Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1562

A History of the World in Three Sentences

A study of 12 countries from 950 to 1850 shows that although Europe at first lagged well behind India and China in numerous technologies, such as cotton processing and textile spinning, its economic development leapt ahead because of 3 factors. Elites were legally blocked from expropriating property; contracts could be enforced; and the West developed cultural emphases on independent thinking, secularism, and saving money, fostering the growth of technology and human capital, say Jakob B. Madsen of Monash University in Australia and Eric Yan of National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Meanwhile, India's technological growth was hampered by its caste system and China's by its civil-service examinations, which selected candidates for administrative positions but, in the view of some scholars, supported the emperor's power and led to a rigidity in the country's intellectual life.

Educate Everyone About Second-Generation Gender Bias

More than 25 years ago the social psychologist Faye Crosby stumbled on a surprising phenomenon: Most women are unaware of having personally been victims of gender discrimination and deny it even when it is objectively true and they see that women in general experience it.

Many women have worked hard to take gender out of the equation — to simply be recognized for their skills and talents. Moreover, the existence of gender bias in organizational policies and practices may suggest that they have no power to determine their own success. When asked what might be holding women back in their organizations, they say:

"It's nothing overt. I just feel less of a connection, either positive or negative, with the guys I work with. So sometimes I seem to have difficulty getting traction for my ideas."

"I look around and see that my male colleagues have P&L responsibility and most of us are in staff roles. I was advised to make the move to a staff role after the birth of my second child. It would be easier, I was told. But now I recognize that there is no path back to the line."

"My firm has the very best intentions when it comes to women. But it seems every time a leadership role opens up, women are not on the slate. The claim is made that they just can't find women with the right skill set and experience."

These statements belie the notion that gender bias is absent from these women's work lives. Second-generation bias does not require an intent to exclude; nor does it necessarily produce direct, immediate harm to any individual. Rather, it creates a context — akin to "something in the water" — in which women fail to thrive or reach their full potential. Feeling less connected to one's male colleagues, being advised to take a staff role to accommodate family, finding oneself excluded from consideration for key positions — all these situations reflect work structures and practices that put women at a disadvantage.

Without an understanding of second-generation bias, people are left with stereotypes to explain why women as a group have failed to achieve parity with men: If they can't reach the top, it is because they "don't ask," are "too nice," or simply "opt out." These messages tell women who have managed to succeed that they are exceptions and women who have experienced setbacks that it is their own fault for failing to be sufficiently aggressive or committed to the job.

We find that when women recognize the subtle and pervasive effects of second-generation bias, they feel empowered, not victimized, because they can take action to counter those effects. They can put themselves forward for leadership roles when they are qualified but have been overlooked. They can seek out sponsors and others to support and develop them in those roles. They can negotiate for work arrangements that fit both their lives and their organizations' performance requirements. Such understanding makes it easier for women to "lean in."

Second-generation bias is embedded in stereotypes and organizational practices that can be hard to detect, but when people are made aware of it, they see possibilities for change. In our work with leadership development programs, we focus on a "small wins" approach to change. In one manufacturing company, a task force learned that leaders tended to hire and promote people, mainly men, whose backgrounds and careers resembled their own. They had good reasons for this behavior: Experienced engineers were hard to find, and time constraints pressured leaders to fill roles quickly.

But after recognizing some of the hidden costs of this practice — high turnover, difficulty attracting women to the company, and a lack of diversity to match that of customers — the company began to experiment with small wins. For example, some executives made a commitment to review the job criteria for leadership roles. One male leader said, "We write the job descriptions — the list of capabilities — for our ideal candidates. We know that the men will nominate themselves even if they don't meet all the requirements; the women would hold back. Now we look for the capabilities that are needed in the role, not some unrealistic ideal. We have hired more women in these roles, and our quality has not suffered in the least."

In another case, participants in a leadership development program noticed that men seemed to be given more strategic roles, whereas women were assigned more operational ones, signaling that they had lower potential. The participants proposed that the company provide clear criteria for developmental assignments, be transparent about how high potential was evaluated, and give direction as to what experiences best increased a person's potential. Those actions put more women in leadership roles.

This is an excerpt from the September HBR article "Women Rising: The Unseen Barriers."

