Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1550

Is Bias Fixable?

"As a brown woman, your chances of being seen and heard in the world are next to nothing," he said. "For your ideas to be seen, they need to be edgier." He paused, as if to ruminate on this, before continuing. "But if you are edgy, you will be too scary to be heard." This was the advice I got from a marketing guru when I asked for his help with titling my second book.

I was confused, as I couldn't figure out how this answer had any relationship to my original question. I walked — somewhat dazed — to my next meeting and repeated what I'd just heard. In return, I received only blank stares. It wasn't that these people affirmed his point of view; it's that they stayed silent. My confusion gradually turned to fear. Was someone finally doing me a service by telling me ... The Truth?

For months after hearing this "... you'll never been seen" message, I was a mess seeing his "truth" into every missed opportunity or unexpected obstacle.

Black / white. Masculine/feminine. Rich/poor. Immigrant/ native. Gay/straight. Southern/northern. Young/old. Each of us can be described in a series of overlapping identities and roles. And we could spend time talking about the biological and sociological programming that causes humans to form personal identity around group structures. But the bottom line is this: we — as a society — don't see each other. You are not seen for who you really are, though each of us is a distinct constellation of interests, passions, histories, visions and hopes. And you do not see others.

As David Burkus recently wrote, innovation isn't an idea problem, but rather a recognition problem; a lack of noticing the good ideas already there. To see and be seen is essential to finding solutions for all of us. Now "noticing" doesn't seem like an especially hard thing to do, but — let's be real — it is. That's because of bias. Bias is shaped by broader culture — something is perceived as "true" — and thus it prevents you from neutrally seeing. Recognizing bias is simply recognizing that you are not impartial — you prescreen by seeing what you expect to see.

Everyone is biased, as research consistently proves. Yet more often than not, I hear people saying "I'm color blind" or "This place is a meritocracy," when all modern reality would suggest it can't be. Nate Silver recently shared research affirming that "those who say they don't have a gender bias actually show a greater gender bias." So maybe it's more this: saying that you aren't biased probably makes you more blind than color-blind. Because only when you acknowledge that you are blind to an issue, can you begin the process of seeing more clearly.

The real question then becomes: can bias be fixed?

Gail Fairhurst, a prof at the University of Cincinnati, has written several influential papers and books on the art of framing. My thinking is heavily indebted to hers on this issue. As she describes it, the world we live in today is conceived and framed in a particular way. This shapes our experience. Even the language we use orders and reorders social life. The Old Guard (and for Americans, you might read this to be old, white, male, rich) doesn't even recognize this issue of frame. And I would build on her idea that, for the Old Guard, the current narrative is more than a frame, it is "just the way things are." It is, for them, The Truth. This is what that marketing guru was trying to tell me. He never questioned his bias, as a white man, and so he was just breaking the bad news to me, like any friend would.

But here's the good news: a world that has been conceived and framed is also a world that can also be reconceived and reframed. This alone is powerful. If you believe that bias is simply an accumulation of culturally accepted norms, then you can recognize your power in shifting those norms.

For instance, across many arenas of power — legislative, executive, corporate governance, financial — women hold between four and 18 percent of the roles. And those percentages have been holding steady for some time. But in one category, an important one for how agendas are set, a quiet shift is starting to take place. Major publications that shape the marketplace of ideas were once dominated by men. In fact, a May 2008 Rutgers University study found that, of all the scholarly op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, 97 percent were written by men. Today, women represent between 15 and 21 percent of bylines at publications like the Washington Post, Slate, and the New York Times, representing a 40% improvement. But this didn't just happen. The program behind this was The Op-Ed Project, which scouts, prepares, and connects under-represented experts with editors so their pipelines are full of equally viable ideas from both genders.

This is a good reminder that often what appears to be a pipeline problem is actually a problem with the selection process itself. If underrepresented groups have a reasonable expectation of not being selected, it's perfectly reasonable that they don't apply, don't try. But the opposite can be true, too: for instance, Sarah Milstein and Eric Ries designed the 2013 Lean Startup Conference with the intention of inclusion. That shift meant that they went from nearly zero women and people of color at the previous year's conference to a conference featuring 40 percent women and 25 percent people of color. Recognizing that you have a bias allows you to design processes that correct for it.

