Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1520

Your Status Depends Partly on Your Upward or Downward Momentum

An individual who was said to have risen in status to become the fourth-ranked member of a 10-person team was viewed by research participants as having greater prestige (6.60 versus 5.24 on a 1-to-9 scale) than if he was said to have declined to become fourth-ranked, according to a team led by Nathan C. Pettit of New York University. In judging status, people appear to consider not only current position but also whether an individual has upward or downward “momentum,” the researchers say.

Make Better Decisions by Getting Outside Your Social Bubble

Decision makers know they’re supposed to seek outside counsel — a diversity of information improves the likelihood of a good decision. This, of course, means that good decisions are social decisions. But the converse isn’t necessarily true: Not all social decisions are good ones.

Alex “Sandy” Pentland has proven this with math, showing that when we seek outside advice  in some social environments, what we get back are actually reflections of our own ideas and biases. He calls these decision making “bubbles” or “echo chambers.” This video explains how and why these decision bubbles form, and what happens to your performance when you find yourself in one.

The good news, Pentland explains in his recent article “Beyond the Echo Chamber” is that it’s possible to rig your decision making process to avoid these bubbles.

High Stakes Decision Making An HBR Insight Center




Timberland’s CEO on Deciding to Engage with Angry Activists
Does Bigger Data Lead to Better Decisions?
How Jeff Bezos Makes Decisions
Don’t Trust Anyone Who Offers You the Answer

Google Glass Isn’t the Future of Wearables

Everybody is hopping on the wearables bandwagon. Since the publication of my HBR article on wearables, I’ve been asked a number of follow-up questions from executives, tech analysts, and most especially from entrepreneurs.

Though the questions vary, they generally fall into three buckets.

“Aren’t Head-up Displays (HUDs) like Google Glass where the market is going?”

No. Not necessarily. Pricey (and for now, socially awkward-looking) HUDs will likely be a sliver of the nearly half-billion units that will ship by 2018. By comparison, most other types of wearables will be relatively cheap, and as socially unobtrusive as a ring or wristband.

No doubt, there will be well-defined segments of HUD wearers. For instance, emergency first responders and many disabled people will immediately benefit from additional contextual information the tools display that enhance safety and the ability to navigate tricky situations. The more you consider real data and use-cases, the more you see wearables’ potential to support humanistic aspirations.

However, as I suggest in my HBR piece, we should vigorously question the ethics and effectiveness of any “asymmetrical” uses of HUDs. The presumption that a Google Glass wearer has a right to ascertain information from others who haven’t opted in isn’t necessarily socially acceptable. (HBR editor Scott Berinato calls Glass wearers who point their devices at others who haven’t opted in “glassholes”). It may not even be legal. In the work place, any use absolutely must be accompanied by clearly stated benefits to the employee (not just the employer) and ensure her data privacy. Otherwise, it’s Orwellian.

Aren’t wearables basically just a hands-free PC or smartphone?

Some wearables are indeed the next stage in the evolution from PCs to smartphones to tablets. Samsung’s watch, for example, tethers to its phone and lets you take and receive calls and texts. But many others tools and applications, such as the one I describe below, are discontinuous. They support radically new ways to improve work and society. The opportunity in the discontinuous space is probably bigger, and certainly some of the killer apps for wearables haven’t even been conjured yet. Something will take us by surprise.

Aren’t wearables just the latest cool new toys?

When people ask this sort of question, they’re usually wondering if these things are just technology for technology’s sake. They want to know about purpose, whether and how they can use (or “hire”) a wearable to fix a problem. In my research, I already see evidence and use cases of a number of ways wearables are helping organizations solve specific and sometimes intractable problems.

Here’s an example of a wearable that speaks to each of the three points above: it’s not socially awkward to wear and offers a radically new solution to a big problem.

The problem: Each year in the United states, about 5 percent of hospital patients catch an infection while being treated, leading to nearly 100,000 deaths.  Hospital-borne infections like MRSA cost hospitals about 10 percent of their operating budgets, and the overall US health care system about $35 billion.

The challenge: Research shows that 70 percent of these infections could be prevented or made less severe by following basic hand-washing guidelines set by the World Health Organization (WHO), though only about 4 in 10 hospitals effectively comply.

