Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1540

Lessons in IT Innovation From Silicon Valley

Innovation is always infectious. But our recent research has taught us a lot about how management innovations can travel — in this case, from Silicon Valley tech sector companies known for their experimentation and agility in information technology (IT) management to the much older Bay Area companies who are their neighbors.

The IT departments of Oakland-based The Clorox Company and San Francisco-based Gap Inc. are among those who are consciously borrowing from the newer playbook, learning from the technology practices and culture of their counterparts at the tech firms in Mountain View and Palo Alto. In doing so, these more traditional companies are not only increasing their competitiveness but also making make themselves more attractive to a new generation of IT workers, their chief information officers say.

“People in the Valley take a different approach to things,” Ralph Loura, the CIO of Clorox, told us. “I can tap into that rich source of innovation and startups and find creative solutions. Being right here at the doorstep of most venture capital firms and people trying to solve today’s technology problems is a real advantage.”

The Accenture Institute for High Performance conducted a study of Silicon Valley IT practices in the past year because we thought the Valley’s IT departments — just by virtue of where they resided — would be ahead of the pack in important aspects of enterprise technology. In many ways, the interviews we did with the CIOs of Google Inc., Facebook Inc., and more than thirty other technology executives bore that out. But our conversations with Clorox, Gap Inc. and CAMICO Mutual Insurance were especially interesting because of the insight they offered into how traditional IT departments might evolve.

Turning IT into an Agile Business Process

At Clorox and Gap Inc., the IT departments have adopted an agile, speed-it-up mentality that seems Valley-like. Clorox, a maker of bleach and other household products which has been in business for 100 years, seeks to get faster by using preconfigured cloud computing solutions and infrastructure, much like Silicon Valley companies do. Gap Inc. is deliberately getting its infrastructure more in line with what Internet companies do by replacing as much proprietary technology as it can, including in its data centers, with open-source software and infrastructure. The company has also beefed up its software testing and release management capabilities. “This is difficult and hard work, but it is going to pay off enormously to the company, in that we’re going to be able to move much faster with a lot less cost,” says Tom Keiser, the retailer’s CIO.

To turn IT processes into agile business processes, both of these companies are stepping back from the more conventional waterfall software development commonly found in the corporate world, and turning to the ways of the tech firms: agile, scrum-style development with deliverables rolling out every couple of weeks.

“What we’re trying to do is get to a point where we can deliver new capabilities into our stores not every year, but every few weeks,” Keiser says.

For its part, Clorox’s IT department uses what Loura calls a “scrum-style model,” a form of agile management in which developers sit regularly with business-side colleagues to show how an application is progressing and increase the likelihood the finished product will serve business needs. “You put up something quick and dirty, learn from it, and in the next iteration improve on it,” Loura says.

Learning from Innovation in Silicon Valley

The IT departments of some nearby companies are also influenced by the innovation in Silicon Valley, and by how technologists there network and manage.

CIOs network with Valley technology leaders and venture capitalists in search of creative solutions to traditional IT problems. Take Clorox: Using his connections, Loura collaborated with several early-stage startups “that are solving problems for us that would have been difficult to solve otherwise.” A breakfast with a CIO working for a Silicon Valley tech company helped him find an answer to a common problem: coping with frustrated managers whose projects got pushed down the priority list. His Valley peer convinced him to see his PR problem in a new light: as, in part, a problem of transparency. Loura began to use visualization tools to show managers why other projects rose further up the queue. “This way, even if they’re not happy about it, they can understand why and be supportive of the decision from a company perspective,” Loura says. This kind of open sharing of information is a hallmark of innovation in Silicon Valley.

CIOs in sectors not known as innovation hot spots are trying to be more like their Valley neighbors. Consider CAMICO Mutual Insurance of San Mateo, a liability insurer for CPAs: Inspired by his Silicon Valley neighbors, the company’s CIO launched a bottom-up innovation program to encourage employees, beginning with his 13-person IT department, to try out new ideas. Several ideas for digitizing paperwork got quickly implemented, saving CAMICO Mutual $300,000 a year, says vice president of IT and eCommerce Jag Randhawa.

In the last couple of years, Loura and Gap Inc.’s Keiser shifted to open floor plans for their departments, scrapping the model of fixed offices and high cubicles in favor of open space for brainstorming and closer seating for teams. This office design isn’t found only in Silicon Valley, but it is often used there to encourage collaboration. It is seen as having similar potential at Clorox and Gap Inc.

Not every IT worker at the companies has been happy about the resulting loss of privacy. But many workers focus on the upside — improved face-to-face communications — and see this and other changes, including flexible hours, support for consumer devices such as tablets, and a more sophisticated use of videoconferencing for collaboration, as signs their decades-old companies are becoming cooler places to work. “I think our embrace of this new working environment will appeal more directly to a coming generation of employees, Millenials and beyond,” Loura says. “They’re looking for a different environment.”

