Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1499

Use the Office Holiday Party to Advance Your Career

Will there be an open bar? Do I have to go? Can I bring my significant other?

A few of the above questions may be dancing in your head when you receive the invite to your organization’s holiday party. These are reasonable questions — but if you want to use the events this month to advance your career, your primary question should be: How can I connect with the right people, in the right way?

For most people this approach doesn’t come intuitively so I’ve teamed up with Zachary Johnson, CEO of Syndio Social and an expert in social network analysis, to come up with a guide for maximizing the results of your time investment in holiday functions. Here are our seven ways to optimize the office holiday party.

Understand that the primary goal is not to have fun: An office holiday party serves a different function than one with your family or friends. This isn’t about completely relaxing and letting loose—unless you want a starring role in the water cooler drama the next day. It’s not about sampling each appetizer. It’s not about hanging out with the same people you see at lunch everyday. It is, however, about spending time with key individuals who you can’t connect with organically because they’re in a different functional area or located at different offices. If you need to stop home to take a nap or eat something before arriving at the event so you aren’t zoning out or fixated on the buffet table, give yourself time to take care of yourself. Then, once your foot steps in the door of the party you should be fully committed to being outwardly engaged and involved until you leave.

Plan to meet key people: If you find it impossible to schedule a meeting with certain individuals because of their packed calendar but you know they’ll be at the event, reach out to them in advance. Suggest meeting up for a drink before the party or simply let them know you’ll be at the event and looking for them. This will prime them to expect your approach and encourage you to make it a priority to find them. If you want to meet new people but don’t know who to approach, pay attention to which people are the center of attention in the different groups or who are making lots of introductions. According to Johnson’s research, these people tend to be “super connectors” who can open doors for you in the future.

Avoid the usual suspects: It’s comfortable to make yourself cozy in the center of a group that already knows you, but that won’t lead to the kind of meaningful connections that can help you get more done in the coming year. After saying a quick, “Hello,” to your standard crew, look for people who you don’t know very well. According to Johnson, “The people who you only talk to a couple of times a year are more likely to bring you new opportunities that you wouldn’t hear about-such as a job posting-because they’re outside of your main circle.”

Build personal connections rather than talking only about work: The speed at which you can complete projects often depends greatly on responsiveness from another department, such as sales, accounting, or legal. Identify which individuals could make life easier for you in the coming year, and then go over and talk to them. This doesn’t mean joining the receiving line in front of the CEO, according to Johnson, “the higher in the company you go, the fewer ‘getting things done’ connections you have.” But it does mean spending some time putting faces to the names of people who can supply information or grant the approvals you need to more effectively do your work. Find out about their plans for the holidays, ask about their hobbies, and generally build rapport so when they see your e-mail request in the future, they’ll be more apt to open it.

Use the buddy system: If you need a bit of a security blanket to venture into uncharted territory, bring along a friend or significant other to help ease your entry into new circles. One strategy is to approach a group and say, “Hello, I’m [Name]. I work in [ABC] department and am looking to meet some people outside of my division.” This then naturally leads to the other members of the group stating their name and department, which opens up the conversation to you.

Don’t spend too long with one person: If the conversation goes on for a while, enjoy the mingling and then gracefully exit by saying, “It’s been great to meet you, but I’m going to refresh my drink.” Or if you would like to keep in touch, say, “Would it be OK if I contacted you to set up a 15-minute phone call to talk about XYZ?” That way, they will be more likely to accept the meeting request when you follow up. Don’t say that you’ll follow up unless you actually want to and will do so. You want to build people’s trust in your follow through. I recommend immediately making a note in your calendar to send a follow up e-mail the next business day. Relying on your memory can lead to you appearing unreliable.

But don’t bounce around too much, either: You’re not playing a game of pinball and getting points for each group you hit. If you’re really not connecting with a new set of people, it’s fine to move on after a few minutes. But for most encounters, you should be spending at least 10- to 15-minutes making a genuine connection. Look for opportunities to give to those around you. It could be as simple as offering to get them another drink, make a connection to a colleague, or follow up with a book recommendation.

Of course, if someone approaches you that you do know or if you’ve met some other groups of people and are ready for something more familiar, it’s completely fine to stop and enjoy the moment. Don’t be rude to the people who already know and like you — just be intentional in widening your circle. Yes, it is a party. But it’s also work.

When It’s Hard to Celebrate Your Colleague’s Success

How do you feel when one of your sales colleagues closes a big deal?  Or when a fellow manager is recognized for leading one of the best projects in the company? Or when a co-worker is selected for a special assignment or training program?

