Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1563

How IT Professionals Can Embrace the Serendipity Economy

With Frederick's Taylor invention of scientific management in the 1880s, and its subsequent assimilation into what we now consider modern management, organizations have used logic and rationality to the eliminate waste, to seek efficiency, and to transfer human knowledge to tools and processes. This perspective created the industrial economy lens through which most managers perceive their operations.

The industrial age economy does not exist in a vacuum. Running alongside it is the Serendipity Economy, an economic space where often random, always unanticipated interactions occur that may lead to value. Industrial age measures can't evaluate Serendipity Economy results, leaving its outcomes like invention and innovation, process improvements, and new businesses relegated to the evidence of anecdote.

IT professionals need to recognize and embrace the Serendipity Economy in order to better understand the impact of technology investments, improve employee engagement and drive business transformation.



Serendipity into Performance

The depths of The Serendipity Economy can't be plumbed in a single short post, but its principles and implications can be spelled out so IT professionals can turn ideas into action.

The process of creation is distinct from value realization.

Consider the slide deck. Microsoft provides productivity tools that create presentations quickly and efficiently. But nothing in Microsoft's Office suite ensures that the resulting presentation represents anything of value. Cost and time savings should never be the primary reasons for purchasing or upgrade decisions. IT needs to create models that examine and reflect the potential for enhanced value coming from such systems. For companies with existing productivity suites, the incremental improvements of new productivity features is small; however, the integration of collaboration features may significantly improve the value realization of the underlying productivity suite.

Value realization is displaced in time from the act that initiated the value. A presentation developed for a conference does not produce much value until it is actually presented, an event which may occur weeks or months after the document is completed. Technology investments work the same way. Take for example 7-Eleven, a company that implemented enterprise social networking with no idea as to it eventual use. It languished for months until 7/11/2011, during the company's birthday celebration, when franchise managers started sharing merchandizing practices. The managers haven't stopped talking to each other. Not only have managers started sharing merchandizing insights, but they also share maintenance tips, and the corporate offices now regularly tap store manager knowledge to help interpret business intelligence results. The implication for IT leaders is that for horizontal technology, like collaboration and enterprise social networking, look past time and cost savings and track longer term, often unanticipated payoffs.

The measure of value requires external validation. Once a presentation is delivered, the only way an organization knows if the message landed is to ask. Serendipity Economy outcomes can't be assigned a value associated with their means of production. These outcomes require feedback in the form of surveys, discussions or collaborative feedback to determine what value they may have contributed. Thus, if a process doesn't result in direct value, then track and ask. Tags like #newproduct or #processimprovement can provide entry points for monitoring the progress of ideas that arise from, or quickly develop, within enterprise social networking environments. Use short, specific surveys to understand if new technologies, or new ideas, are taking hold, and what value, if any, they may have generated, and how long it took for that value to be realized.

Value is not fixed, and cannot be forecasted. The value of a knowledge asset varies depending on who receives it, when they receive it and their perceived need for that asset at the time. This can't be forecasted. Technology as well, deployed at one point in time, and deemed useless, may reveal value as personal, business and technological circumstances change. So, don't assign too much validity to return on investment models for horizontal IT products or services. The forecast will likely be significantly discounted from actual results that arise from serendipitous activity.

You can't anticipate the network's potential for value or any actual value it may produce. The Serendipity Economy is not bound by the creation of assets, artifacts, or things. It also encompasses human networks. Because of complex interactions, the current value of a network may change significantly depending on who takes part, the topic of engagement, and the ability, capability, or permission to execute. That means small pilots won't demonstrate the ultimate value or utility of any horizontal product or service. Rich and complex networks will result in serendipitous activity much more so than pilots. Deploy widely early and monitor a broad spectrum of results for productivity improvements and serendipitous outcomes.

Serendipity may enter at any point in the value web, and it may change the configuration of the value web at any time. Value webs represents human networks at work. These dynamic webs result in different potentials for generating and absorbing value. Changes in value webs reinforce the fluctuating value of knowledge or ideas, and this instability essentially eliminates the ability to forecast value from the current state. IT leaders should therefore deploy systems that can adapt to changes, and leverage those changes to produce outputs and outcomes that might not have been anticipated by the designers. In collaborations systems, for instance, don't overly engineer processes so that they constrain a system's ability to adapt. The Serendipity Economy often unconsciously drives the broad adoption of enterprise social networking because it more readily captures, tracks and facilitates serendipitous activities than systems designed to control rather than empower.

