Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1504

Hiring and Big Data: Those Who Could Be Left Behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talent and the New World of Hiring

An HBR Insight Center




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

How to Get the Answer You Want

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Dangers of Codependent Mentoring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Getting People to Publicly Support a Cause Can Be Counterproductive

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

Big Data Demands Big Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What underlying assumptions am I making?

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

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

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

What emotions will be at play?

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

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

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

 How can I better learn about context?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




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
How is Big Data Transforming Your 80/20 Analytics?

Publishers, Stop Crying Over Spilled Ink

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

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

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

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

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

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

In comparison, here is how Carr started his piece:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitigating the Risks of Social Login

Should we let our users create accounts entirely through Facebook?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Five Superpowers of Marketing

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

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

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

1. To hear what no one else can hear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. To make silos disappear. 

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

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

5.  To bring out the superpowers in others.

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

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

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

How a Bathtub-Shaped Graph Helped a Company Avoid Disaster

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

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

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

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

Consider, for example, the bathtub.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Data to Action An HBR Insight Center




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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