Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1560

Chewing Gum Helps You Sustain Vigilance in a Long Task

At the beginning of a 30-minute computer-based vigilance task, the average reaction time of participants who were chewing gum was about 70 milliseconds slower than that of non-chewers, but by the end, it was about 100 milliseconds faster, suggesting that chewing gum can stem a decline of vigilance over a long task, says a team led by Kate Morgan of Cardiff University in the UK. Gum chewing has been shown to increase blood flow to the frontal-temporal region of the brain.

Advertising's Big Data Dilemma

The proposed merger of ad industry giants Omnicom and Publicis, forming the world's largest advertising firm, promises to change the face of Madison Avenue forever.

So long, Don Draper. Hello, Hal 9000.



It's understandable why two giants of traditional advertising would pursue such a consolidation — to better do battle against Google and Facebook, relative newcomers to the ad game but already upending the entire business dynamic by using Big Data analytics to create highly targeted ads.



But an algorithm can never truly master the art of persuasion.



Traditionally, the heart of any successful advertising agency has always been its creative department. During the heyday of Madison Avenue, in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, a wave of young art directors and writers used wit, energy, and style to usher in the era referred to as the Creative Revolution.

Consider one of the classic examples from the period: in 1955, a minor brand of cigarette aimed at women smokers tapped the Leo Burnett agency to revamp its brand. Burnett and his team might well have turned to the data available at the time on female smokers. Instead, they recognized an opportunity to tell a new story, one that tapped into the cultural zeitgeist, a sense of confusion and loss about American masculinity. The advertising campaign featured a rugged cowboy on horseback, an uncompromised man struggling not with a demoralizing bureaucracy but with the forces of the natural world. He smoked a cigarette "designed for men that women like." The Marlboro Man was born.



This is the art of persuasion. Great marketing and advertising campaigns are exquisitely attuned, not to past behavior, nor to individualized needs and desires, but to the larger cultural zeitgeist. Great advertising speaks to our deepest fears and desires, it answers to our nascent yearnings. Perhaps most importantly, it acknowledges that the majority of our decisions are social: we do things within the context of our communities and we get swept away by the mood of our times. From Volkswagen's "Think Small" print ads to Apple's groundbreaking "1984" television commercial — directed by Oscar-award winner Ridley Scott — to Nike's "Just Do It" slogan, persuasive advertising campaigns have left an indelible mark on our public imagination.



Big Data analytics simply can't address us with this kind of depth, the full context of our lived reality. Take a recent example with Boston potholes. An app called Street Bump was designed to collect smartphone data from the city's drivers. The idea was to collect information about pothole repair at a low cost. Unfortunately, the app had difficulty distinguishing between bumps in the road, manholes, and potholes, and, as a result, the Office of New Urban Mechanics received an overwhelming amount of false positives. Even more problematic, by relying only on feedback from the app, Boston was not receiving any information from neighborhoods where the residents didn't own smartphones. This skewed the objectivity of the data received.



This kind of "skewing" is always happening with data. Despite what we are told, data is never objective, never free of bias. Kate Crawford, researcher at Microsoft, calls this problem "Big Data fundamentalism — the idea that with larger data sets, we get closer to objective truth." Aggregator sites, seemingly objective, are designed with built-in assumptions. They assume that the frequency of your clicks is the same as your level of interest or the degree to which the material "moves" you. But only our fellow humans will ever really understand what we care about. Our care — our deeply felt investment in the world — is always context dependent.



What is the role of Big Data in the future of advertising? Data analytics plays a part in informing a successful marketing strategy. According to the chief executive of one of the industry's major data marketing companies, advertisers can determine, in milliseconds, whether someone looking for a car is a "luxury" or "used car" buyer, and based on that information, they can determine whether to even display an ad or not. If your problem frame is simple and straightforward — "I want to reach a consumer who buys luxury cars in order to entice them to buy my luxury car — these types of targeted ads could do very well for you.



But what if your problem frame is not straightforward? What if, like Marlboro or Nike, you are trying to illicit a new emotional response from your consumers? What if, like Volkswagen, you feel that your product could thrive in an entirely different kind of market? What if, like Apple, you are trying to lead, not follow the decisions of your consumers?



