Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1561

Closing the Chasm Between Strategy and Execution

Setting strategy is elegant. It's a clean and sophisticated process of collecting and analyzing data, generating insights, and identifying smart paths forward. Done at arm's length in an academic fashion, tight logic is the only glue needed to hold ideas together. The output is a smooth narrative in a professional-looking document made up of Venn diagrams, 2x2 matrices, and high-level plans of attack. Jettison this business. Focus efforts here. Build up this organizational capability. Executives buy into the plan. The strategists, confident in their intellectual prowess, quietly recede into the background.

Then the trouble starts. Execution is a minefield. The clean and elegant logic of strategy gets dirty in the real world. Agendas compete. Priorities clash. Decisions stall. Communication breaks down. Timelines get blown. It's never a question of if these problems will happen; it's a question of when and to what degree. Managing these challenges takes street smarts and muscle. Overwhelming success means you take a few punches, but still make the plan happen. The process is always a little ugly. The executors' dirt-in-the-fingernails view on the ground is much different from the strategists' high-minded view from the air.

The implication is obvious — strategists and executors must work together better to bridge these two worlds. It's common sense. Unfortunately, it's far from common practice. What typically happens is an awkward hand-off between the two. In the worst cases the strategists adopt an elitist, disconnected mindset: We're the idea people, someone else will make it happen. They don't bother to truly understand what it takes to implement the ideas. They don't engage the executors early and ask, "How will this actually work?" The executors contribute to the trouble as well. Often they don't truly understand the thinking behind the strategy. They take it at face value and don't ask enough tough questions.

When things fall apart, each points a finger at the other side.

The easy solutions for this divide are the process solutions: better project management, clearer rules of engagement, and tighter operating policies. The tougher (and more powerful) solutions are the cultural solutions: getting each side to actually care about what the other side is doing. Not just from a lip-service perspective, but from a fundamental-belief-that-my-success-is-inextricably-tied-to-your-success-so-I-better-engage-with-you perspective.

Strategy and execution is a false dichotomy, unnaturally sheared apart in order to divide labor in increasingly complex organizations. It's an efficient approach. Alone, the shearing isn't a problem. The problem is that both sides don't see it as their responsibility to intelligently pull the two sides back together again. They leave a chasm, hoping that it will miraculously close on its own. It never does. Things just fall through it.

The best strategists and executors don't see a hand-off between strategy and execution. They see an integrated whole. They continuously hand ideas back and forth throughout all phases of a project, strengthening them together. They fight to bring each other closer. Over the years, I've noticed that the best strategists and executors believe certain things that drive their success — things that the mediocre strategists and executors don't believe.

The best strategists believe:



If I can't see and articulate how we're actually going to make this strategy work, it probably won't work. Smart strategists know that there are a lot of gaps, holes, and challenges in their strategies. They tirelessly keep a critical eye on the viability of their plans and stay curious — continuously asking themselves and others, how will this really work? When they find issues, they team up with the executors and get out in front of them.

While it's painful to integrate execution planning into my strategizing, it's even more painful to watch my strategies fail. Most strategists dislike execution planning. It's a tedious process for someone who likes to think about big ideas. But good strategists understand that they have unique insights into the strategy that executors will miss, usually to disastrous ends. So they stay engaged.

Sounding smart is overrated. Doing smart is where the real value lies. Effective strategists aren't full of themselves. They realize their ideas are just that — ideas. They know that if they're not executed well, their strategies are nothing more than daydreams.

I'm just as responsible for strong execution as the executor is. Is this actually true? Likely not. But it's a powerful mindset to hold. The best strategists see themselves as leaders, not merely thinkers. They feel their job is to deliver results, not just ideas.

The best executors believe:



I need to be involved in the strategy process early — even if that means I have to artfully push my way into it. It'd be easy if executors naturally had a seat at the strategy table. Unfortunately, they often don't. Many still receive strategies as a hand-off. Smart executors don't take this sitting down. They figure out how to get into the strategy process early.

I need to be perceived as relevant and valuable to the strategy process. Smart executors know that they must earn a seat at the strategy table by actually adding value. They must move things forward by providing relevant and thoughtful considerations that strengthen the strategy. They can't show up and "just listen" in strategy meetings or else they won't be invited back.

I need to know the "whys" behind the strategy. Smart executors want to know the intent behind the strategy. They want to know the thinking that drove certain choices. They know that this knowledge is crucial to making tough judgment calls when circumstances change down the implementation road (as they inevitably do).