But first you have to believe in your ability to sway history. One of my favorite stories about this is a relatively unknown historical example. Marilyn Monroe changed Ella Fitzgerald's career. In the mid-1950s when blacks had a hard enough time getting gigs, and women even more so, Marilyn Monroe lobbied the owner of the famed Mocambo club to book Ella Fitzgerald, promising to take a front table every night if he did. The owner said yes, and Monroe delivered: front table, every night. The press went overboard to cover these evenings, and with that visibility, Fitzgerald got the opportunity to be seen. (Now just imagine if the marketing guru at the start of this story had decided to go beyond just reporting and recognizing bias — telling me, "this is just how it is" — but instead to be an agent of change?)

Whether it was through creating a more level playing field, designing for a more inclusive context, or simply using one's own personal power to change outcomes, bias, in the stories above, was fixable. They key was to acknowledge it, and then design solutions to address it.

This week, there has been a lot of talk about the state of bias in America. The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington is upon us, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his landmark "I Have a Dream" speech. His dream included a more just nation — a nation far better than the one he experienced. Today, I want to suggest that dreams are simply goals without an action plan. You can put into action these ideas (or design your own) to create the world you want, and we need.

Don't Just Serve — Enable: A New Model for IT Organizations

The classic model of an IT organization as a central point of control over all things data was never ideal, and today it simply doesn't work. Business users need increasingly fast, broad, and flexible access to data. It is no longer possible for IT to address every single business request. So, what's an organization to do? A small shift in thinking and process—moving IT from a serving mode to an enabling mode—can make a huge difference.

The traditional IT model is much like a classic restaurant. First, IT acquires and stores all corporate data in much the same way that restaurants acquire and store all the ingredients for the dishes they serve. Next, IT provides a pre-determined menu of specific data you can have and in what combinations. Just as with restaurant menus, you can ask for substitutions or to leave out something, but you may not get what you want or, if you do, the change will take extra time. Any modification adds complexity and cost, so restaurants try to avoid them. Similarly, many business people are forced to consume what IT has chosen to serve them rather than what they really want and, in many cases, need.

IT can no longer serve precisely measured and pre-determined views of data to users. To be successful in today's world, IT must to shift focus to enabling access to the range of raw data elements that go into those traditional views. Then, users must be able to mix and match data as required for their specific problems. One method of doing this is to create "discovery" environments where users can freely explore data. These environments include "sandboxes" or "data labs" which are slices of a production environment's resources that are allocated to users. Within a discovery environment, users can query a broad range of data, create output data (which is not typically allowed in such systems), and even load new data. Of course, there are limits on how much data users can load or create. Those limits simply must be high enough to effectively navigate the discovery process.

I have seen many large companies accelerate the development of new analytics through the use of a discovery environment. Not only are users able to experiment more broadly and freely, but since they are already working within the scalable systems that will be used to deploy their findings, it is much easier and faster to move from prototype to final product. This in turn allows more iterations through the discovery process which allows the benefits to compound. With more flexibility and less bureaucratic overhead, users are able to be more innovative, more efficient, and are typically much more satisfied as well. After all, wouldn't you be happier if you weren't constrained arbitrarily in how you are able analyze data?

It is important to note that this isn't about ripping out and replacing an organization's data storage and analysis systems. It really doesn't require much in the way of capital investment. Rather, it is simply about changing how data storage and analysis are configured and how users interface with them. The systems in place at large companies today can easily handle the updated model as many Fortune 500 companies have proven. This shift requires some cultural and mindset changes, of course. At the same time, for those users who still prefer a predefined menu, there is nothing stopping IT from offering that too. The key is to enable users to choose what they prefer.

A model of enabling broad and flexible analysis of data as opposed to serving predetermined views of data isn't all that radical if you really think about it. Why wouldn't you want people empowered to freely search for the next great business-changing analysis? While it is a model that many organizations have yet to embrace, make sure that yours makes the shift.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right
IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
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Can Social Media Make Customers More Civilized?

Social media often make it a little too easy for good people to behave badly. (Think, for example, of the nastier comments one sees on this site.) When those good people are your customers or clients, those consequences can be excruciating and expensive.

Some customers, alas, aren't above being bullies, blackmailers and/or jerks. They live for the opportunity to vent their unhappiness through Twitter, Yelp, or Amazon. Companies live in justifiable fear that a couple of complaints going viral could irreparably damage their business.