Indeed, these executives seem to think that by replicating some aspects of Valley culture they can attract talent that would otherwise head for high-tech companies. They can also develop faster and more innovative ways to move their businesses forward. Given how well it’s worked for innovation in Silicon Valley’s fast growing technology companies, maybe they’re on to something.

Executing on Innovation

An HBR Insight Center




Research: Middle Managers Have an Outsized Impact on Innovation
What’s the Status of Your Relationship With Innovation?
Innovation Isn’t an Idea Problem
Five Ways to Innovate Faster

Let’s Hold Consultants Accountable for Results

When I recently asked a group of MBA students to define what it meant to them to be a consultant, they quickly rattled off phrases such as “trusted advisor,” “problem-solver,” “objective 3rd party,” and “subject matter expert.” What was interesting was that none of their definitions mentioned the word “results.” In other words, from their perspective, the consultant is not someone who actually produces results – but rather generates advice that someone else (the client) presumably turns into results.

As Clay Christensen and colleagues point out in the latest issue of HBR, the consulting industry is ripe for disruption. And this common perception of the “results-free” consultant is a great example of an area that needs to change. Of course with some types of consulting – where the explicit contract is to produce a technical product or system – it may be perfectly appropriate. In many other cases, however, the shielding of consultants from the responsibility to achieve results is potentially dangerous both to the consultants and to the managers who hire them. Here’s a quick (disguised) example:

The head of a large consumer products division felt that one of the keys to future growth would be a greater focus on emerging markets. To that end, she hired a large consulting firm to provide recommendations, including which countries to target, what organizational changes to make, what hiring would be needed, and how products might be modified. The only problem with the study was that it didn’t take into consideration the readiness and capability of the managers and staff, both in the division and at corporate, to carry it out. As a result the client was unable to get her team on board and secure necessary budget, and most of the recommendations were shelved.

The odd thing about this case is that afterwards the lead consultant felt that the project was a success, and was even proud to use some of the research insights with other clients. After all, the study was done well, with the highest standards of analytic rigor and thinking. The failure to implement and achieve any results was the division manager’s problem, so the consulting firm – which was paid a very large fee for this work – was off the hook. Even more troubling was the unwillingness of the client to hold the consultant even partly accountable for the lack of results. Her feeling was that the consulting firm provided good, solid answers and she attributed the absence of implementation to her team’s weaknesses and a lack of understanding by her corporate bosses.

Obviously investing in a consulting project without getting a financial return is not a good business practice. But unfortunately this is an all-too-recurring pattern in an industry that generates almost $400 billion in revenues per year. One reason for this pattern goes back to our MBA students’ definitions: Underlying their view of consulting is the belief that most business problems can be solved through rigorous analysis to develop the “right” answer. What they – and many managers – miss is that when the right answer cannot be implemented successfully, it is in fact the wrong answer. Yes, it might be right in theory but if it can’t be put into practice and yield results, it’s basically worthless except as an intellectual exercise.

And this brings me back again to the definition of consulting. If we say that a consultant is indeed accountable to collaborate with clients to produce results (and not just produce a report) then the analysis will include the social system, the politics, the resource constraints, and the many other implementation issues. And if they take these issues seriously, their recommendations should focus more on what’s possible and has the best chance of making an impact – instead of on what’s theoretically “right.”

So if you want to hire outside resources to help you solve a business problem, don’t give those consultants a free pass that exonerates them from producing results. Instead, change the definition of their job; get them in the boat with you so that you’re all accountable for creating value. It won’t guarantee success – but it certainly will improve the odds.

Playing It Safe Is Riskier than You Think

There are all sorts of reasons why so many big organizations can be slow to make changes that everyone agrees need to be made. “Our current margins are too good, even though the business is being eroded by new competitors.” “Our current products are still popular, even though a new generation of offerings is getting traction.” “Our current distribution system can’t reach the customers we need to reach to build a new business.”

In other words, most leaders and organizations are really good at quantifying the risks of trying something bold or striking out in a new direction. What are the downsides of and obstacles to introducing a new product or targeting a new market? They are far less adept at reckoning honestly with the risks of staying the course. What’s the worst that can happen if we do more of the same?

In a very real sense, the first job of leadership is to identify and overcome the costs of complacency. To persuade colleagues at every level that there are genuine risks for the failure to take risks—that the only thing they have to fear, is the fear of change itself.

And if you can overcome that fear, it’s remarkable what can happen. A fascinating white paper by Bradley Johnson, director of data analytics with Advertising Age, makes the case that difficult and uncertain times are often the best times for organizations to separate themselves from the pack, so long as their leaders are prepared not to stand pat. Johnson looked at the lowest point of the Great Depression (August 1929-March 1933), the Great Stagflation of 1973-1975, and the Carter/Reagan recession of 1980-1982. What’s remarkable about these three periods of economic trauma, he reminds us, is that the problems they posed inspired creative responses that reshaped markets for decades to come.

