Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1549

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.

What Wall Street Wants to See From Twitter’s Executives (and Why It’s Wrong)

All eyes are on Twitter, with last night’s announcement that it has filed an S-1 in order to go public. Between now and the IPO, every bit of information about the company’s finances and other metrics will be closely scrutinized. You can expect to see endless discussions in the press about revenue, valuation, user growth, and product. But one key variable is missing from that list: people.

It’s not just the company’s metrics that investors are interested in. Research shows that firms’ management teams influence the success of their IPOs. Just as investors will be judging the appeal of Twitter’s business, so too will they be analyzing the competency of its leadership.

A research brief by academics at Arizona State and Florida State summarizes the many studies that have assessed the impact of people on IPO performance and pinpoints several attributes that have an impact.

What Wall Street Wants to Know About a CEO

Unsurprisingly, much of the research that the brief cites concerns the CEO of the company going public. And there is reason to believe that CEO Dick Costolo’s background, ownership stake, and compensation package may each impact investors’ confidence.

Ownership: ”CEOs retaining higher levels of equity serve as valuable signals to potential investors,” the authors write. Expect investors to look closely at the S-1 for Costolo’s stake in the company.
Incentive: Similarly, investors will want to see that Costolo is incentivized to see Twitter succeed. One study found that “stock option compensation was positively related to IPO performance, as measured by investor valuations.”
Professional background: Here the research is a bit more mixed. One paper, for instance, found that firms whose CEOs had backgrounds in finance or as professors performed better; another study found no relationship based on those characteristics. One thing that is unlikely to hurt Costolo is the fact that he’s not a Twitter founder. (He joined in 2009, three years after the company was founded.) Here again the data is mixed, with some evidence that the market prefers founders and some that it prefers “professional” CEOs.

Senior Management & the Board of Directors

The CEO isn’t the only one likely to be scrutinized by the market. Research likewise suggests that senior management and the board of directors are tied to a firm’s IPO performance.

Management’s background: Multiple papers have demonstrated a link between the management team’s credentials (measured by prestigious degrees) and reputation (measured by charitable board seats).
Incentives: Just as with the CEO, investors will be looking at the S-1 to see what kind of compensation packages senior executives have; the data suggest that incentives like stock options “positively influence IPO performance.”
Who’s on the board: The research also suggests that the presence of more prestigious board members is correlated with less chance of underpricing during an IPO, and having an underwriter on the board is associated with a higher price at IPO.

Is Wall Street a Good Judge of Leadership?

Of course, the fact that the market likes to see certain backgrounds and incentive structures doesn’t mean those things are actually connected to a company’s success further down the line. And there is less research into how executives’ attributes and compensation impact long-term performance. (Stock options do incentivize CEOs to take risks, for instance, but that doesn’t always translate into gains for the business.)

“Sadly, Wall Street is only good at one thing: mechanistically projecting existing trends on a straight line into infinity,” says Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. As for Wall Street’s ability to gauge people, Martin is even less optimistic. “The notion that Wall Street has a single useful thing to say about the effectiveness of leaders — other than if the financials are trending up, leadership must be effective and the reverse if financials are trending down — is farfetched,” he says.

Of course, that won’t stop Wall Street from scrutinizing.

Why We Didn’t Learn Enough From the Financial Crisis

“Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon may or may not have told Herbert Hoover in the early years of the Great Depression. “It will purge the rottenness out of of the system.” This is what has since become known as the “Austrian” view (although most of its modern proselytizers are American): economic actors need to learn from their mistakes, “malinvestment” must be punished, busts are needed to wring out the excesses created during boom times.

Within the economic mainstream, there is some sympathy for the idea that crisis interventions can create “moral hazard” by bailing out the irresponsible. But the argument that financial crises should be allowed to wreak their havoc unchecked has few if any adherents. As Milton Friedman put it in 1998:

I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, … you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm.

