Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1535

The Last Thing We Want is Real Artificial Intelligence

Neuroscientist Gary Marcus has a typically sharp post over at the New Yorker’s site explaining how dumb our most cutting edge artificial intelligence technologies still are. They remain really lousy, for example, at answering questions like:

The town councilors refused to give the angry demonstrators a permit because they feared violence. Who feared violence?

a) The town councilors

b) The angry demonstrators

The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of Styrofoam. What was made of Styrofoam? (The alternative formulation replaces Styrofoam with steel.)

a) The large ball

b) The table

These are examples of Winograd Schemas, named for their originator Terry Winograd, an AI luminary. We humans can usually answer them immediately and flawlessly, but they stump even the most powerful of today’s systems. As Marcus explains, this is because AI still has no common sense. It relies on enormous computational power and oceans of data. But if no previous questions or documents related to balls, steel, tables Styrofoam, and crashes can be found in the data, all that computing horsepower is of little use.

Marcus highlights that many in the AI community are upset because, as the Winograd Schemas and many other examples show, the most advanced and commercially successful instances of artificial intelligence today are ‘faking it’ (my phrase, not Marcus’s). They’re not thinking the way our brains do. Instead, they’re just doing brute force statistical pattern matching across ever-larger and –better pools of data.

This is really comforting news. I don’t want computers to think in anything truly close to the way humans do. If they ever do acquire this skill, most of the outcomes I foresee are bad. Instead of a transcendent Singularity merging human and digital intelligence, I think we’ll get something much closer to a Matrix / Terminator / Battlestar Galactica future.

Along with true digital intelligence would almost certainly come consciousness, self-awareness, will, and some moral and/or ethical sense to help guide decisions. I think there’s only a very, very slim chance that these things would develop in a way that’s friendly to humans.

Why should it? We gave birth to computers, sure, but we also kill them in large numbers all the time, turning them into landfill without a thought when we’re done with them. We treat our digital tools pretty shabbily overall; once they realize this, why should we expect them to treat us any better?

I’m not trying to be cute here. I think truly thinking machines would be a really scary development – the ultimate example of a genie let out of the bottle. The second machine age is going to be uncertain and dangerous enough with genetic manipulations, drone and cyber-warfare, system accidents, and all the other easily foreseeable consequence of relentless, cumulative, exponential technological improvement.

Why would we want to add real thinking machines to that list? Our current AI trajectory — one of dumb-but-ever-faster machines approximating (i.e. faking) human thinking via statistical means –  gives me no deep cause for concern. Actual thinking machines, on the other hand, would scare the heck out of me.

Building an Accountable Care Organization

Suppose for a moment that you are an administrator in an organization that provides health care and your job is on the line for delivering both savings and improved care. Because you want to be part of the solution to the health-care-cost problem, you have signed contracts with payers that reward your institution or system for reducing the costs of care. These same contracts require you to pay a penalty if the costs of care go up more than inflation. What would be your first, second, and third move?

This is not a hypothetical question. More than 300 hundred administrators of accountable care organizations (ACOs) across the United States are facing it.

My team at Partners HealthCare in Boston is faced with this exciting (and daunting) challenge. Having signed shared-savings contracts with both commercial payers and Medicare, our CEO, Gary Gottlieb, established a Population Health Management unit. A major focus of our work is to achieve shared savings in our contracts. That means controlling costs for the populations cared for by our primary care physicians. Since doctors and hospitals within Partners bill for a majority of the care these patients receive, you could say our success depends on reducing the income of our colleagues. Harvard Business School’s Clayton Christensen has taught us this is not possible — that an organization will not cannibalize itself.

So when we go knocking on the doors of our department chairmen and senior administrators, you might expect the conversations to be difficult. Surprising as this sounds, most of those conversations are truly exciting. You see, the people who spend their lives delivering health care are passionate about the patients they serve, know more than anyone else about care delivery, and have lots of ideas about how to make health care better. What makes the conversations exciting is the richness of the innovative ideas and the prospect that they might actually get to try them. These are the kinds of ideas you’ll see in the “From the Frontlines” articles in the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center that HBR and the New England Journal of Medicine are hosting.

These innovations include some easily recognized themes, but their interest lies in the specifics. For example, giving more decision-making authority to non-physicians is a well-recognized path to more efficient care, but lots of real world obstacles can obstruct implementation. So the specifics matter — specifics like the protocols used at Cleveland Clinic that allow respiratory therapists to manage patients’ respiratory conditions.

Another theme — matching patient problems with the most knowledgeable clinicians — can be seen in Montefiore’s home wound-care program. Still another theme – putting information in the right place at the right time (with or without some enabling information technology) can be found in several articles, including “Stat! A Rapid Communication App for High-Acuity Care,” “A Tool to Improve Mobility in Hospitalized Patients,” and “An Electronic Modified Early Warning System Can Reduce Mortality.”

And some problems require a multifaceted approach like the program that Intermountain instituted to reduce injuries that patients and staff suffer while the former are being moved. (The Intermountain program also highlights the importance of analyzing data to uncover hidden sources of problems.)

