Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1556

Four Areas Where Senior Leaders Should Focus Their Attention

It was getting close to lunch time and the people seated around the table — the CEO and seven of his direct reports — were clearly getting antsy. But it wasn't because they were hungry. In fact, they'd been eating snacks all morning, mostly out of boredom.

The COO was at the front of the room, talking through slides projected on a screen. The conversation was primarily one way, with the COO explaining and, when necessary, defending his work.

Finally, when we broke for lunch, the CEO took me aside and told me what we all already knew: "This is a waste of time."

When you bring a senior leadership group together in a room, it's a massive commitment of resources. The hotel and food are the least of it. Even the consultant, if you're using one, is a negligible cost compared to the investment of monopolizing the focus of seven or eight highly compensated, time-starved leaders.

Yet how often do those meetings consist of one presentation after the next, while the executives listen numbly or answer emails under the table? How often does the conversation involve everything but the big issues that need executive attention?

With all that brainpower around the table, the focus of a senior meeting needs to be conversation, controversy, even conflict — not updates. Leaders should never sit and read together. They should be engaging and struggling with the organization's most critical and difficult-to-solve issues.

So how do you get there? By creating an environment in which leaders are real, vulnerable, and brave with each other. An environment in which they can expose their weaknesses, break through silos, and engage one another with challenging questions, thinking, and decisions.

My first rule for these meetings is no slide decks. As soon as someone projects slides onto a screen, the entire focus of the room shifts from each other to a single person (at best) or their smartphones (at worst). Neither is useful.

Once the no slide deck rule is established, the team needs to choose where to focus their attention. Which brings me to my second rule. When I run senior leadership meetings, I make sure we focus on four things:

1. Decisions that move the needle. Don't waste energy talking about expense reports when you should be talking about mergers and acquisitions or a new business line or a reorganization. Incremental improvements are the purview of lower levels of management. One of my clients, the CEO of a company with revenues of a billion dollars, likes to measure this is by the number of zeros involved. Are we talking about a $500,000 decision or a $5,000,000 decision? If there aren't enough zeros, the decision isn't strategic enough and shouldn't absorb senior leadership time. Senior leadership should be focused on fundamentals, not incrementals.

2. The big arrow. Think of your company as one big arrow that contains lots of little arrows — projects, businesses, clients, business deals. The big arrow is your company's culture, strategic direction, core competencies, and core values. The CEO and his or her leadership team own that big arrow. The problem is that, often, the little arrows point in different directions as people solidify their silos, bicker amongst themselves, and neglect the larger mission. Senior leaders have the responsibility to make decisions and act in ways that break through silos and align everyone with the strategic and cultural direction of the company. That's how they can ensure all the arrows will be shooting in the same direction.

3. The next level of leadership. One of the most important roles of the most senior leaders is to engage the up-and-coming leaders, fostering their leadership and decision-making. That's how a company grows. Talking about the next level of leadership, developing succession plans, pushing decisions to that level, including them in strategic discussions — those efforts are high return.

4. Undiscussables. Talking about the thing that no one is talking about is an almost foolproof way to improve company performance. Maybe it concerns another leader or maybe it has to do with the performance of a certain division. Maybe it's about the CEO's leadership style or a lack of trust among the senior team. Whatever it is, the mere fact that it's important and not being discussed is a solid indication that it's holding the organization back.

Dealing with whatever comes across your desk leaves the control in other people's hands. CEOs and other senior leaders can't afford to be that passive. Every single thing you do as a leader needs to have an impact. Your job is to think big. If the topic is outside the rubric of these four things, then it should be dealt with at a more junior level of the organization.

During lunch, I shared these four points of focus with the CEO and we agreed that the most critical one, for his team, was the way his direct reports were working together. Or rather weren't working together. That had been an undiscussable for some time.

By the time the team got back to the room, the slide projector was gone. At first, people were off-balance. What about the work they had put into their presentations? What about the safety they felt hiding behind slides?

"Your brains are too valuable to sit through presentations," the CEO said, "Your brains need to think together."

Then he threw a zinger on the table: "Look around the room. Who's not getting along with each other? Let's talk about that!"

Silence ensued.

To the CEO's credit, he did nothing to dispel the awkwardness. He tossed the ball and it was their turn to step up and run with it.

Finally, after what felt like forever, one of his direct reports spoke up, admitting what everyone else in the room already knew but never talked about: He and another person in the room were having a hard time working together.