I'm just as responsible for strong strategy as the strategist is. Again, is this actually true? Probably not. But that's irrelevant. The best executors see themselves as leaders, not merely implementers. They feel their job is to deliver strategic advantage for the organization, not just a project.

You can see a clear thread of responsibility running throughout all the beliefs above. Not responsibility for a given task, but rather responsibility for the not-given tasks — the messy spots in the middle where it's not clear who should own something. The best strategists, executors, and leaders stand up and say, "I'm responsible for it" even if it isn't in their job description. It's doubly powerful when both strategists and executors do this, meeting in the middle. That's true collaborative leadership. When these spots go unwatched, un-owned, and unaddressed, they bring down projects and eventually whole companies.

IT Governance is Killing Innovation

Recent CEB research shows that work has become much more interdependent — employees increasingly need to tap a broader array of internal and external colleagues and partners to be successful in their jobs. The emergence of this new work environment has significant implications for how IT should enable business growth and, more specifically, for the kinds of investments IT should be making to support employees.

Unfortunately, when it comes to IT's ability to allocate investments in response to the new work environment, traditional governance processes prove grossly outdated. Some of the key challenges:

Companies don't identify the very best ideas for investment because most capital allocation processes start with business partners' existing ideas about projects to fund. As we've noted in our previous blog, senior business partners might not be that knowledgeable about what actually drives productivity on the front lines.

Companies allocate capital to the wrong investments because our traditional emphasis on ROI-based business cases undermines IT's ability to invest in high-return-but-hard-to-measure areas like improving knowledge worker productivity.

Companies tend to spread their capital allocation bets too thinly across business groups or functions, often for political reasons. This practice helps 'keep the peace' but means that often the most transformational opportunities get short-changed.

Across our year of research into this problem, we have identified a select group of companies that are rethinking their governance and investment processes to circumvent the problems outlined above.

Expand First, Filter Second

Most CIOs will tell you that they have no shortage of ideas to invest in — the hard part is whittling down to the right ones. Push that a bit further and what most CIOs say is that those ideas are in the form of project requests from business partners. The problem is that these "bottom-up" project requests often miss the big picture as too many are incremental or uninspiring. Yes, while most of these requests are vetted for alignment with corporate strategy, what's often missing is how these requests fit within a broader context of how the business overall generates value. Furthermore, this lack of context prevents organizations from identifying other investment ideas that have high potential but haven't bubbled up organically through project requests.

To address this challenge, a global transportation company we spoke with is using a strategic lens to expand the list of project ideas to find the ones with the highest potential corporate value, before filtering them. They start with a map of the company's critical business capabilities — those concrete business activities that are vital to meeting a strategic goal (e.g. rapid new product roll-out). Then, they look at the health of the information available to business leaders who manage those capabilities. They find this leads them into all sorts of overlooked opportunities and provides them with a good proxy for where IT investment can have significant business impact, which can better inform prioritization decisions.

Prioritize Capabilities, not Projects

The currency of most IT project prioritization meetings is the ROI-based business case. As mentioned above, this measure works very well for comparing projects that deliver hard benefits, but undermine the ability to invest in critical capabilities that have a long-term payoff horizon or highly innovative capabilities where the payoff is uncertain.



A global high-tech equipment provider is taking a different approach. Similar to the transportation company mentioned earlier, they start with a top down view of critical business capabilities and pillars required to support long-term business strategy. Then, using customer preference measurement methodologies like conjoint analysis, they survey senior business leaders to determine the relative criticality of each of these pillars. Based on this — and before any projects are even discussed — they are able to map out the relative level of IT investment each capability should receive. So, if the business leadership agrees that capability A is twice as important to realizing their goals as capability B, capability A is targeted for twice as much investment. Projects can then be assessed on contribution to the needs of that pillar, rather than purely on financial metrics like ROI.

CIOs are being asked to arm employees with the capabilities required for success in a new, much more integrated and interdependent work environment. But to do that requires more than capital: it requires a different approach to making decisions and, specifically, rethinking traditional IT project-centric approaches to identifying and funding capital investment opportunities.

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

Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?

There are three popular explanations for the clear under-representation of women in management, namely: (1) they are not capable; (2) they are not interested; (3) they are both interested and capable but unable to break the glass-ceiling: an invisible career barrier, based on prejudiced stereotypes, that prevents women from accessing the ranks of power. Conservatives and chauvinists tend to endorse the first; liberals and feminists prefer the third; and those somewhere in the middle are usually drawn to the second. But what if they all missed the big picture?