When a financial crisis hit in 2008 that was probably worse than anything the world had seen since the early 1930s, it was this mainstream view that won out. The bailout of the big banks in late 2008, while hugely unpopular with the general populace, has garnered near-unanimous support from the economics profession. In a paper eventually published in the Journal of Financial Economics in 2010, the University of Chicago’s Pietro Veronesi and Luigi Zingales — two economists who aren’t generally big fans of government economic intervention — concluded that even without including the impossible-to-measure systemic benefits, the cash infusions and guarantees orchestrated by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson created between $73 billion and $91 billion in economic value after costs.

The Federal Reserve’s subsequent (and continuing) support of asset markets has been somewhat more controversial, but still meets widespread approval among economists. More controversial yet have been fiscal stimulus efforts like the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, but the tide of economic opinion and evidence seems to have turned in their favor too, with the bulk of post-stimulus empirical studies showing a positive effect and the former austerity advocates at the International Monetary Fund dramatically changing their tune starting late last year.

In sum, the economic mainstream got its way, the Austrians didn’t, and we all appear to be better off for it. It has been a tough five years, but not nearly as tough as the early 1930s. And the biggest economic policy mistake made was probably not the bailouts or the deficit spending or the printing of money, but the failure to stop Lehman Brothers from failing on Sept. 15, 2008.

Yet despite this record of relative success, most the commentaries being published in the lead-up to the fifth anniversary of that fateful day seem to focus instead on the opportunities missed. Princeton economist Alan Blinder’s op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal is a prime example of this. Blinder laments that the dangerous financial-sector practices that precipitated the crisis have mostly been left in place. Contrasting the tepid regulatory measures taken since 2008 with the remaking of the financial system that took place during and after the Great Depression, he writes:

Far from being tamed, the financial beast has gotten its mojo back — and is winning. The people have forgotten — and are losing.

What Blinder and his kindred spirits (and I should add that I am one of them) generally fail to discuss, though, is that one of the main reasons the people have forgotten is because economic policy-makers succeeded in averting anything quite as memorable as the wave after wave of bank failures and widespread economic misery that swept the U.S. in the early 1930s. By giving us a Great Recession in place of a Great Depression, they made it much harder to assemble a political consensus for truly dramatic change.

This is where the Austrians surely have it right. If you are spared the full consequences of your actions, you’re far less likely to learn what you did wrong. That still doesn’t seem like enough reason to justify a do-nothing economic policy in the face of a financial crisis. But it ought to be clear by now that there are also real costs to doing something.

How I Got My Team To Fail More

Business-school literature has long stressed the importance of taking risks and encouraging rapid failure. In the real world of quarterly numbers, though, embracing failure mostly remains a throwaway line in CEO speeches.

At PBS Digital, we went beyond corporate lip service and demanded failure from each and every employee.

The results? The transformation of a venerated but legacy brand into a digital leader.

The story of our decision to create and embrace a failure metric begins, as do many business advances, with desperation. By 2007, PBS.org audience growth had stalled and the product pipeline was dry. Worse, the digital team was paralyzed by a deeply engrained culture of caution. Its top two priorities — a redesign of PBS.org and a new video player — had churned on for two years with little to show except a thick binder of product requirements from key constituents.

It’s easy to understand why. Television production works on a different cycle from digital, with programs often greenlit two to three years in advance. Also, PBS is the opposite of a top-down company. It’s a membership organization created to serve more than 350 independently owned and operated stations, each with its own board of directors, objectives, agendas and strategies.

With hundreds of masters, any potential digital product was bound to fall short of meeting somebody’s needs. Layer on the fact that PBS stations receive a small but vital revenue stream from federal and state governments, and you had an almost ideal scenario for paralysis.

That culture had worked fine in the analog world, through nearly four decades of groundbreaking children’s television started by Sesame Street, and primetime television gems such as NOVA, Nature, Masterpiece, and FRONTLINE — each of which has been on the air for more than a quarter-century.