One representative example from the Depression: General Motors had to figure out how to maintain its upscale Buick brand in a sinking economy. The solution? Persuade consumers to buy a used Buick rather than a cheaper new car—a way to keep struggling dealers afloat and hold back the encroachment of rival brands. It was a daring idea at the time, and it reshaped dealer economics and marketing priorities. (If only GM’s modern-day leaders could have summoned such creativity amidst crisis.)

In a wonderful New Yorker column, James Surowiecki, much like Bradley Johnson, chronicled bold strategic moves that repositioned companies and redefined industries during periods of economic turmoil. He compared how Post and Kellogg, two giants in the packaged-cereal industry, responded to the Great Depression. Post, he wrote—“did the predictable thing” when it “reined in expenses and cut back on advertising.” Kellogg, on the other hand, “doubled its ad budget, moved aggressively into radio advertising, and heavily pushed its new cereal, Rice Krispies.” As a result, Kellogg leapt ahead of its rival and became (and remains) the industry’s dominant player.

So why, he wonders, given all the evidence of the chance to gain ground during periods of economic upheaval, “are companies so quick to cut back when trouble hits?” One answer, he speculates, involves a distinction about risk made by two business professors nearly 25 years ago. In a paper published by the Journal of Marketing, Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano argue that executives and entrepreneurs face two very different sorts of risks. One is that their organization will make a bold move that fails—a risk they call “sinking the boat.” The other is that their organization will fail to make a bold move that would have succeeded—a risk they call “missing the boat.”

Naturally, most executives worry more about sinking the boat than missing the boat, which is why so many organizations, even in flush times, are so cautious and conservative. To me, though, the opportunity for executives and entrepreneurs is to recognize the power of rocking the boat—searching for big ideas and small wrinkles, inside and outside the organization, that help you make waves and change course. In an era of economic dislocation and technological disruption, you can’t do great things if you’re content with doing things a little differently than how you’ve done them in the past. The costs of complacency have never been greater.

I don’t mean to minimize the challenges, pressures, and potential setbacks that are a necessary part of making real change. But is there any doubt that far too many established organizations are far better at reassuring themselves about the virtues of standing pat than they are at rallying around the benefits of standing out? As Michelangelo famously said, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

It’s time to aim higher. Playing it safe is riskier than you think.

Homes in Formerly Bombed-Out Areas of Rotterdam Now Command Higher Prices

Home prices are now about 10% higher (controlling for amenities and neighborhood attributes) in areas of Rotterdam’s city center that were bombed in World War II, in comparison with neighborhoods that were untouched. The difference illustrates the impact on homeowners of historic-district rules such as maintenance obligations, says a team led by Hans R.A. Koster of VU University in Amsterdam. Because of the bombing, Rotterdam is the only Dutch city with an American-style central business district with high-rise buildings.

Twitter Isn’t Just Another Social Company

Last week, Twitter’s management subtly let the world know of their upcoming IPO in 140 characters or less. A simple, succinct message. The thrust of it: “We’re coming.”

Today, anywhere you turn, someone is discussing Twitter’s potential. And in almost all of these cases, Twitter is just being thrown into the role of the next social tech IPO. Instead of discussing Twitter as a business, and its strengths and weaknesses, most pundits are simply throwing Twitter into a broad tech category and speculating about IPO valuation.

But as managers, strategists, and investors, we need to be more thoughtful about what Twitter is and how it will continue to shape the world media market. Analyzing Twitter and Facebook as analogs, simply because they both have social components, is a bit like suggesting that CVS and Lululemon are the same because they both have retail spaces.

This failure to discuss Twitter itself probably stems from the fact that most investors don’t grok the service. Twitter represents an unknown quantity. It’s hot. Kids seem to talk about it a lot. And those hashtags certainly pop up on television all the time. But even so, as of this year only 16% of the country uses the service, and that number begins to drop precipitously when you move into suburban environments with residents over 30.

I am an active user and fairly bullish on Twitter’s potential. In my mind, Twitter has evolved into a straightforward broadcast platform; akin to the airwaves, but better constructed for curation and conversation. Twitter may have found an early foothold in the world as a social network for quick updates, but today, it’s an information stream that is much more comprehensive. And while others have tried to build businesses on the back of delivering content – satellite radio, podcasts, blogging platforms like WordPress – let me offer three reasons why Twitter is unique.

Twitter enjoys broad network effects. Many businesses enjoy network effects. Take Skype for instance.  The more of the people that I call who are on the platform, the more valuable Skype is to me.

