Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1518

Create Meaningful Experiences, Charge Higher Prices

The yogurt shelves are crowded with options. So how did Chobani manage to become the number-one yogurt brand in America in less than a decade? It capitalized on a gap in the market, for one. Faced with cheap, low-fat, and tasteless competition, Chobani double downed on its “real” Greek yogurt, and became an easy choice for consumers as a result. It just goes to show: if you offer a meaningful and different experience, people will keep coming back for more — and will be more than willing to pay a premium price.

How to Pick Your Battles at Work

You hate that people consistently show up to meetings late. You find your company’s maternity policy woefully inadequate. You think the company’s IT system is out of date. It’s normal to be bothered by work issues like these, but when do you move from complaining to taking action? How do you decide which battles to fight?

What the Experts Say

One thing is certain — you can’t take on every problem at work. Each person has a finite amount of political capital. “If you make a huge fuss over something silly, you may not be able to get your way when it’s something really important,” says Dorie Clark, a strategy consultant and author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Even if you’re certain that the issues you want to tackle are critical, your reputation may suffer if you take them all on at once. “There’s a line you cross from being seen as an observant problem-solver to a being Debbie Downer,” says Karen Dillon, author of HBR Guide to Office Politics and co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?. It’s important to figure out where that line is. Lois Kelly, co-author with Carmen Medina (see case study #1) of the upcoming book, Rebels at Work: Befriending the Bureaucratic Black Belts and Leading Change from Within, says the smartest people carefully calculate what’s worth their time and energy. Whether the issue is minor or fundamental, here are five principles to help you decide whether to take on a challenge or leave it alone.

Understand your authority

Before tackling something that’s irking you, you’ll need to assess whether you have the reputation and authority to succeed. “People are more willing to accommodate your requests if you’ve proven yourself,” says Clark. Do your best to keep in good standing with your superiors and co-workers. It’s also easier to fight a battle if it’s part of your job. Articulate the challenge in a way that fits into your role responsibilities. If that’s difficult to do, try to formally alter your job description to include the change you want to make.

Be sure you have a solution

You shouldn’t point out a problem without also having a constructive solution — or a plan for developing one — to offer. “You want to be seen as someone who brings ideas to the table in a positive way,” Dillon says.  If you have a critique but you’re not sure how to make things better, spend some time researching the issue and talking to others before you raise it.

Ask yourself how important the issue is to you and the organization

There are costs to going against the grain so you need to be sure it’s worth it. Is the issue a pet peeve or is truly getting in the way of your and your colleagues’ critical work? Think through the risks. “If you’re launching a crusade to get Dunkin’ Donuts coffee instead of Starbucks, the upside is you get the kind of coffee you want but the downside is you look like an unproductive zealot,” Clark warns. Kelly agrees: “Effective rebels have a good radar for what matters to the organization.” She suggests you rate the importance of the problem on a scale of 1 to 10. If it’s a 6 or below, she recommends dropping it. Clark adds that you should be able to articulate how your solution will move your group or company toward its goals. That said, if the issue is a relatively minor one and will require minimal resources to fix, it might still be worth tackling.

Test the waters

Change initiatives are notoriously difficult, so test your idea before diving in. “Go to some trusted colleagues and bounce it off of them,” Clark says. “If they think it will be a Herculean task, then you might want to reconsider. If they think you’re on to something, you’ve got a good data point.” You don’t have to set up a formal meeting; just try floating your proposed solution when the issue comes up naturally. For example, after a long meeting, you could say, “It seems we spend way too much time doing this. Maybe we could try standing meetings to encourage people to move along faster.” Then see how your suggestion is received.

Enlist supporters

Shopping your solution around serves another purpose — it builds early support. And it’s much easier to take something on if you have people behind you. “When it comes time to present the idea, you can point to what you’ve learned from others. That shows you’re not a lone ranger,” says Kelly. Look for supporters beyond your immediate circle to show you’ve got broad backing. But be careful. You don’t want it to seem like you’re secretly trying to get people on your side, says Dillon; make it clear that your aim is to bring like-minded people together to brainstorm possible solutions. And don’t join bad company. “Don’t align yourself with a constant complainer or with people who are unwilling to fight their own battles,” she adds.  “Pick people you know are well respected.”

It’s not essential to have your boss on board — but it can be helpful. At the same time, don’t expect him or her to fight your battles for you. “You don’t want to run to your manager every time you want something to change,” Dillon says. “Communicate with him or her once you’ve got some well thought out ideas and a plan for how you will address it.”

Principles to Remember

Do:

Articulate how the challenge fits into your job or make it a formal part of your responsibilities
Have a viable solution, or at least a plan of attack, in mind before you raise a problem
Be careful about how many battles you take on — you could run out of political capital

Don’t:

Take on an issue that isn’t in some way important to the organization
Rely on your boss to wage the battle for you — approach her with a thought-out plan
Dive in until you’ve first floated the idea by colleagues you trust — both those you know well and those outside of your immediate circle

Case study #1: Make it part of your job

Before filling her current role as Specialist Leader at Deloitte Consulting, Carmen Medina spent 32 years in a government security agency. Ten years into her career there, in the mid-1990s, she realized that the agency’s business model was lacking a digital strategy. “I started thinking that this stuff is really serious and we needed to get moving and do something about it,” she says. She wanted the agency to figure out how to deliver information to policymakers digitally, but most of her early rumblings on the topic fell on deaf ears.