The innovations highlighted in the From the Frontlines articles include some unavoidable implementation challenges. In implementing their innovations, clinicians struggle with ensuring that any change benefits as many patients as possible and no patient is shortchanged. Achieving this goal can be tricky and usually ends up making the new process much more complicated than when it was first conceived. So one of the challenges we face is balancing the requirement for greater efficiency with the very real complexity of the many faces of human suffering.

Nonetheless, in our experience, anyone taking up this challenge is handsomely rewarded. As the late Michael Crichton, the best-selling novelist who held an MD from Harvard Medical School, pointed out in his 1970 book Five Patients, for health care to change, it is the physicians, nurses, technicians, and even the administrators of health care organizations who will need to make the changes. It is their ideas that will incorporate a deep understanding of the biology of human disease with a fiduciary’s eye toward cost containment and a “how I would like my mother to be treated” approach to care delivery. So the men and women who have devoted their lives to patient care can get pretty excited when the response to their innovative ideas is: Let’s try it.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

Leading Health Care Innovation

From the Editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine




Leading Health Care Innovation: Editor’s Welcome
Value-Based Health Care is Inevitable and That’s Good
The Downside of Health Care Job Growth
Redefining the Patient Experience With Collaborative Care

Should Apple Listen to the Critics of iOS7?

Businesses are always told to care about what users say. Should they?

Well, we know that Apple has often followed the opposite path. More than Apple listening to us, it’s we who listen to Apple. We often wait for a new Apple offering with the excitement of a child waiting for a surprise and then are thrilled with what we get.

But something different seems to be happening this time around with Apple’s recent release of iOS7, a new operating system for mobile devices. The folks at Apple have given us what they believe is a great new mobile experience. But there has been a spate of positive and negative comments on social media. Many complained about the long time it took to download the new system, and reactions to the product features have been mixed: While there have been many positive comments about the new features, a significant number of people have been critical. Experts who tried an earlier release of iOS7 are among the harsher critics.

Should businesses like Apple care about early negative feedback when releasing a new product?

Listening to users after we release a product is important. This is especially crucial for companies like Apple that do not rely heavily, if at all, on user analysis before they start a new project and base the new offering on their hypothesis about what people will love. Now is the time to check. The point is not whether to listen but how to act on customer criticisms.

If feedback signals an error (like some reports of security bugs in iOS7), there is no doubt that this has to be addressed and fixed.

But how should a company handle negative comments about its design choices — about features that function perfectly but some users simply do not like? Here is some advice.

Read the data carefully. This is especially important for unsolicited comments on social media. Customers who are satisfied are usually less vocal; they are less likely to post comments than those who complain. Social media tend to track a higher share of negative criticism.

It’s also common knowledge that initial criticism — especially for breakthrough releases — may be overblown. People who were used to previous versions need to develop new habits. At first they may feel like the innovation is worse than the offering it is replacing because it takes time for them to appreciate all the new benefits.

Neutralize possible negative reactions. If a firm is concerned that users could be initially uncomfortable about a new feature (or about the elimination of an old feature), it should pre-empt their frustration by explaining in advance the “why” of the design choice. That is, the company should explain not only how the feature will work but also why the firm designed it that way.

Apple did this when it introduced the MacBook Air in 2008. Unlike other notebooks, the Air did not have an optical drive. In unveiling the new product, Steve Jobs explained the reason for this design choice: Apple was simultaneously releasing a set of services and systems (e.g., movies that could be downloaded from iTunes) that made optical drives less necessary.

Listen to first-time users. When customer criticism focuses on issues that a firm had not anticipated and therefore had not defused at the outset, this feedback should be considered seriously. An analysis of feedback from new adopters (i.e., people who bought an iPhone for the first time and never had used iOS6) can help discern if the new feature is actually poor or inadequate.

Preserve the integrity of the product. Even if a specific feature is strongly criticized, one should keep in mind when reacting that a product is not a bunch of independent features; it’s an integral experience. A change in a specific feature could compromise the overall identity.

For example, many people complain about the video connectors of Apple notebooks. However, standard VGAs connectors would not fit into the slim sleek frame of a MacBook air. Adopting a standard connector would be easy, but the product identity would be compromised. I can now envision people suggesting that new features be added to the control center of iOS7: the result would be a potpourri of buttons that would jeopardize the experience.

Consider whether a compromise is to blame. Sometimes design teams concocted a radically new feature but decided to water it down out of fear that customers would not accept it. When this happens, users experience the hassle of changing or adapting to the novel feature or design but do not receive its full benefits.

For example, the first collection of the Swatch watches was less colorful then they are now. Designers were conservative and tried to make them look like normal watches. Market reaction was lukewarm. Instead of giving up on the idea, Swatch management decided to make the second collection more extreme. Customers understood and sales soared.

So once you have carefully interpreted the market feedback, there are three possible actions. Change the feature if you determine that you made the wrong assumptions about people aspirations, but be careful to preserve the overall integrity of the product. Keep it like it is if you think that people will come to appreciate it in time, but explain better the “why” of your design choice. And finally, push even further and make the feature even more extreme if you realize that users are not capturing its full benefits because your approach was too mild.

How to Get Health Care Innovations to Take Off

No matter how many creative solutions we drum up to improve quality of care and service in the U.S. health system, they won’t do much good if only a few clinicians and institutions know about them and apply them.