And for the next three hours of lively, engaged, sometimes difficult conversation, not a single person looked at their email under the table.

The Most Important Negotiation in Your Life

Life is a series of negotiations.

You negotiate all day, every day, from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep.

Contract terms and conditions. Hiring, managing performance, and firing. Defining deadlines, scope, and deliverables. Collecting fees. Seeking alignment about business strategy. Enlisting stakeholders. Creating partnerships and joint ventures. Dissolving them. You make offers, counteroffers, and agreements to settle. You say yes. You say no. You stall for time.

Finally, lunch.

When you go home, the negotiations continue. Over buying a new car, switching carpool days, or how much screen time the kids are allowed. The stakes of negotiating at home can feel sky-high: which medical advice to follow; how much to spend or save; how long your aging parents can live at home; whether to stay together.

From the major to the mundane, negotiating is the way we get things done. One of my clients told me, "my toughest negotiations are with my dog."

If you're like most people, when you think about negotiation, you picture people talking to "the other side." Whether they're pitching to a customer in an office, brokering a peace deal at Camp David, or arguing over curfew at the kitchen table, negotiators are people trying to persuade other people of their point of view.

That's only half the story.



After nearly 20 years of teaching negotiation at Harvard Law School, and the same years spent advising and training thousands of executives, public sector leaders, consultants and lawyers from all over the world, I see things differently.

Actually, the most important negotiations we have — the ones that determine the quality of our lives and the impact of our actions — are the ones we have with ourselves. Learning to communicate well and to influence other people are essential skills in business. But even more fundamental to your success is learning to negotiate effectively with yourself.

Negotiating with yourself?

Yes. Better results, stronger relationships, and more of life's deeper rewards, all come from learning to negotiate with yourself.

At first this sounds strange. Can you talk to yourself without being crazy? Can you disagree with yourself? If you have an argument with yourself, who wins?

At the start of my leadership development programs, I ask people for examples of "negotiating with yourself." It's not hard to brainstorm a list once you think about it.

People usually come up with personal examples first: Should I eat the ice cream or stick to my diet? Make a scene with the garage for charging more than the estimate, or just pay the bill and move on? Should I raise that difficult topic today — or wait? Accept a "friend" request from my college nemesis, or have 25 years not removed the sting?

Soon, the list of topics grows more serious, and turns to work:



My plate is completely full, but my boss just asked me to start a new project. There's no particular glory in it. Do I say yes to please her? What about ever eating dinner with my family?

I want to approach my colleague who's back from bereavement leave, but then I tell myself it's none of my business.

My client is pushing me hard to do something questionable. Technically speaking, it's not against the written rules. On the other hand, it feels a bit unethical. Should I say no?

We're nearing our fundraising target, but we're not quite there. Our biggest donor said I could ask him for more money if we fell short, but I feel awkward going back to him again.

I suspect you're no stranger to this inner tug-of-war.

As you go about the ordinary business of every day, there are inner commentators competing for your attention. At times they speak nicely. But often their voices debate each other like hostile adversaries on talk radio.

I think of them as negotiating parties, what I call your "inner negotiators." Like actual individuals, these internal negotiators have a range of styles, motivations, and rules of engagement. They have their own interests and preferred outcomes. They also correlate with different regions in our brains.

Meet your inner negotiation team.

Leading mythologist Joseph Campbell described each of us as "a hero with a thousand faces." Mastering a thousand faces sounds a bit daunting. If you have all of these different sides of you, how can you even begin to get a hold on them, no less negotiate with them all successfully?

To help people develop in their leadership and in their lives, I honed in on a small set of those hundreds of faces. I call this group "The Big Four." Since I advise a lot of businesses, I sometimes describe the Big Four as a top team, occupying your internal executive suite. I also use more general names because their functions transcend professional titles.

The Big Four are:

The Chief Executive Officer: your inner Dreamer
The Chief Financial Officer: your inner Thinker
The Vice-President of Human Resources: your inner Lover
The Chief Operating Officer: your inner Warrior

These inner negotiators govern your capacity to dream about the future, to analyze and solve problems, to build relationships with people, and to take effective action. Each one enables you with its own skills, unique characteristics, and particular values about leading and living.

The Dreamer is led by intuition, and fuels your ability to innovate. Look at Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post. His Dreamer is strong, so he sees a world full of possibilities. Facing an industry others see as dying, Bezos senses opportunity to create something wonderful and entirely new. Or last week's remarkable commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King, whose immortal words articulate the signature of the inner visionary, "I Have a Dream."