The solution:  Some hospitals in Florida are piloting a wearable solution called IntelligentM. Doctors, nurses, and all other caregivers wear RFID wristbands with motion sensors, that interacts with tagged locations around their hospital.

For instance, at a hand-washing station, the smartband tracks the user’s sequence of hand movements and offers prompt feedback: Good hand washing that follows the WHO guidelines leads to a single quick vibration in the wrist, while missing the mark prompts three vibrations as a nudge to try again.

The devices connect to other critical locations, equipment, and “events” in the facility, proactively reducing oversights by busy staff. Staff receive alerts as soon as they walk into a patient’s room if they haven’t first washed their hands. Same if they’re about to perform a procedure requiring hand washing, such as inserting an IV needle.

Wearers also upload their data at the end of each shift and then receive a monthly hand hygiene report card. This shows each provider’s compliance results and, for comparison, those of her unit and facility. A surgeon can see that her unit was 80 percent compliant, but that she only hit 52 percent—a number that should provoke a change in her hand-washing routine.

The aim here is to replace visual observation, the costly and labor-intensive approach used at most hospitals to track hygiene. With visual observation the data-sets tend to be small and statistically unreliable, while the numbers from the wearables initiative are abundantly detailed. These context-based and segmented analytics are meant to help administrators spot individual and group trends. Instead of simply knowing that her hospital was 72 percent compliant, an administrator could see that ER nurses are 89 percent compliant before dressing wounds but only 57 percent compliant after touching patients—a red flag worth addressing at a team meeting.

As New Yorker writer and physician Atul Gawande has noted, the barrier to attacking big problems like hospital germs is that they are “invisible…and making [solutions] work can be tedious…” In the everyday tedium of washing hands, a buzzing wristband can serve the critical function of reminding a busy doctor when there’s a better way to go through the motions.

When I look past the knee-jerk use cases (“let’s look at the Eiffel Tower and get a Wikipedia entry about it”) and sci-fi scenarios (“let’s rate people like books and get a star rating when we look at them”) I see the real rise of wearables in cases like the hospital wristband— specific, positive developments where wearables are going to—indeed are already—making a difference.

How Do You Know What You Think You Know?

Friedrich Nietzsche notoriously asserted: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”  Understood one way — that there are no objective truths — his remark seems quite clearly false. However, if the statement is understood as a descriptive claim about human psychology, it’s not clear to me that it’s wrong. That is, if he means that people very often confuse their interpretations with the facts, then he’s onto something.

In my last post, I argued that an admission of ignorance — saying, “I don’t know” — is an indication of intellectual honesty. But obviously many people do know some things, and a few people know many things.   The challenge here is sorting wheat from chaff:  How can you tell when they really do know something and aren’t just making false claims?

Philosophers have given a lot of thought to that question and have offered a number of answers. I think folks standing around water coolers and sitting in boardrooms could benefit from reflecting on what the philosophers have come up with — and from applying it (more frequently).

Probably the most orthodox position in epistemology is that knowledge is justified true belief. According to this account, one can only claim that one’s belief counts as knowledge if the belief is in fact true and one is justified in believing that it’s true. Mark can only claim to know that Steve is manipulating his sales figures if: (1) Steve is actually manipulating his sales figures (truth condition); and (2) Mark has very good reason to believe that Steve is manipulating his sales figures (justification condition).

If Mark’s justification for his belief is that Steve is a jerk and he looks strange, then it seems to me that he’s not warranted in asserting that he knows that Steve is fudging his numbers — even if Steve is indeed fudging his numbers. Mark is free to speculate, conjecture, hypothesize and so on that Steve is up to no good; but he can’t legitimately claim to know that he is. Similarly, an economist who predicted a downturn for the wrong reasons cannot claim to have known that a downturn was coming. And an HR head who predicted that an applicant would do well can not claim to have known that he would do well, if she believed he was a good hire because he had the same birthday as her son.

That obvious next question is, “So what counts as justification?” There is no unobjectionable answer, and I don’t think we need one. Instead I believe a kind of epistemic rule of thumb — a simple heuristic — can help us solve the practical problem of judging how to treat an assertion: When someone makes a claim, simply ask whether what’s been asserted is a fact or an interpretation (i.e., a subjective judgment); and then follow up by asking for justification. After that it’s up to you to decide how much weight to give the claim based on how compelling you find the justification.

