Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1503

This Is What It Looks Like When a Google Manager Gets Feedback

Using a rigorous, data-driven hiring process, Google goes to great lengths to attract young, ambitious self-starters and original thinkers. It screens candidates’ résumés for markers that indicate potential to excel there — especially general cognitive ability. People who make that first cut are then carefully assessed for initiative, flexibility, collaborative spirit, evidence of being well-rounded, and other factors that make a candidate “Googley.”

The thing is, many of those who make the cut are engineers, who typically view management as a distraction from “real” work, not as a useful activity. And that presents a challenge: If your highly skilled, handpicked hires don’t value management in the traditional sense, how can you run the place effectively? How do you turn doubters into believers, persuading them to spend time managing others?

By applying the same analytical rigor and tools that you used to hire them in the first place. For Google, that has meant using its own data to prove the importance of management, as well as surveying employees and conducting double-blind interviews to identify key behaviors of effective managers — and then providing individuals with concrete, useful feedback in those areas. Below is a fictitious, interactive example based on the type of feedback a Google manager would receive.

 

For much more, including how Google gets its people to embrace the key behaviors, read my December 2013 article “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management.”

A Problem Shared Is a Company Aligned

It’s seldom easy to achieve alignment around challenges in any business.  Even agreeing what the challenges are can be far from straightforward. Companies are complicated places; the different stakeholders all have different agendas and are motivated by different norms and incentives.  Sometimes a strong leader can through force of will create alignment among these warring factions, but in my experience a more consultative approach that respects the legitimacy of everyone’s position achieves better results.

A number of years ago, my family company won the Greek franchise of a leading US confectionary manufacturer.  The American company was very dynamic and provided us with a steady stream of new confectionary products to distribute.  It all looked very promising at first.  But we quickly became aware that our salespeople were reluctant to sell the company’s products.  The steady stream of new products, they complained, was too much for their retail clients to absorb.

The problem, I realized, was that the US company’s strategy of constant new product development was not aligned with what motivated our salespeople.  We needed, therefore, to bridge the gap between the interests of our client and the interests of our salespeople and their retail clients.  I doubted that there was a feasible way to force such an alignment and even if there had been I would probably not have taken it.  Instead, I decided to work on getting our salespeople to understand what the US company needed and to bring them in the discussion on how to help the Americans achieve their goals, and thus be able to keep their distributorship.

I started by educating them about our supplier.  Getting the sales team together in one room, I played a video describing the company, its basic principles and policies, its competitive advantages, its sales volume, how it had already successfully penetrated a number of non-US markets, and its vision for the future.  A key takeaway from the video was that the company’s products were not only good to eat, but that from composition to packing materials they were also the most environmentally sensitive sweets in the market.  The video managed to make our salesmen feel proud that they belonged to an “international family” selling the best-tasting and most environmentally friendly confectionary products in the world.

After the video I explained the tangible and intangible gains our company would derive were we to be able to keep this franchise as well as our loss of prestige in the market were we to lose it to one of our competitors.  In view of this, I said, and given that we recognized the difficulty of placing so many new products with our clients, my firm was prepared to double their commissions on the American company’s new products, and to finance a visit to its headquarters in the US of our most successful salesman.

I then opened the floor for discussion, asking people one by one to speak up and freely express their views so that we could together work out a plan to address the challenge of meeting the requirement of our supplier while keeping our retail clients satisfied. Many expressed their concern that if they insisted beyond a certain limit we might well lose important clients altogether.  So I focused the discussion on how best to establish this “limit”.

It quickly became clear that we also needed to offer our retail clients special incentives to compensate for the risks of taking on the new products.  In the meeting we reached an agreement on what the incentives could be and specified the ways in which we would track, monitor, and learn from our sales progress with the new products.

Of course, it took more than a single meeting to achieve genuine alignment.  We followed up with weekly review meetings to discuss progress, analyze problems, and hammer out solutions.  With time, perseverance, and mutual respect between managers and sales staff, sales of the new product started to grow, slowly at first but before long at rates that made everyone very happy.