But Skype’s network effect is narrow. If I frequently call two people outside of the country, and they are not on Skype, the value of Skype’s digital calling platform is rather low. Even if Skype has 100 million total users, it’s essentially valueless to me without those two users. Conversely, for a competitor to enter Skype’s market and steal me away (i.e., Google Hangouts), all they would need to do is sign up those 2 users I care about.

Twitter’s network effects are much more robust. Because its users are supposed to connect to users outside of their geographic or social circles, the more disparate thought leaders, celebrities, and news sources Twitter can add to its network the better it becomes for everyone. And over the years, the company has attracted those contributors in droves — essentially offering them access to millions of fans in exchange for their participation. Now, in order to create a meaningful competitor to the platform, a competitor would have to find a way to entice enough of those thousands of power users away to draw the rest of us. The open structure of Twitter’s network makes its network effect even broader than many other social media platforms.

Twitter lends itself to mobile form factors.  Twitter’s 140 character limit was functional at one point. It was the character limit for a traditional text message. From its inception, Twitter was designed for the mobile experience. It is a singular feed, simply sorted, and monetized in line. Unlike many of its social competitors, who have struggled to streamline their services for feature phones or smartphone applications, Twitter has always been architected for this new mobile paradigm.

Many online firms have stumbled their way through the transition to mobile, seeing valuable display advertising diminish and ancillary revenue streams ignored. But because Twitter was originally built for this format, its revenue isn’t in jeopardy much the same way some recent “tech” IPOs have been. For instance, unlike Zynga, which lost much of its traction as people turned to Facebook on mobile, Twitter will keep its revenue model chugging along regardless.

Granted, there will always be a new paradigm that emerges, opening the door for disruption. But at least for the time being, Twitter is up to date.

Twitter isn’t dependent on winners or losers. Media is changing. The rise of digital distribution, low-cost publishing, and the democratization of media are clearly driving changes in the film and television industries. However, Twitter has managed to make itself invaluable to both the new and the old. Why? Because whether you’re producing big budget studio content or producing a five-minute video for YouTube, everyone needs to engage their audience. There is a job to be done, and Twitter handles it quite thoroughly.

Today, start-ups and incumbents alike are invested in Twitter’s success. Twitter’s structure and broadcast model have driven adoption by hordes of media professionals. Instead of closing the twitter-verse to monetize their product, Twitter’s management team has built a company on the back of incredible openness. Companies like Hootsuite have used this approach to build user interfaces, companies like Topsy have built analytics dashboards, companies like Flipboard have used Twitter to curate their own product, and even industry behemoths like Adobe build tools atop Twitter’s stream. This openness has shielded the company from failure in of any one model. Instead of taking a hard stand on the future of media, Twitter has installed some of the plumbing. While individual companies leveraging Twitter’s platform may fade away, as long as people continue to find value Twitter’s style of real-time communication, they will flourish.

It’s obviously impossible for me to speculate on whether the IPO will be a success or a failure since it hasn’t yet been priced. But I can say that I am optimistic about Twitter’s future. The company’s position is strong. Its network effects create enormous barriers to entry. And it delivers value to a whole heck of a lot of stakeholders. Twitter is more than just another social tech company. And we’d do well to remember that.

Can Building Great Products Help You Build Great Teams?

Silicon Valley was built on amazing products, not on stellar leadership skills. In fact, veterans of some of the world’s most successful tech companies often look with skepticism, even disdain, on efforts to build strong management skills. The premise is that all energy should be focused solely on turning fabulous ideas into hyper growth. It’s true that if a start-up fails — or is sold — the need for enduring leadership may never arise. And in the earliest stages of a company, the need to organize, motivate and inspire large groups of people to accomplish shared goals may not be obvious.

But neglecting the art of people management has significant costs for any company that aspires to be around for a while. Despite employment woes in many sectors of the economy, the talent wars are alive and well in the tech field. Recruitment and retention take up significant mindshare for most leaders. It’s well-documented that dissatisfaction with a manager is a top reason for employees to leave a job. Great managers can help improve job satisfaction and employee retention by leading their organizations with a strong vision, strategic execution and opportunities for career growth. My prediction is that in the next five years, we’ll see a focus on people management catch on with the same enthusiasm that product management has in Silicon Valley and beyond.

In my 20 years leading product and user experience teams at several world-class companies, including LinkedIn and Google, I’ve come to adopt what I call my “Seven Principles to Product Bliss.” Every new member of my product team at LinkedIn gets a personal review of these principles delivered by yours truly. In the course of giving the review many dozens of times, I’ve realized that the seven product principles have direct corollaries to principles for being an effective people manager, and I now work to make sure the managers on my team and I adhere to these corollaries. Below you’ll find my seven product tenets and how I see them connecting to managing people.