The Thinker is led by reason, and equips you to analyze and evaluate information. Larry Summers and Janet Yellen are final contenders to replace Ben Bernanke because they have strong inner Thinkers, respected for sound judgment on complex issues. Political baggage aside, they're first-rate economists who base monetary policy on hard data. The inner Thinker excels at challenges like managing interest rates and defining ways to control inflation.

The Lover is led by emotion, and knows how to manage relationships. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde recently appealed to U.S. policy makers to deploy the communication skills of the Lover. She wants them to explain plans to safeguard global markets in light of changing American economic policy. The Lover's ability to get communication right is essential now to avoid a downward spiral in reactive global markets.

The Warrior is led by willpower, and excels at taking action. In the work world, the inner Warrior steps forward to tell the hard truth, to take a stand for your values, and to roll up your sleeves to get things done. Think of Meg Whitman, Hewlett-Packard CEO. She concedes that HP has a long way to go. And yet, she says time and again, she's facing the challenges with a results-focus. As she wrote in a blog, "I don't want excuses. I want action." Whitman's determined to turn a once-great company around by taking aim at the Warrior's targets: improving execution and operations; making tough calls to control costs; and telling the hard truth to investors until HP is fully back on track.

Despite the temptation to ask yourself, "Am I a Thinker?" or "Am I a Warrior?", those aren't the right questions. You have all of these inner negotiators in you. The right questions are:

How do the Big Four operate in me today?
How do I tap more of their skills and inner wisdom in the future?
How do I best balance them with each other, as four inner executives working as one team? In other words, how do I negotiate effectively with myself?

These are good questions whether you're managing a team or running a global organization.

At the end of the day, a company will find itself in trouble if it doesn't envision possibilities, can't formulate a nuanced perspective, fails to care for its people, or turns in lackluster performance. This is true for you, too.

The most important negotiation in your life is "getting to yes" with yourself. When you learn how to do that, you'll start winning at everything else.

There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Incentive for Entrepreneurs

Many entrepreneurs have their entire net worth tied up in their companies. For a long time, this is exactly what most venture investors wanted: more to gain (and lose) means a stronger incentive, greater focus, and better performance - right?

No. In many cases this lack of diversification is overkill and actually hampers performance.

First, a lack of diversification exacerbates the fundamental difference in economic incentive between entrepreneur and investor: when all your money is tied up in a startup, you're happy with a "meager" 1-2X return. (Let's say you earn $4 million after 5 years on the $100K you put in; assuming you give up $500K in total salary, this is a 100% CAGR). But venture capitalists need to target a 10X return and gladly tolerate a higher chance of failure in exchange for a greater expected payoff.



Simply put, a complete lack of diversification incents entrepreneurs to prioritize exit probability above expected value because of diminishing marginal utility and loss-aversion.

Second, research suggests that high-powered incentives can undermine performance in cognitively complex environments. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has conducted a set of experiments to gauge the relationships between economic incentives and performance. In one experiment, he offered participants payments for pressing alternating keys on a keyboard; in another, he offered payment for math problems - and, in both he varied the incentive so that participants could earn either up to $30 or up to $300. For key-pressing, stronger incentives led to better performance. For math problems, incentives decreased performance.

Ariely's interpretation is that simple tasks requiring no cognitive engagement respond as expected to increased incentives, while cognitively complex tasks peak and then show decreasing performance, as increasing incentive distracts from cognitive performance. Other experiments showed the same result - that very strong incentives actually undermine performance - undermining the traditional assumption that stronger incentives always lead to better performance.



Both rationales for diversifying early apply most strongly to founders without other assets. Taking a small amount of money off the table aligns incentives much better to focus on making a big, world-changing impact. And diversifying also can remove the performance-destroying stress that comes with overly strong incentives.

When is a secondary offering a bad idea? Most cases boil down to signaling, where the founder's desire to sell signals a belief that the company is over-valued, or of a lack of commitment:

• When a founder wants to liquidate more than 20% of her shares

• When a founder who is already financially secure wants to liquidate shares

• When a founder wants to sell during down or flat rounds - unless the amount is small and aims to cover a very specific liability

• When a founder seems to be more focused on money than building the company

To be clear, aligning incentives remains critical to startup success; my argument is simply that a modicum of diversification helps both entrepreneurs and investors. Taking money off the table isn't about getting rich, it's about freeing entrepreneurs to focus on doing something great - not just good enough.