In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women. In line, Freud argued that the psychological process of leadership occurs because a group of people — the followers — have replaced their own narcissistic tendencies with those of the leader, such that their love for the leader is a disguised form of self-love, or a substitute for their inability to love themselves. "Another person's narcissism", he said, "has a great attraction for those who have renounced part of their own... as if we envied them for maintaining a blissful state of mind."



The truth of the matter is that pretty much anywhere in the world men tend to think that they that are much smarter than women. Yet arrogance and overconfidence are inversely related to leadership talent — the ability to build and maintain high-performing teams, and to inspire followers to set aside their selfish agendas in order to work for the common interest of the group. Indeed, whether in sports, politics or business, the best leaders are usually humble — and whether through nature or nurture, humility is a much more common feature in women than men. For example, women outperform men on emotional intelligence, which is a strong driver of modest behaviors. Furthermore, a quantitative review of gender differences in personality involving more than 23,000 participants in 26 cultures indicated that women are more sensitive, considerate, and humble than men, which is arguably one of the least counter-intuitive findings in the social sciences. An even clearer picture emerges when one examines the dark side of personality: for instance, our normative data, which includes thousands of managers from across all industry sectors and 40 countries, shows that men are consistently more arrogant, manipulative and risk-prone than women.

The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people.

Unsurprisingly, the mythical image of a "leader" embodies many of the characteristics commonly found in personality disorders, such as narcissism (Steve Jobs or Vladimir Putin), psychopathy (fill in the name of your favorite despot here), histrionic (Richard Branson or Steve Ballmer) or Machiavellian (nearly any federal-level politician) personalities. The sad thing is not that these mythical figures are unrepresentative of the average manager, but that the average manager will fail precisely for having these characteristics.

In fact, most leaders — whether in politics or business — fail. That has always been the case: the majority of nations, companies, societies and organizations are poorly managed, as indicated by their longevity, revenues, and approval ratings, or by the effects they have on their citizens, employees, subordinates or members. Good leadership has always been the exception, not the norm.

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to "lean in" has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

Most of the character traits that are truly advantageous for effective leadership are predominantly found in those who fail to impress others about their talent for management. This is especially true for women. There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of "transformational leadership"), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated.

In sum, there is no denying that women's path to leadership positions is paved with many barriers including a very thick glass ceiling. But a much bigger problem is the lack of career obstacles for incompetent men, and the fact that we tend to equate leadership with the very psychological features that make the average man a more inept leader than the average woman. The result is a pathological system that rewards men for their incompetence while punishing women for their competence, to everybody's detriment.

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center





Educate Everyone About Second-Generation Gender Bias
Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
Solving the Law Firm Gender Gap Problem

Groups Grow Disappointed with Extroverts Over Time

Upon joining a group, extroverts are perceived as having high status. But in an online experiment involving imagined scenarios, extroverts' perceived status slipped from 4.37 to 3.87 on a 7-point scale as the group came to consider their assertiveness and talkativeness less valuable and to suspect that they were motivated by self-interest, say Corinne Bendersky of UCLA and Neha Parikh Shah of Rutgers. To retain their status, extroverts must contribute at especially high levels to counter growing negative perceptions of them, the researchers say.

Yes, Marketers, You Should Pay Your Influencers

A consumer advocate can be your brand's best friend. They spend 13% more than the average buyer and refer business that equals 45% of the money they spend, according to Satmetrix. The rise of these brand influencers has spawned quite a bit of buzz in recent months for companies thinking this could enhance their marketing campaigns. Some have even started paying influencers for their time to boost some initial success. After all, if the influencer loves the brand and the fans love the influencer, then the fans will love the brand, right?

In reality, it's quite challenging. Our agency recently ran a study that shows brands are having some trouble translating their influencers' authentic love for their products into mutually rewarding relationships. We defined an influencer as someone who: a) has a social media following of 2,500 or more, b) considers themselves to have an influence on their audience, and c) has received or desires to receive compensation from a brand. Through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research (a survey targeting 780 adults and a survey targeting fans with a sample of 1,093 adults), we found that 39% of brand influencers say they have had a bad experience with a company, primarily because the brand didn't follow through with the deal they made (33%) or because they were bad at communicating (23.5%).

Before launching into a discussion about how to better engage your influencers, you may be asking yourself, "How do I find them?" Start by researching who is talking about your company online. You can do this by using social influence identification tools such as SocMetrics or working with third-party influencers or blogger networks. You can also invite influencers to self-identify, or even take it upon yourself to sift through your customer databases to find high-value consumers who might want to influence on your behalf.