To address a more complex problem frame, you need a more complex piece of technology. In these situations, an algorithmic business model based on Big Data analytics — if this, then that — is not going to provide you with the greater insight or perspective. It certainly isn't going to create a strategy or a campaign. For any of the above, you are going to need the human mind.

Responding When Your Expertise Is Challenged

Deepa Purushothaman, principal at Deloitte Consulting LLP, explains why it's important to understand how you're perceived. 

Move Beyond Enterprise IT to an API Strategy

For the vast majority of organizations, the IT function's focus has been inside the enterprise. They might allow some occasional website browsing by employees (though many sites are banned), and perhaps an inbound website or intranet for customers to enter an order. The focus, however, has been on protecting a walled garden of information transactions.

We think the emphasis should instead be external. Toward this end, we increasingly see sophisticated organizations competing in an "API economy" in which application programming interfaces are the primary approach to inter-organizational collaboration and information exchange. APIs, which are specifications or protocols for how to exchange information or request online services from an organization, are already booming in online businesses. As more companies realize that information is key to their product and service offerings, and that they need an ecosystem to provide those offerings, APIs will grow further in popularity. Many of today's ecosystem members are coders and app developers, and APIs are how they interface with a provider organization.

Netflix provides a great example of the role of APIs in a successful information-oriented business. Correlation is not causation, but there seems to be a close correlation between the growth of Netflix's stock price and the rise in the number of API calls it gets. The latter figure is close to 50 billion per month now (from about 2 billion three years ago), which is a powerful indicator of how open the company has become. Netflix makes movie and TV content available through a variety of devices, from iPhones to PlayStations to many "smart" TVs. The company also makes available other information content to many sites, including its catalog, recommendations, and ratings. All of this content makes its way to sites and devices outside of Netflix through the magic of APIs.

Other companies with strong API-based ecosystems include Salesforce.com, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and eBay. All have seen fantastic growth. They all needed API-based ecosystems because consumer demands are hard to predict and they use a wide range of devices. Opening up APIs lets organizations outsource innovation by allowing third-parties to experiment with their information assets and share revenue streams. They can also control usage when necessary by limiting access to partners they choose.

However, there are other sectors that have not yet opened themselves up to ecosystems with APIs. Health care IT, for example, is a largely closed industry; health records systems like EPIC and GE Healthcare IT are protected environments, largely closed to external ecosystems. One exception to this pattern is athenahealth, a Boston-based software-as-a-service health records system company that is trying to engender a health information ecosystem. Called "More Disruption Please," the movement has elicited a few development partners, but CEO Jonathan Bush would like to see more. RunKeeper, a tracker of fitness activities, has had somewhat greater success in building an ecosystem, but it's more about fitness data than health information.

Of course, an API strategy is not a binary decision — to use them or not to use them. There are public (open to everyone) and private (open only to certified developers or partners) APIs. There are free APIs (Google's, for the most part, although they charge under certain circumstances) and flat fee or revenue-sharing ones (Apple's, for the most part). There are information and services that you want to give your ecosystem access to, and those that you probably should keep to yourself. In short, your organization needs to debate the various elements of an API strategy, and then you need a set of governance mechanisms to enforce it.

So if your enterprise IT is only focused on the internal enterprise, you're already falling behind in the API economy. You need to start building an ecosystem, and APIs are the way to do it.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





It's C-Suite Problem
Avoiding the Schizophrenic IT Organization
Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google

Jeff Bezos Brings His Low-Margin Ways to Newspapers

Way back in the first decade of the new millennium, when Craigslist seemed like the biggest threat facing newspapers, founder Craig Newmark paid visits to lots of media companies and media conferences. Yes, his site was definitely taking classified advertising away from papers, he would say. But newspapers were still spectacularly profitable, he'd add, and might be just fine if they weren't so intent on preserving those profit margins.

These days, it's an open question whether newspaper companies can maintain any kind of a profit margin at all. The New York Times seems to have turned the corner toward a modestly profitable future in which circulation revenue pays most of the bills. But The Washington Post, which billionaire Jeff Bezos agreed to buy yesterday, had been losing money since 2008.