Rule 1: Know your audience. For managing products, this means getting out of your office to figure out who your users and customers are, and what makes them tick. This may require opening up meaningful dialog with perfect strangers, and then building their feedback into your product.

For managing people, this principle means getting out of your peer group to really get to know your employees and team members–what they care about, what motivates them and what bothers them about the way things are done. Start with a regular cadence of internal communications–skip-level meetings, town halls, meals with star performers, on-boarding sessions for new hires and team offsites are all good. When you meet with people, listen carefully. Share values and principles that are important to you and your company. Then ask big, open-ended questions about what your team members think–or have seen elsewhere–so that you can interpret and address common challenges together. There’s no better way to get to know your team than to jointly tackle a hard problem.

Rule 2: Simplify. Successful product managers know that customers respond best when the only product features are the ones they want. It’s more important to spend time deciding which features to omit than which to add. A canonical example of the dangers of complexity is the trajectory of Microsoft Word. Between 1984 and 2003, this once-popular software application went from 40 features to more than 1500, with 35 tool bars! Users were overwhelmed, and many turned to simpler alternatives.

Simple is a feature of great management too. Employees of today’s flat organizations are more empowered than ever to gather insights, pursue ideas and make decisions, but they’re also often overcome by choices–how to prioritize their day, whether to go to a particular meeting and which emails to read. Superior people managers can draw a clear mission for their teams–articulating group goals and conveying a strong direction–and then get out of the way to enable their people to make day-to-day decisions.

Rule 3: Embrace constraints. Warren Buffett famously said: “Happiness is not getting what you want but wanting what you have.” When it comes to product management, constraints on time, resources and attention spans can actually make us more creative and responsive to user needs. I love the story of how Napoleonic-era Swiss chocolatiers made hazelnut the most popular flavor of chocolates by using it as a filler during a trade embargo imposed by France. More recently, when moving from web-based to mobile-ready products, the most successful product managers didn’t just scrunch products to fit a small screen–they completely rethought and reinvented their products around mobile users and their usage patterns.

When it comes to leading people, you can actually unleash their creativity by providing a few well-chosen constraints. At LinkedIn, employees sometimes pitch a “venture bet”– a long-shot idea that they’re passionate about. We give them a set amount of time and resources to build that idea and report back periodically. In this context, constraints are necessary safeguards that help simulate real-world constraints faced by any seed-funded startup. The successful bets go on to become part of LinkedIn’s product portfolio.

Rule 4: Data is your guide. The classic example of using data to achieve product success is the multi-step e-commerce checkout process. Amazon’s famous “1-click buying” system materially reduced the buying funnel dropout rates. While you can’t control what users will do with your product once it’s in their hands, you can learn from their interactions and build on this data to improve the product experience.

Data is becoming increasingly relevant for people managers. With tools like LinkedIn, organizations are recruiting, retaining and grooming talent with unprecedented precision. Social tools can enable coworkers to collaborate and build relationships, creating and maintaining a positive culture. At LinkedIn, periodic employee surveys and employee-only networking groups on Linkedin.com allow us to track employee sentiment in a measured, data-rich way. As global leaders, we can’t be everywhere at all times, and we can’t allow ourselves to be swayed by rumors or anecdotal feedback from a few voices who happen to be proximate. Instead, we need to deploy data-driven methods to make the best global decisions.

Rule 5: Innovation is not instant. The beauty of the iPhone is how it combined the best features of its predecessors–the Blackberry’s email features, the Razr’s design aesthetics, the iPod’s music capabilities and the Palm Pilot’s touch screen. Don’t chase brilliant one-offs when seeking innovation–it takes lots of lead bullets to make a silver bullet that enables a step change in user experience.

Similarly, effective leadership takes time, tenacity and regular engagement with the people you’re leading. Gone are the days of “command-and-control” leaders. Today, it’s essential to build an ongoing relationship of trust and authenticity based on open and transparent communication and collaboration. This process of relationship-building takes more time, but those moments of the day are well-spent.

Rule 6: Be fast, flexible and ready to adapt. Some of the most popular tech products today emerged as a result of a major strategic pivot. YouTube got started as a video-dating site. PayPal was created to exchange money between two Palm Pilots. It’s best to be very open-minded when launching a product so that you can build in customer feedback and adapt as necessary. Netflix is a great example. This company that made Blockbuster irrelevant has reinvented itself to move from DVD rentals through the mail to an online streaming and original content entertainment company. Now one-third of downstream internet bandwidth in North America is used by Netflix.

As leaders, we need to continue to take the pulse of our teams regularly, and change our behavior when necessary. We see US presidential candidates go through this process during campaign season, reacting to the input they get from polls. Recently at LinkedIn, a senior executive learned from an employee survey that people were unclear about how their performance was being measured. The executive took immediate corrective action. Within a week of receiving the data, he had pulled together a clear and detailed explanation and held a town hall to explain the performance management process clearly and transparently. The team’s results are now on the upswing.