The traditional mentality is beginning to change among investors, but it's far from extinct. I certainly wouldn't mention taking money off the table until your investors know you well and you're raising an up-round: it suggests you're thinking about how to cash out, and would raise red flags. But when your company is doing well, a reasonable investor should be able to recognize why your diversification helps you both.

Turn Talent Data Into Real Information

Big data is all the rage in HR recently. But more immediately promising is the talk of small data — of more effectively managing the data we already have before we start thinking about analyzing more complex datasets. And nowhere is this more pertinent than with talent assessment data. For here, sitting right under organisations' noses, is a huge, easy, and yet almost always overlooked opportunity to fundamentally improve the way companies select and develop their talent.

Every year, companies spend in excess of US$3 billion on talent assessment — on trying to identify the right person to hire, promote, or select for talent-development programs. Companies do this in all sorts of way, generating all manner of data about which candidates are the best or most suited to a particular position. And this is just fine.

But most companies stop right there, only ever using their assessment results to inform decisions on individuals. Too many are missing the opportunity to use their aggregate assessment data for something more ambitious — to assess the effectiveness of their hiring processes, for example, or to track the outcome of employee-development initiatives. When you build and use your talent intelligence databases effectively, development processes can be targeted, recruitment processes can be adjusted to bring in certain types of talent, and retention processes can be better aimed at specific groups. This may sound complex, but it need not be.

For an example of just how much you can achieve relatively simply, consider a large, global company we recently worked with that was able to transform its selection processes by performing just three simple analyses using no more than a simple spreadsheet:

We compared the average competency ratings of new hires with those of current employees. When we did, we found that the strengths and weaknesses of the new hires were uncannily similar to those of the current employees. This kick-started a debate in the business about whether it "was just employing clones," which in turn led to further changes in hiring practices.
We compared the qualities distinguishing high-potentials with those actually being promoted. On the one hand, we found that those labeled high-potential were more outgoing, showed greater entrepreneurial spirit, and were generally given higher performance ratings by their managers. This was certainly reassuring to the business, as it was trying to adopt a faster paced and more edgy approach. But when we looked at promotion processes, we found that the people being selected were those who performed well but were also viewed as team players. As a result, new criteria for promotion were developed.
We compared the actual strengths of members of groups or business units to those needed to fulfill strategic goals. This might sound daunting but it is simply a matter of taking the competency ratings from individuals' annual appraisals or recruitment interviews, and averaging the scores of members of a particular group or department. This enables you to see which competencies they are strongest or weakest in as a unit. For example, we worked with a business in which the CEO said that he needed his senior leaders to "stand up and make tough decisions" in order to drive change. Yet when we looked at the average capability ratings of new hires into this top-tier of business leaders, we found that that this capability was the one on which they were rated lowest during the recruitment process. So for all the CEO was saying that he wanted tough leaders who would champion change, the types of people the company was actually recruiting were individuals who wouldn't rock the boat.

These were all simple steps, accomplished with simple data and without resorting to expensive systems. More broadly, to put yourself into a position to turn your talent data into talent intelligence requires three commonsense steps:

Collect it. Collection should be centralized and include all your talent-measurement data — interview ratings, psychometric scores, competency ratings. It may be possible to use an HR IT system to do this, but a large spreadsheet will do, as well. The centrality of the database is key here, because without central collection, you cannot build up a picture of the talent across the organization.

Make it consistent. By consistent we mean, make sure that as far as possible you're collecting the same data for everyone. If you measure one person's intelligence and another's personality, for instance, bringing the two pieces of information together will not tell you much. But if you know the personalities of both people, then you can compare them. And if you collect these data consistently for enough people, you can compare individuals to the average profiles of a group, or compare the qualities of different groups. It is therefore critical that as far as possible you know the same information about different employees. Without this, meaningful talent analytics is simply not possible.

Keep collecting and comparing it over time. Initial data are powerful; longitudinal data more powerful still. For example, if you connect the average competency ratings you've collected for new hires to the individuals' annual appraisal performance ratings the next year, you can see which competencies are most predictive of initial success. And if you can connect those to records of who is subsequently promoted then you can see which competencies are most valued in the business.

Succession plans and talent pools and managing talent "on demand" may be sexy — and good and desirable. But none stands a chance of making any real difference unless it is built upon good talent intelligence. And for that a little diligence will go a long, long way.