Looking back on the experience, I believe that what made the difference was the fact that we made a transparent effort to bring all the parties into the discussion. This wasn’t about forcing changes in behavior through bonuses and coercion, but rather about taking our people’s comments and suggestions seriously and frankly sharing our problem.  In this context, we created a positive atmosphere in which to conduct an open and fruitful exchange of views and experiences, reach feasible decisions, and win commitment from our sales force to implement them.

How to Get More Value Out of Your Data Analysts

Organizations succeed with analytics only when good data and insightful models are put to regular and productive use by business people in their decisions and their work. We don’t declare victory when a great model or application is developed – only when it’s being used to improve business performance and create new value.

If you want to put analytics to work and build a more analytical organization, you need two cadres of employees:

Analytics professionals to mine and prepare data, perform statistical operations, build models, and program the surrounding business applications.
Analytical business people who are ready, able, and eager to use better information and analyses in their work, as well as to work with the professionals on analytics projects.

In Analytics at Work, we call the latter group “ analytical amateurs.” That doesn’t mean amateurish – only that you’re not a professional, that analytics isn’t your main occupation.  You can be a scratch golfer or ace tennis player while still an amateur. Amateurs can be very accomplished analytically – in using analytical applications, envisioning additional opportunities for using analytics, and participating as business staff on analytics projects. You’re in luck if your CEO, executive team, and general managers across the business are all accomplished analytical amateurs.

There is widespread recognition of the shortage of analytical professionals. Lesser appreciated is the fact that most organizations are also way short on analytical amateurs. A May 2011 McKinsey Global Institute study on big data analytics predicted a coming shortfall of around 150,000 people with deep analytical skills – and a shortfall of 1.5 million business people with the know-how to put big data analytics to use.

The key to overcoming these shortages is to develop talent in both cadres together. In other words, the most important question may not be, “How can we hire more analysts?” But rather, “How can our analytical professionals best work together with our business people?”

The most effective employee development happens on-the-job, day-to-day, often one-on-one. The way to expand the business acumen of analytics professionals is to have them spend plenty of time working with business colleagues. The way to expand the analytical capability and appetite of analytical amateurs (a.k.a., business managers and professionals) is to have them work directly with analytics professionals on both analytics projects and simply meeting their own information needs.

By spending time “in the field,” professional analysts gain greater familiarity with business operations and pragmatic appreciation for how analytics are used in management decisions and employee workflows. What do the business people learn?

To be more aware of the data they use and their own decision processes. They get better at evaluating and improving their data and adjusting their decision processes depending on the quality and sufficiency of data at hand.
To serve themselves with data and analyses. They become more adept at finding data and using business intelligence and visual analytics tools, more rigorous in using established tools like spreadsheets, and thus better able to meet many of their analytical needs independently and immediately.
To understand the logic and methods behind the analytical models, applications, and outputs they use. Will they pick up some statistical methods? Perhaps, but the real goal is to learn enough to understand and trust their analytics – and develop a sense of the limitations of analytics.

Analytical amateurs accomplished in these ways not only make better use of analytics in their decisions and work, but also make greater contributions when serving as subject matter experts or otherwise participating in analytics development initiatives.

In analytical organizations such as Procter & Gamble, professional analysts spend a lot of time in the field, including “embedded” in business units. And there’s an active rotation program getting business people into analytical roles (many of which don’t require PhDs in statistics or deep data scientist skills). Analyst talent may be in short supply, but the solution is to kill two birds with one stone and develop the two cadres together.

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




Big Data Demands Big Context
How a Bathtub-Shaped Graph Helped a Company Avoid Disaster
Can You See the Opportunities Staring You in the Face?
Use Your Sales Force’s Competitive Intelligence Wisely

Who’s Managing Your Company’s Network Effects?

Much as war is too important to be left to the generals, the business of network effects is too valuable to be entrusted to the CMOs and CIOs. Network effects make Google Google, Facebook Facebook, Twitter Twitter, Netflix Netflix and  Pinterest Pinterest. Network effects are the not-so-secret sauce profitably flavoring Amazon’s recommendation engines and Apple’s App Store. They’re destined to transform the “Internet of Things” from a post-industrial aspiration to a trillion-dollar sector.