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center





Women: Let's Stop Allowing Race and Age to Divide Us
Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
"Feminine" Values Can Give Tomorrow's Leaders an Edge

Solving the Law Firm Gender Gap Problem

Decades of studies have demonstrated that male law firm partners earn considerably more than their female colleagues. Even when data is controlled for such variables as billable hours, origination, seniority, and law firm size, the gender gap persists. And yet women have been 40-50% of law school students for decades. This is not a pipeline problem; this is a discrimination problem.

The Gender Equity Task Force of the American Bar Association (of which I am a member) was created to recommend ways to eliminate gender bias in the legal profession, with a particular focus on the disparity in compensation between men and women partners. This month, we released several publications to help eliminate this gap, including one that is directed to law firm leaders, Closing the Gap: A Road Map for Achieving Gender Pay Equity in Law Firm Partner Compensation, of which I was the principal author.

As the report details, the roots of pay inequity run deep. The easy answer — that women earn less on a comparative basis because of the impact of their family responsibilities — is simply wrong. Women earn less because of the complex interplay between compensation system factors and the effects of unconscious bias in that process.

Moreover, the axiom that "compensation drives behavior" permeates the ways in which partners seek credit for business generation, a key factor in most law firm compensation systems. Often, that behavior includes active efforts to exclude their colleagues from sharing in that credit. Compensation committees are generally reluctant to use their authority as a tool to combat this problem and create a more level playing field. This allows unconscious biases to thrive.

Closing the Gap proposes recommendations that can be incorporated into any existing compensation system to eliminate the barriers that stand in the way of equal pay for female partners. Moreover, adopting these measures would not just help women — it would result in a fairer and more transparent compensation process for all. Some of these recommendations include:

Ensure there is a critical mass of diverse members on the compensation committee. Research demonstrates that the presence of only one or two women on a decision-making body can lead to marginalization of the minority participants. Further inducement for this recommendation can be found in studies that show companies with more women in key leadership roles and board positions out-perform their competitors.
Develop systems to promote fair and accurate allocation of billing and origination credit. To quote from the report: "The current 'underground' system for the allocation of credit for various roles in client origination, service, and retention that exists in so many firms today is a major impediment to achieving compensation equality." Equitable compensation cannot be achieved without systems that discourage client hoarding, promote cross-marketing among practice groups, and incentivize partners to share credit fairly among those who help attract and retain clients.
Implement formal client succession protocols. Women partners in law firms are frequently excluded from the inheritance of client work from senior partners who retire and pass their client relationships to younger male colleagues. Client management in a sophisticated business should not be subject to individual lawyers making decisions about client credit and succession. This practice is also not in the best interests of clients who should have a role in deciding which lawyers will have this important — and financially rewarding — role in the future.
Develop a process to resolve allocation disputes promptly and equitably. Research demonstrates that female partners are frequently excluded from credit allocation, and have even reported being bullied and intimidated. Firms should create a diverse oversight committee to review and resolve credit disputes, ensuring transparency and accountability in the process.
Implement training for all involved in the evaluation and compensation process. Unconscious bias can skew our judgments of others. Training can help individuals recognize their own biases and can help organizations put in place systems to help override the effects of these biases.
Engage the client in gender equity. Clients have a tremendous opportunity to use their economic power to ensure diversity on their matters and the fair allocation of credit for their work. Law firms should welcome their involvement as part of a client retention strategy that can also help close the gender gap.

Law firms will better survive the difficult economic climate by ensuring a culture where economic growth and inclusive opportunities are linked through engaged leadership and transparent systems. Then we will see the equal opportunities that women have long sought in the profession.

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center











Women: Let's Stop Allowing Race and Age to Divide Us

Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace

A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions

"Feminine" Values Can Give Tomorrow's Leaders an Edge

The Danger of Wellness Programs: Don't Become the Next Penn State

Penn State University's wellness program has become every human resources director's worst nightmare: national news. Partly this is because two of the school's professors — Matthew Woessner and Brian Curran — did a much better job organizing their colleagues in opposition to the wellness program than, for example, CVS employees did when they were subject to a similarly intrusive program.

But also partly this was because Woessner and Curran struck a chord with millions of employees everywhere who have started posting similar stories of invasion of privacy, misinterpreted lab values, unnecessary test expenses, and even loss of low-cost insurance. As these disempowered employees see it, wellness has become another tool to bludgeon them into toeing the corporate line.

