Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1497

Mitigating the Risks of Social Login

Should we let our users create accounts entirely through Facebook?

That’s the question our team asked last week, and it’s a question more and more businesses are facing. Ever since Facebook introduced Facebook Connect in 2008, websites have had the option of allowing users to create and log into their accounts using only their Facebook IDs, rather than a username and password specific to that particular site. While the appeal of the program is clear, however, some businesses have been rightfully wary of participating.

For users and customers, the ability to log into a site using Facebook Connect means — they have one less password to remember — and a much faster path to signing up for and using your site in the first place.  For businesses, the ability to offer that fast path is enormously compelling, which is why so many sites do use Facebook Connect, often alongside other login options provided by Twitter, Google, and others.

These third party login tools promise more traffic, more subscribers, more members, more customers and more sales — and those promises have come true: as some have noted, up to 80% of web users choose Facebook Connect or another social authentication option when it’s available (as opposed to signing up for a site with their email address), and Facebook itself has claimed that social authentication increases registration by 30-200%. While some have questioned whether these numbers are the product of social login itself (email marketing powerhouse MailChimp concluded that the real benefit came from better handling of login failures, and abandoned social login), the case for social login remains compelling.

But is that promise worth the price of losing direct access to your customers’ contact information and profiling information — or for that matter, direct access to customers themselves?

In our company’s business — running online customer insight communities for companies around the world — smoothing the sign-up path is hugely valuable. Vision Critical’s clients run communities ranging from a few thousand customers to tens of thousands; the easier we make it for customers to sign up for a community, the sooner they can start providing their feedback on products, services or ad campaigns. If Facebook Connect makes it faster for people to join a community, we found ourselves asking, do we really care whether we know their email address, or whether we only know their identity through Facebook?

The question was still hanging in the air when I turned to my computer on Thursday to quickly check one aspect of the Facebook login experience. But when I pointed my browser to Facebook, instead of my familiar news feed, I saw this message: “For security reasons your account is temporarily locked.”

It turned out there was no quick fix for this issue, as it would need to reviewed individually by Facebook. Since this transpired on Thanksgiving Day (a workday for our Canadian office), I reconciled myself to a multi-day wait.

What’s important to note for businesses that provide a social login option, however, is that I was not alone: enough Facebook users have been locked out to earn media attention, in what Facebook ultimately described to me as a mistake. These lockouts affect these individual users’ experience with (or without!) Facebook, but because of Facebook Connect there is also a much larger impact.

When I got an email the next day notifying me of a Black Friday sale on one of my favorite shopping sites, I clicked the link to log in — only to realize that my account for that site was set up through my Facebook ID. The same was true of many of the sites I would normally visit on my Black Friday rounds: from Fab to Fancy, from TravelZoo to Living Social. My Facebook ID was the gatekeeper to my shopping experience, and for this critical sale day, the gates were locked (unless I wanted to create a new set of accounts, and re-enter my address and other details on each and every site).

My experience highlighted the risk to those sites of using Facebook Connect, or for that matter, any third-party authentication service. Every customer or user that you as a business gain through this expedited path is a customer you can lose — or lose access to — just as quickly. Facebook’s recent spate of account lockouts is a perfect example of how third party authentication puts your subscriber or customer base at risk. As designer James Reffell points out in his excellent deck on Authentication Design Best Practices, “The more 3rd party services you use for critical infrastructure, the more you’re at their mercy….Facebook has amazing uptime, probably better than yours, but if you’re relying on them to handle your authentication, you now have theirs plus yours. And there’s nothing you can do.”

Unfortunately, forgoing social authentication is not the answer either, as its usefulness has proven. But as websites implement such authentication, they need to include risk mitigation in the game plan, as this weekend’s lockout reminded me. If you let a third party provider hold a customer’s only key to your website, that provider’s tech failures, security protocols or business challenges become your failures, protocols and challenges.

Getting each and every customer’s email address, even if it’s alongside a social login, is the best way to ensure that you can still reach your customer (or vice versa) even if social authentication fails you in some way: you simply need to prompt users for a email address once they have connected via their social network of choice.

Missing a few days’ worth of my family photos and stream-of-consciousness updates may not be a big deal to Facebook itself, but for many businesses, arbitrarily cutting off customer accounts in the days before Black Friday and Cyber Monday represents a risk to the biggest revenue-generating weekend of the year. Do you want to leave that decision up to Facebook?

The Five Superpowers of Marketing

Customers are more connected and empowered than ever before. If you want to win their hearts and minds, you have to master the latest technology, assimilate vast quantities of data, engage and delight your customers, and deliver products and services that surpass expectations.  Plus you have to attract the best talent to your own organization and align your team around a shared purpose.

It would seem a nearly impossible feat.  And yet today’s top marketers are combining technology and teamwork to generate extraordinary results.

As part of an awards program that one of us (Cara) created and the other (Mark) helped judge, we had the opportunity to talk with dozens of chief marketing officers (CMOs) in Silicon Valley about the qualities that define extraordinary marketing.  Their insights and experience suggest five marketing capabilities that in their most refined form border on superpowers.