So Newmark was definitely right that newspapers need to learn to accept much lower profit margins. But switching from a high-margin business to a low-margin one is really hard. High margins sound like a good thing, and they can be. They're evidence of what Warren Buffett — himself a long-time newspaper investor and major shareholder in the Washington Post Co. — dubbed a moat, which keeps competitors out and customers in. But when disruptive innovation threatens to breach a moat, high-margin companies usually find themselves especially ill-prepared to fight back.

That's partly because, as Clayton Christensen, Stephen Kaufman, and Willy Shih wrote in the 2008 HBR article "Innovation Killers," standard financial metrics make new investments look much less attractive than existing business lines. It's partly because managers of well-moated companies tend to turn complacent — or just don't need much skill to run such a business in the first place. (Buffett, in his latest Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter, tells of a newspaper publisher who confessed, "I owe my exalted position in life to two great American institutions — nepotism and monopoly.") And finally, the owners or shareholders of high-margin businesses tend to see those margins as their due, and are thus unwilling to countenance lower-margin strategies. One of the things that bothered the newspaper industry most about Newmark, in fact, was that he didn't seem interested in making much of a profit at all.

The result of all this was that, while the decline of American newspapers (especially the big regional papers) was probably inevitable in the age of the Internet, the reluctance and at times inability of newspaper companies to transition from high-margin business models to low-margin ones has made things much worse. Layoffs and other cutbacks meant to preserve profit margins have only sped the decline in revenue, while bold new investments have been few. And for the most part the margins have declined anyway. Profits of more than 20% of revenue used to be common at newspaper companies. In 2012, the Pew Charitable Trusts said in its latest State of the News Media report, "the operating margin for Gannett was 9.9%, New York Times 5.4%, McClatchy 15.1%, E.W. Scripps 6.9% and A.H. Belo 8.1%. The Washington Post operated at a 9.2% loss."

Those are (apart from the Washington Post's loss, of course) still pretty healthy margins by the standards of many industries. Amazon.com, which Bezos founded in 1995 and has run ever since, has an operating margin of just 1.5%. In a time of great change and disruption, Bezos has turned low margins — usually a sign of competitive weakness — into a competitive advantage. And while not much else is clear about what his ownership of the Washington Post will be like, a willingness to countenance low margins will surely be part of it.

That's happening across the industry as papers change hands. Some of the buyers are still financial investors like Buffett, who figures that if he gets in at a low enough price and concentrates on small-market papers with a monopoly of local news, he'll make money even in a declining industry. But that's rare. Private equity firms, which have long focused on buying into declining industries, have apparently deemed the decline of newspapers too precipitous for their tastes. Most of today's new owners appear to be looking for something out of the investment beyond profit. Sometimes that's political influence and hometown boosterism, as with the local developer and hotelier who bought San Diego's daily paper. Sometimes it's the opportunity to try out a new business model, as at the Orange County Register in California. And sometimes it's just too early to tell, as with Bezos at the Post and John Henry's acquisition a few days ago of the Boston Globe. One thing that unites all of these acquirers, though, is that don't seem to have bought in expecting a 20% annual return on their investment. And that's progress, of a sort.

The Innovation Mindset in Action: 3M Corporation

In three recent blog posts we looked at the innovation mindset in individuals, profiling game changers Jerry Buss, Peter Jackson, and Shantha Ragunathan. These three innovators share common qualities, which we call the innovation mindset, a robust framework which can be applied at the micro (individual) as well as macro (organizational) levels: they see and act on opportunities, use "and" thinking to resolve tough dilemmas and break through compromises, and employ their resourcefulness to power through obstacles. Innovators maintain a laser focus on outcomes, avoid getting caught in the activity trap, and proactively "expand the pie" to make an impact. Regardless of where they start, innovators and innovative companies persist till they successfully change the game.

Take, for example, 3M Corporation. 3M was awarded the US government's highest award for innovation, the National Medal of Technology. Over a 20-year period, 3M's gross margin averaged 51% and the company's return on assets averaged 29%. 3M has consistently been highly ranked, often in the top 20, in Fortune magazine's annual survey of "America's Most Admired Corporations." How do they do it?