Wellness is supposed to "empower" employees but instead did just the opposite at Penn State. Ironically, the only thing that has empowered Penn State employees has been fighting back against this misdirected wellness tyranny. Instead of creating what one of Penn State's health care suppliers called a "culture of wellness," Penn State has created a culture of resentment.

This whole slow-motion debacle would have been completely avoidable at many points in the last week or two... if only Penn State's administration had had access to a search engine and a calculator.

The search engine would have told it that even the major academic proponents of conventional wellness programs don't think they save money, that vendors make up savings numbers, that the screens they insisted upon can't even theoretically save money and a whole body of research opposes them, and that all the extra preventive doctor visits they required were useless. (The search engine also would have told the school's administrators that this scheme was highly unpopular among their employees.)

The calculator would have told them that their 43,000 covered lives probably incurred a total of only about 100 wellness-sensitive medical inpatient events, like heart attacks, of which a few might have taken place in people who were not previously diagnosed and were therefore at least theoretically avoidable, saving the tiniest fraction of their healthcare spending. But we'll never know because they embarked on a prevention jihad against their employees without knowing the value of what they were trying to prevent.

Ironically the worst thing that could have happened to Penn State financially would have been if all the employees did exactly what Penn State wanted them do to — go to the doctor and get more preventive medical care, leading to more diagnoses, testing, and procedures.

How to Avoid Penn State's Mistakes

Here are two clip-and-save questions that, if answered and addressed correctly, will keep your wellness program off the front page:



If you're a general, would you rather have troops with high morale or low cholesterol?

Should wellness be something you do TO your employees or FOR your employees?

If not already self-evident, the answer to the second question becomes obvious in the context of the answer to the first. As an HR department head, don't be distracted by your benefits consultants or wellness vendors, who advocate more medical activity, yielding them more profits by making your department the center of attention. Your job is to enhance performance, not to interfere with it. Sure, sometimes you should interfere — when there is a major issue or major money on the line. This is exactly the opposite situation: There is no upside in playing doctor with your employees.

With these two questions in mind, catalog everything you are doing in the name of wellness. Are these initiatives being done "to" or "for" your employees? Your initiatives should be offers, not threats. Subsidizing healthy cafeteria choices, matching personal fitness expenditures, and sponsoring company sports teams are offers. Making people complete intrusive forms and line up to get blood drawn to be diagnosed by non-physicians are threats.

This wellness mania now affecting most companies suggests that HR departments need more C-suite supervision. The C-suite would never undertake any initiative without an internet search, a calculator, or concern about the impact on employee morale. It's time that HR departments operated the same way.

Just How Valuable Is Google's "20% Time"?

Reports of the death or deliquescence of Google's "20% time," which allows employees to devote one day a week to side projects, may well be exaggerated. They certainly inspire less controversy than Yahoo's targeted euthanizing of telecommuting. But both emphasize the importance of Silicon Valley's most precious value-added differentiator: technical talent.

The care, feeding, and culture of productive talent deserve all the attention and debate they get — and more. Virtually everyone who's made money from the App Store or competed against a Salesforce.com or SurveyMonkey viscerally understands the huge differences between "pretty good" developers and those best described as "terrific." "Acqu-hiring" has become both a buzzword and a best practice for a reason. Relative to the enormous economic value talent can deliver, gluten-free gourmet cafeterias and concierge service represent a small price to pay.

But employing talent is one thing. Keeping it productively innovative and innovatively productive is another. What happens to self-image and individual expectations as enterprise definitions of "productively innovative" and "innovatively productive" change? If people believe they've been promised the opportunity to devote up to one day a week pursuing disruptive innovation insights, they're arguably entitled to feel a little cheated or miffed when told to "double down" on their day jobs. At a certain point, innovation cultures are as much about "credibility" as creativity and ingenuity.

That's why Google presents such a special case. No one doubts founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are passionately committed — intellectually and emotionally — to innovation as core to their entrepreneurial identities and effectiveness. That sensibility made Google Google.

Yet it's also true the company shut down Google Labs, its popular intrapreneurial playground and beta site, to the surprise and disappointment of employees and customers alike. More than a few Googlers also feel that Google X — the "disruptive/new paradigms" skunkworks operation launched in 2010 — now owns "big think" innovation hearts and minds of their founders. Google X innovation gets to create the future, they observe, while Google innovation gets to improve the business. Their innovation discretion shrinks while Google X's horizons expand.