1. To hear what no one else can hear.

Extraordinary marketers are amazing listeners.  The digital revolution has given everyone a voice and made everyone their own channel.  Marketers accustomed to doing the talking are adjusting to doing the listening.  The very top marketers are using technology and teamwork to listen at a scale that was unimaginable just a few years ago.

SAP, a leading maker of enterprise software, gets tens of thousands of requests every year for new product features. “Like most large companies, the product teams would usually base decisions on market opportunity or which customer spent the most, but that doesn’t maximize value for our customer base or for us,” says Jonathan Becher, SAP’s CMO. Instead, he and his team envisioned an entirely new process for prioritizing product enhancements based on customer collaboration and “the power of the crowd.”  Jonathan’s team created Idea Place, where SAP’s community of over two million visitors per month can vote, rate, and rank suggested changes.  The top ideas are shared with SAP’s product teams and partners.  This listening engine has generated over 10,000 requests and led to over 600 product improvements.  In addition, the openness and transparency has improved both customer engagement and satisfaction.

2. To be part of the conversation, even when you’re not in the room. 

Thanks to social media, the number of conversations taking place about products and companies has exploded exponentially.  Today’s tweet can easily be tomorrow’s headline.  As a brand, how do you participate in thousands, or even millions, of conversations?  Today’s top marketers have conversational skills that enable them to be part of the conversation even when they aren’t there.  Like hosts of a great dinner party, they don’t spend time talking about themselves.  Instead, they create the environment, make connections, and spark conversations that get everyone else talking.

Caroline Donahue, CMO of Intuit, knows how to get people talking.  Her team launched Intuit’s Small Business Big Game, which gives away a Super Bowl commercial to a small business.  The program is not a sweepstakes, but a social platform for engaging and empowering thousands of small business owners to share their stories and vote for their peers.   As Caroline says, “The whole program is about putting small business at the center of the conversation.  The party is not about us.”  Small businesses seem to like the party.  The program has generated record levels of social engagement with over eight billion impressions, tens of thousands of stories, and 1,500 social mentions every day.  These numbers are likely to go even higher as viewers enhance their television experience with Twitter and other social media.

3. To leap tall piles of data in a single bound.

Digital devices generate a lot of data.  Billions of clicks, carts, posts, pins, likes, tweets, stars, and snaps every day.  Spreadsheets and reports simply aren’t up to handling this mountain of information.  It takes superpower intelligence to find meaningful insights, make split-second decisions, and create truly relevant experiences.

At Williams-Sonoma, CMO Pat Connolly is using data to fulfill the true potential of omni-channel retail.  Like many other companies, the team’s first step was to make the data accessible, combining disparate sources into a single data warehouse available through the cloud.   Next came a step that cause many companies to struggle:  making the data meaningful, with algorithms and data models that see patterns and make recommendations in real-time.  Where Williams-Sonoma leaves most others behind is in making the data actionable, improving both financial returns and customer experiences.

As an example, many companies send out promotional emails that vary slightly based on demographic characteristics.  In contrast, Williams-Sonoma has a substantial personalized email program based on where customers are in the decision process.  Furthermore, each email is personalized with imagery drawn from an immense library of lifestyle images.    According to Pat, “these are hands-down the most productive emails that we send with open rates consistently above 50% and 2.5 times the average return of our regular emails.”

4. To make silos disappear. 

Every company has silos.  On the executive team you have marketing, sales, technology, and service.  Within marketing, you have brand, communications, advertising, and digital.  Retailers have stores, call centers, and e-commerce.  Some marketers work on building bridges between these silos, but that still leaves them standing.  Some use bulldozers and battering rams, but that can create resentment and rubble.  Exceptional marketers make the silos disappear.  They create a vision for an exceptional customer experience and connect everyone in the organization to the delivery of that seamless experience.

At Sephora, CMO Julie Bornstein has reimagined the customer experience in a way that transcends traditional silos.  Marketing, IT, store operations, and loyalty programs are all connected.   “Our customer is in a store, then she’s reading a magazine, then she’s online.  We can’t think the traditional way by channel. Instead, the experience must be seamless.”  Sephora customers can access past orders, create shopping lists, save offers, and view rewards on any device and in any channel.  This requires “the whole team to think client-centric and 360 degrees instead of ‘I work on this’.”  The results are impressive.  Over 20 million customers are part of Sephora’s loyalty program, driving over 80% of both online and store purchases.

5.  To bring out the superpowers in others.

It’s no coincidence that the highest grossing action movie of all time is The Avengers, which brought together four superheroes as a single team.  Today’s top marketers recognize the importance of building great teams and cultivate a superpower of bringing out the superpowers in others.

Antonio Lucio, CBO of Visa, creates superpower teams by combining the best of the old and the new. According to Antonio, “the way to ‘create magic’ is by combining the experience and perspective of traditional brand builders with the energy and innovation of digital natives.”  The combination led to a groundbreaking program for the 2012 London Olympics that leveraged both traditional and digital media to connect fans directly with their favorite athletes.  The result was the most successful campaign in Visa’s 26 years of Olympic sponsorship.