Once you've identified your influencers, the next step is establishing a symbiotic relationship with them — a challenge few brands seem able to meet. To better understand the complex nature of the brand-influencer-fan relationship, we derived these guidelines from our research and experience:

Don't underestimate an influencer's power. Recently, Alishan Hopping, a blogger who has been loyal to Kate Spade for years, had a terrible in-store experience. When she reached out to the company via Twitter and their "Contact Us" website feature, she received no response. So she blogged about her experience instead. Within an hour, her followers re-blogged her post, tweeted at Kate Spade, and wrote on the Kate Spade Facebook page about the issue. It was only after receiving this deluge of vicarious consternation that Kate Spade grasped the impact of Alishan's influencer status and tried to make good. Brands can avoid a similar predicament by actively recognizing and engaging with the influencers who reach out to them (for whatever reason, good or bad).

Look for influencers who actually like and use your products. One influencer we interviewed shared a story of what equated to brand stalking: She received a random box of products — stuff she would never use — from an unfamiliar brand, and was then harassed by repeated phone calls and emails haranguing her for not doing her job. Situations such as this happen frequently and unnecessarily. When you identify a potential social influencer for your brand, get to know them first. Explore the purchasing behaviors and lifestyle needs reflected in their blogs, Facebook postings and tweets. If your brand doesn't fit, don't force it. As influencer Morgan Cogswell shares, "The products that I love ... I'll write a diatribe about. They don't have to twist my arm to do it. I just really love it and want other people to love it, too."

Don't fake it. When news broke that Nestlé was using child labor around the world in 2010, their brand advocates came to their rescue, swaying their followers to focus on the good Nestlé was doing with their worldwide formula initiatives. Nestlé then sought to amplify their influencers' success by sponsoring a blog conference. They invited numerous brand ambassadors to attend with the logical (yet misguided) assumption that it would generate a positive dialogue. The effort failed. Since Nestlé had sponsored the conference, it was seen as a manipulative and disingenuous public relations move. To be effective, influencers need to be perceived as independent, authentic fans of the brand. Learning from this experience, Nestlé now remains behind the scenes, personally rewarding — versus publicly sponsoring — their influencers to advocate on their behalf. Using this approach, Nestlé has since gone on to have many successful paid influencer marketing campaigns.

Compensate them. Really. Our study shows that 53% of influencers expect money and 20% expect free products. Overall, they expect their efforts to be rewarded by something of equivalent value, although that isn't necessarily money. It can be a prelaunch product sample or full sponsorship to attend a conference (We've found great success with both) — just as long as it is a fair value exchange. Kelby Carr, a self-proclaimed type-A parent who founded a blog bearing the same title, wrote a Facebook post that sums up responders' feelings: "I am not sure I can express how little interest I have in sharing a company's giveaway in exchange for... Oh right, in exchange for nothing." The post was met with 73 likes and cheers of agreement from other influencers.

Our research explores the different ways influencers are being rewarded and how they want to be rewarded. Whatever compensation you choose — money, free products, discounts, etc. — should align with your objectives, make good business sense and meet your influencers' stated expectations. For example, if you want to run a simple sampling campaign for a new product, prelaunch access is typically all you need. Your influencer receives the product before anyone else along with a request from you that he/she test and review it. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're seeking a production-quality video from an influencer with great reach and resonance, you can work with third parties like BlogHer or Sway Group (and many more) who have established pre-negotiated rates with "famous" influencers.

There are, of course, other factors that weigh into the balance of your company's relationship with brand advocates. The key thing to remember: When properly aligned, these factors set the foundation for a win for your brand (awareness, brand perception, sales), a win for your influencer (credibility, increased engagement, increased fan base) and a win for the rest of your customers (a product, service or point of view never considered before). So get to know them — well — and you'll soon be on your way to building a strong, authentic brand-influencer-consumer relationship.

What's a Working Dad to Do?

I was on a radio show last Father's Day to discuss the struggles men face in trying to balance work and family demands.

During the interview, the co-host, John Aberman, told a quick anecdote about a run-in he had when he was a rising corporate lawyer at a prestigious NYC firm. He was divorced and his ex-wife and his kids lived in London, so he flew there to see his kids every other weekend. After two monster weeks of work, he was heading out of the office to go to JFK one late Thursday afternoon when a more senior partner confronted him. "Where are you going?"

John explained that he'd bulked up the past two weeks to finish his work for his very satisfied client and that he was catching his flight to Heathrow to see his kids. The partner angrily responded, "Bullshit. You see your kids more than I do, and I live with mine. Besides I need you here tonight — and over the weekend." John pushed back and caught his flight, but shortly thereafter decided to give up his career as a lawyer. Life was just too short.