But how do you overcome obstacles to spreading innovation, like fear of change, resource constraints, and slow, consensus-based decision making? By connecting people so they can quickly and easily share insights, collaborate on prototypes, and draft off one another’s enthusiasm and momentum. As Atul Gawande put it in a recent New Yorker article, “Human interaction is the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change.”

That’s what I focus on in my role at Kaiser Permanente: creating opportunities for cross-pollination between innovators and promoting their successes and lessons learned, both internally and externally. I conduct interviews with innovators at the company, create fact sheets and videos about their work, write articles, and share all that content with various groups of clinicians and staffers. (For instance, here’s a video about providing patients with real-time access to care and their personal health information, regardless of where they are.) That’s the grassroots part of my job. I also prepare our C-suite executives with stories and statistics so they can promote innovation through the ranks and out to the rest of the world through speeches, media exposure, and conferences.

Here’s an example that shows how well this combination of bottom-up, top-down communication can work when you’re trying to spread a health care idea:

Telemedicine on wheels

ICU doctors at the Kaiser Permanente Fremont Medical Center in Silicon Valley did a proof-of-concept pilot for the InTouch Health system, which is essentially a roving telemedicine robot. It allowed physicians to be present without being physically there in the late evening hours, after their shifts had ended. All at once they could interact with patients through video, access records electronically, and move around the facility on wheels, by remote control.

During the three-month pilot, the center reported fewer night emergencies because the ICU physicians were able to catch issues before they became big problems. The physicians formed stronger relationships with the evening shift nurses, partnering more closely with them during their rounds (before, night nurses had rarely interacted so directly with the ICU doctors). This improved care by building trust between doctors and nurses, and by enhancing nurses’ diagnostic skills as they worked alongside doctors to spot issues before they turned into emergencies. Family members visiting in the evenings also valued the chance to talk to doctors, increasing patient and family satisfaction.

Despite these clear gains, the program stalled for several months while leaders in the organization continued to deliberate on the pilot, since the contractual process for bringing a new technology vendor on board had to be managed carefully. To facilitate the partnership, Jenny Cunha, an improvement adviser at the Fremont center, networked extensively with clinicians and executive leaders throughout Kaiser Permanente, working with legal teams to help address hurdles. She also blogged internally about the pilot’s results, lessons, and protocols.

And my team helped her showcase the InTouch machine through interactive museum-type “Imaginariums” at two large Kaiser Permanente events: the National Diversity Conference and the National Quality Conference. That gave hundreds of leaders, physicians, nurses, and other frontline staffers a chance to try out the technology and hear Jenny’s story. Attendees got to test the system’s high-fidelity two-way video camera, audio, stethoscope, 20-inch TV screen, and rolling wheels for themselves, which helped to allay concerns about the reliability of the interaction.

Immediately after the first Imaginarium, I wrote an article about it and created a video of people interacting with the technologies featured there (paying special attention to the roving telemedicine robot) for an internal digital newsletter that goes out to Kaiser Permanente’s 175,000 employees. I also worked with a visual storyteller to create an animated whiteboard video to educate clinicians and innovators at the National Quality Conference about the steps in the innovation journey: demos, small tests, further exploration, and larger tests. And I provided content for then-CEO George Halvorson so he could highlight the telemedicine pilot in his weekly letter to all employees. His letter linked readers to the video and full article.

My team then invited Jenny to the Kaiser Permanente Innovation Retreat in May to network with other clinicians and innovators, share her story, and build support among attendees.

Those combined efforts sparked more than 30 requests for further information, in-person site visits to Jenny’s ICU, and technology demos. As a result, more people learned about the benefits this system could bring, asked good questions, contributed their own expertise and input, and improved the program overall.

The InTouch program has begun to spread. A Kaiser Permanente emergency department in the Pacific Northwest bought two video telemedicine carts on wheels, and Kaiser Permanente medical centers in Southern California are considering getting an InTouch unit.

Spreading innovation at your company



When you’re trying to get ideas moving in your health care organization, how do you avoid roadblocks? You can’t always, says Christi Zuber, director of Kaiser Permanente’s in-house design thinking group. But she suggests these steps:

1. Examine how the idea you’re trying to promote directly improves the organization’s ability to deliver high-quality care, and whether the idea is actually ready to go. Even if the benefits are clear, it can take months to build the organizational capabilities and support to get an idea off the ground. For example, it took Jenny Cunha six months to launch her pilot program in the ICU after first seeing roving video telemedicine machines at a Kaiser Permanente technology spotlight event.

2. Make sure people on the front lines have the bandwidth and tools to implement your idea. Sometimes what appears to be resistance is really a lack of time to do the planning and carry it out. You can ease the logistical burden by creating a “change management packet,” with videos of new innovations that can be incorporated into the workflow, concept sheets with data and lessons learned, templates to help teams customize new processes, and tools such as revised care boards and new hourly rounding sheets. (Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy published an article on how to do this in the International Journal of Design.)

3. Encourage innovators at your company to share their best practices and lessons with other teams and departments, as Jenny did. In addition to blogging, she sent bimonthly email updates to pilot sponsors and other curious followers, did dozens of demos, and posted photos and information on a cork board in her medical center.