The politically correct answer is that we’re supposed to feel pleased.  When people that we work with are successful, it’s not only good for them but it also benefits the entire organization.  So we should celebrate, raise our glasses, and cheer for our colleagues’ success.  And most of the time, we genuinely celebrate their achievement.  But let’s admit it:  Deep down, some part of us can feel envious, resentful, or disappointed. Why did someone else get recognized and I didn’t?  What are the implications for my job?  Will I have to work harder to compete and keep up?  Did I have the same opportunity to be successful — and I missed it?

Most of us try to suppress these feelings. On a personal level, we’ve been taught that it’s impolite, or even a cardinal sin, to be envious of others.  Organizationally, we’ve been schooled in the importance of teamwork, believing that when one of us succeeds, we all win. But the reality is these “moral principles” sometimes run counter to human nature.

At heart, we’re all narcissists to some extent, descendants of the Greek mythological figure who fell in love with his own image As such, we all tend to focus on our own success first, and we worry when we’re not promoted, recognized, or rewarded to the extent that we think we deserve.  When someone else gets the gold medal, we feel a twinge of competitive envy and personal insecurity.

Most of the time there’s nothing wrong with these feelings, especially when they inspire us to work harder and improve our own performance.  But there are instances when these deep-seated emotions can consciously or unconsciously lead to dysfunctional behaviors. For example, not long ago one of the top producers at a professional services firm resigned partly because her colleagues, fearing that she was becoming “too big of a name,” stopped sending her referrals and talked negatively about her to clients.  Similarly, in a manufacturing company, a recent promotion led to morale problems within a team because many of them felt that they were more deserving of the raise.

It’s hard to root for others without also thinking of yourself. In addition, sometimes the good performers invite these reactions with their lack of humility or arrogance; or management unintentionally provokes the bad feelings by recognizing people who really don’t deserve it, or who have been given unfair advantages.  Smart managers, of course, try to avoid these dynamics by spreading around the opportunities, giving people a range of assignments, and basing recognition on measurable accomplishments.  But even the best of managers are human, and can across as favoring one person over another.

So what should you do when you hear that a colleague has done something exceptional and you’re not jumping up and down with joy?  Here are three simple guidelines:

 Accept the fact that we all have mixed feelings about other people’s success.  Just because you experience a bit of disappointment or envy doesn’t make you a bad person.  It just means that you’re human.
Take a hard look at whether any of your negative feelings are justified or should be addressed.  If indeed the playing field is uneven, or some favoritism was involved, then think about whether you want to talk about it constructively with your manager, a colleague, or an HR representative.  If, however, the other person succeeded fair and square, consider how you can use the other person’s achievement as motivation for yourself.  What can I learn from what she did?  What do I need to do differently to be recognized and rewarded in the future?
Take a deep breath and say “congratulations” to your colleague.  Maybe we can’t all be winners all the time, but we can all be gracious and learn how to celebrate success together.  Eventually, it might even be fun — and lead to a stronger team.

Learn How to Spot Portable Talent

My wife, children and I have a farm in beautiful and peaceful Patagonia, where we fatten cattle.  Each fall we buy a few hundred calves, recently separated from their mothers, and then keep them for 11 months, letting them feed on our natural grass.  Once they’ve gained enough weight, we sell them and restart the cycle.  The first year we did this, results were spectacular:  The animals doubled their weight and prices were sky-high.  In the years that followed, we started buying calves from better farms but, for some reason, our average annual weight gain kept dropping, along with our revenues. And last year’s selling season was our worst ever.

Puzzled, I asked a good friend, whose family has a three-generation history of breeding and fattening cattle in Patagonia, for advice.  “Claudio, that first year when your animals gained so much weight, where did you buy them?” he asked me.  I told him they came from a dry-land farm with very poor soil and low quality grass.  “See,” he said.  “That’s what you want.  If you find calves that can survive in a poor and hostile environment, the minute they get to your farm they will blossom.”

Last month I bought half of my cattle from a seller with low quality grass, and a year from now I’ll be able to tell you whether my friend’s theory is right or not.  But his insight makes a lot of sense — and it applies to human talent as well.

The best employees and executives are what talent management experts call “portable”. They are able to effectively transition from one role, company, industry or country to the next, not only bringing their unique strengths to each but also growing stronger in the process.   My great colleague and hero, Harvard Business School professor Boris Groysberg, is the father of this field of research (indeed, his wife Lilyia tells me that their youngest daughter’s first word was “portability”). He wrote an excellent book on the topic, and each year, when I visit HBS as a guest lecturer, I never miss a chance to watch him teach the subject to his students.