This is an extreme example, but many working fathers face similar pressures to conform to a traditional gender role that insists they be "all in" for work, regardless of achievement level and regardless of family responsibilities. And this is the case despite the facts that:

Dual-income, shared-care families are far more the norm than families with a single-earner and an at-home spouse.

Today's fathers spend three times as much time with their children and twice as much time on housework than dads did a generation ago, and

Men aspire to be even more involved in their families than they are.

As a result, it has been reported that dads experience at least as much work-family conflict as mothers, and that in some ways, men are facing a funhouse-mirror version of women's struggles to attain success at both work and at home.

The Flexibility Stigma Working Group at The Center for WorkLife Law at the UC Hastings College of the Law, consisting of researchers from over a dozen universities, just published a series of research studies in the excellent new issue of the Journal of Social Issues. About half of their articles focus on barriers men face in the workplace as they try to balance work and family demands. Among their findings:



While men value work flexibility, they are reluctant to seek out flexible work arrangements because of fears of being seen as uncommitted and unmanly, and expectations of potential career consequences. These fears, unfortunately, prove to be well-founded.

Fathers who engage in higher than average levels of childcare are subject to more workplace harassment (e.g., picked on for "not being man enough") and more general mistreatment (e.g., garden variety workplace aggression) as compared to their low-caregiving or childless counterparts.

Men requesting family leave are perceived as uncommitted to work and less masculine; these perceptions are linked to lower performance evaluations, increased risks of being demoted or downsized, and reduced pay and rewards.

Finally, men who interrupt their employment for family reasons earn significantly less after returning to work.

All in all, that's a pretty stark set of findings. What's a working father to do?

To me, the first step towards healthier workplace culture is to bring the issue of fathers' work-family out of the shadows and to make it a topic for discussion. Employers won't change if dads assume that employer hostility towards family demands is set in stone, and that they can only resort to working through holes in the system, using only informal arrangements or "invisible" accommodations.

If my generation of busy involved dads doesn't start making change happen, company cultures will remain unchallenged, and more and more dads will have to struggle seemingly alone. But change is possible, and there are many prominent examples of workplace cultures that are supportive of work-family.

So how can we start making changes? As Gandhi said, "we need to be the change we wish to see." If you have the security, flexibility, courage, and inclination (I recognize some may have more ability to do this at work than others), here are four things we working dads can do in our workplaces to make it easier for all of us to discuss and address our work-family concerns.

While at work, talk about your family and ask other men about theirs.

Reach out to some male work friends and start an informal group to discuss your lives outside of work. Have lunch together or grab a drink after work and talk.

Occasionally use work flexibility and let your male colleagues see you do so (e.g., tell people you are leaving early for a school event but are taking work home).

If and when your child is born, take paternity leave instead of just cobbling together a week of accumulated personal days. Many companies have an unused policy collecting dust on the shelf. Someone may as well be the pioneer.

Overall, we need to make it more normal for working fathers to discuss and address family issues. I know it is not easy to stand out. But these small steps can lay the groundwork for building more supportive workplace cultures.

Work-family is not a woman's issue. And it's not a man's issue. It's a family issue that affects us all. It's time we started talking about it.

Yes, Managing IT Is Your Job

In order to see the future more clearly, it's almost always helpful to look back — and this certainly goes for IT and its ever-increasing impact on operations, and ultimately on competitive advantage.

"Information Technology Changes the Way You Compete" was a trailblazing HBR article by Warren McFarlan back in the early 1980s. It told how American Airlines and others had introduced systems to help their customers choose their products and services. These "channel" systems helped steer business to American Airlines. Their strategic use of information technology (IT) presaged the dot.com boom of the 1990s when the Internet made this kind of online ordering commonplace. IT went from being a potential source of competitive advantage to being a necessity for competitive parity.

Similar waves of innovative applications of technology (e.g., ERP systems, RFID, knowledge management, business intelligence) have washed over organizations. As with American Airlines, each competitive advantage with IT is temporary. Competitors copy or suppliers commoditize to erase these advantages. The only competitive advantage comes though agility, keeping ahead of the competition, moving on to the next technology wave.

Yet with each wave, the criticality of IT to basic operations and delivery of service to customers continues to escalate. And the new waves of technology keep on coming: social, mobile, cloud, and Big Data promise to raise organizations' competitive capabilities and dependency on IT further. Every organization in every industry is becoming digital, and IT management is core to these organizations' delivery of services: bringing new functions and services to market faster; taking advantage of information, increasing transparency; reducing costs and increasing consistency and reliability by making processes faster, cheaper or less error-prone through automation; and increasing collaboration within the organization and with the entire value chain of partners, both forward to customers and backward to suppliers.