Is this perception unfair or inaccurate? Certainly, many people inside the company and out agree that Larry Page took the late Steve Jobs's advice and admonitions very seriously: "The main thing I stressed was focus," Jobs said. "Figure out what Google wants to be when it grows up. It's now all over the map. What are the five products you want to focus on? Get rid of the rest, because they're dragging you down. They're turning you into Microsoft. They're causing you to turn out products that are adequate but not great."

Neither Steve Jobs nor Apple culture encouraged, nurtured, or celebrated 20% time among employees to inspire innovation. To the contrary, Apple's clarity of vision and relentless dedication to user experience and design assured that the company's world-class talent would overwhelmingly focus their efforts on delivery, not novelty. Apple innovation culture was more top-down alignment of talent than facilitation of bottom-up empowerment. But successfully delivering that vision to overwhelming market approval proved intoxicating and addictive for much of the company's top technical talent.

But I don't think the story is Page or Brin becoming more Jobs-like or that Google's innovation culture has pruned individual discretion in favor of greater organizational alignment. My view — reflected in the comments of many Googlers — is that the company is internally debating how its most talented employees generate the most valuable innovation. Do they productively innovate better by more rigorously focusing on their ongoing projects? Or do curiosity-driven and/or passion-driven initiatives lead to measurably better innovation outcomes?

Google has publicly defined itself as an organization that wants to be data driven in its most important business decisions. The company has put people analytics of individual talent and team performance alike at the core of managing itself. Yes, there's flakiness and inherent subjectivity in many of the metrics. But the simple truth is that Google as both a culture and a global enterprise wants to take more data more seriously.

The obvious result? Google's innovation culture is being shaped as much by the performance data of its people as by their technical intuitions and insights. In other words, tomorrow's Google won't embrace 20% "free time" for everyone; innovation best practice will mean some individuals and teams will have as much discretionary time as they need while others will have virtually nil.

You've got a problem with that? Well, the data suggest you shouldn't. I don't doubt for a minute that Google's founders and top leadership will ultimately rely on their gut instincts and intuitions — albeit richly informed by data — when the time comes to hire, fire, and/or acquire. Nor do I doubt that the care, feeding, and culture of technical talent will increasingly be determined and defined by data. That's where credibility will come from and, yes, that's what will sharpen entrepreneurial focus, as well.

C'mon, IT Leaders. Take a Chance!

Businesses mostly seek to avoid risk. Leaders equate risk with potential failure, so organizations have morphed into hierarchical, fixed systems to constrain variability within an acceptable range that has become progressively narrower. As a result, in recent years, innovative ideas have been stifled and entire industries have fallen into the death spiral of cost/price cutting commoditization. Enterprise IT is no different.

To respond to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of the business environment today, IT leaders need to address risk differently by looking at it in totality and questioning their assumptions, challenging long-held assertions and recognizing both the analytical fallacies and less-than-perfect cognitive processes they use. Instead of risk = bad, leaders need to understand that today, calculated risk = innovation, meeting marketplace demands, leapfrogging competition and creating true profit.

Understanding Risk

Risk is a necessary feature of innovation. It requires us to weigh all the potential benefits and harms of one choice of action over another, and to balance positive potentials and stated priorities to achieve desired outcomes versus potential harmful outcomes. Few IT leaders understand and consider all these risk factors in their decisions and develop the skills to address them:



Decision risk: To make a decision or not, when the consequences of not making a decision, not challenging common wisdom or re-evaluating basic business assumptions, overly weighted worst cases, invisible bureaucratic biases, or prejudicial framing (relative, absolute, 40% loss = 60% win) all contribute to decision risk.

Adoption risk: Adopting technologies or responding to market, business, and technology trends too quickly or too slowly; reactively or over thought, without considering how non-technical implications or unintended consequences contribute adoption risk.

Execution risk: A wrong execution model or poor execution can make a project run too long and cost too much, leading to a total loss of focus and a reduction in value creation. It also comes from not adequately considering the organization's energy, skill, and policies to accomplish the project.

Leadership risk: Psychology has found that "for most people, the fear of losing $100 is more intense than the hope of gaining $150", and IT leaders are no exception. This loss aversion prevents taking appropriate risks.

Identity risk: Constraining innovation to known specific infrastructure or platform stack; focusing on project completion success rather than value creation success; attending more to technology issues than business issues; taking psychological shortcuts like "the illusion of knowledge" where familiarity hides ignorance and the "the illusion of truth" where repetition substitutes for evidence; overconfidence—all these contribute to identity risk.