Still, Carmen was obsessed. “I remember boring my poor friends talking about how the Internet was going to change everything,” she says. She knew she’d have more luck with this battle if it was part of her job description and, in 1998, she was given that opportunity. “A new position opened with a long list of responsibilities, and figuring out online delivery was one of them — although the last item on the list,” she says. “But I knew that I wanted to make it a bigger part of the job.” In her interview, Carmen emphasized how important she thought that was. The hiring manager told her that she’d given him a lot to think about and eventually offered her the position.

Even with digital strategy as an official part of her duties, the battle wasn’t easy. But eventually she helped transform the way the agency worked. “You always want to be right when you take on a battle and I was pretty sure I was right about this one,” she says.

Case study #2: Own the solution

Caroline Johanssen* was annoyed. Every month, all of the employees in her department met for a safety meeting. The department’s admin sent out the invite and downloaded the slides from the pharmaceutical company’s intranet site. People took turns presenting, but it was a joke. “We would be looking at the same slides we’d seen months ago. One slide we saw in eight of the monthly meetings,” she says. It disrupted the workday and was a huge waste of everyone’s time. So Caroline started asking around to find out why the meeting was mandated.  Surprisingly, people knew very little. “I just wanted to get the facts about the requirement. Do we really work for a company that makes us do this every month? Everybody is saying yes but no one knows why,” she recalls.

After talking to several people including her boss, the department head, and the admin organizing the meeting, Caroline discovered that it was indeed required. She suggested combining it with other meetings but that became too complicated so she instead decided to take over herself. “I began putting together what I thought were more meaningful slides. I found ideas on our safety website. It was a good opportunity so my colleagues started speaking up too.” Eventually they turned the meeting into something that people found productive and useful. “I don’t like to complain about things that I’m not willing to do something about,” Caroline says.

This Isn’t Capitalism — It’s Growthism, and It’s Bad for Us

You know the alien cults that announce to their followers that next year, on October 28th, at precisely 4:05 pm, the master race will arrive, and save humanity? Of course, the aliens never arrive. But that doesn’t stop the cult from believing. It only strengthens their belief.

If, as I’d bet you do, you’re head-shakingly familiar with said cults, allow me to ask you a question.

Has capitalism failed? Or, if you like, is it failing? Let me be clear. I don’t mean: is capitalism useless, awful, worthless? I do mean: is capitalism failing at being the best possible means of organizing human work, life, and play?

Imagine a country called CapitalismStan. Imagine that country’s proud emblem was a great invisible hand. In every town square, its flag flew proudly. Prices were its idols; markets were its temples; products its litanies; and all knew what the great hand stood for: the undying ideals of competition, self-reliance, riches. A man’s worth was his wealth; the measure of people’s time was how much they earned; together, millions worked, hour after painstaking hour, on what they called “innovation”; good works divinely ordained by their titans; the markets.

Yet something was wrong in CapitalismStan. That very society was foundering. Its middle class was collapsing. It had already had a lost decade; and was starting on another. Its young had become a lost generation, desperately seeking opportunity. Median incomes had stagnated for decades. The economy spun headlong into a great recession; and then it “recovered”; but during the “recovery”, the richest 1% captured 95% of the gains. Millions faced chronic unemployment and poverty. Social mobility was low and decreasing. Life expectancy was dropping.

In short, life in CapitalismStan was getting shorter, nastier, unhappier, and harder. Meanwhile, other rich nations—notably those which did not worship the invisible hand so completely, totally, obediently, and unflappably—had prospered.

Does CapitalismStan’s story sound a little bit like America’s to you?

Now, allow me to rebut myself.

Maybe what’s practiced in the USA isn’t capitalism at all. It seems to be a toxic admixture of capitalism for the poor, who are ruthlessly whittled down, in brutal Darwinian contests; and socialism for the rich, for whom there appears to be no limit to bailouts, subsidies, and privileges. It’s a lethal cocktail of cronyism for the powerful; and endless struggle for the powerless. It’s neither fish nor fowl; but a chimera.

So what is this system that is faltering, precisely, if it’s not quite capitalism?

I’d call it “growthism.” It’s not just a system or a set of institutions. It’s a mindset; an ideology; a set of cherished beliefs. And one that’s hardened into dogma. A dogma which is palpably failing; but can’t be dislodged—because it’s become an article of faith, the central belief of a cult, whose priests and acolytes threaten mysterious, terrible, divine revenge whenever their authority is questioned.

Growthism says: growth must be achieved at all costs. When growth is achieved; societies are said to be successful; when it is not, they are said to be failing.

Growthism is willing to sacrifice everything for more growth. Even the very rights which enlightened societies once held to be inalienable. Are you concerned about the rise in extrajudicial mass spying, drone strikes, private security guards, military contractors, or even just the analytics that provide detailed information on what you say, do, and search to both the government and private companies? Too bad! Those are our growth industries, and woe to whatever or whoever stands in their way. Who cares about freedom of speech and assembly or the right to privacy when what we really need is good, growth-creating jobs? Jobs like becoming butlers and maids (or coaches, consultants, and “service-providers”) to the super-rich, who can purchase the “right” not to be frisked, stopped, or surveiled. Heaven forbid people protest. Why, that might hurt growth!

Growthism, then, is antithetical to democracy. Basic political and human rights, from the perspective of a growthist, are niggling sources of inefficiency that must be erased, rubbed out, sanded down. They are sources of social friction and tension that make people less productive workers and that encourage them to do things like wonder, question, agitate, challenge, defy, rebel, and think. Dammit! We don’t want a citizenry! We want a workforce.