But who “owns” them in the C-suite?  Who should be accountable for identifying, cultivating and coordinating network effects inside the enterprise and out? The opportunities are clear; the responsibilities are not. Your organization needs a CNEO—a Chief Network Effects Officer—to integrate and align how your enterprise gets value from “harvesting collective intelligence.”

IT may understand the underlying software, algorithms and digital media. But managing network effects as technology byproducts is a bit like treating cars as extensions of internal combustion engines; technically accurate, yes, but missing the larger purposes and points. Similarly, marketing loves the virality that social media and network effects facilitate. But the potential impact and influence of network effects goes far beyond unique selling propositions and user experience. Comparable challenges exist for supply chain management and external partnerships: their collective intelligence may be ripe for algorithmic harvesting, but how well will it link to the rest of the enterprise?

Network effects are media and mechanism for making colleagues, customers, clients, channels, partners and suppliers more valuable. Network effects, not unlike risk management, transcend traditional enterprise functions and silos. Essentially, that design sensibility assures that the more people use these services, the more valuable they become. (The first use of the word “more” in the previous sentence does double duty—representing both the number of users and the quantity of use).  Seeing that sensibility as a series of tactical opportunities rather than a profoundly strategic organizing principle is a huge mistake.

In other words, opportunistically managing collective intelligence is not enough; smart leaderships need to rethink how to collectively manage collective intelligence.  How should organizations design and manage their networks of network effects? These are, arguably, the dominant design and business model issues for the Googles, Amazons, Apples, IBMs, Samsungs and General Electrics of the world. Reaping the network effects benefits of customers and clients is no longer good enough for sustainable value-added differentiation; tomorrow’s organizations need to better capture network effects-enabled value from their channels, partners and suppliers, as well. Monetizing network effects demonstrably makes for a helluva business model. That requires top management commitment and oversight.

The sweet spots will emerge not just from better identifying and addressing network effects opportunities with customers, colleagues and channels, but the intersections between them. For example, what kinds of recommendation engines would be of greatest interest and use for both customers and key suppliers? How might Kickstarter-like innovation initiatives facilitate new conversations and collaborations between clients and employees? Can the challenge of maintenance and upgrades be crowdsourced in ways that create communities of channels and customers who willingly share best practice?

Marshall W. Van Alstyne, a Boston University colleague and collaborator who’s pioneered breakthrough research in the economics of two-sided networks, argues that these are exactly the kinds of questions that organizations need to be asking as their own operating processes become digitized, virtualized and networked. Tomorrow’s organizations are going to give as much thought and care about investing in network effects as they do to new products and services.

Indeed, network effects investment will enable new product and service innovations, as well as new interpersonal capabilities and insights. Effectively managing the network effects portfolio will become one of the most important challenges tomorrow’s management will confront. Training and educating technologists, marketers and innovators alike to both design for and exploit network effects will become an essential core competence.   Can your organization do that without a Chief Network Effects Officer?  Start by asking: Who owns the challenge of network effects management today?

Don’t Give Consumers Too Many Visual Choices

Online shoppers love seeing images of products, but when the number of choices is high, visuals become confusing and presentation of the options in text form helps consumers make better decisions, say Claudia Townsend of the University of Miami and Barbara E. Kahn of The Wharton School. A high number of visual options can also prompt consumers to give up trying to choose: Asked to select among 27 types of crackers, participants in an experiment were 5 times more likely to pick “none of the above” if the choices were presented visually rather than in words. Text prompts a slower, more systematic mental-processing style, the researchers say.

Leaders Who Can’t Forgive

I had a CEO in one of my leadership coaching seminars recently who seemed to be quite bitter about life. Whatever suggestion I would make, he would put a negative spin on it. Curious about his remarkable negativity, I asked him to tell more about himself. After a little bit of prompting, he was ready to talk about his life, a narrative that wasn’t very pleasant to listen to.