Cultural risk: Having a "failure is unacceptable" culture causes total risk avoidance or an inability to cut losses and walk away from a decision that doesn't work out — a trap of "escalation of commitment to a losing course of action." It prevents the wisdom of learning from failure.

Reputation risk: C-suites fear their brand's reputation, neglecting what's best in creating value for the business or customers and letting the bureaucratic brand image which mistakes appearance for relationship and form for content prevent experimentation.

Measurement risk: Fail to measure the real goal of innovation, focus on project progress rather than value created and turning management measures into goals instigating aberrant behavior.

Opportunity risk: Applying scarce resources in one area of IT precludes investment in another, which presents the risk of missing an opportunity. inaction disguised as patience and impatience also contribute to opportunity risk.

This taxonomy should help IT leaders take better-calculated risks in the future, as long as they bear these six truths in mind:

The failure to take on value-adding IT projects is worse than taking on IT projects that fail. Failing to deliver new capabilities to the organization is the most significant risk controlled by IT. Almost half of IT projects run over budget and about 56 percent deliver less value than predicted. Fear of failing means many choose to do nothing. However, it is not failed projects as much as projects not taken on that will most influence the future success of an enterprise. Research from the Standish Group suggests higher failure rates result in more total value generated for the enterprise. Accept failure, do not accept not trying.
A focus on acquiring gains will lead to better results than a focus on avoiding losses. Many new projects get hung up on the chance of failure. Business and IT leaders need to view the glass as half full--40 percent chance of failure is a 60 percent chance of success. The value of an IT investment must not be based on its cost, but rather on the capability to generate value that it might bring to the organization. There is no safe innovation, only varying risk and reward.
Trying to preserve past investments delays value creation. Businesses make irrational, fallacious decisions on prior sunk costs. IT is particularly prone to this when trying to force fit everything into a previously acquired hardware or software platform, regardless of its applicability to the problem being addressed. Trying to preserve past investments or force-fit capabilities into unsuitable platforms delays value creation, increases prospective costs unnecessarily, and creates applications that are not fit for actual use. Sunk costs don't count.
IT creates risk confusing leadership, governance, and managing. IT often fails to step up to its leadership role, identifying instead with "aligned with the business." This outdated thinking can be disastrous. IT must lead by showing how technology is applied in IT itself, then influencing and guiding the organization in making the right decisions and coming up with an innovative product plan. Then, IT must direct and restrain, but not hinder the use of technology--how it is developed, sourced and applied in the best interests of the organization and its stakeholders with appropriate governance mechanisms. Lastly, IT must monitor and manage the delivery and application of IT to serve the organization, even if it is not the primary source of delivery. The risk of a wrong decision is much less than the risk of no decision.
Small IT failures provide great opportunities to learn. This is called "failing forward." Risk doesn't involve putting all of your funding into a huge project only to watch it crash and burn. Rather, IT leaders should fund small innovation projects preferably of non-mission-critical nature as experiments first. The lessons learned from "thinking big, starting small" can be critical when it does come to the bigger projects down the road and helps to earn credibility when IT presents a business case for them. Don't measure and punish failure; measure and celebrate learning.
Failing fast and moving forward is a big win. If IT projects have to fail or a strategy needs to change, failing fast helps prevent losing big. Small, agile cycles of development and risk assessment help to measure goals, evaluate success and easily change execution strategy. Asset light models always beat capital investment until predictable scale is achieved. If the next step needs a budget, it is too big a step.

If IT leaders can take better calculated risks, organizations can be tremendously successful. Companies with broader risk management outlooks and practices outperform their peers, according to a survey from Ernst and Young. Apple, Amazon, and Google are not the only examples risk taking of game-changing innovations.

Dun and Bradstreet, known for their insight on businesses, went a notch ahead when they launched data-as-a-service. Even more impressively, their spin out Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. totally transformed and integrated its existing technology platforms from several expensive legacy systems into a single platform utilizing SaaS, Cloud, and open source technologies.

Netflix is another example of disruptive innovation. The movie-by-mail program was enhanced by the streaming option in 2010 and slowly they killed all their competition like Blockbuster. Interestingly, they started with changing a simple concept of "late fees" and eradicating them even though the move could lead to loss of revenue.