But that was analog. On the digital side, an organization that deliberates too long about products instead of launching them will find itself quickly gasping for survival.

So when I joined the company in December 2006, I decided to deliver a shock to the system. Soon after arriving at PBS, I called the digital team into a conference room and announced we were ripping up everyone’s annual performance goals and adding a new metric.

Failure.

With a twist: “If you don’t fail enough times during the coming year,” I told every staffer, “you’ll be downgraded.”

Because if you’re not failing enough, you’re playing it safe.

The idea was to deliver a clear message: Move fast. Iterate fast. Be entrepreneurial. Don’t be afraid that if you stretch and sprint you might break things. Executive leadership has your back.

When I talked about the failure metric and freeing the team to become more entrepreneurial, some in the larger PBS organization translated this as the digital group wanting a license to be undisciplined. So we worked to build a digital team that was left-brain, right-brain — embracing the nonlinear right-brain mojo of a startup (entrepreneurial, fast-moving, unafraid of risk) while filtering every initiative through the left-brain empirical rigor of goals, metrics, and KPIs. The KPIs also helped ensure our failures were disciplined failures, not the result of sloppiness.

In a beautifully ironic twist, the failure metric itself initially failed. We originally envisioned the metric as a formal KPI in each staffer’s annual performance review. But we soon realized we had created a contradiction: You can’t build a culture that values rapid iteration by simply changing an annual performance cycle. We needed daily reinforcement of the desirability of risk-taking and failing fast.

So instead of spending cycles working with HR to create a KPI measuring lack of failure, we focused on endlessly repeating the “must fail” message.

The change was rapid and profound. Some staff were uncomfortable with the new culture and left. Others began taking risks. The product manager working on our first augmented reality site for PBSKids.org ditched her plans for months of customer research and testing in favor of a 10-week sprint to launch. The site failed. The product manager? She received a spot bonus and her “smart failure” was listed as a top accomplishment in her glowing annual review.

Critically, the lessons learned from the augmented reality failure led to creating a suite of gesture-based games, which are now among the most popular areas of pbskids.org.

With the team taking risks and being rewarded for doing so, we set to work institutionalizing the new culture, adding the day-to-day processes of a lean startup.

Our development team went Agile. We began formally recognizing staffers who took risks, such as the design director who landed several impressive applicants by replacing a traditional job posting with an infographic about the position.

Crucially, we redefined success. When our first foray into web-original video production, a safe, TV-type series called “The Parent Show,” launched to fairly good reviews, we resisted the temptation to declare victory. Instead, the team challenged itself to risk breaking the PBS mold by creating a truly YouTube-native show.

This led to the Mr. Rogers remix, “Garden of Your Mind,” which auto-tuned old clips so Mr. Rogers bursts into song. Within 48 hours, it rose to the top of the most viewed and most shared videos charts on YouTube.

Before the failure metric, the team would have considered a Fred Rogers music video to be risky at best, sacrilege at worst. Instead, the culture change triggered by the failure metric gave the team comfort that even if this blew up in their face, they would be protected.

Every revolution eventually faces a counter-revolution. Ours was no exception. The failure metric was a get-out-of jail-free card for the digital team, but had done nothing for the larger PBS organization. Tensions began to surface between the digital group’s new lean start-up pace and the larger organization’s traditional culture.

Properly managed, it’s a healthy tension. Each culture challenges the other to grow. More often, though, the incumbent culture simply blots out any challengers. So far, PBS has avoided that fate, thanks largely to CEO Paula Kerger, who has pulled off the difficult task of nurturing and supporting the new digital culture while growing audience ratings for the legacy television business.

We learned that to make the culture change stick, we needed to be both radical and incremental.

Radical because we needed to establish audacious goals to inspire the team. Incremental because, well, we didn’t want to get fired. (And because it’s a rare organization able to swallow significant change in one gulp.)

We went radical by re-casting our team’s mission statement into two words: Reinvent PBS.