Most people assume that the best hiring strategy is to find the best performers in a given field and get them on your team.  But Boris has found that most people aren’t so portable:  some who are shining stars in one context can fall out of the sky in another.  One of the best ways in which he demonstrates this is with a study on equity research analysts moving between Wall Street investment banks. You would expect high portability in these situations. As Boris puts it, when a star analyst at investment bank A accepts an offer to join investment bank B, he gets a box, puts his laptop and a few other things in it, goes down the elevator, looks left and right before crossing Wall Street, goes up the elevator, and exactly 56 seconds later he is working at his new job.  He operates in a similar environment, analyzes the same companies in the same sector, and has the same clients.  He doesn’t have to sell his house, move to another state, buy a new house, look for new schools for the children, or help his spouse cope and adjust to a move.  What could be easier?  Yet, Boris has found that, while star equity research analysts that stay at one firm continue to shine, the performance of those who move declines quite dramatically in the following year and remains below previous heights even after five years.

Talent is much less portable than what we think because performance isn’t just one P; it stems from five — processes, platforms, products, people, and politics – and most of those you can’t take with you.

Am I, a 28-year veteran search consultant, confessing my sins and telling you that executives can’t successfully move from one organization to another and so you shouldn’t ever hire from the outside?  Of course not.  Sometimes it’s the only alternative, or the best one.  But you should  help yourself make better decisions on outside hires, as well as internal moves, by learning the key lessons on talent portability.  While falling stars are the average outcome, there are several caveats.

First, origin and destination matter.  While cattle from fertile farms didn’t gain as much weight at ours, the survivors of poor environments flourished.  Likewise, when an executive moves to a weaker firm, performance is likely to decrease; if the person moves to a stronger firm, he or she will keep shining.  Think about it in more practical terms:  Should you only embrace candidates from outstanding firms like McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, as many companies do? Or would you be better off following a more counterintuitive strategy and finding the true stars who have managed to thrive at weaker firms?

Team-specific human capital is important too: when people move together, they tend to do better than when they do it alone.  Boris has also found that starting something new in a new company (what he calls “exploration”) is much harder than taking over an existing project, team or unit (“exploitation”).  In addition, some types of roles are more portable than others: COOs are much less so because their job requires lots of internal knowledge and many relationships; CFOs and other functional experts are usually better positioned to move.

Finally, you must check for how well an incoming star will fit into your industry given its dynamics; your organization given its culture and strategy; and your team given the personalities on it.  Consider the performance of GE executives hired to lead other companies.  We all know that the company has long been a factory for talent, so much so that its alumni account for the second largest group of CEOs within the Fortune 500, after Harvard MBAs.  Whenever an executive leaves GE to become the CEO of another firm, the market value of the latter typically spikes — by at least a billion dollars for large entities, and in some cases by up to $10 billion.  Yet when Boris, along with HBS’s Andrew N. McLean and Nitin Nohria, analyzed the performance of those stocks over the following three years, the results, presented in this article, were mixed. While many of the newly appointed CEOs created great value, others presided over huge value destruction.  What made the difference?  Fit, and especially the strategic kind:  some people are great for startups, others for turnarounds, others for managing cyclical businesses.

If you want to keep your stars bright, reject the myth of the executive who shines at all times and in all places. Instead, assess for your candidates’ portability, including a careful check for fit.

This post is adapted from my forthcoming book, It’s Not the How or the What but the Who:  Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best (Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




Why Japan’s Talent Wars Now Hinge on Women
Research: Recession Grads May Wind Up Happier in the Long Run
Ten Essential Tips for Hiring Your Next CEO
Hiring and Big Data: Those Who Could Be Left Behind

For Cross-Functional Change, a Good Disruption Helps

How do you improve the whole organization, not just parts of it? The uber challenge for process improvement in organizations has always been to successfully make improvements across functions. But have any sizable organizations assigned people to manage their major end-to-end processes — and actually been successful?

I got this question from a process leader at a UK bank. He had read my post, “Where Have All the Process Owners Gone?,” and contacted me because his bank has had success in managing departmental processes, but is struggling to crack the cross-functional, end-to-end management of processes. (An example of an “end-to-end process” is all the work involved from the time a customer places an order until it is delivered, including order entry, order fulfillment, and billing.)

This particular bank is currently on a major “Lean” journey (adopting Toyota’s production system methods and thinking), which was started three years ago, and they are making continuous improvement part of their standard work. He said it has gone well, but only at a functional level. Trying to get end-to-end improvements has proven to be very difficult and virtually impossible to do without a special initiative or project driving the change. They now have some significant resources and imperatives to make cross-functional process ownership happen. But with the scale and complexity of the organization, he is concerned that they may never get over the “managing by function” problem.