Are You Among the "Effort Averse"?

Results of an experiment suggest that more than one-fifth of participants preferred the boring but easy task of watching visitors in an art gallery to the more engaging but demanding tasks of escorting performers and cleaning up at a cultural festival, even though they had predicted that they would enjoy the engaging tasks more. These participants' willingness to accept lower wages to work at the gallery job reveals a phenomenon the researchers, David A. Comerford and Peter Ubel of Duke University, call "effort aversion." The reasons for it aren't clear; the researchers speculate that because attention is a scarce resource, people may reject effortful tasks without thinking about how enjoyable they might be.

You're Probably Wrong About Millennials

Managers routinely complain about their Gen Y employees as entitled, disloyal, and lazy — and as a result, conflicts arise. In a study in partnership with American Express for my new book, we found that while managers have a negative view of Gen Y, employees from this generation generally have a positive view of their managers. Employees feel that their managers have experience (59%), wisdom (41%) and are willing to mentor them (33%). On the other hand, managers feel that Gen Y employees have unrealistic salary/compensation expectations (51%), a poor work ethic (47%), and are easily distracted (46%). While there is a tendency to blame their employees for generational conflicts, managers in today's companies may need to rethink their own management styles.

The first step is to drop generational stereotypes and give Gen Y employees a chance to prove themselves. "The standard Gen Y stereotypes are pretty well accepted in the workplace," says Carrie Hirst, a Regional Marketing Coordinator at Allstate. "Once people have gotten to know me, they will say that the stereotypes don't apply."

One of those misconceptions is that millennials are "entitled," a word that has become synonymous with Gen Y in the management ranks. "I believe that they expect many things to come easy before the work has been put in," says Dean Lawyer, Regional Director of Business Sales for T-Mobile. Contrary to what managers say, Gen Y's are work horses and have a persistent hunger to discover new experiences, take advantage of opportunities and push the boundaries. The recession has forced millennials to develop this work ethic, with 44% of students who are working to help finance their education, reports Rutgers University. Through our research, we've discovered that millennials are the most optimistic generation despite economic setbacks. Furthermore, the Center for Women and Business at Bentley University reports that 84% of millennials view making a positive difference in the world as more important than professional recognition.

Managers view them as having a sense of entitlement because they fail to realize that they want to make a big impact, get connected with executives and engage in professional development opportunities. "Just because someone is younger doesn't mean they can't complete at a high level," says Ryan Brown, a Twitter employee. This isn't entitlement — it's being personally accountable for your own career.

Another Gen Y stereotype is that they lack the company loyalty held by their older colleagues, and this is at least partly true: The average tenure at a firm for Gen Y is two years (compared to five years for Gen X and seven years for Boomers). But those numbers don't tell the whole story. The real issue here is that managers fail at setting expectations with their Gen Y employees, and often don't inform them on criteria for promotions or suggest a path to upward mobility. In our study, we found that 20% of managers don't give annual performance reviews and only 12% give quarterly reviews. Millennials need regular feedback and a set of expectations in order to improve and feel engaged. For the same reason a manager may also get frustrated with a "lazy" Gen Y employee who isn't performing at the expected level — but most of the time it's because the supervisor is not dictating what that level is. When managers don't invest in their Gen Y workers and help them create a path within the company, they look elsewhere — and that costs firms $24,000 per employee on average. Companies simply can't afford to lose Gen Y talent because in the next ten years, they will become the majority of the global workforce.

The real opportunity to bring both generations together is mentoring programs that connect Gen Y talent to senior leaders. PepsiCo is one example of a company that has accomplished this with a mentoring program called Conn3ct, a global network of young professionals within the company. Through the program, Gen Y voices are heard, their ideas are implemented and they received executive exposure and sponsorship. "This young talent pool continues to support recruiting events for new young professionals to enter the company, helps in product development and marketing initiatives, and contributes to improving the overall work-life balance of employees," says Paul Marchand, SVP of Field HR at PepsiCo. Gen Y employees benefit from networking, training and development and their careers are accelerated in the process. Managers benefit from learning about new trends and how to leverage the latest technology from Gen Y, who doesn't know a world without computers.

By understanding how to work with Gen Y employees and creating programs that allow them to network, learn and feel part of the company, you will retain them and they will become your next leaders. If you don't, then you will lose them to your competitors.

Should MBAs Learn to Code?