Suppose you’re out having lunch with colleagues and someone casually says, “Max is arrogant, dishonest, and manipulative.” Is that a fact? An interpretation? What’s the justification for that pretty powerful claim about another colleague? Unless justification is demanded, there’s real risk that some people at the table will later on confuse a potentially baseless assertion with the truth. Not to pre-empt that potential confabulation is, I think, to do Max an injustice. And bear in mind that sometimes you’re the Max.

Quite often, simply asking, “How do you know that?” is not only a good thing to do, it’s also the right thing to do.

That may seem to many of you like a statement of the obvious. But I frequently witness instances in which what look to me like interpretations are presented as facts, and, I worry, heard as facts. So before dismissing this piece because you think I’m simply stating the obvious, please test the heuristic by asking yourself: “How do I know that?”

High Stakes Decision Making An HBR Insight Center




Does Bigger Data Lead to Better Decisions?
How Jeff Bezos Makes Decisions
Don’t Trust Anyone Who Offers You the Answer
Forget Business Plans; Here’s How to Really Size Up a Startup

The Hidden Indicators of a Failing Project

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, recounts a bit of a planning pickle he and his Israeli Ministry of Education colleagues encountered when estimating how long it would take to complete a high school textbook on judgment and decision making.

When the group estimated how long it would take to get the book done, the average wound up being two years. But when Kahneman pressed their curriculum leader to compare their team to other teams in similar situations, something a bit concerning happened: when the leader drew on his knowledge about similar teams and working on similarly big projects, he concluded that his team was slightly below average when it came to their skills and resources. He estimated that 40% of comparable projects failed, and for the teams that did finish, it took about seven years.

Even more concerning was the fact that until Kahneman prompted his colleague, “there was no connection in his mind between his knowledge of the history of other teams and his forecast of our future.” And even after the connection was made, the team didn’t alter their project plans in the slightest.

Eight long years later, the book was completed. It was never used by the Ministry of Education.

If big projects aren’t at the forefront of your mind due to coverage of HealthCare.Gov’s rampant problems, they probably are because you’re actually working on one. And while there’s ample debate about what went wrong with the former (consultants! government! code! all of these things!), Kahneman’s tale points to another factor that may have played just as big a role: misperceptions, insecurities, and communication difficulties that often take place on project teams.

Truth be told, no one wants to be the person to pipe up and proclaim, “this massive project we’re betting our business on isn’t working, and here’s why.” According to Matthew McWha, the practice manager at CEB, a member-based advisory company, the culture of project management often discourages the raising of important red flags that could turn problem projects around.

“There’s a lot of perceived personal risk in saying, ‘I’m managing a failing project,’” he told me. “Or people actually think they can turn it around, so they don’t bring it up. They think they’re better off trying like the dickens to recover it in the meantime.”

McWha calls this a “watermelon project”: nice on the outside and one big mess once you cut through the surface. And if you think you can identify these projects in your company, forget it. “We think, based on our research, that a significant percentage of a portfolio that consist of watermelon projects don’t actually show up as troubled by conventional definitions,” he says.

Aside from human tendencies to self-protect and see themselves as the exception to the rule, the wrong project metrics are often being tracked — and they’re being tracked in the rear-view mirror. Too many projects measure success based on two metrics: time and budget. While these are important factors — research from Bent Flyvbjerg, author of Megaprojects: An Anatomy of Ambition, and his Oxford colleague Alexander Budzier identified time as the “the biggest factor and largest constraint” for tech projects in particular — they may not actually add up to what McWha defines as success: realizing your business outcomes.

The rub is that it’s easy to measure time and budget quantitatively; it’s not always so easy to measure business outcomes or whether you’re on the right track to meet them.

So how should you approach big projects differently? McWha offered a few suggestions based on research he’s conducted for the CEB PMO Leadership Council, analyzing over 100 large organizations with more than $1 billion in annual revenues:

Check and Revise Your Business Case Regularly. Because markets and competitive environments change, you should always revisit what, exactly, you’re doing, and more importantly, why you’re doing it. This is not only critical for uncovering hidden stumbling blocks, but can help guide your project toward accomplishing its business outcomes, which can shift over the course of your project.