I checked with my friend , a consultant who has worked extensively in UK banking, and he said the main reason why there are no process owners — perhaps surprisingly given the state of the banking industry— is that there is not yet a compelling enough reason to change. His most recent client (another bank) had a similar process approach with plenty of supporting documentation and improvement work, but having achieved only the beginnings of end-to-end transformation (process managers were not yet in place). The reason, he concluded, was because “In UK banking, we may need to wait for a sufficiently disruptive event — regulation- or market-driven — that causes the established banks to radically re-think what they do.”

Nick’s assessment of the dearth of end-to-end process owners fits with dynamics I see in organizations between their “performance engines,” which operate the business day-to-day, and their management systems for innovation. Most organizations are optimized for current operational performance. The presumption is that tomorrow will look like today, so all we need to do is fine tune our successful model. We can make incremental change, often called continuous improvement, within the performance engine. More dramatic improvement (innovation, transformation) requires a motivator: a feeling that our world is being disrupted. In this increasingly common condition, the environment appears to be turbulent and unpredictable. The kinds of change required to accommodate a world of increasing disruption requires a different organization to run experiments — to try stuff and learn.  (Not fine tune, but innovate.)

The operating model for experimentation needs an organization with process owners who manage big changes across functions and departments. The challenge is, most of us have a relationship scope of about 100-200 people, so we like to work with these “tribes” of people like us. It’s more difficult with big end-to-end processes to have a tribe that has ownership of the overall goal and a process owner who is also the tribal leader.

In the absence of a significant disruptive event, or obvious proof that the world is changing, the gravitational forces in organizations pull strongly towards the performance engine: functional, hierarchical, command-and-control, rigid. And this engine gets improved and streamlined only with small, incremental changes. I have seen organizations implement complex process management structures (with process executives, process owners, process champions, and process councils) to support the implementation of a major enterprise system. However, the process ownership role then appears to become redundant and hard to justify once the system has been implemented and is delivering the intended benefits.

End-to-end process owners can indeed make a difference in effecting cross-functional change. But organizational leaders must help them fight the powerful, gravitational forces of the command-and-control performance engine that maintain the status quo. To overcome these forces, a good disruption can help. But in an environment that is increasingly unpredictable and volatile, leaders must devote more resources to sensing and responding to threats and opportunities, and then must communicate to the organization what “responding” means in terms of changing the way it does its work. Without a clear and compelling, motivating case being made by leaders, successful cross-functional changes will remain few and far between.

The Case for Slacking Off

I recently asked an executive I coached how many emails she received each day. “Five hundred,” she replied.  But I don’t read any of them. If I did, I wouldn’t really be doing my job. Given the work I do, my challenge isn’t obtaining information but figuring out how to push information away so that I don’t suffer from information overload. I need time to think.”

Helen (as I’ll call her here) did have an assistant who slugged his way through all her emails, and she spent a few hours each week discussing the more problematic ones with him. But what I liked about Helen’s comment was her realization that she needed a considerable amount of time-out to reflect, to be really creative.

As she said, “I am not paid for doing this kind of work. If I’m so busy doing what people expect me to do, there will be no time left for what I ought to do. You can’t do creative work at a cyber pace. Creative work has its traditional rhythms. To be creative, you need to possess a more serene state of mind. Over the years I have learned the hard way that technology sometimes encourages people to confuse busyness with effectiveness. I need quiet time to be able to function.”

It’s an important point. If Charlie Chaplin were to make Modern Times (his caricatured portrayal of frantic survival in the modern, industrialized world) today, you wouldn’t see mechanical wheels crushing the little tramp. Instead, it would show instead him drowning in a flood of email. The outcome would be the same, however: a nervous breakdown.

The biggest problem we have in contemporary society is not that we do too little but that we try to do too much. All the pressures in the workplace and in the social domain are about collaborating, speaking up, stepping forward, leaning in —doing practically anything to be noticed and to get ahead. When all is said and done, doing nothing does not get much press. In fact, in our cyber age doing nothing has become almost impossible with all the distractions our iPhones and iPads provide. People fill their downtime surfing electronic devices in the subway, in the line at Starbucks, and even in meetings.

More and more, the balance between activity and inactivity has become seriously out of sync. But slacking off — making a conscious effort not to be busy — may be the best thing we can do for our brain’s health. It is the incubator for future bursts of creativity.  Being able to balance activity and solitude, noise and quietness, is a great way to tap into our inner creative resources. It is invaluable in nurturing whatever creative sparks we possess.