To keep up with an increasingly connected and empowered consumer, today’s marketers need to acquire new superpowers.  To hear what no one else can hear.  To be part of the conversation even when you’re not in the room.  To leap tall piles of data in a single bound.  To make silos disappear.  To bring out the superpowers in others.  The secret is not doing it yourself.  Technology and teamwork — with your customers, staff, CEO, peers, and partners  – will give you the superpowers you need to create extraordinary results.  What’s your superpower story?

How a Bathtub-Shaped Graph Helped a Company Avoid Disaster

Caught up in administrative activities such as managing employee records and planning company picnics, human resources departments can too easily lose sight of their primary function: Making sure the organization has the needed human capital to implement its strategy.

Not even the best company picnic in the world, with a zip line and gourmet hot dogs, can compensative for an HR department’s failure to help the company put people with the right skills into the right jobs at the right time.

But successfully managing human capital requires quantitative and analytic skills that tend to be scarce among HR professionals, especially those who continue to see themselves as essentially administrative rather than as strategic partners. Today, HR managers need to be attuned to the value of data and need to know how to use it to help them fulfill their obligations to their companies.

We’re not talking about Big Data. We’re talking about small data—ordinary, prosaic data of the type companies have been accumulating for years and that is increasingly accessible, both internally and from external sources. Nor are we talking about the typical human-resources metrics, which evaluate how efficiently the HR department is performing its administrative tasks. We’re talking about data that can show what lies ahead for the company and inform workforce planning.

Consider, for example, the bathtub.

A few years ago, a global tech company had recently been cutting costs and so wasn’t disposed to do a lot of hiring, but an analysis of its data showed that it was heading for trouble. The key numbers included the ages, experience, and skills of its engineers, as well as employees’ expected departure dates as they retired or left for other reasons.

One of the results was a visualization that showed the number of engineers as a function of years of service. It was U-shaped. It looked like a cross-section of a bathtub. It signified that there were lots of newbies and lots of highly skilled employees with a good deal of experience behind them—and not too many in between. In addition, attrition in the early-career professional ranks was significantly higher than that for longer-service employees.

The graph, and other data, pointed out a serious problem that the company hadn’t been aware of: It had a dire need to recruit more engineers to meet both existing and future commitments to customers.

The company then looked at external data, such as the overall decline in the number of engineering graduates and the 10-year projected shortfall of engineers in the workforce, and saw that it was facing a significant problem. As a result, the company stepped up its recruitment, and ended up hiring about 10,000 engineers per year.

Other types of data have similar strategic value. Evaluating turnover by unit or job function, for example, not only contributes to an understanding of what your future staffing needs will be, it also can alert you to problems: Is there a managerial issue? A compensation issue? More fundamentally, will the company be able to compete in 10 years?

And speaking of compensation, the proliferation of wage data today makes it possible for companies—and workers—to compare wages across employers. When salary information was harder to come by, companies mainly focused on the internal labor market—are employees who have the same experience and are doing similar jobs being paid similar wages? Now there’s more focus on how companies’ salary structures stack up against competitors’. The strategic value of this data relates to the company’s positioning: Does it want to lead the market by offering better wages, or does it want to match the market? If there’s a scarcity of candidates, the company might be better off trying to lead the market.

HR is no longer limited to being transaction-oriented, as it once was. It certainly isn’t the “dark bureaucratic force that blindly enforces nonsensical rules, resists creativity, and impedes constructive change.” But in many companies, it hasn’t yet fulfilled its vast potential as a key driver of business performance. Part of the reason is that many HR professionals aren’t well trained to understand the value of the data that their function generates or to know which metrics and forms of data analysis should be used in support of the business’s strategy. Hidden in those numbers are insights such as whether the labor force’s skills match the company’s strategic plans, whether employee-development plans are effective, and whether virtual teams are really working. (For guidance in selecting and applying HR metrics, see this article.)

It’s only by mining those insights that HR can be sure its efforts at workforce planning, recruiting, selection, placement, training and development, compensation, and other core human-resource functions are helping the company move in the right direction.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




You’ve Got the Information, But What Does It Mean? Welcome to “From Data to Action”
How is Big Data Transforming Your 80/20 Analytics?
To Understand Consumer Data, Think Like an Anthropologist
To Avoid the Customer Recency Trap, Listen to the Data

On a Terrible Team? Maybe You’re Making It Worse

I was working away at my desk when the phone rang. It was the CEO of a small financial organization. He was looking for help with what he referred to as his “toxic” executive team.  I told him about our Team Inoculation program, which we affectionately call “the flu shot for teams.”

“Do you have a rabies shot?” he replied.

Wow, I thought, could it really be that bad? I imagined a room full of executives frothing at the mouth.