This trend toward ever more critical reliance on IT is not only transforming the idea and practice of corporate IT, but has disruptive operational implications for every manager. In a previous post, I described the shift in roles as ING, the Netherlands bank, moves from a traditional method of developing new systems in major steps — with design documents and functional specifications thrown over the wall — to making quick, small changes to systems (using "Agile Scrum"). Managers can no longer take months to develop requirements, then wait for IT, then tell IT that wasn't what they wanted. Now, instead, at ING they say, "Here's your team. You need to be in every daily or weekly Scrum cycle or sprint to decide if the work is meeting your needs." ING's change is less a paradigm shift in development (many companies have tried similar approaches such as prototyping in the 1980s and rapid application development in the 1990s), and more of a shift in responsibility for IT — from the IT organization to the core business.

Of course, the trend toward mission-critical reliance on IT is indeed shifting the actual role of the IT organization. In the old days (the 1980s and 1990s), the IT organization was all about managing the technology itself: choosing which vendor's product to buy, then cobbling the products together. In this earlier mode, the IT organization was opaque, inside its silo, taking orders, and controlling costs and risks. But the reality for most organizations today is much different: they are using IT to enable differentiated customer value, so the IT organization must be transparent, collaborative, and accountable for business results and service, with a higher tolerance for risk. And in most organizations, IT commodity services have been placed out of the company, so that the IT organization has been transformed from owning IT resources to procuring IT services and managing IT vendors.

So, where is managing IT for competitive advantage going next?

I believe that IT will become a more integrated operational component of delivering business results, as at ING. Instead of thinking about driving value from the perspective of IT, or HR, finance, sales, or operations, leadership teams will think about a problem they want to solve or a process they want to change, and then align the full breadth of services (IT, HR, operations) needed to accomplish it. Paul Dachsteiner, the Vice President of IS at ice hockey equipment maker Bauer Performance Sports, told me, "Instead of being called IT, I'd rather be lumped into a pool of resources called Business Support or Operations and not differentiate between departments. Just consume resources that help you drive to the desired business value." The IT organization's role will be to manage the delivery and servicing processes, and to assure that the jigsaw pieces that the local fiefdoms in the business develop can fit together.

This will mean that business executives will need to continue to build their comfort with managing IT more directly, instead of relegating it to a "black box" or separate organizational silo, and throwing requirements over the wall. My friend Craig Bickel, Principal at IT strategy consultancy WGroup told me that: "While functional responsibilities will remain specialized, innovation, implementation, and value realization must be shared between the business and IT." And IT will need to continuously reduce its spending on "keeping the lights on" to free up resources and mindshare for innovation and problem solving.

To sum up, how "IT Changes the Way You Compete" is the same in many ways today as it was 30 years ago, as new waves of innovative technology wash over organizations. What's different today is that these successive waves of tech applications have left every organization with a critical core of digital capabilities. Now that IT is essential to the execution of nearly every job, as we move into the future, managing IT will be an even bigger part of your job.

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

Setting Up a Crowdsourcing Effort? Read This First.

Since Jeff Howe first coined the term in a 2006 Wired article, "crowdsourcing" has garnered extensive media buzz and investment dollars. It has earned praise from those who view it as a digital version of the industrial revolution, criticism from some who fear it will cheapen or commoditize their craft and skepticism from those who don't fully understand the mechanics. Frankly, all of these viewpoints have merit.

I've spent the better part of a decade in crowdsourcing — five years as CEO of uTest, an angel investor in crowdsourced CAD firm, GrabCAD — and have consulted for several crowd-driven firms and reviewed dozens of crowd-based business plans for VCs. During that experience, I've developed my own views and insights into what makes crowdsourcing work best. And of course, our uTest experience has honed those views. And so, as we celebrate uTest's 5th birthday, we felt it was a good opportunity to reflect on some of those hard-earned crowdsourcing lessons:

1. Find the right fit: Whether you're considering launching a crowdsourcing business or finding a way to implement crowdsourcing into your existing organization, it's critically important to consider the best way to structure your crowd to achieve the best results. There are various factors that must be examined: Is your crowd performing on-site vs. remote work? Will your crowd compete in single-winner contests vs. multi-winner projects? Are the projects one-off contests or recurring in nature? What incentives can be put in place to ensure engagement and success from the community?