To some extent, we do understand in theory that downtime is good.  But we also get conditioned to be busy early in life.  How many times did your parents or teachers ever suggest you do nothing? As an adult, have you ever found anybody at work telling you to do nothing — to just take your time and reflect? Frankly, people who encourage nothingness are very rare; it isn’t really acceptable in today’s society. Instead, what you’re usually told to do is to work harder, to be diligent, to be on the ball. For most of us, doing nothing is associated with being irresponsible, with being on the wrong track, or even worse, with wasting our lives. As a result silence and stillness terrify us and we protect ourselves from these terrors with noise and frantic activity.

I have learned from experience that the most effective executives realize that doing nothing is good for their mental health. They can take a step back and consciously unplug themselves from the compulsion to always keep busy, the habit of shielding themselves from certain feelings, and the tensions of trying to manipulate their experience before even fully acknowledging what that experience is. Turning down the volume on life can be extremely beneficial and brings them to regions of the mind that they are otherwise busily avoiding.

And while they’re in these regions of the mind, they’re more likely to generate novel ideas. By inducing unconscious thought through reflection they modify the very nature of their search for innovative solutions to complex issues. They understand that doing nothing is the best path to productivity.

Is There Hope for Small Firms, the Have-Nots in the World of Big Data?

Here’s a wishful vision of the future that’s even more radical than Amazon’s concept of delivery drones or Google’s robots: One day, small businesses will have access to affordable consumer data.

Don’t yawn. This is a life-and-death issue for small businesses. Anyone who has worked in or around a supplier to a big consumer company—to a supermarket chain, for example—knows the value of information on shoppers’ preferences. If a supplier can use consumer data to shape its offerings and marketing strategies, it has a significantly better chance of survival than its data-deprived competitors.

We saw the value of data firsthand in a study we did with Gillian Armstrong of the University of Ulster and Andrew Fearne of the University of Kent in the Northern Ireland region of the UK. We provided consumer data and analysis—free of charge, thanks to a government grant—to a group of food and beverage companies that had previously relied mainly on their managers’ intuition and a little guidance from supermarkets. With training and assistance, the providers were able to see how their categories were performing in supermarket aisles and what segments of consumers were buying their products.

“Data exposure focused our feel for the market,” a manager of a tea company told us. “It formed a basis for extended thinking in terms of tea product content, packaging, and design.”

But our research also pointed out that when it comes to data, there are the haves and the have-nots. The suppliers we studied were small—the largest had just 45 employees—and their modest annual turnover made data prohibitively expensive. They never could have afforded the ongoing cost of the consumer data. A single analyzed report runs €7,000, and to keep up with the big firms, they’d need more than that.

Once their eyes were opened to the power of data, the firms saw immediately how great their disadvantage had been. After our project ended, they went back, as one firm owner put it, to “Square One.”

If it’s true, as Andrew McAfee writes, that “data-dominated firms are going to take market share, customers, and profits away from those who are still relying too heavily on their human experts,” then we can expect to see a very different business landscape some years down the road. It will be a landscape with many fewer of the small, artisan businesses that have been so important to societies for millennia.

Small businesses account for a large proportion of private-sector employment; in the U.S., for example, despite a vast corporate sector, the figure is 49%. Small firms are a “fountain of job growth,” according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; companies with fewer than 500 employees account for about two-thirds of net jobs created in the country. They are often great places to work, too. One study shows that marketing managers in small firms report higher levels of job satisfaction, greater esprit de corps, and more organizational commitment than their counterparts in large firms.

Moreover, consumers enjoy the products of small businesses—some of the items provided by the firms we studied were popular in the big supermarkets because they were marked as “locally produced” or “premium.” An added benefit is that these products tend to be high-margin, both for the suppliers and the stores.

Which raises a question: Should big companies assist small companies by providing them with inexpensive access to data?

It’s in the chains’ interest to keep the small firms alive: We doubt that consumers or grocery chains would want the artisan bakers, chefs, and yogurt makers to disappear, bulldozed away by the power of big data.

Yet when one of us, Christina Donnelly, raised this question with a supermarket-chain executive in the U.S., his response was that he had never even thought about it. The data gap and its possible consequences hadn’t crossed his mind.

That response doesn’t say much for the likelihood that supermarkets will ever willingly provide customer data to small suppliers at reduced cost. And in any case, the flow of data is more complicated than it may seem: Food and beverage companies that purchase customer-preference data get it not from supermarkets but from analytics firms that manage the data on behalf of the supermarkets, analyze it, and package it. Analytics firms may be even less likely than supermarkets to make the data available to small firms at lower cost (and their large customers would be irate if they did).

Is government intervention the answer? That seems unlikely, given the probable backlash. A manager of a large food company told a member of our team that even the limited, experimental government funding of data and analysis for our research project was unfair.