And we took baby steps by starting with one product, PBS.TV, which upended both internal and audience assumptions about what a PBS website should look like.

We suspected we had it right when AP led a story with “PBS may be cooler than you think”; the Twitter crowd started calling PBS.TV “sick nasty”; and a middle-aged woman in focus group testing announced, “I can’t believe this is PBS. It’s so … modern.”

Crucially, we delivered business results. In the five years since we delivered the failure metric jolt to our system, unique visitors to PBS.org have doubled. In each of the first seven months of 2013, PBS.org topped ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox as the most-visited network TV site, according to comScore.

In that same timeframe, video views on PBS.org and our mobile platforms have risen 11,200 percent — from 2 million a month to almost a quarter-billion last month.

The 11,200 percent growth in video views has propelled PBSkids.org to become the most popular Web site for kids video for 17 straight months, according to comScore.

In the end, the failure metric was something of a verbal stunt. Here’s what staffers said a few years later: If I had simply announced that they had permission to fail, they would have considered it corporate blather. By making failure a requirement, I had shocked them into taking the message seriously. Sometimes it takes a stunt to push people — and organizations — out of their comfort zones and on to lasting change.

When You’re Innovating, Resist Looking for Solutions

If someone comes to you with a problem, you start thinking of a solution. That’s natural — everyone does it.

But as soon as you start thinking of a solution, you unconsciously begin shutting off possibilities for getting a deeper understanding of the problem and therefore of finding a truly breakthrough solution.

That’s why it can often be more productive to avoid “solutions” thinking when a problem arises. It’s better to stay in what we call the “problem space” for as long as possible. If that sounds strange, here’s an example of what we mean.

A military organization came to us for help because people who were being observed by pilotless drones were using techniques such as smoke screens to deceive the analyzers of the drones’ video and other data. The organization asked for assistance understanding the adversary’s deception techniques. But by framing the request that way, the client had already moved from the problem space toward the solution space — the client was specifying the type of solution that was expected.

We encouraged the client to stay in the problem space, sometimes known as the “front end,” in order to get a deeper understanding of the problem. The client soon came to see that analysts are deceived because there are limits on their ability to perceive. The real issue is understanding these limits.

To further explore that issue, we held an off-site at which we brought in people (outside the military) who are experts at confusing people, and others who are experts at making sense of ambiguous information. The first group included an illusionist and a theatrical set designer. The second included a forensics expert and a blind person who was practiced at perceiving whether her guide dog was leading her into safe or unsafe places.

The insights from this “divergent collaboration” of people from disparate walks of life gave the client ideas for new avenues of research. For example, could the analysts’ information feeds include other types of data, such as auditory signals, or even smells?

What does all this mean about your own efforts to solve problems and execute on innovation?

First, force yourself to stay in the problem space as long as possible. Obviously, companies sometimes face real restrictions on the types of solutions they can consider. But often those limits are purely psychological, the result of narrow thinking about the nature of the problem.

So go deep. Look for underlying issues. What’s the real obstacle you face? Once you’ve found it, go deeper still. What’s the essence of that obstacle?

Then search for different viewpoints on the obstacle. Go far afield. Look for people who have faced that same essential challenge, and tap their insights. This can be easier than you think. It can be as simple as reading a relevant book or magazine that you’ve never looked at before. Or call an unfamiliar organization that includes people who face your challenge on a regular basis. Don’t be afraid to bring outsiders into the discussion. We’ve found that people from wide-ranging backgrounds are often very willing to help — they find the experience fascinating.

Be thoughtful about the physical environment in which you explore the problem space. A lot of companies do offsites in hotel conference rooms, but those can be mind-numbing. Find something a little more conducive to exchanging ideas, a comfortable setting where you can get away from your day-to-day activities, form and re-form small groups, write on the walls. And plan the sessions carefully. When it comes to mixing and matching ideas, don’t trust to luck. Structure conversations so that they’re enriching rather than draining.

