users want one interface for all machines, one machine for every part of their lives. The research went into what this single interface should be. Not whether it should be.

What if users don’t want just one device? What if they’re embracing and owning many specialized devices?

It’s easy to get into a bubble and focus our thinking too quickly. So whenever I approach data, I first ask myself what assumptions I’m making.

What emotions will be at play?

When asked what they want in the hypothetical, people answer rationally. They make “good” decisions. They pick cheaper, faster computers that are less attractive. Or they say that they’d try an exciting new platform without considering the frustration of a learning curve.

But what people say and what they do are two very different animals. Which of us hasn’t been seduced into a less-savvy purchase because of a shiny case?

When designing research, I try to probe for the emotional drivers as well as the rational drivers. I want to know if consumers see a product as a utility or a luxury. Do they identify with a store or brand as part of their persona? Do they see it as a friend? I can use these answers to temper and check the purely rational responses.

 How can I better learn about context?

Yes, people are using touch daily on smart phones and tablets. It’s intuitive. Just look at YouTube videos of babies trying to “swipe” pages in physical magazines.

But when Microsoft put touch at the forefront of its operating system for PCs, consumers didn’t bite, partly because touch computers were more expensive than non-touch. But the bigger problem was that although touch is great for the social interactions and brief browsing that people do on smart phones and tablets, users are relegating PCs to work and productivity, and in that context, they don’t see the value of touch.

Microsoft had the right information. But it was missing the larger contextual picture.

The details are easy to measure. They give you clear-cut data and answers. Context is harder—it gets mushy. The methodologies are more complex and the results are open to interpretation.

Most disconcerting of all, data about context won’t give you an answer; it will only help inform your answer. Compounding that, contextual data can seem superfluous, so fighting for the money to research it can be hard, and selling ideas based on it even harder.

But we take a bigger risk when we ignore the context.

Microsoft’s research points to an increasingly diverse device landscape, with each device being used for specific and differentiated uses and behaviors. Probably the ultimate PC OS leans into PC behaviors, letting the smart phones and tablets specialize and optimizing the user’s journey between devices.

But the real lesson is that we always need to consider context. Otherwise, we too can have all the right answers to all the wrong questions.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




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Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely
How is Big Data Transforming Your 80/20 Analytics?

Publishers, Stop Crying Over Spilled Ink

I’m waiting for all the headlines about what a great time it is to be in the media business. After all, in a single minute, viewers on YouTube watch 100 hours of video — a 233% increase since last year. The number of devices people use to “consume content” — the anodyne catchall term we use to describe reading, watching, and listening — is also surging: a report by Cisco suggested that by the end of this year, the world would contain more mobile devices than people, devices that are increasingly used to find and share information and less used to make actual phone calls to loved ones. Speaking of which, we love content so much that we now spend more time looking at our phones than at our partners. Overall, our time spent taking in information is on the rise. In 2010, the average American spent 10 hours and 46 minutes a day consuming content; by 2013, that number had risen to 12 hours and 5 minutes.

And yet most coverage of the media industry is elegiac — a lament for the days of print. So even when the news is good, the headlines are bad.

Take the recent column by David Carr in the New York Times on New York magazine, a perfect example of a needlessly dismayed reaction to an industry in transition. In it, you learn:

That New York is changing from 42 issues a year to 29 issues a year.
That no layoffs are planned
That 15 new people will be hired on the digital side
That nymag.com grew its traffic 19 percent in the last 8 months
That The Cut, nymag.com’s successful fashion vertical, will be integrated into the revamped magazine
That digital revenues have been growing 15% year over year, and will surpass print ad revenue in 2014
That print revenues have declined, with the magazine 9.2% down in ad pages since last year
That the website gets 9 million unique visitors per month while the print magazine has a circulation of 400,000
That it was named “Magazine of the Year” in 2013 by the American Society of Magazine Editors.

Faced with this information, a commentary I’d have written might have started thus:

New York magazine is continuing its successful ride. Online ad sales are growing at a double-digit pace, the digital side is hiring 15 new people, and its online spinoff, The Cut, has become so popular it will be integrated into a revamped print magazine launching in March. The retooled print offering will have 13 fewer issues a year, but despite this decrease in frequency, no layoffs are planned. The magazine won the prestigious ASME “Magazine of the Year” award in 2013–sometimes called the “Best Picture” award for magazines, in a nod to the Oscars.

In comparison, here is how Carr started his piece:

Since its founding in 1968, New York magazine has served as a prototype of literate, high-tempo publishing, using its weekly cadence and location in one of the world’s cultural capitals to usher in a new, more intimate and frank approach to what a publication could be.

….Now, this magazine that has been at the vanguard of Manhattan publishing for almost five decades is acknowledging that the cutting edge is not necessarily a lucrative, or sustainable proposition, at least on the same schedule.

I would venture to suggest that perhaps the cutting edge is now online, where New York’s website rules more than just the eponymous city.

But instead, Carr treats the story as if print’s primacy over digital is a mathematical truth, such that when print<digital, the result = bad. Using words like  “dreary” and “lost,” Carr laments New York‘s “retreat” as “the end of an era,” confessing to “misty” eyes before recapping the struggles of Newsweek, a magazine that resembles New York only in the way that the Hindenburg looks kind of like the Goodyear blimp. Same shape, very different stuff inside.

I was reminded of how last year, Encyclopaedia Britannica received similarly negative press for announcing the end of their print encyclopedias. But those faux-leather volumes were just 1% of their business by the time they killed the product. As Jorge Cauz, Britannica’s president, wrote in HBR, “Commentators intimated that we had ‘yielded’ to the internet. In fact, the internet enabled us to reinvent ourselves and open new channels of business.” Similarly, it sounds like New York is now in a position to divest from a declining business and invest in a new growth engine. All businesses should be so lucky.

There is a problem, of course, in the media landscape, but it’s not with reader habits — where so much of the sturm und drang of industry commentary often focuses. It’s with advertiser habits. In the past, publishers charged dollars for print — today they have so far only charged dimes for digital. This does not make sense to me: It’s the same brand. It’s the same content. It’s more convenient delivery and more customizable, too. And now advertisers can also track how effective their creative is! With all of these improvements, a digital ad should actually be worth more to an advertiser than a print ad. After all, ad men in Don Draper’s day never knew how many people skipped over their zingy slogans and catchy fonts; today, technology makes it obvious. But rather than blaming their bad ads, they blame the technology and ask for a discount. That is a challenge for publishers, but let’s be clear: the challenge is not fickle consumers,  the latest mobile game, or that “kids today don’t read.” (They do.) The challenge is finding new business strategies that make money off of our ever-less satiable appetite for content.

Publishing today is a thriving, dynamic industry — one that is changing rapidly. As in many rapidly changing industries, the right business moves are not obvious. But the move to digital should not automatically be greeted as bad news. In fact, it’s often good news — it means the business is adapting.

So media critics should leave their sad trombones at home. Consumers not spending less time on media. If anything, we’re in danger of becoming giant brains with only eyeballs and thumbs and tiny vestigial legs no longer strong enough to hoist our forgotten bodies off the couch. That is bad news for our waistlines, but very good news for publishers.