So where does that leave small businesses? Is their situation hopeless?

Maybe not. After all, the ultimate source of data is the consumer. Shouldn’t shoppers have a say in what happens to their loyalty-card information? If they value small firms, shouldn’t they be able to ensure that these firms have access to a consistent flow of market data?

That idea may seem farfetched, but so is the concept of product delivery by drones. The difference between the two is that Amazon, with all its money and power, is well capable of taking a crazy idea and turning it into reality; like many mammoth corporations, it can afford to deploy cutting-edge technologies in the pursuit of greater growth and greater dominance. Small firms simply can’t do that—at least not on their own.

But in the ordinary consumer, small firms do have a powerful ally. If they could somehow tap into that power, the artisan firms might just be able to garner enough competitive advantage—or at least achieve enough of a competitive balance—to continue providing enriching, satisfying jobs and valuable products to millions of people the world over.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment
Small Businesses Need Big Data, Too
How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts
Big Data Demands Big Context

CEOs Appear to Have Little Faith in Their Companies’ Acquisitions

CEOs are 23.5% more likely to sell shares of their companies’ stock shortly after announcing acquisitions of other firms, a finding that suggests the executives have little faith in the value of the acquisitions, says a team led by Cynthia Devers of Michigan State University. “It wouldn’t make much sense” for CEOs to sell stock “if they truly felt that the company’s stock was going to appreciate,” Devers says of her research, which analyzed data involving more than 2,000 publicly traded firms over a 12-year period.

Our Dangerous Obsession with External Recognition

Rebecca, a tech entrepreneur, would love you to equate her company’s expansive press coverage with real value creation. “Yesterday, we got written up in TechCrunch and LA Magazine, and we all had dinner at Nobu to celebrate!” She will, however, conveniently forget to mention that her startup has yet to settle on a viable business model and has zero paying customers.

John, a middle manager at a Fortune 500, attended no less than 21 industry conferences this year in an effort to increase his overall visibility. “It’s all about optics,” he says, “and you need to be everywhere.” While John was schmoozing on the company’s dime, his team members were starved of the leadership and hands-on coaching they desperately needed.

Steven, a consulting partner, tweets about 40 times per day and has his own Facebook page with 50 fans. “I do it primarily because it makes me feel good.” He spends over 20 hours a week massaging his social media profiles and trawling online for new business, inevitably compromising the quality of work provided to current paying clients.

Although our fundamental desire to be noticed is not a new phenomenon, our unending use of social media has radically elevated the level of ego in our personal lives. Famed psychologist Jean Twenge recently showed that self-importance personality traits among 37,000 college students rose as quickly as obesity from the 1980s to present. Two Western Illinois University researchers found a high correlation between Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores and Facebook activity. Countless other study sample groups, from pop musicians to Millennials, prove that we are in the middle of a “narcissism epidemic.”

This obsession with external recognition is now entering our professional lives. Every day, even the most disciplined entrepreneurs, executives, and consultants are becoming addicted to the powerful endorphins associated with heightened visibility. They invest disproportionate time and effort into advancing their own personal fame bubbles at the expense of broader goals and potentially threaten their careers as a result. Teens posting selfies on Instagram is one thing. But when visibility trumps vision in the working world, there are several dangerous consequences that can arise.

First, we distance ourselves from the fundamental growth engine of our careers. In other words, we lose sight of what really matters. Admitted Rebecca: “It feels great to get press, but that’s not an indication of success at all. We haven’t figured that part out yet.” Our LinkedIn connections, speaking engagements, and press profiles should be seen as rewards for the value we create, not the actual process by which value is created. If you’re too focused on these “vanity metrics,” you risk painting an all-too optimistic picture of yourself without accurately identifying, measuring, and improving the underlying drivers of your performance. How can you improve what you don’t measure?

Second, we misallocate our time and attention. Going for visibility is not only exhausting, it’s distracting. Steve said, “It takes real effort [to manage my online profile]. But it’s also the additional time I spend thinking about it when I’m supposed to be doing other work.” Research shows how everyday social media multitasking reduces our cognitive depth. But take it a little further, and you might actually be destroying significant value. Lamented Steve: “Maybe if I reallocated the time it took me to gain 1,000 followers into mentoring a star analyst, she might still be at the firm.”

Third, we alienate critical nodes in our professional networks. If you let your quest for visibility drive your behaviors, your bosses, colleagues, partners, and investors may quickly scurry offside. Anita Vangelisti, a University of Texas psychologist, found that visibility-oriented individuals aim to keep conversations centered on themselves, putting off those around them. In true “taker“ fashion, they place their own needs before others and feel little remorse about the colleagues they hurt along the way. John reflected on his unfortunate conference showboating habit: “I get the sense people are waiting for me to slip up, and honestly, I’ve brought it on myself.”