None of this is easy. Staying in the problem space, in particular, can be very difficult. Sometimes clients feel frustrated that we resist moving from the problem space to the solution space. Even some of the “divergent” collaborators we bring in for additional insights feel frustrated when they hear we’re less interested in their proposed solutions to a client’s problem than in how they look at the issues involved.

But staying in the problem space is worth the effort. If you rush to a solution, you run the risk of solving the wrong problem. The place to get the problem right is in the problem space, where you’re more open to new ideas.

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

Don’t Sugarcoat Negative Feedback

The old rap against coaches and consultants: they borrow your watch to tell you the time.

And yet I’d bet anything that 90% of the coaches reading this hung out their shingles with an eye toward helping executives grow and overcome impediments to success. So why do they bear the stigma of being a cajoling cheerleader rather than a conscientious change agent?

The answer is that, in the same way that hungry rats learn to navigate the blind alleys of a maze in their search for food, coaches, consultants, and other change agents learn that punishment most often follows their constructive criticism. Conversely, when they stroke the egos of clients, rewards come raining down. Managers fall victim to the same temptation: it’s much more fun (and in the short term, rewarding) to praise your direct reports than to deliver negative feedback.

The bad news is that if you’re a consultant or coach, folks will tire of having smoke blown at them and, sooner or later, react negatively. They’re paying for reasoned critiques, and chronic evasiveness eventually gets on their nerves. And if you’re a manager, you can’t only rely on praise. (Although of course, praise is just as important as criticism, and needs to be delivered in larger doses.)

First, remember: Mary Poppins don’t know squat. A spoonful of sugar does not help the “medicine” go down. Who hasn’t been enraged by a putz who wanted to deliver criticism and started his spiel by saying, “With all due respect, Adam…” Don’t folks know that in the argot of the business world, “with all due respect” means “screw you”?

This isn’t an opinion of mine; it’s an empirical fact that Dr. Edward E. Jones, the psychologist who (literally) wrote the book on ingratiation, demonstrated: When evaluators gave critical reviews to experimental subjects role-playing employees, those who expressed what was wrong immediately were significantly more respected than those who began with praise and ended with, “the bad news is…”

If you want to help a person change restrict your sugarcoating to breakfast cereals. Deliver constructive feedback rapidly in its raw form. This doesn’t mean harshly; there’s a way to soften blows without delaying them if you strive to be empathic. Just never make it seem like you’re avoiding hard cold facts. All that does is make the facts seem worse than they are.

And yet, proceed cautiously with established stars. Somewhere in the collective unconscious of coaches and CEOs lives the notion that being young equates to being thin-skinned. Fact: There is often an inverse correlation between tenure on the fast track and tolerance of criticism. Professor Chris Argyris demonstrated that many “stars” who effortlessly ascend the career ladder are shockingly unable to handle negative news. What Argyris showed was that managers who “never failed” — who were hot shots in school and then on the job — were often devastated by constructive criticism and actually sought to ignore or deny it. Conversely, if you’ve learned, through failure, that you don’t die from being criticized, you take it as it is intended: Information to learn from.

So know your target: If a person has never performed poorly, handle with care. Someone who obtained a degree from the School of Hard Knocks before coming to your company can take feedback straight, no chaser.

Resist the urge to prophesy. The absolute worst thing a CEO, coach, or consultant can do when offering constructive criticism to someone is to provide a timetable for the process that a person who must change should be expected to conform to. Saying, “Most of my clients can get their anger management issues checked in less than 6 months…” adds insult to injury. You may think it’s encouraging to say, “Don’t worry; it’s a quick process,” but what you’re doing is adding fuel to a negative fire.

Similarly, don’t minimize the challenge. When you critique someone with a history of success you have to assume that the flaws you see in them are (a) entrenched, and, (b) something they have long grappled with to suppress or get past. Saying, “No big deal” to that sort of issue can scare the socks off someone who knows that what you’re targeting for change is an issue they have battled unsuccessfully for years.