It wasn’t quite that bad, but it was pretty horrible.  Members of the team had stopped trusting each other and essentially stopped communicating. The organization used to be listed as one of the nation’s best employers but now engagement had plummeted. Business wasn’t going well, either. Thanks to internal squabbles, the team couldn’t deliver the tools the sales force needed to keep up with the increasingly tough competition. Sales had been falling for three years. There was no time to waste in getting this team back to health.

When we started, everyone was focused on their grievances. They felt wronged, and they wanted to see public trials for the offending teammates. The alleged crimes varied. Some had publicly accused their teammates of not knowing how to do their jobs. One Vice President had instructed her direct reports to ignore instructions from her executive peer. Another refused to share an important document with a colleague because she didn’t trust her with the sensitive material. Even the CEO was in the action, asking the Board to let him terminate the CFO without addressing the issues directly with him.

It was our third session with them before things started to improve. One member of the team, the CFO, realized that he was contributing to the problem.  He raised his hand and said, “I have to take ownership of my part in this.  I realize I’m grabbing the reins and not leaving you room to prove to me you’re capable. For my part, I promise to give you more room to do your jobs.”  It was a big moment.  They had entered the room expecting that they would have a rockem-sockem no-holds-barred battle and here was the bully CFO short-circuiting it all with a heartfelt admission that he was a part of the problem.

And instead of piling on the CFO — “You’re right, you were a jerk!” — the next person to speak quickly took on her share of the responsibility for what had gone wrong. It was the VP HR; one of the people who had been most affected by the CFO’s lack of confidence.  She replied. “I was hurt when you didn’t trust me to do that work, but I shouldn’t have responded by shutting you out.  I’m sorry.”  By this point, the tide was unstoppable.  One team member after another stepped up and took ownership for what they needed to change.

When things on teams go wrong, most people spend their time blaming everyone else for their predicament.  They have plenty of ideas for how their (vilified) bosses and teammates can shape up. Seldom do I talk to a person who includes their own actions – or inactions — in the story of their team’s dysfunction. Instead, they wait for someone else to change their team.  If you’re waiting for someone else to change your team, you’re waiting in vain.

You have to take accountability for the effectiveness of your team.

Start admitting that you are part of the problem. Few people are aware and honest enough to see the role they play in the dynamic of the team.  Instead, they focus on the aggressive behavior of a teammate or the disorganized antics of a lackluster leader.  Like any relationship, a bad team dynamic is never the result of only one person’s behavior. Think about how the things you have said and done have affected your team. Even if you have just sat silently as one teammate has berated another, you have contributed to the current state of your team.

But you can also be part of the solution. Everyone has an opportunity to change the dynamic of an unhealthy team.  Figure out what role you’ve been playing and change accordingly:

The wicked: Some team members actively destroy the team dynamic.  Their tactics can be overt; such as yelling, belittling, or interrupting.  They can also be covert; such as gossiping, negotiating through back channels, or just ignoring someone.  If you’re honest with yourself, have you been damaging your team?  There is hope. With greater self-awareness and some coaching, you can change.  In my experience, the wicked team member is actually the easiest to convert. Usually this is because the wicked ones are smart and want to have an impact.  If you give them a way to make a more significant and positive contribution, they are willing and able to make the shift.

The wronged: When one finds a wicked team member, the wounded are always close at hand.  You can identify the wronged by their woe-is-me attitude and their inability or unwillingness to stand up for themselves.  At some point, the frustration tends to boil over and the victim goes on the attack. Are you wallowing? Have you let someone on the team marginalize you?  Do you veer between being a doormat and aggressively asserting yourself? It’s time to change how you show up.  You might be surprised to learn that, in my experience, it’s more likely to be the wronged who is voted off the island than the wicked.  That is because the wronged often lack the energy and resilience to make another earnest attempt at making the team better.  They are exhausted by the experience and often past the point of no return.

The witnesses: Not everyone on a dysfunctional team will be participating actively.  While cutting and insensitive remarks are lobbed across the table, some watch, just waiting for things to simmer down.  The witnesses are the first to throw up their hands and say that life on the dysfunctional team is unbearable.  Unfortunately, commiserating does nothing to change the course of things, and their disengagement costs the team, too. Are you just watching as your team goes down the tubes?  Get in the game.

Imagine a team where any one of these characters decided to change for the better, as the CFO in the small financial organization did.  The wicked one repents; the wronged gets it right; the witnesses raise their hands and their voices. That team will immediately be different. Any one person can change a team. What will you do today to change your team for the better?

If You’re in Over Your Head at Work, Try an S.O.S.

“I’m in over my head.” How often this thought has crossed my mind.

If you’re ambitious, this will happen to you a lot.  It has with me: in every single job.

You reach a plateau.  You are no longer enjoying the feel-good effects of learning so you jump from one learning curve to the next.  And at first, your progress is slow: everything’s coming at you way too fast.  What was I thinking? you wonder.   Say hello to risk-taker’s remorse.

In most instances, if you give yourself six months, which the 10,000-hr rule suggests you need, you should find yourself happily afloat.

But what if you really are in over your head?  Really.