Pay Attention to What Really Happens at Meetings. Gathering lots of data isn’t the be all and end all of project management. How people behave is just as important, if not more so. “If you have a project review meeting and no challenges or conflicts get raised, that’s a potential red flag,” he says. “The same is true if people walk away from a meeting with different perspectives of what’s happening.”

Cast a Wide Knowledge Net. It’s not just the core project team that needs to be part of the conversation. Educate your project sponsors on how to spot signs of trouble, and help people who aren’t involved in the day-to-day running of the project understand its goals and potential pitfalls. Often, when you’re in the midst of that Big Important Thing, it could take someone with an outside perspective to notice a problem everyone else missed.

Monitor What’s Not Being Spent. “If you’re not spending the money you should be spending, either you haven’t identified the right things to be spending it on, or people are hesitating to make decisions because the project objectives aren’t clear,” explains McWha.

Have an Entrepreneurial Project Manager. The number one driver of successful projects is a great manager. This doesn’t just mean someone needs to be good at conducting the trains; the person you pick should be an ‘entrepreneur’ — someone able to manage stakeholders and risk, and be comfortable adapting and changing course if necessary. “Nothing stays constant,” says McWha. “You have to find and develop project managers  who can exercise judgment instead of slavishly following the process.”

In the end, even the drivers of even successful projects aren’t actually technical, Flyvbjerg and Budzier explained: they largely involve the project’s environment, whether there’s organizational resistance, and how risk is being managed. All of these internal indicators, combined with our own human perceptions about what we can and can’t do or say, play into whether projects are headed for a head-in-your-hands kind of moment.

The SCOTUS Case That Could Give Voice to More Whistleblowers

In mid-November, the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a complex business case that might expand the universe of employees protected under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). In Lawson v. FMR LLC, the Court will have to discern what Congress meant when it allowed a whistleblowing employee to sue for retaliation. The uncertainty, however, lies not in the whistleblowing but in what Congress meant by “employee.” The Court does not send laws back to Congress for clarification, so it will have to figure out for itself what Congress intended.

The case turns on what seems to be a truly ambiguous provision of SOX that, to put it briefly, makes it unlawful to retaliate against a whistleblower for disclosing corporate corruption. The issue in the case is whether SOX prohibits only the publicly-traded companies that are covered by SOX from retaliating against its own employees who allege shady activities, or whether it also prohibits closely-related but un-SOX-covered companies from retaliating against their employees who make such allegations.

Here, two employees of FMR LLC, a privately held company that provides investment advice and management services to the Fidelity mutual funds, sued the company, claiming that it violated SOX when it allegedly discharged them in retaliation for calling attention to alleged fraud and conflicts of interests. As a privately-held company, FMR LLC is not covered by SOX, but Fidelity is. FMR LLC denied any retaliatory motive, but more to the point it sought to dismiss the lawsuit without trial, on the ground that it is not subject to SOX in the first place and thus cannot be sued for violating it.

The issue turns on the wording of Section 806 of SOX, which is less than clear. It states that no publicly-traded company “or any officer, employee, contractor, subcontractor, or agent of such company may discharge, demote, suspend, threaten, harass, or in any other manner discriminate against an employee in the terms and conditions of employment because of any lawful act done by the employee.” Here, FMR is a “contractor” of Fidelity. So the issue here is whether the word “employee” refers only to employees of a public, SOX-covered company, or whether it also includes an employee of a private, non-SOX covered contractor. In other words, is FMR LLC exempt from SOX claims because it is private, or does it come within the retaliation ban because it is a “contractor” of a covered company?

Read literally, the statute would seem to give the FMR employees the better of the argument: FMR was a “contractor” and it did — allegedly — “discriminate against an employee” (its own) by discharging them for protected activity. Indeed, that is essentially what the federal district court in Massachusetts ruled in allowing the case to proceed. But the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed that ruling in a 2-1 split, the majority reasoning that the purpose, the context, and the legislative history of SOX amply demonstrate that it was intended to cover only public companies. For example, the court of appeals noted, the caption of Section 806 is “Protection for Employees of Publicly Traded Companies Who Provide Evidence of Fraud.” What Section 806 actually means, said the court, is that employees of public companies are protected if they are subject to retaliation by the contractor for reporting fraud of the public company. Since the employee plaintiffs here are not employed by the public company — Fidelity itself — they are beyond the statute’s protection.