Innovative companies provide forums for employees to pursue opportunities.

One of 3M's strengths (PDF) is how it treats promising employees: give them opportunities, support them, and watch them learn and thrive. 3M provides a rich variety of centers and forums to create a pool of practical ideas that are then nurtured into opportunities and provided the necessary resources for success. Scientists go out into the field to observe customers to understand their pain points. Customers also visit Innovation Centers set up specifically for the purpose of exploring possibilities, solving problems, and generating product ideas. Scientists share knowledge and build relationships at the Technical Council, which meets periodically to discuss progress on technology projects, and the Technical Forum, an internal professional society where 3M scientists present papers— just two of 3M's fruitful forums.

Arthur Fry, a 3M employee, attended a Technical Council where Spencer Silver spoke about trying to develop a super-strong adhesive for use in building planes; instead, Silver accidentally created a weak adhesive that was a "solution without a problem." Fry, who sang in a church choir, had the niggling problem of losing the bookmark in his hymnbook. Fry noticed two important features of Silver's adhesive that made it suitable for bookmarks: the note was reusable, and it peeled away without leaving any residue. Fry applied for and received funding to develop a product based on Silver's accidental discovery. Thus was born the Post-it note.

Innovative companies create an environment that fosters the right tension with "and thinking."

One critical balance at 3M is between present AND future concerns. Quarterly results are important but should not be the sole focus; staying relevant is also important but cannot come at the cost of current performance. 3M has several mechanisms to sustain this "and thinking." Employing the Thirty Percent Rule, 30% of each division's revenues must come from products introduced in the last four years. This is tracked rigorously, and employee bonuses are based on successful achievement of this goal. 3M also uses "and thinking" in their three-tiered research structure. Each research area has a unique focus: Business Unit Laboratories focus on specific markets, with near-term products; Sector Laboratories, on applications with 3-to-10 year time horizons; and Corporate Laboratories, on basic research with a time horizon of as long as 20 years.

Innovative companies create systems, structures, and work environments to encourage resourcefulness and initiative.

Reporter Paul Lukas best expressed the resourcefulness of 3Mers: "A 3M customer identifies a problem, and a 3M engineer expresses confidence in being able to solve it. He bangs his head against the wall for years, facing repeated setbacks, until management finally tells him to stop wasting time and money. Undeterred, the engineer stumbles onto a solution and turns a dead end into a ringing success."

Richard Drew is just such an engineer. Running some Wetordry sandpaper tests at an auto-body shop to improve paint removal, he noticed that the painter was not able to mask one section of a two-tone car while painting the other. The tapes available at the time, back in the 1920s, either left a residue or reacted with the paint. Drew assured the painter that 3M could solve the problem and worked on it for two years, eventually receiving a memo from senior management instructing him to get back to work on the waterproof Wetordry sandpaper. Drew did, but he continued working on the tape project on his own time. The result: Scotch tape.

3M has a rich set of structures and systems to encourage resourcefulness:

Seed Capital: Inventors can request seed capital from their business unit managers; if their request is denied, they can seek funding from other business units. Inventors can also apply for corporate funding in the form of a Genesis Grant. (The Post-it was funded by a Genesis Grant.)
New Venture Formation: Product inventors must recruit their own teams, reaping the benefit of 3M's many networking forums as they seek the right people for the job at hand. The recruits have a chance to evaluate the inventor's track record before signing up. However, if the product fails, everyone is guaranteed their previous jobs.
Dual-career ladder:: Scientists can continue to move up the ladder without becoming managers. They have the same prestige, compensation, and perks as corporate management. As a result, 3M doesn't lose good scientists and engineers only to gain poor managers, a common problem in the manufacturing sector.

Innovative companies focus on the right set of outcomes. They tailor what is measured, monitored, and controlled to suit their focus, and strike the right balance between performance and innovation.