Maybe your ego cashed a check your skills couldn’t cover; or you looked the part, so you got the promotion.  Perhaps the problem you were hired to fix is much bigger than anticipated, or you’ve jumped into what you thought was a fresh-water lake only to discover you are swimming with sharks.

Before you drown, send out an SOS:  stop, organize, secure.  Regardless of how you got here, do not make it worse by acting without thinking and moving uncontrollably, such as sending out e-mails you haven’t slept on or vetted thoroughly.  As uncomfortable as it may feel, don’t just do something — stand there. When you stop, you conserve emotional and physical reserves and preserve your political capital.  Next, organize, assessing the situation and appraising what you need to do to regain your buoyancy. How far are you from the shore? How deep is the water? How close is that thunderstorm? Do you need swimming lessons, or a lifeguard?

As for securing what you need to succeed, in the best of situations, you’ll be able to ask for and get the help you need.  When I started in equity research, I didn’t know how to craft a persuasive investment thesis or build a financial model.  In retrospect, I was flailing (working all the time even when I wasn’t working, for example) but there were lifeguards on duty – in a supportive boss, colleagues that were ceaselessly helpful, and salespeople who were confident that I would be a rock star analyst. They threw me a lifeline every single day, and I eventually figured it out.  Provided you have a team that wants you to succeed, it will take hard work but you can keep your head above water.

Even in a less trusting work environment, help from the right people and the right places can make a difference. This is what happened to me at one bank where I worked as an analyst – my skills were there, but I had colleagues who for their own reasons did not want me to succeed.   The combination of an internal sponsor and an external coach made all the difference.

But there will be times when you won’t know how deep or choppy, or shark-infested the water is.  No matter how good a swimmer you are, when the sharks are circling, you are dead meat. Sometimes then, the only way not to drown is to get out of the water.  I’ve had that a time or two in my career – we all have. It’s just part of an ambitious career.

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, if you aren’t in over your head, you can’t know how tall you are. The best will dive where no one is swimming — or wants to swim. Swimming in unexplored waters means you will sometimes get in over your head. Like I am right now with the D^4 conference I’m planning for 2014.  I announced it before I even had a venue. I haven’t ever put on a conference of this magnitude before.  Which has left me gasping and   thrashing.  Fortunately, I’ve swum a lot of laps, and I’ve got the one essential safety device for explorers in deep water: the life jacket of a network, whom I will humbly ask for help.

Living an ambitious life means being perpetually in over your head. You’ll be fine as long as you keep your S.O.S. at the ready.

The Human Brain Is Too Weak for Gossip

William Shakespeare, speaking through one of his characters in The Comedy of Errors, articulated a very important psychological insight: “Ill deeds are doubled with an evil word.” Words act as multipliers — they’re powerful. And if the Bard had wanted to give management advice, he’d certainly have warned us about the pernicious impacts of gossip in the workplace.

Gossip is evaluative talk among familiars about a third party who is not present. Surely it is a bit of stretch to characterize gossip as “evil.” Yet a number of the world’s most prominent religions and philosophies explicitly have dissuaded their adherents from engaging in the activity — sometimes even characterizing it as sinful. In Leviticus, one finds, “Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people.”

Similar remarks are found the Koran. Confucius, in The Analects, is reported to have said, “To engage in gossip and spreading of rumors is to abandon virtue.” The same sentiment appears in the writings of ancient Stoic philosophers and in modern-day self-help books. The thought is everywhere — and for good reason.

The old philosophers and sages understood instinctively what contemporary psychology is more formally demonstrating:  our beliefs are not always established and maintained in the most rational ways.   To begin with, when we encounter new information, there is good evidence that our mind’s default mode is first to assume it is true.   Only when the receiver has sufficient motivation and time to reflect on the information, will it potentially be tagged in the memory as false.  Until then it’s stored as if it were true. With gossip, that’s clearly dangerous.

Gossip becomes even more worrisome when one starts to appreciate other ways in which our mind is fallible. For instance, we sometimes mistake the source of our memories and the context in which they were encoded.

I recently told a class about my vivid recollection of the day the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded. I vividly remember my elementary school gym teacher gently breaking the news to my fellow six-year-old classmates and me. After I recounted this story, one student commented that I looked rather old for my age. It turns out that the Challenger exploded in 1986 when I was twelve years old and in middle school. (It took a bit of Googling to convince me that my memory was mistaken.) You could just as easily “remember” something you overheard from the office’s arch-gossiper as coming from a truly credible source.

The multiplying effect of gossip gets more troubling when beliefs formed through it shape subsequent perceptions. Our minds attend selectively to information that supports already existing beliefs, and to discount information that goes against our beliefs. That phenomenon — confirmation bias — has been documented in countless psychological studies. (Mind you, anyone who’s witnessed discussions around contentious political issues — e.g., gun control or Obamacare — should have more than enough data to conclude that people selectively choose their “facts.”) By implanting beliefs, therefore, gossip can dangerously shape subsequent perceptions.