As Albert Einstein once said, “Strive not be a success, but rather to be of value.” As the social media echo chamber descends on our professional lives, never before has this message been more relevant. Instead of measuring your progress using the yardstick of external recognition, optimize around achieving your unique vision. At the end of the day, people who tap into their deep intrinsic motivations are much more (PDF) likely to succeed on long-term projects and hit loftier goals than those who are powered by the praise of others. Focus on achieving your vision first, and you’ll be more visible than you can imagine.

The Twelve Sales Metrics that Matter Most

Sales is both an art and a science. It is the skillful combination of emotion and logic, people and process, free-thinking and organization. I recently conducted an extensive research project involving more than one-hundred vice presidents of sales at top technology companies (software, cloud, computer hardware, and telecommunications) to better understand the art and science of managing a sales organization today.

While the study results provided detailed insights about sales organization trends, it also yielded a wide range of statistics that reflect the strategies sales leaders are employing to overcome their top challenges. Below, you will find twelve of these key sales metrics that benchmark sales organization performance, structure, and effectiveness.

1. Percent of Organization Achieving Quota

The overall average for percentage of salespeople that achieved one hundred percent of quota last year was sixty percent. However, the number of salespeople who achieved one hundred percent of quota varied greatly by sales organization. Twenty-six percent of sales leaders reported that seventy percent or more of their salespeople made quota. Fifty-four percent of sales leaders reported that between fifty to six­ty-nine percent of their salespeople made quota. Twenty percent of sales leaders report that less than half of their salespeople made quota.

2. Quota Attainment Average

The average percentage of salespeople that achieved one hundred percent of annual quota last year varied by type of industry:

Software                                 52%

Computer hardware                60%

Cloud/SaaS                             61%

Telecommunications             66%

3. Average Annual Quota for Field Salesperson

The overall average annual quota for an outside field salesperson was $2.7 million. Quota for computer hardware salespeople was the highest at $4.2 million. Telecommunications salespeople averaged $3.3 million and software was $3.2 million. Cloud/SaaS salespeople had the lowest quota at $1.6 million.

4. Average Annual Quota for Inside Salesperson

The overall average annual quota for an inside field salesperson was $985,000. Annual quota for computer hardware inside salespeople was $1.35 million, for computer software it was $1.22 million, for Cloud/SaaS inside salespeople the average was $795,000 and telecommunications was $730,000.

5. Average Annual On Target Earnings

The average annual on target earnings including salary, commission, and bonuses for field and inside salespeople at one hundred percent of quota are shown by industry below.

Outside salesperson                           Inside salesperson

on target earnings                               on target earnings

Software                                 $240,000                                 $120,000

Cloud/SaaS                             $210,000                                 $100,000

Computer hardware                $180,000                                   $80,000

Telecommunications              $150,000                                   $85,000

6. Average New Deal Size

The average new deal size reported for field sales was $166,000 and new deal size for inside sales was $19,000.

7. Sales Cycle Length

Seventy percent reported an average sales cycle length of sixty days or less for inside sales while fifty-four percent reported an average sales cycle length of ninety days or more for outside sales. Twenty-four percent of inside sales cycles and twenty-three percent of outside sales cycles were between sixty-one and ninety days in length.

8. Vertical Sales Adoption

Sixty-four percent of study participants have vertical sales specialists on their sales force (calling on verticals such as public sector, finance, healthcare, manufacturing, etc.). Seventeen percent are planning to add vertical sales specialists in the future while nineteen percent do not have any plans to do so.

9. SMB Specialization

Sixty-three percent responded that they have specialized inside salespeople that are dedicated to SMB (small to medium business) or mid-market sales. Twenty percent of these inside sales representatives are allowed to make field sales calls when necessary.

10. Field Sales Revenue Trends

Trends for 2013 and 2014 projected annual revenue attributed to field sales as opposed to inside sales varied by industry. The overall trend is for the number of companies that derive more than ninety percent of their revenues from field-related sales to decrease dramatically. For example, twenty-eight percent of software companies will derive more than ninety-percent of their revenues from field sales in 2013 and this number is expected to decrease to zero in 2015. The number of computer hardware, Cloud/SaaS and telecommunications companies with more than ninety percent of their revenues from field sales in 2013 is also projected to drop by half in 2015.