This post was originally published on the author's blog. It has been edited slightly.

"Should I learn to code?"

MBAs who lack programming skills often ask this question when they pursue careers in technology companies.

Bloggers like Yipit co-founder Vin Vacanti have shared views on the payoff from learning to code, as have several students at Harvard Business School, including Dana Hork, Matt Boys, and Matt Thurmond.

I thought it'd be helpful to supplement bloggers' perspectives with some survey data. I received responses from 24 of the 41 HBS students who enrolled over the past two years in CS50, the introductory computer science course at Harvard College.

My survey didn't ask for comments on the quality of CS50 itself. The course is widely acclaimed; my colleague David Malan has grown its enrollment five-fold to 715 students over the six years he has served as lead instructor. Rather, my goal with the survey was to learn whether MBAs saw this well designed and rigorous course as a good investment of their time, given their career objectives and other course options. The tradeoffs are tricky: survey respondents reported spending an average of 16.3 hours per week on CS50 — perhaps 2-3x more time than they would spend on an MBA elective that yielded equivalent academic credit.

So, was it worth it? Of the 18 survey respondents who founded a startup, joined an existing startup, or went to work for a big tech company upon graduation, 83% answered "yes" to the question, "On reflection, was taking CS50 worth it for you?" and 17% said "not sure." Of these 18 respondents, none said that taking CS50 was not worth it. By contrast, of the six respondents who pursued jobs outside of the tech sector — say, in consulting or private equity — only two said CS50 was a worthwhile investment; three said it was not; and one was not sure.

Benefits

Respondents cited several benefits from taking CS50.

Writing Software. Respondents differed in their assessments of their current ability to contribute working code on the job, based on their CS50 learning. Several said they regularly do so, for example:

Kyle Watkins, who joined an existing startup, said he has "used CS50 skills to create a half dozen VBA programs that will likely save the startup I'm working for tens of thousands of dollars."

Michael Belkin, who founded his own startup, said, "After taking CS50, I was able to build an MVP that would have cost at least $40K to outsource. And it was better, because I understood all the small details that drive a user's experience. After HBS, I became one of the lead developers at my startup, which has saved the company several hundred thousand dollars."

Communicating with Developers. Other respondents, especially those employed in large tech companies, said they couldn't really write production software, but felt more confident in their ability to discuss technical issues with developers as a result of taking CS50. For example:

Jon Einkauf, a product manager for Amazon AWS, said, "I work with developers on my team every day to define and build new features. In addition, the users of my product are developers and data scientists. Taking CS50 gave me a glimpse of what it's like to be a developer — to get excited about complex computer science problems, to get frustrated when you hit a bug. It taught me enough about software development that I don't feel lost in my current job. I can ask intelligent questions, I can push back on the developers when necessary, and I am confident that I could teach myself anything else I need to learn."

Luke Langford, who joined Zynga as a product manager upon graduation, said that CS50 "gave me a working knowledge and confidence to be able to review code. Product managers at Zynga don't often work in code, but there were several times when I was able to diagnose issues and help the engineers identify why certain algorithms that calculated scores were wrong. Pre-CS50, I wouldn't have been able to do that."

Recruiting. Several respondents mentioned that their CS50 experience had helped persuade recruiters that they were committed to a career in technology. As one anonymous respondent reported, "I wanted to get a job at a tech startup and ended up as a product manager at one of NYC's hottest tech startups. The founder, who is a CS PhD, was really impressed that I'd learned to code. I think it made a difference in getting the offer."

Costs

The benefits from CS50 came at a considerable cost, however, in terms of workload. In addition to lectures and section meetings, the course has weekly problem sets, two mid-terms exams, and a final project that requires students to design and build an application.

Beyond the heavy workload, respondents who were less sanguine about the payoff from CS50 often cited its use of C to teach fundamentals such as functions, loops and arrays, rather than a more modern programming language. While acknowledging that C is well suited for this purpose, these students would have preferred more focus on languages used in web development (e.g., JavaScript, HTML, and PHP), which are covered in the last one-third of CS50's syllabus. Likewise, some students said they understood why certain "academic" concepts (e.g., algorithm run times, security) were covered in an introductory CS course, but they did not view such concepts as salient to their "just learn to code" personal priorities.