Tech innovation is almost dead in the financial industry. Our own experience with tradeMONSTER, a small startup founded in 2006, has become a leader in online trading by taking risks like being the first browser-based trading platform, the first html5 mobile trading platform, and by offering disruptive option trading tools based on an open source trading platform.

What is the key similarity behind all such examples? Leadership overcoming a "fear to fail" by broadly balancing all risks enabling ground breaking innovations resulting in business growth, customer preference, industry recognition and awards.

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

To Simplify, First Clear the Underbrush

This post was coauthored by Lisa Bodell.

Many people envision the upper rungs of the corporate ladder as an inspired, innovative place where leaders spend their time on stimulating projects that shape the organization's future. But this vision is not always a reality. In many companies today, even the most tenured individuals are just as bogged down with policies and procedures as their entry-level colleagues, if not more so. In addition, the focus on producing short-term results often leaves little time for long-term strategy — the area where the expertise of experienced professionals is needed most.

To make way for innovative and big-picture thinking, managers need to clear the underbrush that often chokes productivity. This is the first of seven strategies for simplifying your organization that we outlined in an earlier post. Here are four best practices to get you started:

Pick up the phone. Sure, having an email chain to document interactions can be useful to reference, but it frequently takes more time to write an email than to simply explain details in a live conversation. If you find yourself struggling to organize your thoughts in an email, stop and ask yourself if it would be quicker to vocalize the situation. Having a two-way conversation out loud is also helpful for answering questions immediately, and preventing future back-and-forth messages.

Encourage streamline ideas. Let's face it, most people work on tasks that aren't always the best use of time. Senior leaders who assign these tasks can be so far removed from certain processes that they aren't aware when assignments are more trouble than they're worth. Sign-offs required in triplicate? Recurring meetings that no longer serve a purpose? Separate reports that include the same information? Encourage employees to keep an eye out for inefficient tasks and challenge them to suggest a new way of doing things. Ask: What meetings can we eliminate? What reports can we stop doing? What steps in a process can be removed right now? Make it clear these suggestions won't be taken as complaints, but instead viewed as creative ideas for improving productivity. For example, one senior manager did this by sponsoring a yearly "spring cleaning" that was essentially a contest for identifying low-value or time-wasting tasks. (And of course it can be done any time of the year.)

Rethink "reply all." One of the biggest time-sinks in the corporate world is managing an ever-growing inbox. To simplify the process of sorting through emails, people should be clear about what they need from specific people. If someone is copied as an FYI but no action is required, say so at the beginning of the message. Even better, try this trick: add 'NNTR' — No Need To Respond — in the subject line of your email. Train staff to also consider whether people should be taken off the email chain, rather than automatically replying to all. Some companies, like Ernst and Young, discourage internal blasts by making the reply all button harder to access in Lotus Notes. By adding to the number of clicks needed to reply all, the company sends the message that it should only be used in specific situations.

Stop reviewing low-impact work. Another opportunity for freeing up time is to get out of the business of checking and double-checking your people's work products. If you've hired good people and trained them appropriately, you probably don't need to review all revisions of their assignments. Sure, when documents are being sent to potential clients or very senior managers, it's a good idea to make sure they are thoroughly reviewed. However, not all work products have that kind of impact on business outcomes. So for outputs that are not mission-critical, make it clear to staff members that it is their responsibility to proofread their own work and ensure their own quality control — and that you trust them to do a great job.

All organizations are slowed down by unnecessary underbrush that reduces productivity. And while you'll never get rid of all of it — and it will always keep coming back — these best practices can give you a starting point for clearing some of it away.

This post's coauthor, Lisa Bodell, is the founder and CEO of FutureThink and the author of Kill the Company.

A Gender Curiosity: Parents with All Girls and No Boys Own More Stock

For unknown reasons, married couples with only female children are about 6 percentage points more likely to own stock than those with both male and female offspring, according to a study of a large U.S. database by Vicki L. Bogan of Cornell University. The phenomenon is limited to stocks; there's no impact of offspring gender on a couple's likelihood of holding mutual funds, for example. Having only male children has no effect on stock ownership, except in the case of single mothers, who are more likely to own stock if they have only boys.

Here's What Really Happens When You Extend a Deadline

In June, the Obama administration pushed back the deadline for employers with fifty or more workers to provide health insurance for their employees by a full year — until Jan 1, 2015. Admittedly, the implementation of anything as complex as the Affordable Care Act is going to take time, and those involved have been working furiously to try to meet the government's deadlines. So, at least with respect to this particular part of the ACA, everyone has an additional year to get everything just right. Sounds like a good thing, doesn't it?