Rule 7: Build for scale. In the tech world, we talk about creating flexible architectures that can “scale,” or grow quickly: “prototype for 1x, build for 10x and engineer for 100x.” The truth is that technology companies can become obsolete quickly–95 percent companies listed on the NASDAQ don’t maintain an independent existence after 20 years.

If you want to build a company that lasts — especially a tech company — you need to focus on establishing culture and values that are strong and flexible enough to endure changes. And you need to hire people who are at least as focused on building amazing products as part of a team as they are on their own personal star trajectory. As I like to say, never hire anyone whose blast radius will be bigger than his or her impact radius.

As successful companies mature, investing in strong leadership skills can help create and sustain a culture of innovation by empowering teams to make better decisions, take intelligent risks and execute on a winning business strategy.

Don’t Inflict Help, Provide It

A colleague of mine on the leadership coaching staff at Stanford had a student who was wrestling with an important personal issue. I knew a dean who was well-positioned to be of assistance, and I offered to put her in touch with my colleague. I emailed the two of them and felt good that I’d been able to help.

Shortly afterward, though, my colleague called me, and I was stunned to realize that she was upset and angry with me for intervening. While I had thought that she had accepted my initial offer, she had actually said she’d think about it and would let me know if and when she wanted me to take action. She felt that by taking the initiative without her assent I had interfered with the work she’d been doing with the student and, far from helping, had potentially made the situation worse.

When I tweeted about it, Torbjörn Gyllebring responded, “I usually refer to [that] as ‘inflicting help,’” —  a perfect way of describing what I’d inadvertently done to my colleague.

What are the various ways we can, with the best of intentions, inflict help?

The Right Help at the Wrong Time. This is what I provided to my colleague. The dean I knew was in a position to support my colleague and her student, but providing help before it had been asked for created confusion and frustration and was ultimately counterproductive. For help to truly be helpful, the recipients must be ready for it — and as helpers we need to assess that readiness accurately. It’s easy to misread potential openness for an actual invitation.

The Right Help, But Too Much Of It. Alternatively, we can offer help and it’s received with gratitude. But we may not know when to stop. The desire to help takes over, and we pass the point of diminishing returns and keep right on going. I’ve often made this mistake when providing coaching clients with readings intended to supplement our work together. My enthusiasm can lead me to send someone far more material than they have time to absorb, and they feel overwhelmed. I’ve learned that I help not only by providing access to material, but also by limiting that access and by gauging each client’s individual capacity. As helpers we need to be keenly attuned to recipients’ ability to make effective use of our help and to stop helping when it’s no longer helpful.

The Wrong Help. Someone wants our help, and we’re able to offer it at the right time. But as the situation evolves it becomes clear that what we’re offering isn’t actually what’s needed. This was the mistake I made with several teams of MBA students that I supervised in the first few years of my work at Stanford. I thought they needed help with tactical execution, but what they lacked was strategic guidance; to use Peter Drucker’s distinction, I was offering management when they needed leadership. Thankfully, in my second year I got some candid feedback that allowed me to change my approach. As helpers we may think we know what’s needed, but even—and perhaps especially—when we’re viewed as experts we need to access our ignorance and be open to the possibility that we may be wrong.

What motivates all this unhelpful help? Why do we step in when it’s not necessarily helpful? Two factors not only explain this dilemma but also suggest potential solutions.

The Relationship, and Our Role In It. First, in many cases the motive to inflict help is a function of the relationship, or, more precisely, our interpretation of our role in that relationship. If there’s a difference in status within the relationship, such as between a manager and a subordinate, in the senior role we may feel that our primary function is to offer help. But when we find ourselves repeatedly inflicting help, we need to step back and question how we’re interpreting our role in that relationship.

Perhaps we’re fulfilling the role in an outdated way that no longer reflects the state of the relationship or the capabilities of the other party. Perhaps we’re applying a set of archetypes to the relationship — such as expert/novice or guide/follower — that no longer fit (or never did.) While the desire to be of service is laudable, we need to check our assumptions about how and when we can best be of service in this particular role.

Emotion Regulation. Second, it’s essential to understand and regulate the emotions that underlie our helping impulse. Logical analysis can influence our behavior, but our actions inevitably have an emotional dimension, although at times these feelings may lie just beyond our conscious awareness. Comprehending the emotions that motivate our desire to help can allow us to (1) sense when they’re causing us to inflict help, (2) arrest our habitual helping responses, and (3) create opportunities to make different choices.

We’re driven to diminish our negative emotions and enhance our positive emotions, and helping relationships can trigger powerful feelings on both sides. When we feel the need to help we perceive a problem that we want to alleviate, and its persistence can trigger discomfort, anxiety, anger, and fear. The task here is to gain a greater sense of comfort with our discomfort, to simply notice these feelings and sit with them without being compelled to take action in order to soothe ourselves.