To help someone with a problem that hasn’t derailed an otherwise productive career, ask them how they believe they can best cope with it. After they give you their (terrified) perspective say, “Well, I have some suggestions for reducing the time and energy you might expect to devote this matter.”

Any and all of my success as a coach is because I internalized an observation by Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” Constructive criticism and your plan(s) for having someone address the flaws you see emanate from your worldview. To have these well-intended messages hit home, you must understand your audience and tailor your feedback to their needs.

Drink Your Way into the Middle Class

Straight Up How Johnnie Walker Conquered the WorldForeign PolicyForeign Policy

<p>At a gathering of Beijing techies, on a cruise up the Nile, at a four-day wedding in Jaipur, or among members of Iraq’s Baath Party. These are all places where Johnnie Walker whiskey has been poured — and, according to Afshin Molavi, the Scotch whisky's global reach is only expanding. This delightful tour through the history and marketing of the  “amber restorative” is a blueprint for how to use our aspirational desires to sell us lots and lots of stuff — all over the world. The story begins in the late 1800s, when Alexander Walker became the company's first brand ambassador, meandering around London "on a specially-built open carriage known as a phaeton, a mode of transport favored by royals and the superrich." Today, five of Johnnie Walker’s seven top global markets are emerging markets, and ads from Mexico to Africa exhort the emerging global middle class to “keep walking” or “step up.”</p><p>This transnationalism has a long heritage: the iconic “Striding Man” logo was originally designed "to look English, not Scottish," complete with a monocle indicating his literacy. Today, most of the Striding Man's features have been wiped out, and for good reason: "He has become a silhouette," writes Molavi, "a colorless everyman. He could be anyone — and you could be like him." </p>

Those Pesky Gray Areas The Upsides and Dark Sides of RivalryStrategy + BusinessStrategy + Business

<p>Most of us aren't psychopaths or saints. We're all bumbling about in a gray area, a zone that's of particular interest to Gavin Kilduff, an assistant professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. In particular, he studies how rivalry chews away at our morals. He's found that merely writing about a rival for five minutes makes people "agree more with all kinds of Machiavellian statements." People are "also more likely to inflate their performance on a task by saying that they fared better than they actually did" after such an exercise. Rivalry can hurt entire companies if they dwell on historical competitors, losing sight of what's actually happening around them – for instance, U.S. car companies in the 1980s who battled so hard against one another that they missed the rise of Japanese autos. But are there any times when rivalry can actually push us in positive ways? Possibly: Kilduff is investigating whether fierce competition with another company can improve group cohesion and loyalty. And competition on routine office tasks can improve worker performance. The key, of course, is managing when rivalry is appropriate — and when it's dangerous for both your employees and your company. </p>

"Am I gonna be psycho?" Survivors of Bangladesh Garment Factory Collapse Still Suffering, 5 Months LaterWashington PostWashington Post

<p>The Rana Plaza garment factory collapse killed more than 1,100 people. In the aftermath, companies like Walmart, Gap, and Disney <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/bus... to identify</a> whether their supply chain partners conduct work in the country, promising to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/sustainabl... an unwieldy system</a>. The Bangladeshi government has started making settlement payments and global corporations are <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09... decisions</a> about how to compensate victims and their families. Ad hoc and grassroots organizations are trying to identify and help those who might be suffering psychological effects from the disaster.</p><p>In the meantime, survivors, families, and rescue workers are struggling. According to Jason Motlagh, "none of the 4,000 families affected by the Rana Plaza disaster have received the full payments," with some families relying on handouts because their single breadwinner is dead or injured. The psychological toll may be even more dire: one man, Rafiqul Islam, cut eight people out of the wreckage with a hacksaw blade. Now he says he hears voices "calling for me," and his propensity for violent outbursts and memory lapses following his heroics cost him his job. Faizul Muhid searched corpses for identifying documents and features; he now self-medicates with anti-depressants, asking, "Am I gonna be psycho?" Then there's Omar Faruque Babu, who became a bit of a media celebrity after rescuing more than 30 people. He has since hanged himself. </p>