Courage and Patience

IT leaders and their business counterparts need to acquire the patience to monitor serendipitous activity, and the courage to protect technologies and ideas that may take time to mature, or changes in circumstance to reveal their true value — and the willingness to empower people to embrace, explore and follow serendipitous activity wherever it may lead. That means not just finding serendipity in the business, but examining your own shop for new value that can't be found in lines of code per day or the speed of a call center response.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





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Health-Care Executives: How to Prepare for the Onslaught of Confused Consumers

It's hard to see anything clearly from inside a jar. I know because I sit inside one much of the time. I'm a health-plan executive, and my jar is the U.S. health-care system.

From the inside, it's impossible to know how consumers think — or, more urgently, how they're going to behave in the very near future when many of them have to buy their own health insurance via exchanges.

It's time health-care leaders took a few lessons from the business world — in particular, from consumer-marketing experts, who often have to battle to get their own companies to see outside the jar. As a marketer by trade, I've waged that fight myself, and I know that looking into the lives of real people often yields real surprises.

The health-care jar can be a very comfortable place, though. Inside, we have our own language, rules, and oddities. In fact, we seldom even realize we're in a jar, let alone deign to accommodate people unfamiliar with our world. But we're going to have to accommodate them, and soon.

Market and regulatory forces are combining to shift health-care decision-making responsibility onto end users, and in 2014, approximately 10 million consumers will begin buying their own insurance. The new online exchanges will be a marked improvement over today's health-insurance purchase process, but if you've ever tried comparison-shopping for insurance, you know what's going to happen. Without a lot of education and support, consumers are going to find they're unable to make sense of the options.

Are those of us in the health-care industry ready for this onslaught of confused consumers? Judging from what I've seen, we're not. No, we're not ready at all.

I recently facilitated a round-table discussion at a Massachusetts consumer-empowerment conference where heads of hospitals, health plans, government agencies, and associations tried to take off their industry-expert hats and think like consumers. Their task was straightforward: evaluate hospitals for a hypothetical knee surgery. They looked at data — presented in a tidy grid unlike any I've seen in real life — about costs, complications, and volume of procedures. The participants at one table complained that these data points were insufficient. How many procedures had each surgeon performed? How long would recovery take? And how likely were their knees to be fixed? (Of course, the irony here is that the people wishing for more data were the very people with access to the real data and the clout to publish it.)

The experts at this conference ended up making the "right" choice — the larger of two community hospitals. Like wine novices ordering the second-least-expensive wine in a restaurant, they made a respectable choice that wouldn't have broken the bank. They were not swayed by hospital brand or a primary-care doctor's recommendation. But to me, their choice didn't reflect real consumer behavior, like mine.

After all, if I had to pick, I'd go for the most expensive option, which bears a striking resemblance to the teaching hospital where my husband works. Even though I know better, when faced with a decision about my own health care, I am affected by brand, and I doubt I am alone. In my day job, I care a lot about the total cost of care, but when it comes to my family's care, I do not. If my copayment is the same, it's actually not economically rational to care. In fact, many consumers assume that the higher-priced option is better. Most consumers do not seek the best option for society as a whole, no matter how much insiders might wish they would.

For our health-care system to enable consumers to shoulder the responsibility coming their way, health-industry leaders need to get outside of the jar. Instead of "playing" the patient, we need to understand what actual consumers want, what matters to them, and what information they need in order to make decisions.

This is the same challenge faced by consumer-marketing people in business. Like health-care leaders, most corporate executives are very comfortable inside the jar. It's not easy to get them to look outside, but it can be done. If forward-looking marketers were to advise health-care leaders about solving their jar problem, they'd say:

1. Recognize you're in a jar. You can't solve a problem until you acknowledge it exists. Look around. Are you surrounded only by people who think, talk, and act like you? Do you design "new" approaches with little input from end users, or without a clear-eyed view of how much impact it will really have? If so, guess what: You're in a jar.

2. Ask for help to get out. If you've been in the jar for a while, you'll need directions to find your way outside. First, realize you don't have all the answers. Then seek help. Establish a dialogue with employees. Survey your customers. Collaborate with other companies — even across industries — on best practices. Pay attention not only to what your competitors are doing, but also to what other industries are doing. (Perhaps health care can learn from the Cheesecake Factory?) Remember: When you ask questions you signal strength, security, and maturity — not weakness.