Growthism contends that growth is the point; the alpha and omega; the sole purpose of all human effort—and therefore, all human effort must be directed towards growth.

That is the great mistake growthism makes. But growth is not an end. It is a means. A means to, at best, expanding eudaimonia; the capacity to live meaningfully well. And a means, at least, to expanding human freedom.

And because it is a means, not an end, growth is necessary—but not sufficient. For what? For prosperity. And nowhere is that more evident that in the USA; where the economy is “growing” but the majority of people under 40 are worse off than their forebears.

But wait! The average Joe now has riches he might never have dreamt of! Giant 3D TVs with subwoofers the size of small countries! A venti-soy-latte-ccino bigger than a beer keg…for $3.99! Soon, he’ll have a flying car…a robo-butler…a self-cleaning house…Talking Glasses That Tell You The Weather!! It’s amazing!

All of those toys are nice. But they are not substitutes for working societies, or real human prosperity, or the fact that it takes a working society to spark real human prosperity.

A good education; transport; energy; healthcare; community; food; all these and more are the foundations of real prosperity. Real prosperity isn’t a supergadget in every pocket…while educational attainment, income, wealth, community, opportunity, and life expectancy are dropping, while insecurity, loneliness, poverty, and inequality are skyrocketing.

Supergadgets, if they are to reduce you and I to something like fat miserable drooling zombies who’ve never read a book and enjoy no rights and don’t really remember why they matter…well, if that’s the upside of capitalism, maybe it’s a bargain only a fool would make.

Remember the alien cults? The aliens never arrive. The leaders turn around and say: followers! The aliens have been delayed on Jupiter! Why, the very fact that they’re not here is precisely how we know they’re coming! They’ll be here next year, same day, same time! Just hold on!

Sound familiar? It’s the story that growthism keeps telling all of us…about our lives. That one day, if we just believe in the magical power of growth, we’ll be saved! It’s just around the corner! The economy’s picking up steam! GDP’s growing again! Just hold on a little while longer. What, things didn’t get better for you this quarter? They surely will next quarter!

Growthism is a kind of cult. Like all cults, it asks us to deny reality; to sacrifice ourselves; to sever our ties with all that we love; and to indulge in magical thinking. Its high priests soothe us with incantations that have been flat wrong for decades. Its acolytes recite the prayers that have failed to bring rain for years. And still, they tell us: keep the faith. One day, salvation will be yours.

Growthism’s great crime—and yes, it is a crime; for it is costing you and I, right here, right now, lives we should be living, instead of the days we find ourselves limited to—is that it prevents societies from developing a sophisticated conception of what prosperity is. And hence, how to attain it. It is failing because it is stifling us from reaching past the tired, rusting idea that prosperity is merely stuff and trinkets, glittering baubles and gewgaws—and that it might, instead, be health, friendship, purpose, wisdom, resilience, happiness, a searing sense that all one’s days have mattered.

My answer, then, is this. Capitalism’s devolved into growthism. And growthism’s to this age what alchemy was to another. It’s a futile, mystical, laughable quest to turn lead into gold. But lead is just lead. And the truest wealth of life is having lived a life that matters.

The problem with alchemy isn’t that it doesn’t work. It’s that it does. It works so well—at telling us what we so desperately want to hear; Pssst! here’s the Secret! The Secret Formula! The Hidden Recipe!—that it leaves us incapable of thinking, feeling, dreaming, wondering, challenging, defying, rebelling. Thus, science remained stuck for centuries while alchemists searched in vain for the Philosopher’s Stone that they knew — they just knew — had to be possible.  So, too, we’re stuck—lured by the glittering seduction of growthism.

But there was never any shortcut to turn lead into gold. And there’s no shortcut for building societies that work, in which every single person has a shot at a life that matters. And for each of us, there’s no shortcut for living that meaningful life.

So maybe, then, it’s time for you and I to leave this cult. The aliens probably aren’t going to arrive. The cheap, plastic junk that surrounds us probably isn’t worth what we paid – not just in cash (or, more likely, credit) to get it, but in freedom, time, and tears.

Maybe it’s time for each of us to take a deep breath, tell growthism to shove it, and chart our own new course.

Leveraging Silicon Valley — From Wherever You Are

In business, volatility used to be more limited to the realms of finance and high tech. But as the tech wave has continued to sweep the globe, the environment for all organizations, including non-tech ones, has shifted from stability and predictability to rapid, unpredictable change. Innovations like Amazon price checks, or changes to healthcare or shipping enabled by mobile phones, are becoming commonplace. The only sure thing, especially when it comes to technology, is continuous discontinuity. Organizations need to enhance their design and capabilities to survive and stay competitive in a world where innovation matters more.

How can you build your organization’s ability to sense and respond to rapid improvements in technology? Many large, successful companies are creating offices in California’s Silicon Valley to spot big new trends and learn how they can transform their organization in ways they couldn’t otherwise imagine. It’s no longer good enough to wait for change to come to your industry; you need to be out there where it’s happening. And a lot is happening in Silicon Valley.

Consider General Motors, which is looking to Silicon Valley for innovative ideas and technology that could give it a competitive edge. GM established a corporate innovation group in Silicon Valley in 2010 to look at advanced technologies related to the Internet and mobile connectivity, “infotainment”, and self-driving cars. Now it is providing critical early-stage funding to entrepreneurs and offering to be the first customer for startups in a wide variety of sectors, from advanced materials to alternate fuels.