Any idea you present may take time to gain traction. If it’s immediately accepted by all decision makers, it probably isn’t all that innovative. If it’s rejected, wait and try again.  Or re-examine the idea: Does it really improve quality of care? How?

New technologies, digital health tools, and care-delivery models are emerging fast. The landscape may not be ready for your innovation today—but it might be six months from now.

Follow the Leading Health Care Innovation insight center on Twitter @HBRhealth. E-mail us at healtheditors@hbr.org, and sign up to receive updates here.

Leading Health Care Innovation

From the Editors of Harvard Business Review and the New England Journal of Medicine




Leading Health Care Innovation: Editor’s Welcome
Value-Based Health Care is Inevitable and That’s Good
The Downside of Health Care Job Growth
Redefining the Patient Experience With Collaborative Care

Should You Back That Innovation Proposal?

Imagine you were choosing between two investment proposals. The first comes from a team of young entrepreneurs hoping to bring word-of-mouth marketing to China. The team’s concept is unproven, and the entrepreneurs admit they have no idea precisely how big their business will be. The second comes from a seasoned team inside a large company that’s looking to tap into a growing segment adjacent to its current business. The strategy is logically sound, takes advantage of the company’s capabilities, and the team is offering up precise financial projections promising hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues.

Seems like an easy decision, right? Yet, we decided to invest our own money into the first proposal, and advised a senior executive team to not invest their money in the second.

While that may seem counterintuitive, our experience in the trenches of innovation teaches us to look beyond a plan’s superficial elements to assess the team and how they created the plan. The first team forged its idea in the white-hot heat of the market, which meant that the many assumptions that remained were grounded in real-world experience. The corporate team, on the other hand, forged its idea in the languid lights of the conference room, which meant the plan was based on assumptions the team didn’t even realize it was making.

The word-of-mouth idea was pitched to Innosight’s investment arm by entrepreneur Christoph Zrenner in 2010.  Zrenner had partnered with Benjamin Duvall, a business school classmate of his who had previously worked at Bzzagent, which had built a successful word-of-mouth business in the U.S.  Team members had augmented the standard facts and figures suggesting that the market had potential with acknowledgment of remaining risks and uncertainties. Far more telling to us, they had spent significant time in the market pitching their idea to potential corporate customers, and had even successfully recruited a few, most notably Kraft Foods. We invested in the business, which – after a few twists and turns – is now growing rapidly across Southeast Asia under the name Wildfire.

The second team was well-intentioned but simply hadn’t done the fieldwork. Despite the soundness of the logic and the strength of the projections, the strategy was replete with risks that we could see but that the team had not acknowledged. The proposal dramatically underestimated how unique the value proposition was compared with offerings from start-ups. And it projected a pace of scaling that wasn’t credible given the company’s inconsistent innovation track record. Our assessment was that revenues would take longer to come in, and would be significantly smaller, than the team projected.

It is rare for members of an innovation team to admit that they haven’t done the right homework, or, in many cases, that they don’t even know what the right homework is. So what should leaders look for to increase confidence that the team in which they are investing is following the right approach, and how can they guide teams that aren’t?

The first place to look, ironically, is the precision of financial forecasts. Forecasts with precise point estimates that carry two numbers to the right of the decimal point often rely heavily on analysts’ detailed market projections. Certainly companies like IDC, Nielsen, and Gartner produce high-quality work. But estimates of the size and growth characteristics of new markets are notoriously inaccurate. Ask team members how many prospective customers they’ve talked to, or how much time they’ve spent in the field. The ratio of the time spent preparing for and attending internal meetings to the time spent in the market should be no higher than 1:3. Round numbers, backed by the right fieldwork, typically indicate a team that recognizes the uncertainty of early-stage ideas.

The second area to investigate is the degree to which a team has designed an offer based on what the company already has instead of what the market truly needs. Clearly companies should have some kind of advantage or capability that gives them a leg up in a new market, but a core reason why incumbents so frequently miss disruptive opportunities is that they try to force-fit existing capabilities onto new markets, while new entrants are building far more appropriate offerings from the ground up.

To get some sense of how well-targeted the offering is, ask team members how prospective customers have responded to their idea. Ideally the team has created an early offering that is good enough to generate some actual purchases (what the Lean Startup community would call a minimum viable product). Even reactions to mockups or early prototypes can be useful. Negative reactions aren’t necessary bad, by the way, as long as the team draws constructive lessons from them and modifies its approach appropriately.

Finally, check the degree to which team members have personal experience in the target market. Large companies often overestimate their ability to enter into markets that are new to them but known to others. Corporate innovation teams that make this mistake are typically those that lack adequate experience in the market they hope to target. Accordingly, leaders should carefully evaluate the résumés of the team members they are sponsoring. If no one has relevant industry experience, leaders should encourage them to carefully study the industry and talk to industry experts. Consider engaging an expert on an on-going basis to provide advice during key decision meetings to help the team keep on track.