On the other side of the emotional spectrum, when we feel the need to help we perceive an opportunity to distinguish ourselves while being of service, and this can trigger excitement, enthusiasm, and even joy. The task here is to calm ourselves in the face of these stimulating emotions, to simply notice these feelings and, again, sit with them without being compelled to take action to maintain this pleasurable state.

As leaders, as colleagues, as friends, and as family members, we’re asked to help in almost every sphere of life. Those who feel, as I do, a powerful desire to be of service, may have chosen a profession that presents us with the opportunity to fulfill this drive on a daily basis. But being mindful of the difference between providing help and inflicting it is what allows us to truly make a difference.

The Benefits of Negative Feedback

I recently gave a lunchtime “author’s talk” at Children’s Hospital in Boston and, although I thought the talk went well, somebody in the audience didn’t like it at all. On the evaluation form, the person in question wrote a single word in the comment box: CONFUSING.

Thank you, whoever you are. While everybody else gave me good marks and said nice things, which I appreciated, my critic forced me into self-examination. Was he the only one forthright enough to speak up, or was he the only one not paying enough attention to get it? What was confusing? The ideas? The presentation?

This all got me thinking about feedback. Whenever you go public with an idea — in a book, a talk, a presentation, a video, a graphic — you will inevitably get many kinds of responses. This feedback generally falls into one of three categories: praise, silence, and backlash.

Praise seems quite easy to handle — we all love to be praised, especially when the praise is nonspecific, such as “fascinating!” Go ahead and bask in the praise: It is a reward for your work and a motivation to push forward. But such praise is not necessarily valuable feedback. In order to make use of this praise, you must probe it deeper: What, exactly, was fascinating?

Silence can be difficult to interpret. A few years ago, during a 90-day interim as blogger-in-residence for BzzAgent, a start-up social media marketing firm, I wrote a daily blog about company issues and stories. Some of these posts received zero comments. I assumed my readers were indifferent, disengaged, or actively did not like these particular bits of writing. But, in face-to-face discussions with my audience (there I was, surrounded by them), I discovered that often Internet silence corresponded to deep thinking and reflection done off-line. So, as with praise, the value of silence may require mining: Did I leave you speechless? Or did you just not care?

An idea that advocates any kind of change is likely to receive some amount of negative response. When you’ve invested time, energy, and passion into your idea, this rejection can hurt. Your first impulse may be to lash back, to rebut the rebuttal. But a better response is to let the backlash unfold a bit: It is likely that negative feedback will be the most useful in further developing your idea.

Backlash takes many forms and is unleashed for many reasons, so it’s important to first understand the nature of the criticism, as well as its source. A thoughtful review from a credible source is not the same as a mean-spirited comment online from an anonymous Internet troll. (The latter of which you can ignore.)

If, as with praise and silence, you take a moment (or a night’s sleep) to reflect on the backlash — what kind is it? why is it happening? — you may realize that backlash has its own unique advantages:

It deepens the appreciation of advocates. In light of a contrary opinion, those who initially said your idea was simply “fantastic” may be forced to think about it more deeply, and respond with more detail. I thought X was fantastic, but in light of these comments, I had to reconsider and found that XX… Additionally, backlash can cause those who were silent at first to speak up as advocates of the idea. Only when an idea is challenged, and especially when it is attacked, do people realize just how much they care about it.
It creates new contexts for the idea. Consider backlash against Michael Pollan, the best-selling food expert, whose books include The Omnivore’s Dilemma and, most recently, Cooked . Adam Merberg, in the Berkeley Science Review, suggests Pollan misrepresents and even vilifies science. Tyler Cowen, in Slate , writes that Pollan “neglects the macro perspective of the economist.” And Emily Matchar argues against Pollan’s historic view of women’s role in cooking in her Salon.com article, “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” Did Pollan think his ideas through from the point of view of science, economics, and feminism? Maybe, maybe not, but thanks to the backlash he received, the debate about the value of home cooking now embraces those topics. Negative feedback from disparate domains empowers you to articulate your idea more clearly — to incorporate, avoid, or merge it with other areas of thought.
It improves the quality of the argument. Recently in The New Yorker , Adam Gopnik explains how brain science has become an explanation for just about everything (why we eat what we eat, say what we say, etc.), and how people are beginning to push back against it. This backlash may be a case of idea fatigue: People are merely tired of hearing about the brain, to a point of heated annoyance.

Discussion, debate, and positive­­­-negative tussling serve to put an idea through a public testing that makes it stronger and better or, sometimes, rejects it. As the one who has brought the idea forward, it brings you into the conversation in a new way, giving you more license to speak further, create new expressions of your idea, and seek to influence outcomes you care about.