In my experience, spaces that enable multiple winners to perform remote work on a recurring basis are a better fit for building high-growth, sustainable crowdsourcing businesses. Going remote eliminates geographic restrictions, thus opening up the community to anyone with internet access. But why is it important that the community work on a recurring basis? And why should there be multiple winners? Let me put it this way: Imagine recruiting and training a team at your own company for a long-term engagement. Now imagine telling them that only one of them would get paid. Do you think this would help with retention? Do you think your clients would be happy with a new team for every project? Probably not.

2. Crowdsourcing is not enough: Tell a prospect or potential customer that you're a crowdsourcing company and — if you're lucky — you might capture their interest (or perhaps just a polite "ah, cool"). Most of the time, this is the point at which they tune you out. Why? Because your prospective customers don't care how you do something; they care about what you're doing and, more importantly, how it will benefit them.

So never lose sight of what matters to your customers — it's about what crowdsourcing enables them to achieve. In our case, our crowd enables customers to test their web and mobile apps under real world conditions (devices, OSes, browsers, languages), just like their end users will experience. In short, no one will write you a check for being a crowdsourcing company (well, maybe some VCs will) — they care about how it enables them to solve their problems.

3. Engaging a community: Treat the crowd as customers. Appreciate them. Understand that you have two sets of "customers" — your clients and your community. You must provide service above and beyond to both sets of constituents. Properly training and communicating is one thing (and a necessary step). But proactively delighting your community is as important as delighting your customers. Proactively providing our community of testers with opportunities to grow — including networking events, free training, games, awards and career advice — is vital to the overall nurturing of the community.

4. Incentivizing a community: Members of a community care primarily about three forms of currency: money, reputation and increasing their skill set (usually in that order). If you want the best workers in your space to join your community and stay, you must create a path for their growth in these areas. Higher pay is important but what about enabling them to share their knowledge with the rest of the community as a mentor? The one thing you cannot afford is for your valuable members to outgrow you — which happens to a shockingly high percentage of crowdsourcing firms. That doesn't mean stifling their growth, it means empowering them in their professional journey and growing with them.

5. Supply follows demand: While vetting, building and serving a vibrant community is critically important, these things cannot be done instead of building an effective demand generation engine — whether through sales, marketing and/or reseller strategy. At uTest, we like to remind ourselves that, sometimes, the best thing we can do to create opportunities for our tester community is to win our next big customer.

Ultimately, this balance between creating new effectiveness or efficiencies for customers while celebrating and improving the lives of your community is the only way to create lasting, defensible value for all stakeholders. It's harder than most entrepreneurs think, but for those who crack the code in their space, the rewards are great.

Help Your Intern Get a Full-Time Job

Alex, a summer intern in public relations, found herself facing the end of a successful summer internship without the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Alex was smart, talented and well regarded by her colleagues. Her agency, however, simply didn't have a full time job to offer her at the end of her internship.

So Alex's manager took it upon herself to help Alex find a full-time job. Unfortunately, she's the exception, not the rule. Only 37% of students say internships are a good job search resource.

What can you do to help your intern find a job? Here are four options to keep in mind as summer comes to a close:

Open your Rolodex. The first thing Alex's manager did was give Alex a short list of high-quality names of friends and colleagues in the business. She encouraged her to reach out directly and use her name as a reference. One of those names, the president of another PR agency in Chicago, passed along Alex's resume to an employee, who invited Alex in for an interview. She wowed in her interview and the rest is history.

Make introductions. Perhaps you're willing to take it a few steps further. If you've got a stellar intern, why not reach out directly to colleagues or clients who you think might benefit from a bright and motivated new grad? Or invite your intern along for a working lunch or business meeting — and sing her praises on the spot. You can play matchmaker in the moment and give your intern an opportunity to interact with a potential new boss right then and there.

Write a stellar recommendation. Before you get caught up in life-after-interns, take time to sit down and document the great work your intern has done. Take note of both her individual accomplishments and her contributions to the team. You can also weigh in on her future potential — why will she be an outstanding member of any team going forward? What does she bring to the table that you don't typically see in young twenty-somethings? And while you're at it, feel free to post a snippet of that recommendation on LinkedIn for the whole world to see.

Act as a mentor. Rena, a student at UCLA, spent her summer internship with a boutique financial services firm on the East Coast. She excelled in every way possible, but by the end of the summer she realized finance wasn't for her. Her boss Ken took the news in stride. He offered to stay in touch and told her to keep him in mind once she realized what she did want to do — he'd be happy to help in any way possible. Three years later, Rena counts on Ken as one of her most trusted advisors. He has counseled her through career ups and downs, provided referrals and introductions, and continued to support her as she moves through the ranks of the fashion industry.