Many respondents acknowledged that there are online options for learning to code that would not require as big a time commitment as CS50. However, they saw a graded course for academic credit as good way to ensure they would actually get the work done. An anonymous respondent said, "I knew that I would never learn programming if I didn't have something — a problem set or test — to keep me accountable every week. I don't want to generalize, but I highly doubt that most HBS people after doing their cases/travel/socializing are going to set aside time to consistently do Codecademy or Treehouse every week."

Justin Ekins added, "You can learn everything in this course online, but, let's face it, you're not going to force yourself to do that. And you won't get the depth of knowledge that CS50 will provide. It's an outstanding course, and it's incredibly well taught. I'd recommend taking it and then spending J term [three weeks in January when regular HBS classes do not meet] with Stanford's online CS193P, which will get you to the point of building iPhone apps."

Why Emerging Markets Don't Need Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the South Africa-born entrepreneur, recently unveiled his proposals for the Hyperloop, a groundbreaking high-speed transportation system. The technology community has become accustomed to Musk pushing the boundaries. His name is also attached to Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City, and he is very rightly celebrated.



At the same time, South Africa is currently considering its own transport future and many African countries are much farther behind in transport infrastructure. The gap between Hyperloop and the state of infrastructure in the vast majority of developing countries is a demonstration of what economist William Janeway calls the Two Innovation Economies.



On one side is the frontier economy, populated by highly skilled engineers pushing the boundaries of technology, and investors making highly risky bets on which new fields will take off. On the other side, where most of the world's billions reside, is the follower economy which is characterized by solving problems that have already been solved elsewhere, but have not been adopted due to institutional or structural reasons. Here, investors often do not make bets on technology risk; they are more worried about political and implementation risk.



The frontier economy has unimaginable appeal to the skilled engineers and savvy entrepreneurs. It is sexy to work on the world's most technically difficult problems at the bleeding edge. Top talent in the follower economy has to deal with messier problems, like poverty, lack of healthcare, lack of education, and unemployment. Instead of cutting-edge science, they have to spend time worrying about things like politics and economics (the dismal science).



As a result, many top-tier students in developing markets graduating from the best Western institutions are motivated to stay abroad. Even when they come "back home", they often seek ways to replicate the frontier economy in their local markets. Companies like Rocket Internet (which is bringing consumer web technologies to low income countries), for example, have been very successful in recruiting diaspora talent. In South America, programs like Startup Chile are attempting to recreate Silicon Valley.



The problem is that these paths are often "low-leverage". They make a small dent in the problems of many follower economies, and often do not build the country's capabilities. There are exceptions, of course, like mobile technology. But even such "leapfrog" innovations sometimes feel like patchwork solutions to much more foundational problems. One cannot use them to their full potential until roads, electricity and other infrastructure are in place.

In reality, most of the significant progress made in the world's follower economies over the past 50 years has been through adopting old technologies. Paragons of international development like Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong relied heavily on basic manufacturing copied from the West in order to find a firm footing on the development ladder. China's adoption of Western and Japanese technologies was a key step in its upheaval of hundreds of millions over the poverty line. Japan itself used to be labeled a copycat with low quality products. Time and time again, the rise of from follower to frontier status has depended on technology transfers, across nearly all the sectors of the economy.



Technology transfer. It sounds like a dirty, anti-Musk word. It lacks the magic and creativity of inventive thinking and Ivy League teams. Yet it has increased the incomes of hundreds of millions, and, crucially, it has done this in a sustainable way. Because when low-income earners learn how to make cheap copies, this is often a first step in the process to making more sophisticated products.



Governments and corporations in developing markets should be paying more attention to technology transfer. It makes economic sense and it is probably the lowest hanging fruit in accelerating the catch-up process. It happens across many channels: government institutions (e.g. Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), cross-border corporate activity (e.g. JVs, M&A, licensing, outsourcing), and human capital (e.g. university partnerships, exchange programs, diaspora programs).

International students and foreign graduates should also be paying attention to technology transfer. The problems Elon Musk is solving are no more important than the problems that need to be solved in the follower economies of the world. Musk is celebrated worldwide, and deservedly so. But what we really need is new Elon Musks for follower economies.

Why Giving People an Option to Be Charitable May Hurt Your Business

After a store chain introduced new recycling machines that allowed consumers to donate their returned bottle-and-can deposits to charity, people started avoiding the machines, says a team led by Mikael Knutsson of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Whereas the amount of deposits returned by the old machines had been up to 3,026 Swedish krona higher per month than in the previous year, indicating a rising level of recycling, the amount returned by the new machines was up to 12,303 krona lower per month year-over-year. The results show that in the absence of pressure to donate, many people are reluctant to give to charity.