The United States, which has filed an amicus brief, does not agree. Given the broad protective purpose of SOX, and the absence of any qualifying condition on “employee,” the Solicitor General argues that Section 806 should be read to cover employees of contractors as well as those of the public entity itself. The dissenting judge on the court of appeals was correct, the government contends, when she said her court was imposing “an unwarranted restriction on the intentionally broad language” of SOX that “bar[s] a significant class of potential securities-fraud whistleblowers from any legal protection.”

FMR, for its part, argues that, given SOX’s focus on public companies, the “contractor” clause “does not enlarge the class of protected employees; it simply makes specified additional actors secondarily liable” for retaliation. It urges the Court to “reject petitioners’ policy-based plea to judicially amend Section 806 to extend the private right of action from the employees of about 4,500 publicly traded companies to those of more than 6 million private companies.” (Because the issue arose on a motion to dismiss the plaintiff’s suit, there has as yet been no trial on their allegations of fraud, and there won’t be, if the Supreme Court affirms the court of appeals’ dismissal). The case will be argued on November 12.

So where will the Court come out on this case? That’s a tough call. A bedrock principle of statutory construction holds that courts are to interpret the words of the statute, and resort to context, purpose, and legislative history only if the words are ambiguous. Yet here, even those aids to construction look in both directions. As FMR argues (and the court of appeals agreed), the whole purpose of SOX is to root out and expose misbehavior in public, not private, companies. Yet the Court must also take seriously the position of the US government that the purposes of the statute are advanced by resolving any statutory ambiguity in favor of greater, not less, protection to those who blow the whistle. However the Court rules, Congress can always amend the statute to make clear just whom it protects. Had Congress done that originally, there would be no need for this dispute.

Don’t Tidy Up Before You Do Your Creative Thinking

Research participants in a room where papers were scattered on a table and the floor came up with 5 times more highly creative ideas for new uses of ping-pong balls than those in a room where papers and markers were neatly arranged, says a team led by Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota. A disorderly environment seems to aid creativity by helping people break from tradition, order, and convention, the researchers say.

How Office Control Freaks Can Learn to Let Go

An internal battle rages inside many high performers who advance from positions where they thrived as individual contributors to positions that require them to depend on others. On the one hand, they pride themselves on knowing more than anyone else about their area and like feeling confident in their abilities to deliver exceptional work. On the other, the scope of their new responsibilities no longer makes keeping up on all the details possible —or even preferable.

If you find yourself taking on an increasing number of projects and/or people, the only way to regain a sense of control is to, paradoxically, let go of control: let other people help you. This requires facing fears like, “Maybe everything won’t be done the way that I would have done it.” Or “Maybe I’ll need to defer to someone else to answer a question instead of immediately knowing the answer myself.” It also requires redefining control from “knowing every detail off the top of my head” to “having the right level of big picture perspective to make informed decisions and the right systems in place so that I know when it’s time to check in with someone or when I need to take a next action.” And it requires redefining competence as “helping others to do great work,” instead of “doing great work all by myself.”

Here are four steps to put this mindset shift into action to achieve a greater sense of peace and control and empower those around you:

1. Carefully evaluate what only you can do. If you keep having responsibilities added to your position — such as more people to manage or more projects to oversee — you will hit overload unless you were previously working below capacity. (You can determine whether you have in fact reached that tipping point in “Stop Work Overload by Setting These Boundaries”.) To counterbalance these added time investments, you’ll need to carefully examine what only you can do by asking yourself these questions:

Could someone else complete this work to an acceptable level?
Could someone else do part of this project?
Could someone else do the initial draft so I only have to review and “tweak” it?
Is this work keeping me from my highest value activities?

2. Defer early and often. Deferring is different than delegating. Delegating is handing off your responsibilities; deferring incorporates delegating, but also involves passing activities on to another appropriate party before they ever hit your to-do list. This requires deflecting random tasks that really should fall in someone else’s court — even when you could help. For example, if someone asks you an IT question when there is a full-time IT department on call, kindly direct them to the Help Desk. Or if someone questions you about a project of which you’re no longer a member, refer them to someone currently on the team. Or if you’re invited to attend a meeting where you may offer some insight but other attendees could probably offer something similar, consider not going.