So suppose you want to follow the over 200 multinationals across a multitude of industries that have set up a strategic beachhead in Silicon Valley. What would your Silicon Valley office do? How might it identify the big ideas that are important and bring them into your legacy organization?

My friend , founder of 650 Labs, which advises companies on leveraging Silicon Valley, has identified three approaches: idea scouting, venture investing, and traditional product research and development. These approaches show how companies are going beyond simply establishing an outpost in Silicon Valley to creating, instituting and sustaining different “operating models.”

Idea Scouting

Swisscom AG is the major telecommunications provider in Switzerland. With a big market share in a small country, Swisscom has decided to grow by providing new services to Swiss citizens. Their strategy is to get out in front of ways that mobile phones will change healthcare, education, and shopping. The job of Swisscom’s Silicon Valley team is to find the very best ideas from the giant marketplace of mobile innovations and introduce them to headquarters in Bern, Switzerland.  To describe her role, Ursula Oesterle, vice president of innovation, uses the metaphor of throwing and catching a ball between her team in Silicon Valley and headquarters. To make sure the various headquarter divisions in Bern can catch and use the ideas they “throw,” they’ve developed a give-and-take synching process. The process has gone through an evolution: at first the Silicon Valley outpost would pitch opportunities to corporate, hoping that someone would catch the “ball” and run with it. This led to corporate providing a “shopping list” allowing the Silicon Valley outpost to be much more targeted in scouting and screening — in this stage the outpost was again pitching opportunities to corporate, but there was a catcher waiting for the ball.  Now, there is something closer to real-time exchange, deeply connecting continuous pitching and catching back and forth.

Venture Investing

American Express believes that technology will continue to dramatically change the way that consumers buy goods and services in the future. For example, consumers are going to Amazon for a price check at the point of purchase, or getting coupons based on their location. Harshul Sanghi, Managing Director for American Express Ventures (based in Silicon Valley), has a team that works closely with different groups at American Express to understand their current and future roadmap, as well as existing pain points. The Silicon Valley team then leverages their relationships to identify start-ups with new technologies that might be relevant for a particular business unit. The evaluation process typically includes a trip to the Bay Area with the senior executive sponsor and his/her leadership team to meet companies and evaluate them as potential partners. In many cases there is a fit and the start-up begins working more closely with the business unit to define use cases and run a pilot. Depending on the underlying strategic importance and financial viability, American Express Ventures may invest in these companies to further align and drive value for all parties. Sanghi told me, “This process is a repeatable, scalable, ongoing effort that enables our senior executives to work closely with start-ups to understand how companies are innovating in areas that are important to American Express. This degree of involvement helps us make the right investment decisions, while also keeping AmEx at the forefront of innovation in financial services.”

Product Research and Development

Honda launched Honda Silicon Valley Lab (HSVL) in 2011 to partner with talented entrepreneurs and tech companies to create cutting edge products and services. HSVL efforts are currently focused on providing drivers with seamless access to information, and sensors, displays, speech interfaces, and tactile communications. For example, they recently introduced voice-activated commands (Apple’s “Siri Eyes Free”) into certain Honda and Acura vehicles. With voice commands you can call people, select and play music, hear and compose text messages, use maps and get directions, get calendar information, and more.

“Many industries, from retail to manufacturing, have been fundamentally transformed by Silicon Valley technology,” said Zawacki. “Success relies more than ever on how successful a company is in embracing transformative technologies and managing the rapid change that is inevitable.”

As I wrote in a previous post, this means organizations need to become “anti-fragile,” shifting from command-and-control models within a predictable, stable environment to greater flexibility with a shared purpose and coordination. They need to be able to sense opportunities and threats, and respond flexibly.  Companies with offices in Silicon Valley, such as the ones above, are cultivating this sensing and responding as a core capability.

Why It Might Be Helpful to Apologize for Something That’s Not Your Fault

An apology for something beyond anyone’s control, such as the weather, has the effect of making others trust the apologizer, says a team led by Alison Wood Brooks of Harvard Business School. For example, when a young man approached strangers in a train station on a rainy day and said, “I’m so sorry about the rain! Can I borrow your phone?” he was successful 47% of the time, compared with just 9% if he simply asked to borrow a phone. Past studies have shown that when culpability for negative situations is ambiguous, people reward those who take blame more than those who express remorse.

The Big Lesson from Twelve Good Decisions

How is it that managers facing high-stakes decisions, despite all the resources and knowledge available to them, often make them so poorly?  In large part, it’s because their whole perspective on decision-making is wrong. Managers think of major decisions as choices they must make in order for the work of the organization to proceed. The truth is that decision-making is work.  This simple shift in perspective – seeing big decisions as tasks to be managed – has huge implications. It means they should be approached with the same level of discipline and direction good managers bring to other areas.  It means everyone understands that decisions improve when the right people, tools, and processes are brought to bear on them.

A while back, Brook Manville and I published a book called Judgment Calls that focused on the challenges of high-stakes decisions through the lens of twelve actual cases. Rather than pouncing on spectacular failures in decision-making, we looked for organizations that had made good calls and studied how they got them right. Twelve stories allowed us to put a spotlight on twelve lessons we took away from the exercise.  But I’m not sure we underscored the “meta” lesson of the book strongly enough: that the first rule for anyone hoping for improved decision-making is to view decisions as work.