3. Act on the basis of input. You need to do something with the information you collect. Not only will you lose credibility with the people you've asked if you ignore what they tell you, but you are also likely to miss out on valuable insights that can help you hone a competitive advantage. Too many business executives busy themselves with gathering data, but then fail to put that data to work — or, worse, they dismiss or explain away whatever they don't like. In the past, successful leaders were supposed to know what to do, and to prove their competence by making bold, independent decisions. Today, however, leaders must be more connected — to one another, and ultimately to the customer. That means you have to listen, and then respond and adapt on the basis of what you hear. In health care, for instance, we're learning that it simply doesn't work to will patients to do what we think they should. Rather, we must acknowledge what consumers actually do, and understand why — if we're to have any chance of changing their behavior.

4. Lather, rinse, repeat. In today's marketplace, there's no time for resting on laurels. Customers are constantly changing, as society does, and organizations must evolve accordingly. Keep tapping on the glass. You might even want to push the jar over and venture outside.

Marketers always start with questions about the customer: Who are they? What makes them tick? I don't hear these questions very often inside the U.S. health-care jar, though. As I travel across the world to learn about other health-care systems, I'm finding the most forward-thinking health-care leaders are observing and responding to signals from patients, and, indeed, whole communities. We need to do the same. Outside the jar, consumers are ready to tell us what they want and need. We just need to get out there, ask, and listen.

Blackberry Forgot to Manage the Ecosystem

The story of Blackberry underlines a new truth about the competitive landscape we live in: success or failure isn't a function of a good product or service, or a well-run, cost effective company with a sound capital structure. It also requires an effective strategy to manage your ecosystem.

This was Blackberry's failure. The company had become complacent about its remarkably loyal customers and didn't recognize the threat posed by rival ecosystems. Like many established firms before it, Blackberry blew the opportunity to become a nodal player and leverage the energies of its complementors, in the way that Apple does with its apps.

But incumbents don't always have to lose in the game of value capture. By playing their cards right, they may be able to sustain their position and both create a value proposition that will appeal to the end customer, and keep their suppliers and complementors in check.

In the July issue of HBR, Wharton's John Paul MacDuffie and I report the results from our research on how value migrates in industry ecosystems. We consider why in sectors like the computers of the 1980s value can migrate from the former integrated firms, giants such as IBM, to the new specialists that spring up in the industry ecosystem, such as Microsoft and Intel, and see what makes the "bottleneck," the core of the system's value, shift around in the sector.

We then consider why other sectors, such as automobiles, despite the hype and the expectations of change and value chain reconfiguration, have been remarkably stable. Despite the massive outsourcing that has happened in cars, value appropriation (in terms of share of market capitalization in the ecosystem) still rests with car manufacturers and not the ever-growing component makers.

Our research offers an explanation about what drives value to move or not.

We find that firms that succeed are those that proactively manage the structure of their sectors and keep a set of suppliers working for them in hierarchical, closed supplier networks. IBM made the mistake of opening up its sector through a set of standards which ultimately led to its demise, whereas today's Apple has a carefully controlled set of suppliers and complementary players to support its value proposition.

The solution is not to be vertically integrated but, rather, to control by managing differentiability — i.e., being the actor along the value chain who guarantees the product quality and shapes the experience — as well as manage the replaceability of other actors along the value chain. Automobile manufacturers have kept the lion's share of the sector as they managed to control the sector and shape the experience.

Bain & Company famously predicted in the 1990s that cars would soon look like computers, with giant suppliers ruling the sector. And Deloitte is once again predicting that with the advent of the Electric Vehicle, the sector will disintegrate and value will migrate.

Yet this doesn't look likely to us. Rather than seeing the car industry go the way of the computer, as many predicted, Apple is now pushing the computer sector to increasingly resemble cars: Hierarchical, tightly managed supplier networks, a keen eye for technology integration, a focus on the differentiation in the eyes of the final customer. Apple, unlike Blackberry, hasn't just grasped the importance of a solid value proposition; it is focused on managing the ecosystem and bringing value its way.

Of course, life always looks easier when you're the kingpin of the ecosystem. What's exciting is to consider not only how successful kingpins can defend their position, but also how upstarts might upset the sector.

By becoming go-to outsourcees, leveraging the need of incumbents to save on assets, and patiently moving up the food chain to become solutions providers, or by carefully managing the standards game to gain a toehold in broader markets, aspiring entrants may emulate the shift of firms like Huawei or Honhai from sub-assemblers to industrial giants.