Only — how furiously do you think everyone with this new, extended deadline is working now? Are they still burning the midnight oil... or are they saying to themselves, Let's take a breather. We've got plenty of time.

What happens when we move back deadlines — once we get past the initial feeling of sweet relief? Research suggests we have a lot of difficulty using our newly-found time wisely. We wind up facing the same problem again — the same time pressure, the same stress, the same feeling-not-quite ready — only now we've gone an additional week, or month, or year without reaching an important goal.

So why do we squander the time extensions we are given, and what can we do about it? The answer to the latter requires an understanding of the former, so let's start there.

Problem #1: We lose motivation

It was first observed by researchers in the early part of the last century that one's motivation to reach a goal increases as one's distance from the goal decreases. Whether you are a salesperson trying to reach a sales target, or a rat running down a tunnel to get a piece of cheese, the closer you get to success, the more intensely you pursue it. Psychologists call this largely unconscious mechanism the "Goal Looms Larger Effect," meaning that the nearer you are to the finish line, the larger the goal "looms" in your mind — the more it dominates your thinking, and benefits from your attention.

Whenever you push back a deadline, you are increasing the distance once again between you and the finish line. Now, more urgent goals will loom large, and your original goal will languish in the back of your mind.

Problem #2: We procrastinate



In 2012, the IRS received over 10 million tax extension forms — a number that increases every year. Also increasing, according to Turbo Tax, is the number of people who wait until the last two weeks of tax season to file. What do we have to thank for these trends? E-filing. That's right — now that it is quicker and easier to file our taxes, or file for an extension, we are waiting even longer to do so. E-filing takes the pressure off, so it's easier for those with a tendency to procrastinate to delay.

But that's ok, because I work better under pressure, says the procrastinator. Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't. No one does. Psychologically, saying your work is better under pressure makes zero sense, because "pressure" is just another way of saying "just barely sufficient time to complete whatever I'm doing." How can less time help you do a better job? This is like claiming that you are more rested when you give yourself fewer hours to sleep.

It's really far more accurate to say that if you are a procrastinator, you work because there is pressure. Without pressure, you don't work. Which is why pushing back a deadline is absolutely terrible for procrastinators. (Though naturally, they are usually the ones asking for extensions in the first place.)

Problem #3: We are terrible judges of how long things take



Psychologists call this the planning fallacy — a pervasive tendency to underestimate how long it will take to do just about anything — and it can be attributed to several different biases. First, we routinely fail to consider our own past experiences while planning. As any professor can tell you, most college seniors, after four straight years of paper-writing, still can't seem to figure out how long it will take them to write a 10-page paper.

Second, we ignore the very real possibility that things won't go as planned — our future plans tend to be "best-case scenarios." And as a consequence, we budget only enough time to complete the project if everything goes smoothly. Which it never really does.

Lastly, we don't think about all the steps or subcomponents that make up the task, and consider how long each part of the task will take. When you think about painting a room, you may picture yourself using a roller to quickly slap the paint on the walls, and think that it won't take much time at all — neglecting to consider how you'll first have to move or cover the furniture, tape all the fixtures and window frames, do all the edging by hand, and so on.

If you push back a deadline without addressing the poor time planning that landed you in hot water in the first place, you will likely end up in hot water again down the road.

How to Make Good Use of an Extended Deadline



If we want to solve Problems 1 & 2 — keeping motivation high and keeping the pressure on for procrastinators — we need to find ways to shorten the distance between where we are now and where we want to end up. The most effective solution is to impose interim deadlines, effectively breaking a larger goal up into discrete sub-goals spaced out strategically in time. These deadlines need to be meaningful as well — if it's no big deal to miss the deadline, then it's not a real deadline.

Research by Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch suggests that many of us understand this implicitly. In one of their studies, students had to turn in three papers by the semesters' end. Only 27% of them chose to submit all three on the last day — the majority established earlier deadlines for one or more of the papers voluntarily. In fact, roughly half the students chose to impose deadlines optimally, evenly-spacing them throughout the semester. Those that did turned in superior work and received higher grades. (So much for working best under pressure, eh?)

To solve Problem #3, you need to be very deliberate when it comes to project planning. Specifically, you need to make sure you explicitly:

consider how long it has taken to complete s similar project in the past,
try to identify the ways in which things might not go as planned, and
break the project down, spelling out all the steps you will need to take to get it done, and estimating the time necessary to complete each step.