Looking back on the twelve great calls we studied, it’s clear that making them was hard work. I think of NASA, which has a big decision to make every time a launch date approaches. Its process for doing so changed after a couple of heartbreaking disasters reminded everyone how high the stakes really are. When momentum is established and people’s hopes are high for a blast off, it’s hard to round up all the interested parties (including the mission astronauts) in a room and stage a thorough debate over whether the mission is safe and should go ahead. But make it part of standard procedure, and the decision is made better.

View decision-making as work and you soon realize that many general principles about good work apply to it. Just to prime your own thinking in this direction, let me offer five basic pieces of management advice:

Don’t do all the decision work yourself. A major theme of Judgment Calls was to urge organizations to move beyond the “great man” school of decision-making. Work in the behavioral economics and decision bias domains suggests that every single decision-maker—no matter how senior—has flawed, less-than-rational decision processes. The unaided human brain is not that great a decision engine unless it has made the same decision many times and learned from its mistakes. This means that major decisions should rarely be made solely by the CEO or any other single individual. In the book we mostly focus on good decisions with positive outcomes, but we mention a few bad ones by CEOs like Gerry Levin of Time Warner (Even the sainted Steve Jobs of Apple made some clunkers.). A variety of individuals should be consulted in decisions, with a systematic process for sampling their perspective. Social media can even play a role, as EMC showed when it asked employees to weigh in on some important decisions about cost-cutting during the last recession.

Bring a big toolkit to your decision work. The authors of “Deciding How to Decide” in the November 2013 issue of HBR point out that most decision-makers default to using some single, favorite tool to aid their deliberations. No matter how powerful that one-trick pony is, having only one will lead to suboptimal results across the set of all decisions. Instead, people should bring a wide variety of decision tools to the task—analytical models, “wisdom of crowds” approaches, human experience and intuition, disciplined experimentation, and others. Indeed, in our Judgment Calls cases, we saw a variety of decision approaches in use, and no single approach taking over in a complex organization with complex decisions to make.

Measure before deciding. Just as carpenters admonish their apprentices to measure twice and cut once, decision-makers should know not to make a decision without careful measurement. Having just said that no single decision approach can suffice, I will admit the one I’d turn to if I had to choose would be reliance on data and analytics. Rigorous decisions depend on gathering some data and performing some analysis. We saw the power of data-driven decisions in organizations from Partners Healthcare in Boston to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools. Although no one should abandon human responsibility for good decisions to computerized analytics, they can provide a massive amount of help.

Systematically review your work. Here’s another tip decision-makers can borrow from the managers of “real” work: decisions will get better if you establish the habit of reviewing them after the fact. This requires “a culture of honesty and self-examination,” as a manager at Chevron told us when we visited there. If your organization can’t shine a light on past decisions to learn what went well and what didn’t, you are very likely to make bad ones. Our favorite example of this turned out to be a small business, WGB Homes, which has a process to reflect on decisions that didn’t work out as expected. Managers there systematically assess not only “why didn’t this house sell?” but “what made us decide to build it the way we did?”

Have a process for decision work. Decisions are sometimes viewed as an ad hoc activity with no need for process, but if they’re serious work, they need a process to guide them. The process flow dictates who gets involved when, what kind of data and analysis should be applied, and how quickly the decision needs to be made. If you’re worried about “analysis paralysis,” or excessive focus on analytics (rare in my experience), a process will address the issue. In Judgment Calls we talk about McKinsey & Co. and Media General, two organizations that employed well-defined processes for important decisions.

If you apply just this handful of ideas, I’m confident your organization can make high-stakes decisions as well as the twelve we wrote about did.

So don’t kid yourself. Good decision-making is hard work. If I seem to be overstating the case, well then possibly you are an especially gifted manager, and such proven management principles are just second nature to you. Or possibly you are clairvoyant, and can make the right calls without additional perspectives, analytical tools, or logical process.  But here’s another possibility about your decision-making: if it’s that easy for you, perhaps you’re actually not doing it very well.

High Stakes Decision Making An HBR Insight Center




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The Five Characteristics of Successful Innovators

There is not much agreement about what makes an idea innovative, and what makes an innovative idea valuable.

For example, discussions on whether the internet is a better invention than the wheel are more likely to reveal personal preferences than logical argumentation. Likewise, experts disagree on the type and level of innovation that is most beneficial for organizations. Some studies suggest that radical innovation (which does sound sexy) confers sustainable competitive advantages, but others show that “mild” innovation – think iPhone 5 rather than the original iPhone – is generally more effective, not least because it reduces market uncertainty. There is also inconclusive evidence on whether we should pay attention to consumers’ views, with some studies showing that a customer focus is detrimental for innovation because it equates to playing catch-up, but others arguing for it. Even Henry Ford’s famous quote on the subject – “if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” – has been disputed.

We are also notoriously bad at evaluating the merit of our own ideas. Most people fall trap of an illusory superiority that causes them to overestimate their creative talent, just as in other domains of competence (e.g., 90% of drivers claim to be above average — a mathematical impossibility). It is therefore clear that we cannot rely on people’s self-evaluation to determine whether their ideas are creative or not.

Yet there are relatively well-defined criteria for predicting who will generate creative ideas. Indeed, research shows that some people are disproportionately more likely to come up with novel and useful ideas, and that – irrespective of their field of expertise, job title and occupational background – these creative individuals tend to display a recurrent set of psychological characteristics and behaviors. As summarized in a detailed review of over 100 scientific studies, creative people tend to be better at identifying (rather than solving) problems, they are passionate and sensitive, and, above all, they tend to have a hungry mind: they are open to new experiences, nonconformist, and curious. These personality characteristics are stronger determinants of creative potential than are IQ, school performance, or motivation.