There is no denying that strategy has become more complicated, and that it's far easier to analyse than engage in real-time problem solution. But if we look start looking more carefully at what drives the movement of value in our industries we may be able to re-think our strategies before it gets to be too late to respond.

Sellers Charge More Than They'd Pay to Buy What They're Selling

In an experiment, people who were asked how much they would demand to sell a coffee mug set a price that was 2.2 times greater, on average, than the price other participants said they would pay to buy such a mug, according to a team led by Promothesh Chatterjee of the University of Kansas. Because people ascribe enhanced value to an object that they associate with themselves, they nonconsciously view a sale as a threat. Thus they demand more to give it up than they (or others just like them) would be willing to pay to acquire it, the researchers say.

Coddled Relatives Can Kill a Family Business

Denis was a bright, handsome, 45-year-old French executive who had failed his way up the ladder—almost to the top of his family's fourth generation perfume business.

As the eldest son of the family patriarch, Denis went directly from university into the family business. During his entire career, he worked in his father's span of control, reporting directly to his dad within six years of joining the business.

Denis has always been the presumptive heir apparent for the CEO position. The apple of his father's eye, Denis could do no wrong, including doubling a sales force while halving sales and running a new cosmetic division into the ground. Each of these career steps led to more and more responsibility befitting a rising—not a failing—executive.

Non-family employees, knowing that someday Denis would be their boss, kept their mouths shut—or exited the organization, leading to a drain on talent.

Ultimately, however, the other family owners of the business had to end this dangerous game of "chicken." Denis's had risen high enough in the organization that underperformance was becoming a threat to the health of the overall business.

Worse, Denis's cavalier attitude to the firm's values—launches of new fragrances hawked by aspiring actresses who were given million dollar contracts; business budgets that were set and missed with no consequences—threatened the very fabric of the of the organization. Another upward failure could be financially calamitous.

The owner group slowly, cautiously, raised the issue of Denis's performance and behavior with the patriarch. The patriarch kicked up a storm, but with his eyes pried open, he reluctantly let his son go.

Denis broke down and admitted to one of us privately that he had been totally in over his head in his job: "I've never worked anywhere but in our family's business. I don't have the skills to be an executive. What the hell am I going to do now with my life?" We empathized with Denis. Throughout his career, everyone had acted with the best of intentions towards him. But because he was a family member, likable and protected, everybody treated him with kid gloves.

We have run into Denis-like characters in family businesses around the world. And we have come to realize that the situation nearly always end badly — both for the business and for the individual. When exposed, the coddled family member often feels such shame that he or she chooses to give up all interactions with the family for three or more years.

How can you avoid this tragedy from happening?

Here's a quick test to indicate whether you are enabling a family member. If you answer "yes" to at least four of the following questions, then you are probably cocooning, indulging, overprotecting—in short, coddling—a family member:

1. Has a family member worked exclusively in the family's business?

2. Has he reported within his parent's span of control for most/all of his career?

3. Has she never received 360 feedback on her performance?

4. Is the family member paid above the market-based compensation for his position?

5. Has the family member been promoted beyond his capabilities?

6. Is the family member's behavior often outside the boundaries of acceptable value-based behavior of the company?

If you detect a problem, you should take immediate measures. Here are some remedial steps to be considered by the various players:

Overindulgent parent: It is the responsibility of the family owners to set things right. This almost always involves adopting a merit-based system—carefully, fairly. This isn't easy. Altering what are often generational-old family employment policies can be upsetting to the family, but it is necessary if you want to stop strangling your business. In family businesses, merit-based systems mean both that family employees are in explicit competition for positions with non-family members in the business, and that family members receive supplemental feedback to ensure that they learn and grow. If your family business has a board with outside directors, consider enlisting them in the sensitive task of gathering honest feedback and delivering it to family employees

Coddled individual: You need to get outside of your parent's span of control. Given your special treatment, it is likely that you are now in a job that requires more competence than you currently have. Working in a job that is beyond your capabilities is not good for the business—or for you. Continued coddling is toxic to your sense of achievement and self worth. Find a place in the business where you can display your talents. Take a leave of absence and work at another firm. Wherever you go, actively seek more honest feedback.

Non-family employee: You are in a difficult position. Providing candid feedback to or about the coddled individual can get you fired, as happened to one of our friends who worked in a family business. However, all is not lost. Most family businesses have long-term employees who have earned the deep trust of the leadership over several decades. If you are one of those people, you may be in a unique position to carefully raise the need for action. If you are not in that position, seek out those who are and share your concerns. When you do have the dialogue, make sure to frame it as concern for the long-term health of the business and for the individual in question.