Gossip may provide momentary entertainment to some people. That part is clear. What is less apparent to them, I suspect, is that it also can alter their minds and hence their realities. Gossip can blow up start-ups and corrode morale in large companies. It is, as Shakespeare might say, a most calamitous evil.

Factory Workers Are More Productive When Managers Can’t See Them

In a factory where mobile data cards were being made, hanging a curtain to conceal workers from managers’ view increased production by 10% to 15%, according to an experiment by Ethan S. Bernstein of Harvard Business School. The curtain prevented distractions and allowed workers to test productivity-boosting ideas before explaining them to managers. Managers need to consider not only their individual workers’ privacy on the job but also group privacy, Bernstein says.

Why China Loves the Internet

The size of the Chinese Internet is staggering. There are almost 600 million Internet users in China now, more than in any country in the world — next highest is the U.S, with 254 million. That’s just 44% of the Chinese population compared to 81% in the U.S., so this gap will continue to grow. For example, if every province in China achieves a 50% penetration rate, 135 million new Internet users will come online. 78.5% of Chinese users access the web from their mobile devices (compared to 63% in the U.S.), and many of the most popular services, like WeChat, exist only as a mobile application.

Chinese users are also more engaged than Americans are. Already in 2011 the Chinese spent more time on the Internet than watching TV, while in the U.S. this crossover is predicted to happen only this year. More than 75% of them regularly contribute content online, but only less than a quarter of Americans do. And users in China are probably going to spend more money on e-commerce in 2013 than Americans will. A recent online shopping holiday brought in more than $5.75 billion in one day, compared to last Cyber Monday’s $1.5 billion.

There are many reasons China outdoes the rest of the world in online use. The first set is related to what is happening in the offline world there:

Existing media are weak.  Because their media are censored, people in China turn to the Internet to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on in the country and see what other people think. Also, if you ask an average Chinese person about TV, you will often hear: “Oh, it’s really boring. There are so many channels, but often there is nothing to watch.”  So, they turn to the Internet for their entertainment.

People are on the move. In 1990 only a quarter of the Chinese population lived in cities. Today, half does. This means that over 300 million people moved far away from the people with whom they grew up, and the Internet is critical to reconnecting them with their roots. This will only continue. The Chinese government plans to move 250 million rural residents into newly constructed towns and cities by 2025.

Income inequality is growing.  China’s economy is growing really fast and so is inequality. For example, in 2013 there were 315 people in China who had more than a billion dollars, up from zero in 2003. Those who have grown wealthier than their peers in a short period of time want to establish relationships with others of similar economic stature, and to do that they often turn to the Internet.

Kids are lonely. The one-child policy has been around for over 30 years. Most kids grow up without siblings. They come home from school and the only people they see are their parents. They want to hang out with people their own age, so they are glued to the Internet.

And some adults are lonely too. Due to the one-child policy there are many more men than women in China, particularly in rural areas, so competition in the marriage markets is intense and some men have to work really hard to find a spouse. The Internet offers a great opportunity to do that.

Second, people in China are drawn to the Internet because they have so many choices of engaging sites and services. Even though they cannot access Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, many blogging services, and some Google services, they can access multiple Chinese equivalents. In the U.S. people pretty much only use Facebook to interact with friends, but in China they can choose between QQZone, WeChat, and Renren, to name a few. To interact with celebrities and strangers, Americans tend to go to Twitter. In China, people can choose to go to Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Alibaba Weibo — as well as a ton of little Weibos. The same goes for social gaming — Tencent, Netease, Sina Weibo, and others provide many social games for users to play. There are also many sites for which there’s no equivalent in the U.S. For example, there are sites such as 9158.com or yy.com where you go and sing for or with other people. Such sites provide much-needed entertainment and allow people to connect with others easily.

The third set of reasons why the Internet is so big in China is that it connects shoppers to businesses in unique ways:

You can find a large selection at low prices. In China, the five largest retailers account for only 10% of the total retail market, so most customers have to buy items in mom-and-pop stores. Since these do not offer great variety, or low prices, customers go on the Internet to get what they need.

Brands are weak. Some China specialists I interviewed in the country estimated that 330,000 new products are introduced every year in China. Most of them are unbranded, and most of them fail. Consumers don’t have enough information about these products, so those who can are turning to the Internet to discuss these products with others online. In fact, More than 40% of Chinese e-commerce shoppers first saw information about a product on a social media site before buying it.

TV advertising is expensive. Since the state has a monopoly on television — and on TV advertising rates — companies often complain that it is too expensive. The Internet often offers a more cost-effective advertising solution. Firms not only advertise online, but they also pay online opinion leaders to drive their product reviews.

Same-day delivery is common. E-commerce really works in China largely because in many of the 160 cities with populations over one million, you can get extremely cheap same-day delivery. Buying online is so much more fun when the item you ordered in the morning is already on your doorstep in the afternoon. This will only get better as some Chinese startups are gearing up to deliver products within 24 hours to any city in China within the next eight years.