Creativity alone, however, is not sufficient for innovation: innovation also requires the development, production, and implementation of an idea. This is why the number of “latent” innovators is far larger than the number of actual innovations, and why we all have at some point generated great ideas that we never bothered to implement. Here are a couple of mine: rent-a-friend – a service that enables tourists to hire locals for advice or simply some company – and location-based dating via an app that finds your nearby matches based on personality profiling. As with most of my ideas, these have since been successfully implemented by others, who also happened to have them.

The key difference between creativity and innovation is execution: the capacity to turn an idea into a successful service, product or venture. If, as William James noted, “truth is something that happens to an idea”, entrepreneurship is the process by which creative ideas become useful innovations. Given that entrepreneurship involves human agency – it depends on the decisions and behaviors of certain people – a logical approach for understanding the essence of innovation is to study the core characteristics of entrepreneurial people, that is, individuals who are a driving force of innovation, irrespective of whether they are self-employed, business founders, or employees. The research highlights several key characteristics (in addition to creativity):

An opportunistic mindset that helps them identify gaps in the market. Opportunities are at the heart of entrepreneurship and innovation, and some people are much more alert to them than others. In addition, opportunists are genetically pre-wired for novelty: they crave new and complex experiences and seek variety in all aspects of life. This is consistent with the higher rates of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among business founders.
Formal education or training, which are essential for noticing new opportunities or interpreting events as promising opportunities. Contrary to popular belief, most successful innovators are not dropout geniuses, but well-trained experts in their field. Without expertise, it is hard to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information; between noise and signals. This is consistent with research showing that entrepreneurship training does pay off.
Proactivity and a high degree of persistence, which enable them to exploit the opportunities they identify. Above all, they effective innovators are more driven, resilient, and energetic than their counterparts.
A healthy dose of prudence. Contrary to what many people think, successful innovators are more organized, cautious, and risk-averse than the general population. (Although higher risk-taking is linked to business formation, it is not actually linked to business success).
Social capital , which they rely on throughout the entrepreneurial process. Serial innovators tend to use their connections and networks to mobilize resources and build strong alliances, both internally and externally. Popular accounts of entrepreneurship tend to glorify innovators as independent spirits and individualistic geniuses, but innovation is always the product of teams. In line, entrepreneurial people tend to have higher EQ, which enables them to sell their ideas and strategy to others, and communicate the core mission to the team.

Even when people possess these five characteristics, true innovation is unlikely to occur in the absence of a meaningful mission or clear long-term vision. Indeed, vision is where entrepreneurship meets leadership: regardless of how creative, opportunistic, or proactive you are, the ability to propel others toward innovation is a critical feature of successful innovation. Without it, you can’t attract the right talent, build and empower teams, or ensure that you remain innovative even after attaining success. As Frances Bowen and colleagues recently noted, there is “a vicious circle [whereby] innovation leads to superior future performance, but such investment can also give rise to core rigidities and hence less innovation in a future time period.” In other words, innovation leads to growth, but growth hinders innovation… unless innovation is truly ingrained in the organizational culture, which requires an effective vision.

In short, there is no point in just hoping for a breakthrough idea – what matters is the ability to generate many ideas, discover the right opportunities to develop them, and act with drive and dedication to achieve a meaningful goal.

Ideas don’t make people successful – it’s the other way around.

Wikipedia Has a Management Problem, and It May Be Impossible to Solve

You Can't Edit That The Decline of WikipediaMIT Technology Review

Sure, we all use it. But to most of us, Wikipedia’s inner workings are a mystery. That, surprisingly, is by design. And while the site’s bureaucratic structure brings order to the chaos of public editing, could ultimately cause its downfall (or at least its stagnation). Tom Simonite traces Wikipedia’s origins through the lens of management, exploring how a cadre of volunteers, feeling that the accuracy of the content was slipping away in 2006, developed new procedures to prevent bad edits. It worked (yay!) but brought on another problem: It became almost impossible for new editors to be folded into the system. A group of researchers who studied collaboration at Wikipedia facetiously (but accurately) suggested that the site adopt a new description of itself: "The encyclopedia that anyone who understands the norms, socializes him- or herself, dodges the impersonal wall of semi-automated rejection, and still wants to voluntarily contribute his or her time and energy can edit."



Why does this all matter if Wikipedia is accurate? There's a difference between "correct" and "representative" — currently the editors are 90% male — and a closed-off system goes against Wikipedia's mission to democratize knowledge. The organization has made a variety efforts to encourage new editors, but there's been plenty of backlash from the rank and file. These factors, combined with new types of sharing and online aggregation on social media, may signal the end of Wikipedia's evolution.

Hell Comes in 9 Minute Intervals The Devil Is in Your Snooze ButtonPacific Standard

Much to the explicitly stated anger of my significant other, I use my phone's snooze function six to 10 times when I wake up each morning. It's worth it, right? I can ease my way into my day, bright-eyed and... actually, no. Casey N. Cep has convinced me to chill out on the whole "waking up in nine-minute intervals" thing with her fun article on the history of alarm clock technology and how it's made us terrible at sleeping.