Clearly, I was dealing with a person who carried grudges, hanging on to grievances that should have been forgiven long ago. Whatever negative experiences he had, he would blame others for his unhappiness. He was not prepared to look at himself, and to take personal responsibility for his part in whatever conflicts, or events he was complaining about.

Mahatma Gandhi once wisely said: an-eye-for-an-eye only ends up making the whole world blind. How true his comment is. And it is especially relevant for people in leadership positions. Leaders have such an important effect on other people’s lives that their lack of forgiveness can create a climate where anger, bitterness and animosity prevent a team, an organization, a society, and even a nation from being the best they can be.

Of course, all relationships with others, whether friends, strangers, or family members, come with the risk of being hurt: your parents may have been tough on you, your teachers may have been unpleasant, colleagues at work may have sabotaged your projects, or your life partner may have been unfaithful. Anytime you let others come close you are vulnerable. And the most logical reaction to an insult or injury is to get even.

In a leadership position, the risks are magnified. Leading others means dealing with a maelstrom of relationships implying an enormous amount of emotional management. As a leader, you are operating in settings rife with strife, which if left unresolved, can become a festering drag on an organization’s effectiveness. People who cannot forgive get stuck into a downward spiral of negativity, taking everyone around them with them.

Good leaders, of course, are aware of how costly it is to hold on to grudges and how an unforgiving attitude keeps people from moving forward.  Unfortunately, for far too many people in leadership positions, revenge comes more naturally than forgiveness. We have an innate sense of justice: we want others to be punished for what they have done to us. A strong reaction to fairness or unfairness seems to be programmed into our brain, making us hard-wired to retaliate and seek justice when others hurt us.

From an evolutionary point of view, this behavior served a critical purpose. Tit for tat has is a way of protecting ourselves, with reciprocity and vengeance being a warning signal to the violator to not cross over that boundary again, or risk escalation and more negative consequences. But it can also open a Pandora’s box of counter-reactions: revenge begets more revenge, which can be costly to your mental and physical health.

When you cannot forgive the people who have hurt you, these feelings become a mental poison that destroys the system from within. As numerous studies have shown, hatred, spite, bitterness, and vindictiveness create a fertile ground for stress disorders, negatively affecting your immune system. And, to boot, an unforgiving attitude is positively correlated to depression, anxiety, hostility, and neuroticism, and associated with premature death.

But why are some of us more likely to forgive than others and what differentiates them from those who remain vindictive and bitter? Taking a psychodynamic-systemic orientation to the study of leaders, I have found three features associated with a resistance to forgiving:

Obsessional rumination: Unforgiving people spend their time obsessing about their pasts. Those subjected to rigid, autocratic parenting and to childhood abuse seem to be more likely to do this, contrary to those who were fortunate to grow up in a more benign and nurturing environment.
Lack of empathy: Empathy is the evolutionary mechanism that motivates altruistic and pro-social behavior. Imagining and feeling what another person experiences- putting yourself in the other person’s proverbial shoes – allows you to consider the motivations of the transgressor, giving you a route to forgiveness. It is a skill that you learn early on. Children brought up by largely absent or abusive parents generally can’t develop the ability. For these people, forgiveness becomes extremely difficult.
Sense of deprivation: Individuals who did not receive much attention and care as children often focus on what they do not have, and how they might get it. But when they get it, they continue to compare themselves to others, envying their success, reputation, possessions or qualities, often expressing this envy towards the achievements of others through emotional explosiveness and outbursts of rage.

I would not say that people who exhibit these behaviors—and are less likely to forgive—cannot be leaders. But they will not be the kinds of leaders that get the best out of their followers. The ability to forgive is an essential capability for any leader wishing to make a difference.

Of course, forgiveness doesn’t mean excusing unacceptable behavior; it is about healing the memory of the harm, not erasing it. When you forgive, you don’t change the past, but you can change the future by taking control of your destructive feelings instead of letting them control you, and creating a new way of remembering. Transformational leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Aung San Suu Kyi have figured this out, refusing to replay past hurts and choosing serenity and happiness over righteous anger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Make Your Innovation Proposal into a Hitchcock Movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Will China’s Internet Transition Come?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if Performance Management Focused on Strengths?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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