11. Inside Sales Roles

Sixty-two percent of participants reported their outside field salespeople are assigned an inside salesperson. Seventy percent of inside salespeople carry a quota and fifty-five percent indicated that the revenue generated by the inside salesperson is applied to outside salesperson’s quota. Forty percent of inside salespeople schedule meetings for the outside salesperson. Seventy percent of inside salespeople perform lead generation and telemarketing activities.

12. Sales Preparedness

Eighty-three percent of participants thought their outside field sales teams were equipped with the sales strategies, tools, and skills to exceed their numbers, compared to fifty-seven percent for inside sales and forty percent for channel sales.

America’s Economy Is Officially Inside-Out

This is the first generation of Americans in modern history expected to enjoy lower living standards than their forebears. It is the first generation in modern history whose life expectancy is dwindling. It is the first generation of modern Americans whose educational attainment is declining. It is the first generation of modern Americans who face less opportunity than their parents.

Shorter, nastier, dumber, harder, bleaker. That’s the future for not only Americans, but for many in the world’s richest countries.

Let me be clear why this is so remarkable. It’s not that the great wheel of prosperity is merely decelerating. It is that it actually seems to be turning backwards. The great wheel of progress already ground to a halt—several decades ago, if measured in terms of average incomes. And the real danger now? That it may be beginning to spin—in reverse.

Perhaps it’s just a blip. Perhaps it’s a temporary malfunction. Perhaps I’m overreacting — after all, the economy’s growing, right?

Yes… it is. And that’s precisely the problem.

For that is what tells us we are in truly uncharted water. The economy is indeed “growing.” But the top 1 percent have taken 95 percent of the gains in this so-called “recovery.”  The plain fact is that the average household is poorer in the “recovery” than during the “recession.”

We cannot suggest that an economy is perfectly fine—nay, even healthy—just because a tiny number are growing richer while the lives of the vast majority are literally growing shorter, nastier, dumber, harder, and bleaker.

I can think of many other examples of progress slowing. Of prosperity decelerating. The great wheel’s motion is never even; there are bumps in the road of human progress — sometimes the great wheel spins furiously, sometimes, it hums along gently, and sometimes, it sputters and strains.

But.

I can think of almost no other example in the history of modern democracies of progress actually becoming regress. Short of war or cataclysm, it is literally unprecedented. And that’s not the half of it. It’s unprecedented…because it should be impossible. If the rich get richer, it should be precisely because they create goods of real value to people, which elevate their living standards. In a working economy, “growth” should reflect real prosperity multiplying.

But when growth rises and living standards fall? That begins to hint that there is something wrong—very wrong, perhaps terribly wrong—with the way things are.  It suggest that what is happening to this society is not merely a simple, passing, self-healing ailment; but a chronic, possibly permanent, definitely debilitating condition. Not a flu—but a cancer.

Economics has no language—no word—to describe this condition: one in which the economy is “growing” but human progress is reversing. It’s not a depression—for that’s a situation where growth flatlines. It’s not a recession—for that’s just a temporary setback in growth. A “dark age” would signify both a decline in growth and a decline in living standards.

We have no words for this condition because economics has no concepts with which to fully grapple with—let alone understand—it. And economics has no concepts with which to understand this condition because economics believes, more or less, that it simply isn’t possible. Progress cannot go backwards when an economy is “growing”; because growth, as I’ve noted, is believed by the acolytes of the cult of economics to be the alpha and omega of human prosperity.

What, then, do we call it?

For we must give it a name, this secret hidden in plain sight. The secret that, if it were to be mentioned, would—and should—instantly discredit our leaders. Would and should silently condemn our institutions.

Given that the growth rises even as life expectancy, mobility, and educational attainment fall — that GDP expands even as the lives of the vast majority contract from shrinking health, intelligence, income, wealth, relationships, stability, security, meaning, and purpose — I suggest we call it a Great Inversion.

In this post-recession twilight zone, our economy is upside-down and inside-out.

I won’t pretend to smile, pat you on the back, and offer you bullet-pointed “solutions.” Because to a phenomenon this great, this unprecedented, this historic? I don’t believe there are any.

But I do believe that maybe, just maybe, if we have the wisdom to think through the above, the empathy to feel the tremendous suffering the future already surely holds, and the courage to see what is right in front of us—well, then, maybe, just maybe we can reach another turning point.

Not one in which human progress goes into reverse. But in which it goes into overdrive. In which the great wheel hits the redline and we all surge forward.

That’s the real challenge of the 21st century. Not just more tired, piecemeal incrementalism; not more excuses for a broken status quo; not more apologists and yes-men for leaders barely worthy of the term; not more dead ideologies and empty dogmas—the very ones that led to a Great Inversion. But revolutions. Millions of them. In every mind; in every undreamt dream; in every skyward eye. In every life.