Don’t volunteer yourself for additional activities if you already can’t accomplish your must-do list. If you’re used to doing it all and pride yourself on being able to figure everything out, this will feel uncomfortable. You might even feel like you’re not being a team player. But in the end, deferring tasks others could do shows respect for others’ competency and lets you have the capacity to get done what only you can do — which is what your team really needs.

3. Create simple follow-up systems — and rely on them. When you have delegated or deferred items where you have accountability for results, having systems of follow up plays a critical role in your ability to rest assured that work will get done.

To make sure this happens, you need to have two items in place: 1) A consistent location to capture outstanding activities from your current projects. 2) A consistent routine for checking them.

A consistent location could be as simple as a Word or Excel document in Google Drive or a task list in Outlook for each member on your team. For a greater level of sophistication, you could use a task management system like Asana. In terms of when to check on these tasks, you could do so during a weekly planning time where you go through the status of all projects; during a recurring meeting with the responsible individual; or at the appropriate time before a deliverable is due. In order for you to trust the system, make sure that all of the delegated items go into your recording location and that these check-in times live in the appropriate places on your calendar.

4. Resist taking back control. Once you start to let go of control, inevitably there will be a time when something doesn’t get done in the way that you would prefer. Your gut reaction will lead you to blame yourself for letting go — “Why did I ever let anyone else do this?” – which typically manifests on the surface as anger toward or frustration with others. But instead of immediately putting the work back on your agenda, transform this situation into an opportunity for learning. First, evaluate whether you could do anything differently in the future. Second, help the people who did the work understand what they need to know to complete the work successfully next time. Often you don’t know what went wrong until you really dig in. Finally, remember to focus on your own highest-value work — instead of letting fear of letting go keep you from making the greatest contribution to your organization.

The More Time We Spend Online, the Less Time We Spend Working

What are we choosing not to spend time on to make room for the hours we all spend each week on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and the like? While numerous articles have worried that such screen time might be coming at the expense of face-to-face socializing, a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests, happily, that that is a relatively small part of the tradeoff. But managers won’t find much comfort in the study’s conclusions. More than anything else, the leisure time we spend online comes at the expense of work.

In the paper, Scott Wallsten of the Technology Policy Institute attempts to measure the offline activities that are crowded out by our online recreation throughout the day, using data from The American Time Use Survey, a government survey that, since 2003, has been asking U.S. citizens how they spend their time. While there are several caveats to the research, it provides a quantitative view of what we do less of to make time for leisure activities online. For every additional minute the average American spends online recreationally, they spend roughly 16 fewer seconds working, nine fewer seconds watching TV, and seven fewer seconds sleeping.

Now for some caveats. In the time use survey, not all common online activities are collected in a single category, and some of the most common ones, including email, online gaming, and videos, are grouped with similar offline activities. (So, for instance, someone watching Netflix counts as “Watching TV and video” and someone playing video games counts in a broader games category.)  The category of “computer leisure time,” which Wallsten uses to approximate online leisure time, mostly includes newer online activities that didn’t exist when the survey was created in 2003, including, notably, social media use.

In addition, the study deals with multitasking by asking respondents about the “primary” activity they were involved in at any moment in time, which one could argue fails to capture the use of computers and tablets alongside other offline activities.

Finally, time spent online and the offline activities it replaces vary significantly based on age, income, and other demographics. Not surprisingly, younger people spend more recreational time online, accounting for a higher percentage of their overall leisure time.

Other differences include the fact that women don’t let online leisure time crowd out household activities, whereas men spend eight seconds less on them for every extra minute online. And, somewhat disturbingly, 15- to 19-year-olds spend 20 fewer seconds on educational activities for every extra minute online. 

While interesting, none of this will comfort managers concerned about lost productivity as employees spend more time online.

“If you imagine the tradeoff between watching Netflix and watching standard cable TV, that represents a huge fight within the video industry but it still might not affect the size of the economy,” said Wallsten. “But if you’re talking about it coming out of work time, then that could be a significant negative effect.”

And yet he cautions that such concern might be overstated, adding that “the numbers are still small enough that it’s conceivable it has no net negative effect on productivity.” 