3M has created measurement and reward systems that tolerate mistakes and encourage success. 3M rewards successful innovators in a variety of ways: the Carlton Society, named after former company president Richard P. Carlton, honors top 3M scientists who develop innovative new products and contribute to the company's culture of innovation, and the Golden Step is a cash award. 3M also has a rich tradition of telling the
stories of famous failures that subsequently created breakthrough products— such as the weak adhesive that inspired Post-It notes— to ensure a culture that stays innovative and risks failure for unexpected rewards. Another
3M failure story from its early days, still repeated inside the company: 3M's initial business venture was to mine corundum, a material they planned to use to make grinding wheels. Instead, what they found was inferior abrasive. After much experimentation came their first breakthrough product: Wetordry sandpaper.

Innovative companies have strong mechanisms to ensure a continuing focus on expanding the pie, by effectively converting non-consumers into consumers, and providing richer solutions to current consumers. In the process they transform their industry, community, country, and sometimes even the world.

3M uses a research and development focus and a unique "15% rule" to ensure continuing effort on expanding the pie. 3M spends approximately 6% of sales on research and development (PDF), far more than a typical manufacturing company. This has resulted not only in new products but also the creation of new industries. David Powell, 3M's vice president of marketing, affirms R&D's importance: "Annual investment in R&D in good years— and bad— is a cornerstone of the company. The consistency in the bad years is particularly important."

William McKnight, who rose from his initial bookkeeping position to eventually become chairman of 3M's board, best explained the logic of the 15% rule: "Encourage experimental doodling. If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need." 3M engineers and scientists can spend up to 15% of their time pursuing projects of their own choice, free to look for unexpected, unscripted opportunities, for breakthrough innovations that have the potential to expand the pie. For example, some employees in the infection-prevention division used their "15% time" to pursue wirelessly connected electronic stethoscopes. The result: In 2012, 3M introduced the first electronic stethoscope with Bluetooth technology that allows doctors to listen to patients' heart and lung sounds as they go on rounds, seamlessly transferring the data to software programs for deeper analysis.

The innovation mindset is a game-changing asset for companies as well as individuals. Innovative companies like 3M use creative "and" thinking and resourcefulness to pursue promising opportunities and strategically meet outcomes, all the while "expanding the pie." Such organizations create the structure, systems, and culture to enable their people to think and do things differently in order to achieve extraordinary success.

Jeff Bezos, John Henry, and the New Reality

On the very day that the Washington Post Co. announced it was selling its flagship newspaper to Internet billionaire Jeff Bezos, the Boston Globe opened its doors for a meet-and-greet with billionaire Red Sox owner John Henry, who had announced plans to buy New England's iconic newspaper less than 72 hours before. So much for the lazy, hazy days of summer: If any of us needed one final reminder that the competitive logic of business and media and branding are being reshaped before our very eyes, that the merciless advance of technology upends every institution it touches, well, we got it. As one pundit wryly noted, the Graham family, which controlled the Washington Post for the last 80 years, "survived Nixon, but not the Internet."

I have no idea what Jeff Bezos plans to do with the Post or what John Henry plans to do with the Globe — and I'm not sure they do either, at least not yet. To me, the reason these transactions are so noteworthy is that they symbolize so vividly three powerful new realities that define not just the media landscape, but the competitive landscape in which all companies and leaders operate today. You don't have to be in media to face those realities — in fact, facing them is mandatory.

The first new reality is that the logic of economic value has changed forever. How do we process the paultry $70 million that John Henry paid for the Globe, or the $250 million that Jeff Bezos paid for the Post? One thing to remember is that, as a result of Amazon, Bezos is worth something like $28 billion — so writing a check for the Post means committing less than 1 percent of his personal fortune. Thanks, ecommerce! It's also worth noting that a few months before Bezos opened his checkbook, Yahoo opened its checkbook to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Thanks, sassy teenagers!

In other words, a company launched in 2007 to host a collection of photos and short blog posts is worth more than four times as much as an organization launched in 1877 that has shaped democratic discourse and brought down presidents. When it comes to pure economics, the value of incumbency has never been worth less. Do you understand the new sources of economic value in your field, and have you reckoned honestly with how the market currently values what you've done in the past?