In 1956, General Electric-Telechron introduced the world to the Snooz-Alarm, which was followed a few years later by Westclox Drowse Alarm. Both gave us the power to regulate our own mornings while inducing what Cep calls "a pitiful mix of hazy, haunted wakefulness." In truth, by conflating snoozing with sleeping, we're "compromising the very sleep we're trying to steal." So is it time to declare war on the snooze button, with a public-service campaign proclaiming that the minutes gained are actually hours in rest and productivity lost? I'm game (and I'm sure my bedmate is, too).

It Starts with the Right BossCreating the Job You Love Gallup

The next time someone criticizes you for not taking the high-paying job that gave you a mild case of the creeps, consider this: One of the most important aspects of having a job you love, says Gallup senior scientist Shane Lopez, is working in a caring environment. That doesn't mean you need to find a company where everybody gets a birthday cake. It means your coworkers should be interested in you as a human being. Caring workplaces are hard to find, but they're even harder to create. "That's why we need to be better at picking jobs," says Lopez. "We need to respond to our intuition, our gut reaction, when choosing a place where it feels good to work and where we are connected to people who care about one another." And to love your job, you need to have a boss who really gets you — who understands what you do well. So when you identify someone like that in your organization, "start moving in the direction of that boss." —Andy O'Connell 

What Hank Paulson Is Emailing to His Friends (You Mean You're Not One of Them?)Economic Theory, via YouTube and Cartoon The New York Times

An "oddly entertaining" animated video about credit, default, and deleveraging is making the rounds, even among the elite: Hank Paulson has been sending it to friends, according to The New York Times. Maybe that's because the cartoon constitutes 30 minutes of free information from a billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, whose firm (Bridgewater Associates) charges 2% of assets plus 20% of investment profits. Or maybe it's because the ideas are both provocative and "refreshingly basic." Paul Volcker says the video is "unconventional, but it casts strong light on how the economy actually works." Dalio says he hopes it will help decision makers reduce economic blunders. Or maybe he made the video simply because he could. —Andy O'Connell 

Forget LinkedIn For Some Job Seekers, the Killer App May Be TextingBloomberg

Flip phones make up 48% of mobile phones globally. One in five U.S. adults doesn't use the Internet, the largest percentage being Spanish speakers. And 59% percent of the American workforce is hourly. These stats are a big part of why one start-up is placing its bets on texting as the future of hiring. Jobaline works with employers to advertise for hourly jobs that can be applied to via text message. After potential employees are pre-screened (also with text messages in English or Spanish), they may be asked to come in for interviews. Evolv, another start-up that focuses on hourly workers, crunched the numbers and found that high turnover among hourly workers costs U.S. companies $350 billion a year on things like posting jobs and conducting interviews. Jobaline equates that with 1 billion hours lost on operational efficiencies. And while there’s a whole host of issues surrounding some segments of hourly work (low pay, a lack of health insurance, and little job security), the idea of making it easier for people to find work while also saving money for their potential employers is intriguing — and a reminder that the ease with which you're reading this isn't something available to everyone who wants a job.

BONUS BITSIt's the Little Things

Small Office, Big Impact: How to Project Authority, Creativity (The Wall Street Journal)
Can a $400 Blender Change Your Life? (Slate)
Apple's War on Pixels (The New Yorker)

To Diversify Your Network, Follow the 2+1 Rule

Aimee, a senior executive at a global financial services firm, had carefully cultivated her network of sponsors and supporters over 15 years, but recently, she watched helplessly as waves of market dislocation, structural reorganizations, and headcount reductions battered the industry and shredded her connections. “Many of the leadership team whom I had worked with for a number of years changed,” she explained. “You feel you’ve lost the equity you built up over the years — people knowing what you do and how you perform.”

Conventional wisdom claims that a powerful sponsor can help you keep the job you have or find you a new one. But with job insecurity the new normal, we have heard from a number of top-level managers who had counted on one high-level backer to protect them — only to find themselves marginalized or even made redundant when their sponsor jumped ship.

Financial advisors frequently enjoin clients to diversify their portfolio of assets. Sponsorship is no different. A single sponsor offers a very thin shield. She — or he — might be spread too thin to give you the protection you need. She might take a better offer elsewhere. She might get canned. She might peel off to launch her own venture. In short, in tough times, your sponsor may no longer have the chips to expend helping you because she needs them to protect her own interests.

The solution? Cultivate more than one sponsor. The ideal life raft, research from the Center for Talent Innovation shows, consists of three sponsors: In organizations with fewer than ten people, you’re best served by having one sponsor within the firm and two outside of it in the same industry; in larger firms, you’ll want one outsider and two insiders — one in your line of sight and one in a different department or division. This “2+1 Rule” pertains for every career stage, from entry level to executive.

One manager compares her sponsor strategy to her investment portfolio. “You want it to be diversified, and you want to keep adding to it, or it won’t be an adequate hedge,” she counsels. This means that your sponsors should be independent of each other, so that if one goes down, you don’t find the others — and yourself — dragged along.

Building out your portfolio of sponsors means increasing the number of arenas in which you play a leadership role. Your job alone probably won’t attract the attention of powerful individuals outside your team, department, or division, especially if they’re busy watching their own backs. You need to make yourself visible to a wide range of high-level managers across divisions. Volunteer for formal mentoring programs as a mentor, or sign up for a high-profile position in another leadership development program. Ask for formalized mentorship for yourself, as executives are often tapped to lead these programs.