It is no small feat to stimulate genuine conversation about any idea, and to generate criticism, rebuttal, debate — and even attack — suggests that you have touched a nerve, surfaced a tension, or put your finger on an issue that needs discussing.

While the particular comments matter, what matters more is how you use the feedback to gather advocates, interpret your idea in new contexts, and improve its quality for your now broader audience.

So, to the person at the Children’s Hospital talk, please be in touch with a bit more detail. I don’t mind being called confusing, but I need to know exactly how and where and why you think that.

An Upside of a Long Recession: A Deepening of Personal Trust

The longer a recession drags on, the greater the growth of interpersonal trust among the population, according to an analysis of survey data from 10 Latin American countries by Elizabeth A.M. Searing of Georgia State University. For each additional year of a recession (holding all else constant), the probability that people will agree that “most people can be trusted” increases by 9.03%. A long recession may bring communities together and encourage social investment, Searing suggests.

Five Years After Lehman’s Collapse, Bankers Still Haven’t Confronted Their Biases

In 2005, four dozen senior executives at Lehman Brothers took a decision-making course. They holed up at the Palace Hotel on Madison Avenue and heard from top business school researchers and behavioral psychologists about dangerous cognitive biases. Then they rushed back to their headquarters in Times Square and made some of the worst snap decisions in the history of financial markets.

Five years after Lehman’s collapse, the question endures: can bankers learn the limits of human cognition? Might tomorrow’s bankers redesign a course to help them learn something useful and lasting from Lehman’s legacy? Or are they doomed, like lemmings, to repeat the same mistakes?

Unfortunately, financial leaders still do not recognize that Lehman’s widely-publicized transgressions — accounting shenanigans, massive leverage, undisclosed risks — were the symptoms, not the disease. And the disease is spreading. Regulators who focus on new capital requirements or proprietary trading limits for banks are missing the one problem that those rules do not address: modern financial markets tempt human beings into cognitive error.

Instead of recognizing and confronting this problem, financial market participants are following Oscar Wilde’s advice about how to overcome temptation: they are yielding to it, in droves. Today’s super-fast technology cues traders’ fight-or-flight responses, leading them to make snap decisions that do not account for the probability of disastrous future events. Even the supposedly long-term compensation structure of banks – the annual bonus – leads salespeople and brokers to ignore future harm and focus too much on immediate consequences. Day-to-day, bankers’ lives have come to resemble those of the impatient four-year-old children in the famous “marshmallow experiment”: they cannot wait 15 minutes for a second treat.

In the past, reputation was an effective tool to police bad financial behavior. At banks a hundred years ago, as in hunter-gatherer society a hundred thousand years before that, people worried that bad behavior might ruin their futures. They paused to consider the long-term consequences of what the human beings who mattered in their lives might think about their behavior.

But because today’s bankers succumb to short-term bias, they care less about their longer-term reputations. Moreover, the complexity of modern markets and the detailed (often nonsensical) web of financial regulation have impersonalized finance so that reputation has become virtually irrelevant. When the majority of banks and bankers have bad reputations and there are no real personal consequences for ripping off a client or taking excessive risks, it doesn’t matter what you do.

To some extent, human beings can overcome their cognitive biases. Deliberative speed bumps can slow down snap decisions. A longer-term approach to compensation — the career instead of the year — can lead people to think more about future gains and losses. The prospect of real reputational consequences might make the next rogue banker think twice. Lehman’s bankers didn’t imagine that their actions might destroy their reputations. And, in fact, for most they did not.

Financial leaders who want to avoid becoming the next Lehman should structure their decision processes so that, instead of always lunging ahead, they consider the best arguments against their gut reaction. That doesn’t mean their decisions need to be slow, just that they should be conscious of potential error. Bank officers might require traders to reflect periodically on their positions: how much are they really worth and what risks do they face? Supervisors might stop relying on overly simplified numerical measures of risk, which attempt to predict what will happen most of the time. Human beings tend to anchor thoughts around such numbers, so that they become blind to other factors. Instead of crunching numbers, bankers should tell stories. They should reflect on worst-case scenarios and conduct what the psychologist Gary Klein calls a “pre-mortem” by imagining hypothetically that their bank has failed and then asking what led to the failure. In other words, they should stop, wait, and think.

The main lesson of Lehman is that banking should be a slower profession, as it once was — like medicine or law. Professions require thoughtful training, and courses designed to tap our human spirits, not our animal ones. When Joe Gregory, the former president of Lehman, preached that employees should “go with their gut,” he was leading them in the wrong direction.

Like humans, lemmings have strong biological urges. Yet the urban myth about lemmings is false: in fact, they rarely rush into collective death. When they arrive in groups at a body of water, they usually have the collective wherewithal to stop. Perhaps one day that might be true of bankers as well.