Remember, there's more at the end of the rainbow than just a full-time offer. If you don't have a job to give, think instead about sharing your network, endorsing your candidate or acting as a mentor — all of which could prove equally or more beneficial over the long-term.

Previously: Hiring an Intern? What to Do Before the Summer Starts and Your Summer Intern Is Here. Now What?

How To Build a High-Performing Digital Team

Digital skills are in high demand and short supply. But first things first — how do you define a digital team when nearly everything is digital?

Digital teams are responsible for developing, testing, and implementing a strategy to reach and engage target audiences through digital channels like web, mobile, and social. While other groups may draft the messaging, a digital team works hand-in-hand with marketing and product leaders to curate and create digital-first content strategy. Most often reporting through the CEO or CMO, digital teams may also be responsible for implementing cross-channel analytics, surfacing relevant emerging trends, and providing comprehensive guidelines. As institutions have weathered the seismic communications shift from managed brand broadcast to real-time community interaction, digital teams have stepped in to manage listening platforms and identify opportunities for engagement. Finally a successful digital team will build a strong partnership with IT, who owns critical technology infrastructure and associated services.

Now that we've defined the team, how the hell do you hire for it? Your general hiring practices still apply: intelligence, energy, and above all integrity. In my 15+ years building digital capabilities in startups, agencies, and the enterprise, and most recently as the Chief Digital Officer at Harvard University, I've seen some consistent traits emerge. Here are six attributes to consider when sourcing talent for a high-performing digital team:

1. People who are omnivores, not vegans. Digital is part technology, part content strategy, part marketing art — and science. People who very strongly identify with only one piece of the equation will struggle on a high-performing digital team. Over the past decade skills within digital teams have merged even further. For example, years ago there was a tidy division between the wireframe creators and front-end developers. As development has become quicker and less costly, more prototyping occurs in code. People who are used to throwing their deliverable over the transom and clocking out — a familiar paradigm in print production — may have trouble tolerating the shifting sands of digital.

2. People who understand a website launch is only the beginning. Focusing solely on a website launch is a bit like planning for your wedding more than your marriage. Smart project managers and content strategists will force you to create personas and walk through use-case scenarios that test workflow and resource assumptions. "Who updates that feature? How? Where does that video clip come from?" Team members should all be aware of desired analytics results like increased sales or reduced transaction steps that will be measured at intervals post launch. Here's a test: if the job candidate can speak compellingly about the launch collateral but less than fluently about the digital product's six-month analytics proof points, beware.

3. People who recognize that design is a differentiator. A unique idea for a digital product or service is surprisingly rare, and design excellence is often the differentiator. Understanding of design is not only a belief in the value of a strong initial concept, but also adherence to the belief that multiple small design decisions add up to a significant user experience impact. This requires a level of attention to detail, and a belief in the value of microinteractions. Everyone on your digital team — not just the designers — should be able to wax effusive about a digital product design they love, and point to the specific attributes that make the design work.

4. People who are comfortable with uncertainty and can act with agility. Everyone who claims to have a five year digital strategy is lying. You aren't shopping for team members who can predict the future — you are looking for people who can make smart decisions based on limited information, and cut their losses when they fail. Changes can start from the technology, like Google releasing Penguin or Twitter changing its API. Or change can originate from the product team, who sees a usage pattern shift and needs to change course. In any event, a bias toward smart-step action rather than becoming mired in analysis is vital for a digital team.

5. People who eat the dog food, willingly and visibly. Digital team members do digital stuff. They put their band's recordings online. They write and share online book reviews. They participate in social networks from Spotify to LinkedIn. Skeptics take note: it takes less time to write a tweet than to tie a Windsor knot. Of course, the greater the level of responsibility in the workplace, the less time people have to create content and engage online. And gender and culture matter in the level and kinds of participation. But you'll find that the best candidates make some time for their digital lives, to see firsthand the benefit and the costs.

6. People who bring varied perspectives, earned from experience. Digital's new compared to print, but it's been around long enough for strong candidates to have work experience that's varied in both role and organization. Look for people with experience delivering software product, toiling on the agency side, and juggling on the client side. Software team experience will give them a thick skin and an always-be-shipping mindset; agency dynamics will teach flexibility and how to handle a crunch; and client roles will provide organizational, stakeholder, and vendor management skills. Varied experience can lead to a kind of multilingualism, making team members able to view problems from others' perspectives and find creative solutions.

Hiring is hard. Building a team is harder. Each addition is a potential win for the culture, or a proverbial bad apple. I've found that using your hiring best practices, and zeroing in on the attributes above results in a digital team that delivers.