There's a second new reality to reckon with: In a world defined by "creative destruction," the destruction happens a lot faster than the creativity. I love the world of new media, Internet-era brands, grassroots information flows. Indeed, I've benefited personally from all digital ferment. More than ten years ago, during the first Internet boom, a big German publisher, bought Fast Company, the magazine I cofounded, for more than what the Washington Post and the Boston Globe sold for this past week — combined. Thanks, Gruner+Jahr!

And yet, I can't get over what all of us have lost in the process. In virtually every major city in the United States, once-powerful local newspapers are shells of their former selves. Does anyone think that City Halls in Philadelphia or Detroit are more efficient or less corrupt because the Inquirer and the Free Press are on their knees? Or that the public conversation about the future of Atlanta or New Orleans is more robust because bloggers are bringing new attention to the arts and food scene, even as the daily newspapers wither on the vine? As much as I celebrate the rise of the New Economy, I can't help but echo Joni Mitchell as I witness the demise of so many venerable companies and institutions: "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." My question for all of us as leaders, and as members of society, is: Are we being as honest about the costs of the digital revolution as we are about its benefits?

That question leads to my third new reality of the world today: For old organizations to survive, new ownership structures are required. As I said at the outset, I have no idea what John Henry and Jeff Bezos have planned for their newspapers. What I do know is that the Globe and the Post had virtually no chance to survive, let alone prosper, as unpopular stepchildren in larger, publicly traded companies. There are plenty of worse circumstances for making much-needed change than being owned by smart billionaires — and the worst of all is being at the mercy of Wall Street's mindless quarterly demands or working under nervous-nelly CEOs trying to please the Street.

A case in point: Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Less than four years ago, the privately held company controlled by billionaire (and New York City Mayor) Michael Bloomberg paid a few million bucks to acquire one of the great names in business publishing — a magazine that was launched just a few weeks before the stock market crash of 1929, and was on the verge of crashing into irrelevance and insolvency as a basket case inside publicly traded McGraw-Hill. Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek is a force to be reckoned with, brimming with new energy and confidence under editor Josh Tyrangiel, who was named Ad Age's Editor of the Year in 2012. I have no doubt that BusinessWeek's renaissance would not have happened had it not been rescued from McGraw-Hill. The lesson seems clear: To respond to radically new circumstances, organizations and their leaders need new ownership structures that give them day-to-day breathing room and fire up their creative juices.

So here's my final takeaway from the head-spinning events of the last few days, one that applies well beyond the world of big-city newspapers. Yes, technology changes everything it touches. But technology is not destiny. Talented leaders, given enough imagination and the right organizational platforms, can respond creatively and effectively to the most challenging circumstances. In fact, that is the defining work of leadership today — unleashing long-lasting, positive change in an environment that moves faster than ever. Our ability to do that work will shape the future of our organizations, our media, and our society for decades to come. So good luck to John Henry, Jeff Bezos, and all of you!

IT's C-Suite Problem

Employees in today's interdependent, knowledge-intensive workplace have IT needs that are diverse, fast-changing and difficult to articulate. But when we at CEB ask CIOs who in IT is responsible for understanding and responding to these needs, we get an uncomfortable silence.

For years, CIOs have sought a "seat at the table" by building strong links with senior business leaders. Their approach has been driven by the assumption that senior leaders speak for employees on the front lines. This may have been true in the past. But as the workplace becomes more collaborative and knowledge-intensive, and as employees' IT needs diversify, the assumption no longer holds true. In fact, relying on senior relationships is not only inadequate, it can lead IT to pursue the wrong priorities. Instead, IT should interact directly with individual employees to identify their needs and to generate innovations.

The most progressive IT organizations are taking three steps to engage directly with employees and to better serve their needs:

1. Developing Employee-Focused Interface Roles

Service managers, business analysts, and the service desk all have a role to play in building stronger relationships with frontline employees. Service managers should understand what employees need from the services they offer and continually enhance their services to meet these needs. At progressive companies, we are beginning to see business analysts expand their remit beyond projects so that they, too, can help identify emerging needs. The service desk, if correctly resourced, can act as the eyes and ears of IT, picking up on employee challenges and needs in their day-to-day interactions.