Spearhead a philanthropic project or cultural event, or consider taking a leading role in an employee network. Two women whom Barbara Adachi, head of Human Capital for Deloitte Consulting, describes as her protégées both “found” her, she says, through WIN, Deloitte’s professional women’s network, which Adachi heads up. It was their offer to help her and their follow-through on the important tasks she assigned them that won them her advocacy. “Even though one of my protégées was in a different division, I was able to be a voice at the table when she came up for partnership,” Adachi says, because the woman’s work on the WIN project had convincingly established her leadership abilities.

Outside the office, take a similar tack. Run for office in your professional association. Attend conferences, and find a way to be invited to be a speaker, panelist, or facilitator. Create a personal board of directors or circle of mentors outside of your company to act as a sounding board and source of advice and introductions.

Nurture your networks. Join a philanthropic cause; get on a nonprofit board; take a leadership role in your church, synagogue, or community organization; head up your alumni chapter — all with a view to gaining visibility in a larger community by showcasing your unique skills or experience. While potential sponsors in these arenas may not be directly linked to your profession, they comprise an influence network which will burnish your brand and expand the scope of connections you can call on.

The 2+1 Rule ensures that you’ll survive a direct hit to your department, a threat to your division, or even a catastrophic blow to your firm. Finding and sustaining a relationship with three sponsors is a daunting task, to be sure. But now more than ever, diversification is the key to career survival.

Marketing’s Mission: Make it Meaningfully Different

Everything you do in business builds your brand for good or ill, as your actions generate feelings, associations, and ideas in the minds of your consumers. The challenge is to make sure those actions create a meaningfully different experience that people want to repeat. This is because people are predisposed to choose things that stand out from the crowd. A brand’s difference gives consumers an easy rationale for choosing it, and a ready justification for paying a price premium. Research by Millward Brown finds that brands with a meaningful difference command a price premium 13 percent higher than weaker category alternatives.

For example, look at Lululemon. Founded in 1998, Lululemon produces sports apparel for women that is fashionable, environmentally friendly, and as technically advanced as sports apparel for men. The company spends virtually nothing on advertising. Instead, it concentrates on building an ardent consumer base by creating a unique customer experience. Instructors wear the clothing at in-store events like self-defense and goal-setting workshops, simultaneously building product awareness and forging ties with local communities. Through the community portal on its website, Lululemon invites customers to share their experiences via Instagram and Twitter. They are encouraged to apply to become Lululemon ambassadors, “unique individuals … who embody the Lululemon lifestyle and live our culture.” The company now has over 200 stores, and sales soared from US $40 million to US $1.37 billion in eight years. In the US alone, sales grew 40 percent in 2012.

People have always been attracted to brands with meaning, whether their experience of that meaning is tangible and functional or more of an emotional nature. Meaning drives volume; brands that stand for something meaningful and different in customers’ minds can generate five times more purchases than less meaningful brands.

What is marketing’s role in realizing such results? For one thing, we know that getting the word out about a brand makes it salient – marketing’s term for being included in the set of options a customer is considering. The faster a brand comes to mind in relation to a specific need, the more likely it is to be chosen. Meaningfully different brands are the most likely to benefit from a marketer’s efforts to improve salience. (In fact, a better way to think about how salient a brand is would be to ask: How quickly does a sense of what the brand stands for form in the mind of the consumer?)

But marketing plays a broader role in shaping a brand. It does not just manage to get a brand into a customer’s consideration set; it powerfully influences which aspects of that brand the customer notices and experiences. Good marketing helps ensure that brands are meaningful, different, and salient.

Chobani provides an example of how a product that delivers a noticeably different experience can overtake the competition. The company came along in 2005, after years of focus on low-fat products had left the US yogurt market vulnerable. Chobani’s brand strategy focused on the taste, texture, affordability, and authenticity of its “real” yogurt. Consumers responded enthusiastically and the brand attained mass distribution in just two years. In five years, the company held over half of the U.S. Greek yogurt market, and nearly 20 percent of the total yogurt market. By 2011, Chobani was the number-one yogurt brand in America.

Or consider the Mini Cooper, a car that reentered the US market in 2002 after an absence of 30 years. Younger, more non-traditional car buyers were attracted to the unique brand appeal of the Mini’s compact size, fuel efficiency, and fun, sporty performance. The company relies on clever stunts (challenging a Porsche to a race), event marketing (annual road trips for owners), and offbeat outdoor advertising to stand out in a crowded marketplace and appeal to the non-traditional consumer base. As a result, Mini has grown from one to seven available models at 119 dealers in 38 US states. Sales in the US have eclipsed those in the UK, and the company posted a 26 percent increase in 2011 and 15 percent increase in 2012. Mini’s well-defined and targeted purpose clearly made a clear impact on the bottom line.

By working in ways like these to make a brand more meaningful, different, and salient, Marketing drives the positive consumer behaviors that yield financial value growth. Our analysis of the annual reports for 49 corporate brands found that the strongest brands returned an average of 31 percent more operating profit as a proportion of revenues than those that lacked meaningful differentiation. Additional analysis looked at changes in value market share over time and found that meaningful, different, and salient brands are also four times more likely to grow.

This finding should come as no surprise. Strong, profitable brands are meaningful to their consumers, perceived as different from the competition, and are more salient than the alternatives. These three qualities determine how likely people are to choose the brand, pay a premium for it, and stick with it in future. If a brand is more meaningful, different, and salient than its competition, then it will likely command the highest value market share among its target audience. And this value is what will drive sales and profits, not just for now but for a while down the road.