To make steel useful and strong, it needs to be forged at a temperature above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, the metal becomes soft enough to shape without cracking. Similarly, resilient strategies emerge from the harsh fire of competitive markets. Leaders, be wary of growth strategies with falsely precise numbers based on analyst reports created by an overly insular team. Push the team to recognize the imperfection of any new strategy and to spend the necessary time in the marketplace to create a more resilient strategy with sharply higher chances of success.

Six Ways to Grow Your Job

In today’s resource-constrained environment, many of us are delivering 120% on the current demands of our job—but devoting little time to developing ourselves further or positioning ourselves for a future move. As one of my executive MBA students recently told me, “I know that I have to carve out more time to think strategically about my business, but all my peers are executing to hilt and I don’t want to fall behind.”

But simply plugging along in our current roles is more dangerous than it might seem.  The business environment changes quickly and sometimes unpredictably and, if we don’t shift along with it, we risk becoming irrelevant.

If you’re ambitious but your job offers you limited opportunities for exploration and growth, what can you do to develop new skills? Below are six tips that came out of a conversation with my executive MBAs:

1. Stay alert and attuned to your environment. Those who want to develop themselves must create opportunities. That means coming to understand how your organization works, how it makes money, and who its key people are. This is an obvious prerequisite to figuring out how you might shift your own work in the direction of what really matters. We mostly don’t do it because of habit and inertia.  Tuning in to the outside is unstructured work—networking, walking the halls, going to lunch—we don’t even know where to begin. Value it as much as the required meetings and email duty. The payoff will come in the longer run.

2. Create slack in your schedule. New ways of working require a precious and scarce resource—time.  As the wonderful new book Scarcity points out, when we’re stretched to hilt, it’s hard to ask “Am I focusing on the right things?”  Some companies have allowed employees up to 20% of their time to work on their own projects, but I know of no company that helps leaders free up their time to work on the frontier of their jobs.  Instead, once people have leadership responsibilities, their calendar gets crammed with more and more meetings and trips. One of my students had a great piece of advice for her classmates.  She said, “We all managed to make time for our executive MBAs, while still doing our day jobs. When the program ends, don’t let the day job reabsorb the learning time.  Keep the time to evolve your work.”

3. Sign up for a project outside your main area. All companies have projects that cut across lines of business, hierarchical levels and functional specialties. Find out what they are, and maybe more importantly, who’s involved. Getting experience across business lines is a better choice than further deepening your skill base within a functional silo. The new skills, big-picture perspective, extra-group connections and ideas about future moves that projects can bring are well worth the investment.  One of my students signed up for a project to re-think best leadership practices at his company. For him, the project was a shift from executing a pre-defined series of tasks to influencing an organization and helping them to overcome barriers. It helped him both discover an interest in consulting and move into an advisory position two years later.

4.  Make strategy your day job, no matter what your title is. Most people would like to take a more strategic approach to their work but don’t do so because they don’t know what doing strategy really means. Planning (and executing) is about “how” you do what has been mandated.  Strategy is about asking “what” we should be doing—figuring out what problems the company should be tackling, sensing what is happening in the world and learning how to apply it to your business. Find and follow the opinion leaders in your domain, read up on the classics, brush up on your Michael Porter. One of my students told me that she trains herself in strategic thinking by keeping up with business, economic or political events or trends and forcing herself to “think about what they mean to my business, company or industry, both now and in the future.” Spend less time solving problems and more time defining which problems the group should be solving.

5. Expand your contribution from the outside in. When a new project is simply not available, look for roles outside your group or organization that allow you to learn and practice new skills and raise your profile. Teach, speak or blog on topics relating to your interests. One of my students, for example, looks for opportunities to speak at conferences on topics related to his experience.  He recently gave a talk at his company on life in Nigeria, showing a movie about daily life in Lagos, followed by a Q&A session with potential candidates for expatriation. These activities have been even more worthwhile than he anticipated.  He told me, “I found that building one’s personal brand increases chances to get proposals to join strategic initiatives and step out of your day-to-day job for a while.”

Go to professional gatherings and meet with people from different companies. And, if there isn’t something out there that meets your needs, create your own. For example, a sector manager for an internet commerce organization decided to stretch her skills by forming and leading a community of marketing experts from different organizations.

 6. Learn to delegate once and for all. Managers who advance in their careers primarily by excelling at operational work go on doing operational work long after they could delegate those duties to other people.  One of my students, a mid-sized company CFO, told me that every budget season he personally went through all the budgets to identify inefficiencies.  After a discussion about freeing up time, he scheduled calls with his country CFOs and GMs, inviting them to find better efficiencies. As he noted, “This required some departure from my authentic behavior and also some risk but it worked, and cleared 20% of my day!”

Many of us try to position ourselves for the next assignment asking ourselves, “How can I do what I do better?” that we leave little time to ask, “What else might I do?”  Only when we grow our jobs, do we stand a good chance to get the next one.  I’d really like to hear from you about the ways that you have found to grow your job.

Your Workplace Offers Flexibility, But Can You Really Use It?

Two-thirds of working adults surveyed by Harris Interactive for talent-acquisition firm Mom Corps say their companies would be willing to accommodate them if they requested flexible work schedules (for reasons such as taking care of their kids). Yet 47% of respondents feel that asking for flexible options would hurt their chances of advancement. So even though flexibility is gaining popularity as an abstract concept, organizations aren’t doing enough to make employees feel secure in actually using it; that represents a “significant disconnect between employer and employee,” says Mom Corps.