Yes, customer-centric firms need serious social media strategies and processes to manage legitimate complaints and concerns. But minimizing the challenge posed by impulsive and/or excessive digital badmouthing is unwise. Companies have a huge stake in making social media platforms more sociable and more civil.

Accountability and transparency cut both ways. There's no question that consumers have more power than ever before to call attention to bad products, services, and experiences. But it's equally true that companies also have greater power to call attention to bad customer behaviors. The same social media platforms that can viralize customer complaints can similarly share unflattering aspects of customer excess. That may be a powerful incentive for better behavior.

I'm not talking about restaurants tweeting the names of reservation no-shows or posting photos of receipts with horrible tips (although they're undeniably interesting social media "business" malpractices.) My concern is designing reasonable, rational, and reliable mechanisms for encouraging customers to think twice before behaving badly. Social media make wonderful platforms for "nudging" people into making choices that reduce the chances of unhappy outcomes.

Uber, the popular and fast-growing car hailing service, ensures that its drivers can rate customers just as surely as customers rate drivers. Airbnb, the pioneering travel renting/share company, similarly encourages renters to rate guests and guests to rate renters. The goal here is obvious: create a symmetry of accountability and transparency between parties. Whether you're driving or hailing a car — or renting or letting an apartment — you know you're being rated and that those ratings are being shared. That should make you at least a little self-conscious.

Insurance companies increasingly use clever technologies to segment their customers. Progressive's Snapshot literally instruments the car to see how well, how often, and when its people drive. "Socializing" the data — letting you know how well you drive relative to others in your community or peer group — would be an excellent way of subtly reminding you to drive better and safe.

These "sharing economy" companies have little choice but to invest in mechanisms that encourage greater accountability and better behavior from their customers. Their business models depend on it. If reliability and good behavior doesn't scale, they can't succeed.

Of course, as anyone who's applied for a loan or credit card well knows, rating customers is an integral part of global finance. Smart businesses are quick to run a D&B of a prospective client; FICO scores ostensibly help screen and manage credit risky customers. There's nothing intrinsically new about using public information to creatively segment customers and clients.

But what's both qualitatively and quantitatively different is that customers — and clients — who ordinarily might not think twice about making a scene or being difficult (as opposed to demanding) can now find themselves ranked and rated in ways that create genuine costs.

Have a reputation as being an unusually picky and quarrelsome guest at a popular hotel chain? Don't be surprised if you find it impossible to get any of its discount rates when you book. Your record shows that you're an expensive and time-consuming guest; unless you pay a higher minimum, the hotel would rather inflict you on its competition. Enjoy litigating contract disputes or insisting on arbitration? You can increasingly be sure your smartest vendors have excellent insight into your litigiousness and will adjust their terms accordingly. Do your marketing and/or procurement teams enjoy bullying your vendors a little too much? Don't think for a moment that the nastiest aspects of those interactions won't become common knowledge.

The entwined rise of Big Data and predictive analytics virtually guarantees that — just as structured and semi-structured data are being fused — informal gossip and formal ratings systems will be collected, correlated, and converted into business rules designed to make badly-behaved customers pay more or go away.

Put another way: in the same way "dynamic pricing" takes peak demands and troughs into account, we'll see prices dynamically reflect the quality and behavioral reputation of customers and clients. Better-behaved clients pay less; troublemakers pay more. As most serious entrepreneurs and CEOs well know, few things are more expensive than a bad client. They cost more money, time, morale, talent, and opportunity than they're ultimately worth.

Of course, there will always be bad behavior and desperate companies chasing truly abusive clients because they'll do almost anything for the money. But what's sauce for the customer goose is sauce for the enterprise gander: companies can use social media to rate customers as surely as customers use social media to rate companies.

Being nice isn't just nice — it's a best practice for both sides of the transaction.

With Labor Costs Easing, U.S. Companies Invest Less in Technology

American labor costs have been so well contained of late that the proportion of nonfarm business revenue going toward wages, salaries, and benefits hit a record low 57.9% in the first quarter of 2012, the most recent period for which figures are available, says the Wall Street Journal. A decade earlier, the share was 62.7%. But when labor costs are low, companies are less willing to invest in labor-saving technology; the 10-year period ended in 2011, the latest on record, was the weakest for tech investment since World War II, the Journal says.