2. Adapting Product Marketing for IT

Many of the techniques IT requires in order to understand employee needs already exist in marketing and product management. For example, we worked with a large packaging company where IT service managers adopted the concept of market share management. They track the penetration of their services and manage a queue of enhancements designed to boost their market share. The CIO at another leading company employs staff with anthropological and ethnographic research skills to shadow employees, since anthropologists are trained to spot hidden trends and behaviors unobtrusively, without leading the witness or introducing biases.

3. Making User Experience Design an IT Priority

If IT only listens to senior leaders, investment in user experience tends to be deprioritized as it is cheaper and faster to deploy whatever interface the vendor provides. Many companies spend money to improve interfaces used by customers, but don't think the investment is worth it for their own employees. However, if you actually ask employees what they want from IT, an intuitive, easy-to-use interface comes high on the list. And user experience is even more important when employees can choose to use non-sanctioned external technologies instead. In response, leading IT groups are increasing their user experience capabilities, and making usability an important measure of project success.

In each case, IT is treating employees as its customers, and responding to their needs rather than to what the C-suite thinks those needs are.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Avoiding the Schizophrenic IT Organization
Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
Today's CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer

Don't Make Decisions, Orchestrate Them

Is the role of the manager to make decisions, or to make sure that decisions get made? The answer, of course, is both — but many managers focus so much on the first role that they neglect the second. The reality, however, is that decision-making often is not a solo activity, but rather an orchestrated process by which the manager engages other people in reaching a conclusion. Doing this effectively not only improves the quality of the decision, but also ensures that everyone is more committed to its implementation.

There are many ways to facilitate this kind of engaged decision-making, but here are two examples:

Several years ago a new senior leader was brought in to lead a large financial services business that was in need of a turnaround. Making this happen required a series of weekly decisions and tradeoffs about deals, marketing alternatives, internal investments, and human capital that affected most of the senior management team. While it would have been easier and faster to simply weigh the pros and cons of each issue and then give directions, the senior leader realized that her managers understood the implications better than she did, and that if they didn't fully support the decisions, the execution might be compromised. So everyone had to be engaged. The problem was that the managers all approached the problems differently and had trouble reaching consensus — so they kept pushing the decisions back to her instead of hashing them out amongst themselves. To shift this pattern, the senior leader started holding her weekly team meetings on Friday afternoons, telling the group that she was prepared to stay as long as necessary until they reached agreements. The first few meetings stretched into the night, but eventually the team learned how to make decisions together — and how to get home for the weekend.

In another example, the division president of a manufacturing firm took an alternative approach to the same dilemma. Because the business was highly functionalized, senior managers realized that decisions in one area affected the others, so they escalated almost everything up to the president. While this made sense on paper, in practice the president became a bottleneck in the decision process, and everyone became frustrated with how long it took to get things done. To break this logjam, the president began to push back on each decision that was brought to him by asking a series of boilerplate questions such as, "How will this affect our customers?"; "Who else needs to be involved in this decision?"; and "What's stopping you from working with your colleagues to figure out the right thing to do?" Eventually, through this repeated process of Socratic dialogue, the team members began to work through the issues with each other first, and brought far fewer decisions up to the president.

Every manager needs to make sure that decisions are made and implemented, whether it's for an entire company or a small team. And while it may seem easier to just make the decisions yourself, in many cases this won't lead to the best outcome — nor will it increase your team's capability to make future decisions. The alternative, however, is not to shy away from decisions, but rather to create an orchestrated process by which the right people are engaged, including yourself.

Do You Need a Résumé in the LinkedIn Era?

Now that LinkedIn has become the standard place to present your professional history and credentials — not to mention the fastest way to check somebody else's — the humble résumé has lost its once-hallowed position as the canonical version of your professional identity. Your LinkedIn profile should be the most-viewed and most current version of your professional life. That has many people asking: Do I even need an old-fashioned résumé anymore?

The answer is a highly qualified "yes".

The Value of LinkedIn

In the past, résumés have served several functions:

1. Applying for a job: When you're applying for an advertised position, you almost certainly need to submit a résumé as part of the application process.