What's happening in your family business? Do you have a Denis who is being coddled and cocooned from the realities of everyday business? Have you tried intervene? What happened?

Or are you Denis?

Fortune Favors the Prepared, and Hiring Managers Favor the Fortunate

Do You Feel Lucky, Punk?


When they’re hiring, companies are looking to find out what candidates have really done — not what they’ve participated in or watched, but what they’ve done. At least, that’s what Neil Roseman was looking for when he was Technology VP for Amazon and Zynga. “Even at the greatest companies,” he says in this illuminating piece from First Round Capital, “there’s a gap between those who get the most stuff done and those who don’t get much done. You need to try and figure that out during an interview.” Roseman explains how he designs interview processes to build effective organizations, but he also has a lot to say about what the interviewer should be thinking about. For example: “Once you form an initial impression of someone — which usually happens within the first 60 seconds — you should spend the rest of the interview trying to invalidate that impression.” And dig for the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the candidate’s accomplishments. He also asks everyone he interviews whether they consider themselves lucky — but without the threatening edge that Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character puts into the question. Why? “I’m looking for the people who embody the phrase, ‘Fortune favors the prepared,’” Roseman says. “It’s the willingness to be ready and take advantage of every opportunity that presents itself.”

Selling the Hacker Mind-Set

That Cookie-Killing Student? An Ad Agency Just Hired Her AdAge

If you’re young and entrepreneurial and have a radical streak, you can always start your own company. Or join the big boys. Twenty-five-year-old Rachel Law, whose master’s thesis at Parsons New School recently caused shock waves of distress in the world of digital-ad targeting, has taken a job with, of all things, a creative ad agency, CHI & Partners. Her browser extension, Vortex, is designed to misinform and confuse ad-targeting technologies by collecting cookies that have no ties to actual user behavior, says AdAge. Jeff Anderson, co-executive creative director of the agency’s New York office, says Law’s hacker mind-set was partly why she was hired. "We think that ideas can come from anywhere in the agency; it's not just up to the creatives anymore…and in order to do that we need all different types of brains," Anderson says, adding, "She has a brain that I don't think I've ever met before."

The Great Beyond

When the Next Ernest Hemingway Dies, Who Will Own His Facebook Account? Quartz

Suppose the amazing idea you’ve never told anyone about actually panned out and you became famous…but then you died. While your soul ascended to join the pantheon of the great, your writing would remain stuck in limbo. On Facebook. Once Facebook is notified of your death, it turns your account into a memorial and locks it. Friends can leave messages and see posts, but no one can log in and use the account, including people who had access prior to your death. The executor of your will (you had a will, right?) can request a copy of your content, but, Facebook says, he or she isn’t guaranteed to receive it, even with a court order. Simone Foxman of Quartz tells the story of a couple whose son committed suicide at age 21; Facebook gave them limited rights to their son’s content, but only after a months-long legal nightmare. The best thing, for now, is for your heirs not to inform Facebook about your demise. And to make sure the executor of your will has your passwords readily available.

No More Mister Nice Board

A 4-Point Guide to Fighting Bill Ackman Fortune

Almost as soon as Ron Johnson was fired by JC Penney, blame for the retailer’s annus horribilis shifted to board member and billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who had lured Johnson to Penney from Apple in 2011. Now Ackman is out too, and Fraser P. Seitel of Fortune offers the board members (and someday board members) among us some useful advice on how not to do what Penney’s board did. Under threat from a renegade member, the rest of the board should quickly get its act together, be tough with the miscreant, and go to the media with a unified message. And not just any media. The New York media. “The only way a company or a board can expect a fair fight with a street hustler like Ackman or Einhorn or Icahn is to meet them, mano-a-mano, on their hometown New York City turf.”

BONUS BITS:

Creative Minds

Marimba! How Apple's Default Text-Message Alert Was Born (The Atlantic)
Why I Started a Business: 5 Unusual Founder Stories (Inc.)

Your Thoughts Can Release Abilities Beyond Normal Limits (Scientific American)

Make Your Work More Meaningful

Have you noticed the rising chorus in the management literature proclaiming that work must have meaning? On this very site, for example, several authors have published research-based blog posts on how managers can create the conditions that support meaningful work. This is a very positive development, because work is a huge part of life, and meaning in life is not just a "nice-to-have". We need it in the way we need oxygen. There are few things more life-enriching and life-prolonging in human experience than a sense of meaning.