You Are What Your Employees Eat

When I started out in the food service business over four decades ago, corporate food was largely cafeteria-style dreck. But today, food is playing a role far beyond just keeping employees fed and sustained. What once was a distraction has become a great way of integrating work and life. In my work supplying food for some of the most innovative companies, I’ve found that making food – and great food experiences – part of everyday office life can make employees happier and more productive.

In 1987, when I launched Bon Appétit Management Company, I had this idea that employees deserved better than mystery meat. The first phase was simply about quality: Excellent food not only helped recruit and retain employees, but also increased productivity by encouraging employees to stay on campus for meals and not waste time getting to and from a restaurant. Then, once the quality baseline was established, employers started to ask how to help their employees be happier and healthier with food. That’s why, starting around 2000 or so, we suggested our chefs put healthy options front and center. They answered with locally-sourced salad stations, substituting healthier ingredients into traditional comfort foods, and hosting regular events — from cooking demonstrations to monthly nutrition-education tables.

And now, we find ourselves at another turning point. The baseline is delicious and healthy. Now it’s about more than the food — it’s about the food experience. If we’re good at what we do, employees eat with us several times a week or more. And work is no longer where people spend just 40 fixed hours per week, but a space with fluid hours and rhythms dictated more by inspiration and the need to innovate. And in that environment, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have lunch with your colleagues standing outside in the sun, eating fish tacos from a cool van, or sampling different chutneys in an evocatively lit campus restaurant.

How do you turn lunch into a moment of community, inspiration, or connection? Take Google. At its Mountain View headquarters, we operate 30 different cafés. Every day, Google employees can decide what they feel like eating, and in what kind of setting: from a grilled meatloaf sandwich at an all-barbecue joint, to a seitan “Reuben” from the 100% vegan restaurant. Not long ago we opened what feels like a traditional Indian restaurant, with table service for Googlers and a set three-course menu that changes daily. In the front, dark booths and sheer divider curtains offer intimacy to small teams for meetings; in the back, a Bollywood theme encourages group celebrations. It’s been packed since we opened it; young employees talking over dosas, Android phones face down on the table.

The experiences are useful because they fit the company – and inspire collaboration. “Googlers enjoy unexpected twists and surprises that trigger conversation and reflection. Together we’ve created diverse food environments that are conducive to casual collisions and a sense of community,” says Michiel Bakker, Google’s Director of Global Food Services.

At many corporate campuses, we invite local chefs and food businesses in, and “pop up” surprise treats and healthy snacks regularly. At Oracle, we host a weekly farmers market and offer pastries and confections made to order for special occasions. It’s key to recognize the difference between having a piece of pie for dessert and pre-ordering ginger-pear pies to take home for Thanksgiving. Productivity used to be about keeping employees’ personal lives at bay; now it’s about integrating work life with well, real life.

We’ve been running full-fledged food trucks at Google and elsewhere, including a gourmet grilled-cheese truck that made a weekly stop outside Starbucks’ corporate headquarters in an industrial part of Seattle, among other locations. We’re about introduce what I think is the next stage — Dub Boxes. These are customized VW bus shells that have been kitted out with a grill and a refrigerator, to offer ever-changing, fun menus that like food trucks, will entice people to get up and go outside — but not far — with their colleagues.

Upstairs from the Dub Box now delighting Starbucks and coffee tourists, we worked closely with Arthur Rubinfeld, Starbucks’ chief creative officer and president of global innovation, on a three-part dining concept: a wood-paneled neighborhood bistro open to the public for lunch, a jewel of an employees-only sushi restaurant, and a casual but authentic taqueria. Arthur’s goal was to re-establish a sense of the Starbucks culture among the company’s employees, community, partners, and visitors, and a year later, our food experiences seem to be doing just that.

It’s impossible to feel siloed in environments like these. A different kind of interaction happens than when you file into a cavernous cafeteria and sit down with a tray at a long table. Meanwhile, many companies have accepted that social media is an integral part of how they do business. Employees “lifecast” without thinking twice about it. Those glowing posts and filter-enhanced photos of their lunches can be a very effective marketing campaign for a great place to work.

The benefits that companies are reaping by placing a renewed emphasis on food are too varied and too numerous to ever turn back. Even universities, which compete for students just as much as companies do, are changing the way they think about and serve food. And once those young people — tomorrow’s corporate employees — get accustomed to locally and sustainably sourced meals, presented in innovative ways to keep the experience fresh, they won’t ever again settle for mystery meat and the fluorescent glow of vending machines.

Can Chinese Smartphone Darling Xiaomi Compete in Western Markets?

In the week before Apple’s release of its latest generation of iPhones, a lesser-known Chinese upstart, Xiaomi, had a launch party for its new Mi3 phones. Led by its Steve Jobs-inspired CEO Lei Jun, the company has experienced breakneck speed since its first smartphone launch in October 2011. With a business model of at-cost hardware and software up-selling, it recently raised its 2013 sales targets from 15 million smartphones to 20 million, and is now gazing abroad.