Please Stop Complaining About How Busy You Are

We're all just so "busy" these days. "Slammed" in fact. "Buried." Desperately "trying to keep our heads above water." While these common responses to "How are you?" seem like they're lifted from the Worst Case Scenario Handbook, there seems to be a constant exchange, even a a one-upping, of just how much we have on our plates when we communicate about our work.



My favorite "busy" humble-brag was that of a potential client who apologized for lack of communication due to a "week-long fire drill." What does that even mean? Does this mean there were fake fires, but not real ones, all week? Does calling it a "drill" mean that everything is okay? Is your business in flames? Should I call someone?



Then there was the date I had with a fellow who was so busy "crashing on deadlines" that he asked me to "just make a reservation somewhere" for him. I was floored.



So much of this is about out-doing each other. To say that "I'm busier than you are" means I'm more important, or that my time is more valuable, or that I am "winning" at some never-finished rat race to Inbox Zero. (Inbox Zero is another absurd contest to tackle at another time.) What you're trying to say with these responses is: I'm busier, more in-demand, more successful.



Here's the thing: it's harming how we communicate, connect, and interact. Everyone is busy, in different sorts of ways. Maybe you have lots of clients, or are starting a new business, or are taking care of a newborn. The point is this: with limited time and unlimited demands on that time, it's easy to fill your plate with activities constantly. But this doesn't mean that you should.



To assume that being "busy" (at this point it has totally lost its meaning) is cool, or brag-worthy, or tweetable, is ridiculous. By lobbing these brags, endlessly puffing our shoulders about how "up to my neck" we are, we're missing out on important connections with family and friends, as well as personal time. In addition to having entire conversations about how busy we are, we fail to share feelings with friends and family, ask about important matters, and realize that the "busy" is something that can be put on hold for a little while.



I am not trying to belittle anyone's work-load in the slightest. But in using it as a one-upping mechanism, we're failing to connect in a very substantial way. And we're making the problem worse: When everyone around us is "slammed," it's easy to feel guilty if we're not slaving away on a never-ending treadmill of toil. By trying to compete about it, we're only adding to that pool of water everyone seems to be constantly "treading" in. And all this complaining is having serious effects on our mental health.



And yet we continue to use long hours as a sort of macho badge of honor.



We need to work smart, not (just) hard.



Just because you clocked 15 hours at your office, with likely dry eyeballs and a complete lack of focus, doesn't mean you've accomplished things in a smart way. Many people have written or spoken about this. Typically, you have 90-120 minutes before you devolve into internet fodder or social media. If you're putting in 15 straight hours at your desk, without breaks, how good is your output? How much time are you wasting?



The distinction between working hard versus smart has hit me as an entrepreneur. In high school and college I was always that girl who read all the assigned reading (and no, I was not giving you my study guide). I created outlines, outlines of outlines, and then flashcards. One of my greatest lessons as a businessperson has been to throw out that skill set. This isn't to say you shouldn't be diligent or that you should half-heartedly execute, but rather, that it's crucial to know what you have to do as opposed to everything you could do. It's about being strategic.



For once, I'd like to hear someone brag about their excellent time management skills, rather than complain about how much they can't get done. Maybe we could learn something from each other.



In fact, I'll start — here are three tactics I've been using to work smarter:



Constrain the time. The more I constrain my time, the more focused and productive I feel, and the less I waste time on low-priority work. If you can only afford to spend 45 minutes on a certain project, then only spend 45 minutes on it — and move on, even if it isn't perfect.



Use a scheduler. If you're really up to your neck, it's very easy to find a scheduler, virtual or otherwise, to help put things on your calendar. Sometimes it's a matter of freeing up that time used for coordinating plans to actually doing them. Zirtual is a great answer to this. As is the DIY scheduler Doodle.



Cut the fat. Once I cut out superfluous meetings that were not: fun, productive, leading to new business, or really had something wonderful in it for me professional or otherwise, that plate emptied a little bit. (Here's a tool for figuring out what to cut.)



Yes, we all have some strange need to out-misery each other. Acknowledging that is a first step. But next time you speak to a friend and want to lament about how busy you are, ask yourself why. Try steering the conversation away from a complain-off. With some practice you might find yourself actually feeling less "buried" (or at least feeling less of a need to say it all the time).



And maybe that's something worth bragging about.