Constructing Your Career Castle

As the story goes, Walt Disney had a key piece of advice to the executives planning the Magic Kingdom: Build the castle first. Disney understood that everyone involved in achieving his vision — from the Madison Avenue advertisers selling it to the guys hacking their way through the mosquito-infested Florida swamp — needed literally to see the beauty of this vision to remind them what they were working toward. So the first thing to rear up out of the swamp was, in fact, Cinderella's Castle, which, with its fluttering flats and whimsical turrets, was the very embodiment of the magic he intended to make.

Building a successful career is equally arduous. No matter what you bring to the undertaking, you need a vision: not just a destination but an inspiration. Direction and drive will serve you well but you've got to see where you're headed to push forward and progress toward your goal.

Start by performing a diagnostic on your dream. Consider these questions: What place would feel magical? With whom would you like to share that space? What sort of conversation would you like to have with them? What sort of transformation do you most like to drive? This blue-sky thinking will serve to sketch out your career castle construction strategy.

Once you've done the heavy lifting of imagining your future, you can get pragmatic about assessing what you bring to the task. You needn't do this in a vacuum. Online assessment tools, workplace performance evaluations, classes and seminars are all good opportunities to hold a mirror to yourself and discover hidden treasures. If you haven't had a performance review, formal or informal, ask for one; no matter what size company you work for, somebody's taking your measure. Don't miss out on the opportunity to benefit from their perspective.

But these first steps can only get you so far. Success is never a solo endeavor. You need to find the right people to support you, advise you, and stretch you to realize your dream. Mentors and sponsors are vital, and each brings special strengths and attributes to your cause.

Mentors shine as you start to define your dream. They can see and put into words for you what you may not see about yourself or be able to articulate. They can help you determine your strengths: what you do exceptionally well and what sets you apart. In addition, they can help narrow your focus as you tackle such amorphous topics as what accomplishments have given you joy and won you accolades, what gives you satisfaction, and whether the mission or mandate of your organization overlap with your own set of values. This is heavy lifting, so don't be surprised if your mentor doesn't have the time or ability to assist in all of these areas, but can only provide some advice and wisdom.

A well-chosen mentor will also know the lay of the land in your firm and help you learn to navigate the corporate ladder. Research from the Center for Talent Innovation shows that the vast majority of women (85%) and multicultural professionals (81%) need navigational help. Mentors can help you understand the unwritten rules, provide a map for the uncharted corridors to power, and reveal "the business behind the business." Most important, by assisting you with this essential assessment, they prepare you to attract sponsors.

If mentors help define the dream, sponsors are the dream-enablers. Sponsors deliver: They make you visible to leaders within the company — and to top people outside as well. They connect you to career opportunities and provide air cover when you encounter trouble. When it comes to opening doors, they don't stop with one promotion: They'll see you to the threshold of power. They will make sure your castle gets constructed.

It's important to differentiate between mentors and sponsors, between sideline cheerleaders and center-ring champions. A mentor is a counselor, someone who will lend a sympathetic ear, act as a sounding board, and offer advice and encouragement. But where mentors often take an interest in you out of altruism or like-mindedness, sponsors get involved because they see furthering your career as an important boost to their own career, influence or vision. Mentors advise; sponsors act.

Finding the right support system as you define your vision is vital to career success. It's important, though, to remember that neither mentors nor sponsors can construct a castle for you. You have to commit to being the architect of your career. But once you do sketch out that blueprint, you will be able to identify and enlist the mentors and sponsors who can help you turn it into reality.