We should expect the Chinese Internet to continue to draw vast numbers of additional users in, while finding many more ways to engage them more deeply. Chinese companies will accelerate this by constantly trying something new—often in partnership with each other. This is partly because engineering costs are low and partly because there is less of a fear of failure. If Chinese Internet companies introduce something and it does not work, they just scrap it and move on. I believe this approach will allow them to innovate far beyond what American companies like Facebook and Twitter are doing right now.

And if these trends do continue, it will not be long before we see broad adoption of Chinese Internet products in the U.S. and around the world, just as we saw with non-digital products in the past. With such innovation and variety, that can only be a good thing for consumers.

China’s Next Great Transition An HBR Insight Center




If You Want to Change the World, Partner with China
Ten Predictions for China’s Economy in 2014
How Chinese Companies Can Develop Global Brands
The Chinese Steamroller Is Already Sputtering

I Wasn’t Hiding From You, Boss. I Was Just Being Productive.

Oz Was Right?Hiding From Managers Can Increase Your Productivity HBS Working Knowledge

I'm sitting here, alone, in HBR's library, writing about how my decision to relocate from my open workspace is making me much more productive. It's not merely because it's quieter; research from Harvard Business School professor Ethan S. Bernstein suggests that employees can actually be more productive when they're outside the gaze of their managers — and that being outside this gaze can, in the end, make your company more transparent. In one study, Bernstein hired Chinese-born Harvard undergrads to embed themselves as workers on a Chinese manufacturing floor. When managers were around, the frontline staff did everything by the book. When they weren't, employees showed the Harvard students tricks they had developed to work faster, more easily, or more safely. Why didn't they show their bosses these shortcuts? They didn't want to rock the boat or take precious time away from doing the work in order to explain the work. "Everyone is happy," explained one worker. "Management sees what they want to see, and we meet our production quantity and quality targets."

In another study, "simply hanging a curtain increased production by 10 to 15 percent." And while Bernstein is careful to say that companies shouldn't just go around building walls, he does urge managers to note that "this race to full observability of everything can have unintended consequences."

Managing the End of PolioThe SurgeWired

Oh, you think you have a management challenge? This remarkable and inspiring article by Matthieu Aikins follows a group of World Health Organization workers who are on a quest to eradicate polio — a disease that afflicted 223 people last year, down from 350,000 cases in 1988. Sure, it may seem as though they're close to achieving their goal. But then there's the small issue of trying to vaccinate children in the region where Afghanistan meets Pakistan, an area that’s tightly controlled by the Taliban. While Taliban leaders in Afghanistan have been more amenable to the program, those in Pakistan have not — 22 people have died after attacks on the vaccination program. Aikins traces both the history of how diseases like smallpox were eradicated amid Cold War tensions and the unique issues facing vaccinators today, including the hurdles that a 25-year-old woman named Rana faces as she manages seven teams charged with vaccinating 13,962 children during National Immunization Days. 

Cats Squeezing into Tiny Boxes and … Javad Zarif?This is Bigger Than a Nuclear Deal The Atlantic

Uri Friedman looks at the nuclear deal with Iran and sees a new era in Iran-U.S. relations, a development made possible not just by diplomatic  negotiations, but by…YouTube? His argument is worth hearing out. Coming after decades of failed attempts at communication — including prank phone calls, snail mail, faxes (remember those?), and even a bizarre case in which a senior Iranian commander texted the Iraqi president and asked that the phone with the text message be handed to a senior member of the U.S. military – the disintermediating power of the internet has finally reached into the halls of power. Theoretically, governments already possessed the power to speak to their people. It was the first Roosevelt, after all, who called the U.S. presidency a bully pulpit. But today, when an Iranian leader can speak directly to the American people on YouTube, those international messages are less likely to get lost in translation. —Sarah Green 

Oh, This Is RichClinging to Outlook, Only 25% of Yahoo Employees Willing to Eat Mail "Dogfood"AllThingsD

Enjoy this leaked email from Yahoo that begs – nay, pleads with, in rollicking and at times painfully annoying language — employees to please finally switch from Outlook to a Yahoo mail product for job-related work. The urgency? The company asked workers to make the move earlier this year and a mere 25% did, a fact that doesn't bode well for the company and one of its signature products (email). After mocking Outlook — "it doesn't feel like we are asking you to abandon some glorious piece of communications nirvana" – execs Jeff Bonforte and Randy Roumillat offer Outlook defectors the promise of early access to features. "Feeling that little tingle? Take a deep breath, you can do this," the duo implores. Kara Swisher at AllThingsD finds the memo utterly delightful. Others declare it to be "rambling" and "one of the finest examples of interoffice literature ever leaked." Get ready, Katie Couric.

To Tweet During or After Twerking?What Pepsi Discovered by Monitoring Millennials During the VMAsAdWeek

Everyone knows there’s a big difference between someone who's 12 and someone who's 34, or even between an 18- and a 28-year-old. But for many marketing purposes, they all get lumped together as millennials, presumably more similar to one another than to Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. When Pepsi took a more-detailed look at millennials’ behavior during the recent MTV awards, though, it found a marked difference between the 18-to-26-year-old crowd and the 27-to-36-year-olds. The younger group shifted immediately from the TV to their smartphone screens during Miley Cyrus’s "twerk-tastic" duet, while their older counterparts just kept on watching, waiting until after the show to go on social media (perhaps suggesting that not all millennials make it a habit to carry their phones in their hands at all times, or maybe indicating something about how the romance of multitasking wanes with age).