2. Job hunting: Even if you're not applying for a specific job, you may still use a résumé as part of your search process, as a way of introducing yourself to people who may be interested in your skills.

3. Professional credentialing: Résumés act as a way of establishing your professional credentials in many circumstances, like grant applications, requests for proposals, and conference or speaker submissions.

4. Professional memory: Your résumé is your own professional memory. Keeping it up-to-date is a way of ensuring you don't forget the professional accomplishments or qualifications you may want to highlight during your next job hunt.

In the world of LinkedIn, blogs, and professional landing pages (a.k.a. "nameplate" sites), however, most of these functions can be better accomplished through your online presence. If you are job hunting, send people to your LinkedIn page instead of sending a PDF of your résumé. (Unlike a résumé, a solid LinkedIn profile includes not only your self-proclaimed qualifications, but testimonials from colleagues, clients, and employers.) If you need to establish your professional credentials, sending someone a link to your LinkedIn page will often be the most efficient way to convey your relevant experience. And for maintaining a professional memory, LinkedIn is unbeatable, precisely because it's easy to update, and because you're likely visiting the site on a regular basis.

To serve any of these purposes, however, your LinkedIn presence must be well-crafted and up-to-date. Even if you aren't sending people to your LinkedIn page, it is likely to be one of the first results for anyone who Googles you to find out about your professional qualifications and experience. That's why you need to ensure it's accurate, compelling, and current; unless you're updating your LinkedIn profile monthly or at least quarterly, you're not putting your best foot forward. Setting up a memorable short URL for your LinkedIn profile, and including that URL in your email signature line, is a good way to remind yourself that this is something people are going to look at regularly.

Blogs, Websites, and Landing Pages

For all its merit, LinkedIn has limitations: you have to fit your career story into its structure, and you have only minimal control over formatting. That's why many professionals use their own blog, personal website, or professional landing page to craft a more strategic online presence. For many professionals, the best bet is to maintain several presences, customized to different purposes, so that you can point people to the presence that is relevant to each specific scenario. For example, you might maintain:

• A speaking profile: Professionals who do a lot of speaking or conference submissions would do well to create a specialized presence on a speaker directory like ExpertFile (formerly Speakerfile), a nameplate site like about.me, or even on Slideshare.

• A services profile: If you offer services as a independent contractor, whether that's as a web developer, a designer, a coach or an accountant, setting up a landing page for your contract work can be an efficient place to point potential clients.

• An author profile: If you have a book, blog, or publication file, you will want to profile yourself for readers or future writing assignments with an author page on Amazon, a writing marketplace like MediaBistro, or a web presence for your book.

Why You Still Need a Resume

When you are actually applying for a job, however, neither LinkedIn nor a professional landing page can replace the résumé. A strong résumé is still the gateway to an interview, and with more and more employers relying on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) — software that screens résumés to determine which applications warrant human review — you need a résumé that you can upload to those systems. Nor can it be the same résumé for every application; since an ATS typically screens for specific qualifications and keywords, you need to customize your résumé for each job (or type of job) that you apply for, and optimize it for ATS screenings.

Even when you are reduced to creating a résumé that is an old-fashioned printable document, LinkedIn can still make your life easier. LinkedIn offers a free résumé builder that converts your profile into a draft résumé which you can format, tweak, and even download as a PDF. Don't rely on the résumé builder to do the work of résumé creation on its own, however. When I compared LinkedIn's automatically-generated résumé with the latest version I authored myself, the handcrafted version got an A from the résumé evaluation service RezScore, while the LinkedIn version only got a B-. And that was after I gave up on the PDF, and turned it into a more scannable Word document that I then cleaned up.

While it can't eliminate the job of editing and formatting your résumé for specific job searches, LinkedIn and its résumé builder can and should change the way you think about and maintain that résumé. The standard wisdom — treat your résumé as a living document that you update anytime you have a new accomplishment to record — now applies to LinkedIn, not to your résumé itself.

Keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date, along with any professional landing pages or blogs you choose to maintain, and most of the purposes of your résumé will be well-supported. And at the moment that you're actually applying for a job and need an old-fashioned résumé, LinkedIn's résumé builder will give you a strong head start.