The First 90 Days in a New CIO Position

Perhaps the most exciting (and challenging) aspect of working in a progressive IT organization is the pace of technological change. It requires that IT staff — and our customers — are continuously learning. Managing this rapid change and fostering innovation while "keeping the trains running on time" is the primary leadership role required of any CIO, new or old. I fundamentally believe that these need not be mutually exclusive goals. As I approach my own new role as CIO at Harvard Business School, I'm focused on promoting a culture that provides the highest levels of service quality while enabling true agility and innovation. These are core tenets that all CIOs need to hold close. The following are a few key areas on which I've focused in my first 90 days that I think would be valuable for other new CIOs to consider as they plan for their own organizations' future:

Create a Sound Service and Project Management Framework

In your initial days and weeks as the new CIO, it will be imperative to determine whether your organization has a sound strategy for increasing efficiency, service quality, and transparency for your community. Today's IT consumers understandably expect to receive the highest levels of service and the best-suited solutions for their unique goals and day-to-day activities. To meet these objectives within our organization at HBS, we are initiating a replacement of the myriad disparate platforms currently utilized to provide support and are pursuing a comprehensive IT Service Management (ITSM) strategy based upon the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) international framework. This includes a wholesale migration of our many support applications to a unified cloud-based platform. These changes must be made with the goal of preserving and enhancing the aspects of the organization's service culture that are most valued by the user population. At HBS this means we'll leverage new analytics and integrated work flow capabilities to improve our already high levels of support to the community. I am confident from my own experience that this fundamental realignment of our support infrastructure will yield a significant positive impact to the user community.

In today's complex and increasingly heterogeneous technology environment, it is also critical to integrate a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) strategy that aligns project lifecycles from concept through development and finally to support and continuous enhancement. Our Project Management Office is therefore enthusiastically pursuing new PPM capabilities that will enhance the transparency of our decision making processes. This will allow us to most effectively allocate resources to the most strategic and innovation-focused initiatives.

In the first 90 days of a new CIO role, I would strongly encourage my counterparts to develop a plan for service delivery and portfolio management that emphasizes transparency and directly supports your institution's unique governance processes.



Generate Room for Innovation

In addition to service improvement efforts, new CIOs should also continuously review which information services are "core" versus "strategic." It's a key responsibility of IT to effectively architect and operate core services such as email and content management systems; however, these systems are unlikely to distinguish one organization from the next. At HBS, we will therefore seek to most effectively run or push non-strategic systems to the cloud — recognizing that yesterday's strategic service may be today's baseline offering. Taking this approach will allow the organization to free up existing resources that can be redistributed to serve new strategic and distinguishing priorities.

Know Your Community's Needs and Cater Your Strategy Accordingly

At HBS, IT's role is to support the school's mission to educate leaders who will make a difference in the world. It is therefore critical that we facilitate the enrichment of our students' learning experience consistent with the mission's ambition. This requires providing outstanding classroom technology, an integrated and differentiated online learning ecosystem, innovative academic applications, and rich content delivered via a multitude of channels, including social media and mobile apps. To do this, our Information Technology Group must engage with our key constituencies — faculty, students, and alumni — to best enable their innovative and experimental use of technology. Additionally, we must support the research needs of our faculty by ensuring that we're providing world-class technological research capabilities. The lesson here for new CIOs, in Higher Ed or elsewhere, is to know your audience and know them well. Fostering relationships with your end-users and continually learning from them and their needs will allow you to more strategically align your IT delivery with what your end-users truly need.



Be Your Organization's IT Visionary

It is also incumbent upon CIOs and IT organizations to stay on top of new and emerging technologies — to "skate to where the puck is going to be," in the oft-quoted words of Wayne Gretzky. This requires us to be knowledgeable of and experienced with the latest technologies and trends while fostering an internal culture of innovation. Similarly, we must establish effective methods to further leverage the creative vision and knowledge of our end-users. At HBS this certainly includes directly engaging our students to capture their creative ideas on how to best meet their needs both in and out of the classroom. In other words, our goal as CIOs is to create a virtuous feedback mechanism that results in exceptional outcomes for our respective businesses. This requires a thoughtful strategy that accelerates action, rather than introduces friction. It also requires us to learn from the organization's past successes and failures in developing a rich portfolio of tools that's strategically aligned to the community's needs. At HBS, this means delivering unique learning applications and rich courseware, and efficiently driving administrative applications that will enhance teaching, learning and working at the school. I encourage all new CIOs to thoughtfully and strategically engage your users with the specific goal of aligning the IT organization's vision with their needs and aspirations.

Set a Strategic Vision



New CIOs need to hit the pavement early in their tenures to begin fostering relationships with key stakeholders across their organizations. Personally, I've been enthused by the engagement levels I have already received from faculty and staff during my first several weeks on the job. Gaining this insight from stakeholders will be instrumental in developing a new strategic plan for your IT organization — which is a goal of mine by the end of this calendar year. I have also found that surveying your community can be an effective way to assess current services while simultaneously identifying new priorities.