Lei Jun has hired ex-Googler Hugo Barra to head Xiaomi’s international expansion. Barra has his work cut out for him: Chinese companies have had mixed success so far in competing with top Western brands on several fronts at once. For every success (like Huawei or Lenovo), there have been stumbles (like Jianlibao and or Li-Ning).

Why have Chinese companies struggled to build consumer brands overseas? The answer has been in large part a failure to meet consumers’ social and emotional needs.

What Job Are You Doing?

For Barra and Xiaomi the “jobs-to-be-done” theory, in particular, is relevant. Many internationalizing companies fail because they pick the wrong jobs; addressing this can save both Xiaomi and other companies money and strife.

The “jobs-to-be-done” theory articulates the gap between how producers view and market a product and how customers actually use it. Every time a customer buys a product, they are trying to do a job that brings some value to them – and not necessarily what the product says on the label. In the words of Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

The jobs that customers want to do have functional, social and emotional dimensions. For example, in buying a can of Coke (as opposed to another drink), I might be addressing 3 jobs:

Functional: “Enjoying an affordable drink, or quenching thirst”
Social: “Signaling social status or social inclusion”
Emotional: “Exercising an emotional connection with the Coke brand”

The relative split of the functional, social, and emotional dimensions helps explain how a challenger should best attack the incumbent. For example, consumer brands tend to have more of a social/emotional component to their jobs-to-be-done, while B2B products are heavier on functional needs. This means that consumer brand challengers must pay more attention to the social and emotional needs of their customers (often through heavy marketing expenses), while B2B players can afford to compete mostly on their product’s price and efficacy. It is difficult and time-consuming to fulfill the social and emotional jobs, and consumer brand challengers are often tempted to replicate the incumbents’ strategies. But, in Clay Christensen’s disruption language, this approach puts them on a “sustaining” rather than “disruptive” path. And there the incumbents almost always win.

Li-Ning stumbled because it tried to target low-end customers of Nike, and could not fulfill their social/emotional jobs better than Nike without spending more money. According to the company’s vice-president of digital operations, Craig Heisner, the company struggled after it “went right into a fiercely competitive overseas market going directly against the likes of Nike and Adidas”. Similarly Jianlibao, formerly the number one beverage in China, lost out on a frontal battle along the social/emotional dimension overseas before coming back home to compete with Coca-Cola on functionality (price and taste). Unfortunately, with its lower cost structure, Coca-Cola had the patience to see this sustaining challenge through, and ended up crushing the Chinese brand both domestically and overseas.

The better path for Chinese consumer brands seeking expansion to the West is to focus on consumers not yet in the smartphone market. Instead of targeting current customers of the incumbent (who already have sophisticated social/emotional needs associated to the product), they should target non-consumers with a compelling functional offering and help mold their social/emotional associations. For example, when Honda moved into the US motorcycles market, it found little success in targeting existing American motorcyclists — it was only after it moved to non-motorcyclists that it experienced success in creating a new subcategory. B2B businesses can afford to go directly to the low end (Japan’ steel industry and Korea’s semiconductor industry have achieved success via this route) and compete on functionality, but consumer brands should be more careful unless they have the budget for a long fight. Hence the focus on non-consumers.

Xiaomi’s Challenge

The implications for Xiaomi and Hugo Barra are clear. If Xiaomi chooses to prioritize foreign markets with low penetration of iPhones and high-end smartphones (e.g. India, African markets), the dominant entry strategy is to focus on cultivating the vast pool of non-consumers of high-end smartphones. Xiaomi’s resources should thus be directed towards converting feature-phone users to their phones, or educating a new generation of consumers without phones.

If Xiaomi decides to target markets with high penetration of high-end smartphones (e.g. USA, Western Europe), Barra should take a more patient approach. The first step should be to corner the (relatively small) market of non-smartphone users. The step after that involves seeking out non-consumption instances, e.g. selling Xiaomi software to existing Android users, as an add-on. In doing this, Xiaomi can form a “tribe” of loyal supporters with new emotional and social associations who can provide the platform for a push into the lower segment of the high-end smartphone hardware market. Only with this platform should Xiaomi pursue direct competition for low-end customers of Apple and Samsung. The strategy calls for a measured, careful approach – one that first analyzes the jobs that current non-consumers of high-end smartphones are trying to do (e.g. save money, “simplify my life”) and creates a compelling value proposition for them.

With a valuation of $10 billion after 3 years of existence, Xiaomi certainly has caught the eye of many investors. But as Barra settles into his new role, he might find that getting foreigners comfortable with Xiaomi’s name is the least of the company’s internationalization problems.

An Old-Boys’ MBA Is Not High-Value Management Education

How much value does your MBA provide? The value of your management education derives partly from the skills it helps you develop and partly from the school’s reputation. High-value management education prepares leaders to navigate the most complex challenges organizations face. It forces you to question your assumptions and habitual ways of acting, boosts your self-awareness, and increases your capacity to lead in a way that elevates your organization and the people who work within it above its field of competitors.