Perhaps more important, Pepsi’s marketers discovered that the show’s appeal ebbed and flowed at different times for different groups, holding or failing to hold people’s attention in varying degrees. The lesson: It’s important to maintain a brand message throughout a show, rather than just in the traditionally more valuable (and pricier) beginning and end slots. —Andrea Ovans 

BONUS BITSBlack Friday, from the Archives

Crush Point (New Yorker)
I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave (Mother Jones)
Black Friday Is a Bunch of Meaningless Hype, in One Chart (Washington Post)

How to Start Thinking Like a Data Scientist

Slowly but steadily, data are forcing their way into every nook and cranny of every industry, company, and job. Managers who aren’t data savvy, who can’t conduct basic analyses, interpret more complex ones, and interact with data scientists are already at a disadvantage. Companies without a large and growing cadre of data-savvy managers are similarly disadvantaged.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or a Bayesian statistician to tease useful insights from data. This post explores an exercise I’ve used for 20 years to help those with an open mind (and a pencil, paper, and calculator) get started. One post won’t make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative.

While the exercise is very much a how-to, each step also illustrates an important concept in analytics — from understanding variation to visualization.

First, start with something that interests, even bothers, you at work, like consistently late-starting meetings. Whatever it is, form it up as a question and write it down: “Meetings always seem to start late. Is that really true?”

Next, think through the data that can help answer your question, and develop a plan for creating them. Write down all the relevant definitions and your protocol for collecting the data. For this particular example, you have to define when the meeting actually begins. Is it the time someone says, “Ok, let’s begin.”? Or the time the real business of the meeting starts? Does kibitzing count?

Now collect the data. It is critical that you trust the data. And, as you go, you’re almost certain to find gaps in data collection. You may find that even though a meeting has started, it starts anew when a more senior person joins in. Modify your definition and protocol as you go along.

Sooner than you think, you’ll be ready to start drawing some pictures. Good pictures make it easier for you to both understand the data and communicate main points to others. There are plenty of good tools to help, but I like to draw my first picture by hand. My go-to plot is a time-series plot, where the horizontal axis has the date and time and the vertical axis has the variable of interest. Thus, a point on the graph below (click for a larger image) is the date and time of a meeting versus the number of minutes late.

Now return to the question that you started with and develop summary statistics. Have you discovered an answer? In this case, “Over a two-week period, 10% of the meetings I attended started on time. And on average, they started 12 minutes late.”

But don’t stop there. Answer the “so what?” question. In this case, “If those two weeks are typical, I waste an hour a day. And that costs the company $X/year.”

Many analyses end because there is no “so what?” Certainly if 80% of meetings start within a few minutes of their scheduled start times, the answer to the original question is, “No, meetings start pretty much on time,” and there is no need to go further.

But this case demands more, as some analyses do. Get a feel for variation. Understanding variation leads to a better feel for the overall problem, deeper insights, and novel ideas for improvement. Note on the picture that 8–20 minutes late is typical. A few meetings start right on time, others nearly a full 30 minutes late. It might be better if one could judge, “I can get to meetings 10 minutes late, just in time for them to start,” but the variation is too great.

Now ask, “What else does the data reveal?” It strikes me that five meetings began exactly on time, while every other meeting began at least seven minutes late. In this case, bringing meeting notes to bear reveals that all five meetings were called by the Vice President of Finance. Evidently, she starts all her meetings on time.

So where do you go from here? Are there important next steps? This example illustrates a common dichotomy. On a personal level, results pass both the “interesting” and “important” test. Most of us would give anything to get back an hour a day. And you may not be able to make all meetings start on time, but if the VP can, you can certainly start the meetings you control promptly.

On the company level, results so far only pass the interesting test. You don’t know whether your results are typical, nor whether others can be as hard-nosed as the VP when it comes to starting meetings. But a deeper look is surely in order: Are your results consistent with others’ experiences in the company? Are some days worse than others? Which starts later: conference calls or face-to-face meetings? Is there a relationship between meeting start time and most senior attendee? Return to step one, pose the next group of questions, and repeat the process. Keep the focus narrow — two or three questions at most.

I hope you’ll have fun with this exercise. Many find a primal joy in data. Hooked once, hooked for life. But whether you experience that primal joy or not, do not take this exercise lightly. There are fewer and fewer places for the “data illiterate” and, in my humble opinion, no more excuses.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




You’ve Got the Information, But What Does It Mean? Welcome to “From Data to Action”
How is Big Data Transforming Your 80/20 Analytics?
To Understand Consumer Data, Think Like an Anthropologist
To Avoid the Customer Recency Trap, Listen to the Data