I suggest all new CIOs consider drafting a vision of this nature in their first six to nine months, or at a minimum, consider adapting what is already in place to ensure strategic alignment with the organization.

Lead with Passion

Determining how to harness and leverage the unique cultural DNA of both your new IT organization and the user community is imperative for any new CIO. I took the CIO position at HBS because of a deep attachment to the school and a strong belief in its strategic mission. All new CIOs should seek to tap into a similar personal passion in their own organizations.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right
IT Doesn't Matter (to CEOs)
The New CTO: Chief Transformation Officer
Google's CIO on How to Make Your IT Department Great

Design Your Top Jobs to Appeal to the Goals of Top Talent

A few leading-edge companies are making real progress in increasing the proportion of women in their executive ranks by turning the problem on its head. Rather than focusing their efforts on fitting the candidates to the jobs (through, say, more mentoring and training), they are taking practical steps to make the positions more attractive to their already high-potential candidates.

Take Australia-based hearing-aid manufacturer Cochlear, which when faced with a chronic underrepresentation of women in its high-potential pool, made an effort to better align its leadership roles both to their candidates' individual strengths and to their individual career aspirations.

This might sound like a monumental task, but the core of Cochlear's Leadership Presence Program is a one-day workshop, supplemented with various pre- and post-workshop activities. At the workshop, women create a personal mission statement and map it directly to their career goals and the company's needs. This is a critical step for helping them to see that their personal strengths and passions can be directly connected to leadership career goals at the company. Then the program helps women build networks, by assigning them mentors outside their core area of work, to give them opportunities to present (and become familiar) to senior leaders around the firm.

Of the 30 women who have gone through the Leadership Presence Program, 68% have taken on new responsibilities. Some have moved vertically and some laterally, but in every case the moves are testament to an increased desire to apply their talents to the organization. Even those who have not taken on new responsibilities are showing increased levels of discretionary effort and intent to stay.

Other firms are smoothing the leadership career path by addressing the onerousness of relocating, often so necessary for building the experience and breadth of outlook needed for advancement. A barrier to anyone with a family, relocation is often a worse deal for high-performing, mid-level women loathe to interrupt and lose the income of their high-earning spouses. So it's no wonder that, our research finds, they are 13% less willing than their male colleagues to relocate abroad to advance their careers.

Nestlé took creative steps to address this problem, which its internal research confirmed was a barrier to advancement for both men and women, but for fully 80% of its high-potential women in dual-career families. Through its Self-Sustaining Dual Career Network, Nestlé tackled the problem head-on in two ways. First it extended relocation support to spouses, offering such services as guidance in navigating, and entrée into networks in, the local job market. And second, recognizing that many other large, global companies face the same challenge with dual career mobility, Nestlé invited them to join in a program in which spouses of transferred executives are alerted to promising open positions in other companies. Although no formal preference is given in hiring, increasing people's awareness of these opportunities expedited spouses' job searches.

One appeal of this program is that spouses of high potentials are often high potentials themselves. Nestlé reports that the spouses they work with tend to speak at least three languages and have an MBA or equivalent. Multinational recruiters are happy to discover such qualified candidates.

The success of the Dual Career Network is reflected in its growth from enabling 350 spouses to find suitable positions in seven companies in 2011 to about 700 working in more than 30 in 2012. At present the network is based in Nestle's home base of Switzerland, but already some of the multinationals are working to set up similar networks in other countries. Smaller organizations are seeing similar results using LinkedIn and Facebook groups for relocating spouses — creating ways for employers and spouses to connect in advance of moves.

As women "lean in" to opportunities, leading organizations are meeting them half way: designing roles that map to the personal ambitions of diverse talent and helping remove the barriers that impede their progress. They are seeing their investment in such programs return significant benefits in increased effort, more effective teamwork and collaboration, and decreased turnover — without breaking the bank.

And an added bonus for those considering whether to follow suit: when the word gets out that this is how your company treats its rising leaders, don't be surprised to find a fresh crop of new high-potential, high-performing diverse candidates knocking on your door.