Why Your Virtual Garden Doesn't Yield Any Crops How Zynga Went from Social Gaming Powerhouse to Has-BeenArs TechnicaArs Technica

<p>Between 2007 and 2011, Zynga seemed unstoppable. Its flagship game, FarmVille, was ubiquitous on Facebook, with both social companies reaping financial benefits from the virtual care of animals and crops. But around the time the company went public — with a share price of around $13 — its cracks were beginning to show. Among them: an explosive and often chaotic increase in staff (mostly in middle management), relying too heavily on Facebook as the core of its strategy, a focus on getting new players instead of retaining old ones, and squeezing as much money out of its users as possible in ways some felt were unethical. Cash was also being thrown around like crazy for lavish game-themed parties and, on one occasion, clowns. "I came in one day and there were clowns that were passing out balloons," said the current Zynga principal engineer. "Some people said they were deathly afraid of clowns! I don't know the thought process there. [I mean, why not] jugglers? Nobody is afraid of jugglers."</p><p>This past summer, founder and CEO Mark Pincus stepped down, and the company's shares now sell for under $3. Can Zynga turn itself around? Possibly, though the consensus is that it will take a drastic reduction in staff and a renewed focus on mobile, a platform the company has struggled with. And maybe fewer clowns are in order, too. </p>

When the Bottom Drops OutHow Austerity KillsCNNCNN

<p>Fixing a struggling economy ain't easy. But austerity, Europe's budget-slashing policy, may be causing a preventable public health crisis that's also costing countries more in the long run. Political economist and epidemiologist David Stuckler and physician Sanjay Basu have been deeply analyzing how austerity is affecting citizens. Some of their findings: in Greece, the public health budget was cut by more than 40%, eliminating needle-exchange programs and funding for mosquito-spraying; the result has been a 200% rise in HIV infections and a malaria epidemic. In addition, forty percent of people say they can't access medically necessary health care. Stuckler and Basu argue that it doesn't have to be this way, pointing to numerous examples of depressed countries actually making health care <em>better</em> for its citizens: 1930s America, Malaysia after the East Asian financial crisis in the 1990s; and Iceland today. In fact, the authors say, investing in public health can actually save money: "Each euro invested in public health can yield up to a three euros return if invested wisely in data-supported government programs." </p>

BONUS BITS"You Just Weren't a Good Fit…"

<p><a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001... Should You Bring Mom and Dad to Your Job Interview?</strong> (Wall Street Journal)</a><br /><a href="http://gawker.com/company-sorry-for-t... Sorry for Turning Job Interview Into a Daft Punk Dance-Off</strong> (Gawker)</a><br /><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/beauti... Women Get Callbacks for Job Interviews More Often</strong> (Business Insider)</a></p>

At a gathering of Beijing techies, on a cruise up the Nile, at a four-day wedding in Jaipur, or among members of Iraq’s Baath Party. These are all places where Johnnie Walker whiskey has been poured — and, according to Afshin Molavi, the Scotch whisky's global reach is only expanding. This delightful tour through the history and marketing of the  “amber restorative” is a blueprint for how to use our aspirational desires to sell us lots and lots of stuff — all over the world. The story begins in the late 1800s, when Alexander Walker became the company's first brand ambassador, meandering around London "on a specially-built open carriage known as a phaeton, a mode of transport favored by royals and the superrich." Today, five of Johnnie Walker’s seven top global markets are emerging markets, and ads from Mexico to Africa exhort the emerging global middle class to “keep walking” or “step up.”

This transnationalism has a long heritage: the iconic “Striding Man” logo was originally designed "to look English, not Scottish," complete with a monocle indicating his literacy. Today, most of the Striding Man's features have been wiped out, and for good reason: "He has become a silhouette," writes Molavi, "a colorless everyman. He could be anyone — and you could be like him."