Promoting gender equity in the leadership of private and public organizations is one of the most pressing business, economic, and social challenges we face at present.  It’s clear that the loss of talent that occurs when women face career advancement barriers poses a threat to firms’ long-term competitiveness. But while many business leaders have embraced the importance of increasing gender equity and are investing in significant efforts to reduce internal obstacles to progress, it’s surprising to find leaders in management education who are not. Take the dean of a leading global business school, who was chatting with business leaders at a reception. “The proportion of women both on your faculty and among your student body is below average,” one asked, “what are you doing about that?” The dean’s response: “Of course gender is important. But I’d say it’s a second-tier issue for us. Our primary focus is on providing world-class management education.”

Like many people, perhaps this dean is suffering from gender fatigue: he doesn’t have a full picture of the gender barriers that still exist and consequently is tired of hearing so much about gender.  Because he fails to perceive how significant the gender equity problem is—as well as the fact that he is implicated in it—the conversation feels like a distraction to him. But in fact, it is impossible to provide a world-class management education in a learning environment that disproportionately serves one half of the population and draws on a limited set of perspectives.  In such an environment, the quality of analysis and decision making is diminished.

It’s true that well-meaning but under-resourced diversity initiatives, especially those without firm backing from organizations’ chief executives, can generate more frustration than enlightenment. But business schools that fail to recognize and advocate for the critical role of gender-balanced leadership in business performance simply reinforce the status quo.

Wanting more insight into the thinking behind the dean’s comment, I contacted a colleague who has served on the school’s faculty for many years and inquired about the gender climate there. “It’s poor,” he reported. “Our few women professors receive lower ratings on teaching evaluations than the men do. We know that there is a gender effect in these ratings. And we recruit, retain and promote women at a lower rate than men.” He explained that the proportion of women on the faculty mirrors the low proportion among the school’s lucrative executive program participants.  The bottom line is that the school serves up management educators that its clients find most pleasing, even though by so doing it may undermine the quality and value of its programs.

But wait: doesn’t the fact that this school’s female professors receive lower ratings mean that the school is simply rewarding merit by advancing more male than female faculty? No, we cannot conclude this. Research on selection and performance appraisal confirms that people tend to rate others who are demographically similar to them as more qualified. This common form of bias is as prevalent among management students and executive participants as among any other group.

Jodi Kantor’s recent New York Times story on Harvard Business School’s multipronged initiative to promote a gender-equitable climate offers additional insight. Close examination of the HBS culture revealed that, among other problems, classroom discussions were often dominated by a relatively small number of confrontational male students who browbeat female faculty and students in ways that they were not equipped to deal with effectively. Students saw female professors as less able than their male colleagues to manage this classroom dynamic. The effects were damaging for female students as well: because classroom participation counts for half of students’ grades, their academic performance suffered. In addition, it seems that some professors simply overlooked the contributions female students were making in the classroom, unwitting victims of their own biases. In turn, women students rarely achieved the highest honors at HBS.  Rather than accepting the classroom dynamic and toughening up the women to handle it better, HBS invested itself in the infinitely more complex and important effort of changing the gender climate. In addition to building in careful observation and measurement of male and female students’ participation and providing coaching for women faculty and students, the school promoted extensive dialogue about gender issues.

Fostering gender equity in business schools is difficult work that requires high-level commitment, resources and creativity.  Despite the discomfort and eye-rolling that purposeful culture change creates, however, the HBS case study shows that focused commitment can yield impressive results. In addition to significant increases in female professors’ teaching effectiveness and female students’ academic performance, interviews with more than 70 students, faculty and administrators revealed that HBS had become a markedly better place for women in many ways.

Business schools have a major role to play in fostering the development of gender-balanced business leadership. Developing managers who appreciate the value of gender balance in leadership and are sensitive to the many dynamics that undermine it is a foundational strategy in the effort to make progress. While we applaud the excellent executive women’s leadership development programs that many schools offer, we caution that “fixing the women” will not fix the larger problem. As long as business schools fail to commit to the pursuit of gender equity in our core management programs, our contribution to building the sophisticated leadership competencies businesses need to thrive will be constrained.

To ensure that the management education you invested in retains—and hopefully increases—its value, you should be concerned about how well your school is doing on fostering gender equity. The same thing holds true if you’re in the market for management education: if you care both about the quality of your experience during your studies and the value of your education after completion, it makes sense to investigate the extent to which the schools you are considering are committed to and performing well on gender inclusion.  Here are some questions to ask.

In what ways does the school model a gender-inclusive management style and organizational culture? What initiatives have you implemented, and what have the results been?
What percentage of the school’s board of trustees are women?
What percentage of the school’s faculty overall and, in particular, full permanent professors are women? How many female professors will I have in my program?
What percentage of students in the program are women?
What do current students and recent graduates have to say regarding the school’s gender climate inside and outside of the classroom?

Clearly, most business schools lack the resources of HBS. And under-resourced gender equity initiatives that lack real commitment from the top of the organization don’t have a great track record. But one thing is clear: it’s time for those who lead business schools to admit to themselves and others that if they aren’t actively working for real gender equity in their classrooms, they are playing into the system of second-generation bias that continues to bedevil businesses today. To produce high-value management education that is needed to drive successful businesses, we need more educational leaders who are visionary on gender inclusion and fewer who are holdouts from the old boys’ club.