Women in Leadership
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U.S. Poised to Become the Low-Cost Manufacturer of the Developed World

The United States is becoming one of the lowest-cost countries for manufacturing in the developed world: By 2015, average manufacturing costs in Germany, Japan, France, Italy, and the UK will be 8% to 18% higher than in the U.S., estimates Boston Consulting Group. Among the biggest drivers of this advantage are the costs of labor (adjusted for productivity), natural gas, and electricity. The U.S. could capture up to 5% of total exports from these developed countries by the end of the decade, BCG says.

To Go From Big Data to Big Insight, Start With a Visual

Although data visualization has produced some of the most captivating artistic displays in recent memory, some of which have found their way into exhibits at the New York Museum of Modern Art and countless art installations around the world, business leaders are asking: is data visualization actionable?

I think so. In my role as the Scholar-in-Residence at The New York Times R&D Lab, I am collaborating with one of the world's most advanced digital R&D teams to figure out how we can draw actionable insights from big data.

How big? Massive: We are documenting every tweet, retweet, and click on every shortened URL from Twitter and Facebook that points back to New York Times content, and then combining that with the browsing logs of what those users do when they land at the Times. This project is a relative of the widely noted Cascade project. Think of it as Cascade 2.0.

We're doing this to understand and predict when an online cascade or conversation will result in a tidal wave of content consumption on the Times, and also when it won't. More importantly we are interested in how the word-of-mouth conversation drives readership, subscriptions, and ad revenue; how the Times can improve their own participation in the conversation to drive engagement; how we can identify truly influential readers who themselves drive engagement; and how the Times can then engage these influential users in a way that complements the users' own needs and interests. Do it, and we can turn that statistical analysis, as you'll see below, into elegant, artistic real time data streams.

Handling the streams, archiving the sessions and storing and manipulating the information are in themselves herculean tasks. But the even bigger challenge is transforming beautiful, big data into actionable, meaningful, decision-relevant knowledge. We've found that visualization is one of the most important guideposts in this search for knowledge, essential to understanding where we should look and what we should look for in our statistical analysis.

For example, here are three visualizations that have helped us gain knowledge. They show cascades of the tweets and retweets as lines and dots about three different Times articles over time, combined with the click-through volume on each article synced in time and displayed as a black graph under each cascade. Each panel tells a different story about engagement with the content.

For the first article, there is a sizable Twitter conversation and several large spikes in traffic. But the click-through volume seems independent of the Twitter conversation: The largest spike in traffic, highlighted in blue, occurs when there is very little Twitter activity. In this case, a prominent link on a blog or a news story that referred to the story, rather than the Twitter conversation itself, is probably driving the traffic.

On the second article, the Twitter conversation is intense. There are many, tweets and retweets of the article — yet the article itself gets very little traffic. People are talking about the article on Twitter, but not reading it. This sometimes happens when the main message of an article sparks a debate or a conversation that can happen without the content of the article being that important, for example, when a timely piece of news contains little analysis or editorial content, or when the conversation or debate gets away from the article and evolves its own independent content.

In the third and final article, an intense Twitter conversation moves in lockstep with engagement. As people tweet and retweet the article, their followers are clicking through and engaging with the content itself. This tight relationship between the online conversation and the website traffic is most pronounced when the three "influencers" tagged in the figure inspire the two largest spikes in traffic over the engagement lifecycle of the article.

With just these three data visualizations, we've gained understanding in important nuances about so-called virality. The relationship between online word-of-mouth conversations and engagement isn't as simple as something just "going viral." Different patterns emerge with different types of content.

Still, the visuals cannot tell the whole story. We see some clear correlations here, but complex conditional dependencies and temporal and network autocorrelation make it necessary to build more sophisticated causal statistical models that will generate true, reliable insights about word-of-mouth influence.

What these visuals do help with is getting us to know where to look and what questions to ask of the data. That is, we can't build the more complex models until we know the most suitable places for building them. These visuals give us some of that inisght.

Cascade 2.0 will be built on sophisticated analytics, and it will require data visualization. Asking important questions and avoiding unnecessary ones is essential to moving forward effectively and efficiently with big data. Without visualization, we are much less efficient in getting to the questions whose answers teach us something. That's why visualizing data must be one of the most important tools for data scientists. It is our torch in a thick, dark forest.