If it's not possible to set interim deadlines or make sure actions are taken to avoid the planning fallacy, then you really should try to avoid pushing back your deadline altogether. The odds are good that you'll have little to show for it but wasted time.

Stanford Medical School's Plan to Attract More Female Leaders

The Stanford School of Medicine (SSoM) recently launched an initiative to increase the representation of women on its faculty. The program is rooted in data that should resonate with any business or profession confronting its own gender gap in the leadership ranks.

Like many organizations, SSoM requires an "all-in" commitment from its faculty members, which often translates to punishing hours that aren't exactly conducive to work-life balance. Such work-life conflicts significantly impacted the SSoM's ability to recruit and retain women. SSoM has a stable of policies (PDF) which offer flexibility options — including unpaid leave for up to a year after the birth or adoption of a child; grants of up to $5,000 per year for childcare; on-site childcare options; grants for dependent care expenses incurred while traveling to attend professional meetings; temporary reductions from full-time to part-time status for family-related needs, etc. However, the utilization rates for these policies were low, and they were often seen as incompatible with professional norms of success. SSoM realized that a much fuller response was needed to combat the threats to faculty excellence and growth. Recognizing that leadership support and engagement is fundamental to the success of any cultural shift, the SSoM embarked on its effort with the full commitment of leaders throughout the University.



That effort has taken root in the development of a strategic focus on flexibility that can serve as a blueprint for any workplace. It includes an analysis of flexibility practices at other institutions and the collection of detailed data from within to better understand the individual flexibility needs of SSoM faculty and the specific cultural barriers that were inhibiting the use of existing opportunities.

Not surprisingly, the results demonstrate that when existing flexible policies are not aligned with the culture of the workplace — in this case, academic medicine — it results in a dynamic that inhibits their use. Specifically, (1) professionals are concerned that they will look less committed to their careers if they opt-in to flexibility policies and (2) they fear placing an extra burden on their already overburdened colleagues. SSoM's data shows that professional identity drives behaviors — as well as attrition — when the demands of a 65 hour workweek lead to a high rate of dissatisfaction with work-life integration and create significant work-work conflict as a result of the many demands on a faculty member's time.

Research has also shown that male STEM professors spend more time engaging in activities that directly relate to career advancement, devoting 42% of their work hours to research, compared to 27% for female professors, who spend more time on service and mentoring activities that do not necessarily get rewarded.

Armed with this data, SSoM is now moving forward with a comprehensive program to integrate flexibility policies as a core element of the faculty advancement process. A key aspect has been the development of Academic Biomedical Career Customization (ABCC). ABCC is a comprehensive program designed to increase the cultural acceptance of work-life integration plans and policies. The program is based in part on Deloitte's Mass Career Customization framework. A key component includes planning conversations between faculty members and their Division Chiefs that focus on developing a short- and long-term strategy to achieve career objectives and leverage existing policies. The ultimate goal is to help faculty better combine their work and life goals.

Another major innovation is the development of a banking system that allows faculty to earn rewards for time spent on certain activities that benefits their departments or divisions, but that frequently go unrecognized. For example, the banking system allows hours spent mentoring students and participating on committees to be converted into support mechanisms such as grant writing assistance, meal deliveries, and housecleaning.

The program is currently being implemented as a pilot involving 50 faculty members across six divisions within the medical school. According to initial surveys of the participants, the early results are positive. Participants appreciate the value of engaging in a thorough career planning process that includes work-life concerns and offers support mechanisms. The pilot will continue for another year to allow for additional data collection and opportunities to ensure successful integration into the school's culture. SSoM anticipates that this program can be scaled throughout the medical school at the conclusion of the pilot phase.

The School of Medicine's efforts are combatting the well-worn argument that flexibility initiatives cannot work in certain settings. Perhaps it will be a group of STEM specialists who can clearly demonstrate through leadership support and detailed data that flexibility — and attracting more female leaders in turn — isn't rocket science. It's about creating the right culture.

Women in Leadership
An HBR Insight Center





Women: Let's Stop Allowing Race and Age to Divide Us
Tell Me Something I Don't Know About Women in the Workplace
A Fairer Way to Make Hiring and Promotion Decisions
"Feminine" Values Can Give Tomorrow's Leaders an Edge