Indeed, other studies have suggested that workers can be be more productive when given regular breaks to browse the web. Moreover, for some workers at least, time spent on social media can improve work-related knowledge and skills.

If anything, managers should worry about that smaller chunk of sleep that gets crowded out by time spent online. The paper notes that those who can’t sleep might be spending more time online rather than time online causing people to sleep less. But if our online activities are in fact taking time away from sleep, that would mean a real impact on productivity.

Who Advises the Entrepreneur?

If you’re leading a startup business with potential for high growth, one of the most valuable things you should do early on is to set up an advisory board. Scaling an enterprise is hard work, and you only stand to benefit from drawing on perspectives, experience, and networks that augment your own. A group of advisors committed to your success not only provides a sounding board to test and strengthen your ideas, it gives you access to important competencies and resources.

But many entrepreneurs, especially those in the early stages, find the task of building an advisory board daunting. Whose strengths would complement their own and counter their weaknesses? Who might bring an insight to the table that would otherwise be missed? It can feel like an exercise in knowing what you don’t know. Moreover, most people who have not formalized such a board before haven’t given much thought to what it takes to keep one running effectively.

This is why, in the Entrepreneurial Winning Women™ program I oversee at EY, we make this an early part of our teaching. The program is our effort to help women entrepreneurs in particular take their small businesses to the next level. We identify promising startups and provide the women behind them with customized executive leadership training and the opportunity to join an elite network.

The advice we offer and the discussions that take place among our entrepreneurs center on five key tips:

Look outside your existing network of contacts. As you sit down to think about whom to invite onto your advisory board, remember first that this should not be a group of your friends and fans. You’re looking to drive new business opportunities and new ways of thinking with diverse experience, expertise, viewpoints, and skill sets. Work to find people outside your inner circle who have built successful businesses and can pass that knowledge on to you. Think about who would be a constructively critical audience, and who can provide access to other valuable contacts, from potential customers, suppliers, and strategic partners to financiers, publicists, and other professional service vendors.

Recruit a well-known community member or industry influencer as your first board member. There is a reason that film producers begin their projects by lining up the most bankable talent they can. Their involvement helps to attract others who want to work with them, or who simply see a star’s commitment as reassurance the project will take off. In the same way, entrepreneurs should work first to recruit the people who will attract others, and give an advisory board strong credibility from the start.

Invest the time in developing relationships with your board members. Since most are not compensated, their reward is the satisfaction of sharing their knowledge and experience and helping you succeed. So make them feel appreciated! (Meanwhile, if a prospective board member does insist on being compensated, determine how uniquely valuable he or she is. If there’s a possibility of a long-term business relationship, you might want to offer that person some kind of remuneration.)

Establish goals and expectations for the board up front, including how often it meets and where. Usually, in-person meetings once every three to six months will suffice, but you may want to reserve the right to consult with individual members on an ad hoc basis if a particular issue comes up. When the board does meet, make sure there is an agenda with specific goals. Your board members are busy professionals, so don’t waste their time. Perform a yearly assessment of how the board is working. If you can afford it, invite them to an offsite at a comfortable locale at your expense to have them discuss the board’s progress.

Have a framework for transitioning out board members. As a high-growth entrepreneur, your business will evolve, and you will likely need advisors that bring different skills to the table at different phases of growth. Most will not have the time to serve on your board for more than two or three years, anyway. And others may not be as helpful as you had hoped. So, make it clear up front that they serve as needed and spell out term limits.

Finally, if you’re thinking of setting up an advisory board, be very clear on what it is, and what it’s not. It’s not a formal board of directors, which has well-defined duties including a fiduciary one. An advisory board holds no legal or financial responsibility for the decisions you make.

Instead, it is a group of volunteers with knowledge and skills that you, the business owner, lack, and whose purpose is to help you make your company a success. It is there to assist you, challenge you, guide you, and open your eyes to new opportunities.

For a high-growth business, it is difficult to overstate the importance of that kind of support. Advisory boards allow entrepreneurs to leverage others’ specialized knowledge while honing skills and talents of their own. Reaching new markets, accessing new forms of funding, adopting new technology, and garnering information to manage risk are all necessary to scaling a sustainable entrepreneurial venture. A strong advisory board is one of the fundamental building blocks that will allow you to take your business to scale.