John McCain's Cable TV Bill Is Anti-Capitalist

My cable television needs are simple — give me the four staple network stations and a few business channels (for professional reasons) and I'm happy. When I called my local cable provider, a rep cheerfully informed me that the price for a basic network package is roughly $9 a month. Not bad, I thought. But when I explained my interest in adding Bloomberg TV and CNBC, the rep replied that I'd have to upgrade to the "Digital Starter" package, which would run me about $70 a month. Whoa — an extra $61 for two key channels plus a slew of others that I'll never watch? At that moment, I completely understood Senator John McCain's opinion of cable companies offering "consumers all the 'choice' of a North Korean election ballot."

McCain recently sponsored a bill — the Television Consumer Freedom Act — which would require cable, satellite, and phone companies to offer channels a la carte. This would allow consumers to hand pick (and pay for) only the channels they are interested in. Under current law, local municipalities sometimes have the right to regulate prices for basic channels but companies can charge whatever they want for other (non-basic) channels. Mr. McCain's bill would not regulate prices, but it would mandate a specific type of pricing strategy (a la carte).

This presumes a) that the offerings of that industry are so essential to the American people that they ought to be protected by government regulation and b) that there's not enough competition in the current video-information-entertainment industry to ensure the public has access to those essential goods and services.

First, I think we can all recognize that cable TV is not an absolute necessity product. The FCC regulating access to Duck Dynasty is not exactly like the Food and Drug Administration regulating artificial heart valves.

But the second issue is more contentious. While it's common to complain about cable behemoths, I'd argue that there is actually healthy competition in the MVPD (multi-channel video programming distributor) market. Almost every home in the U.S., for instance, has the option of ordering satellite television service (the Federal Communications Commission requires all buildings to allow satellite dishes), which tends to be cheaper and offer more channels than cable. In fact, satellite companies are the second and third largest U.S. MVPD providers. Direct Television and the Dish Network respectively have 20M and 14M subscribers (Comcast is the largest provider with 24M subscribers). Sure, there may be drawbacks to satellite television, but it is a reasonable cable substitute. Telephone companies such as Verizon and AT&T also offer television service.

The FCC estimates that in 2012, 35.3% of all U.S. homes were eligible for four or more television alternatives (the two satellite services plus at least two other — cable and/or telephone — options). And that doesn't count the new wave of web-based distributors, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Hulu, and others who are aggressively promoting the Internet as a prime pipeline to television sets as well as creating original content. Some content providers, such as PBS and Major League Baseball, are starting to stream some of their content directly to consumers, rather than rely on an MVPD alone. Revealing how disruptive the Internet may be to traditional distributors, it's rumored that Google is in negotiations to broadcast Sunday NFL games.

Still not good enough? Remember that network channels can often be accessed for free with an antenna, games are often broadcast on the radio, and most series are eventually available through a streaming, rental, or retail outlet. While the Internet is not itself free — you do have to pay for the service, and for the computer you used to access it — much of the information on it is. Still too expensive? A single issue of a newspaper can be had for pocket change. Still too pricey? Go to your public library, where internet access, computers, DVDs and more are often available free of charge.

Of course consumers want low prices and a pricing plan that works best for them. This desire, however, is often incongruous with the goal of capitalist companies to set the pricing strategy that reaps the highest profit for them. I'd like, for instance, to only purchase "Boardwalk Empire" from HBO (instead of the monthly subscription service), pay less for shorter rides on Boston's "one price to anywhere" subway system, buy only certain rides (as opposed to unlimited rides) when I accompany my niece and nephew to Disney World, and to stay at the Ritz Carlton every time I travel. Unfortunately, these entities have chosen to employ prices and strategies that don't perfectly meet my needs. There's healthy competition in the MVPD market, and to date no provider has decided that it's in their best financial interest to offer a la carte pricing.

To be clear, my experience with my local cable provider has been remarkably dismal. Trust me, I'm not happy about paying an extra $730 annually to receive key business channels. So while I'd enjoy needling Comcast about their pricing, the facts don't support such an argument. The MVPD market is competitive, more competition is on the horizon, there are plenty of non-television alternatives, and we aren't dealing with a "life or death" product. This hardly qualifies as a situation where injustice is "being inflicted on the American people," as Mr. McCain recently opined. Let's allow the market to rule — our government has more far pressing issues to focus its energies on.