Critically important to performance and well-being, meaning is what makes people thrive. And conversely, a lack of it undermines people's ability to function on many levels, from job performance to mental and physical health. For example, people who self-report that they are missing a sense of meaning in their lives are far more likely to exhibit the chronic pro-inflammatory stress response that is associated with life-threatening diseases like heart disease and some cancers.

But how many people truly experience their work as meaningful? From my experience conducting research, teaching, and speaking in a number of countries over the last 15 years, I can attest that large numbers of people do not. Across all manner of occupations, from gas station attendants to investment bankers, surveys reveal the numbers of people failing to find meaning in what they do.



So what do you do if you're not in a setting where meaning is obvious — because your organization, for example, exists to provide life-saving technology or to raise people out of poverty? What if you work in place where management is unaware or unconcerned that it could do more to infuse the daily grind with a higher sense of purpose?

You learn to make your work more meaningful yourself. While it helps enormously to have conditions in place that facilitate work meaning (like autonomy in deciding how you do your work), it's important to realize that meaning is ultimately something you create on your own. Indeed, even in jobs that may look dismal from the outside, there are always steps you can take to build the kind of meaning that will make you feel better and work better.

I saw this firsthand when I was a PhD student, in the call center of a large telecommunications company. As part of the research for my dissertation, I was there interviewing and observing customer service representatives while they worked. The pace of work was relentless: as soon as a worker completed a call and hung up the phone, another call would automatically be directed to his or her extension. Every detail of representatives' work was measured and recorded: the number of rings it took them to answer each call; the number of seconds they placed each call on hold; the amount of time they spent resolving each call, etc., as well as daily totals of calls handled and sales made. Supervisors monitored the resulting data in a room that resembled the deck of a starship from science fiction films, with an array of lights that identified representatives who were "out of adherence" with the standards set for the aforementioned metrics. What's more, supervisors could listen in on representatives' calls without their knowledge at any time in order to monitor their performance. If you failed to make a sales pitch on a call that your supervisor was monitoring, you'd be reprimanded. All in all, the work conditions were prime for high stress and low meaning.

Yet there were some employees who experienced their work as meaningful. Joan, a 24-year-veteran of the call center, told me, "I really enjoy my work." She explained, "I am a customer service professional. [Joan's emphasis.] When customers call, it's often because they have a problem that is frustrating to them. I know how to solve every request or problem customers might call with, and I know how to do it in a way that makes them feel good about their call. I resolve the problem so it's no longer stressful for them." The skill mastery she described and demonstrated provided her with meaning, as did the way in which she incorporated this mastery into her identity as a helping professional. Knowing that she was capable of reliably producing a result that she cared about amplified Joan's experience of her work as meaningful. In other words, Joan's recipe for work meaning was self-efficacy mixed with concordance with her personal values, seasoned with connection to and feedback from the beneficiaries of her work.

Sitting by her side with a headset that enabled me to listen in on her calls, I witnessed how Joan systematically built an authentic connection from the first few seconds of her interaction with each caller. "I hear what you're saying, and I know how frustrating this is," she assured her customers. "I understand the issue. I promise that I will help you solve this. I'm so glad I could help you today." Customers responded positively to her competence, compassion, and reassurance, thereby affirming her sense of mastery and boosting her self-confidence and pleasure in her work. Joan's way of working—and of thinking about her work—created a self-reinforcing cycle of performance, meaning, and positive emotion.

Joan's example provides a lesson that everyone can use to make their work more meaningful, regardless of company, industry, or occupation. The key is to link your personal values and motivations to the work you perform. To do this, pay close attention to the elements of your work that you find energizing and fulfilling, and then find ways to incorporate them systematically into how you perform your work. Look for opportunities to make an authentic connection with the people who benefit from your work. Invest some energy in developing positive relationships with others who contribute to the same work results you care about and find energizing.

Since you have the ability to determine how you think about and respond to the conditions you experience, you do have control over the meaning you derive from work. So yes, as you interact with hiring managers and supervisors, keep making it clear that you want meaningful work. But at the same time, do what you can to make the work meaningful.

Who Dares Bake Cookies for the Office?

Recently, I asked one of my partners, a big, strong father of three, what he had done over the weekend. He explained that while his wife was out one rainy afternoon, he and the kids baked blueberry crumble, then assembled a confection known as an "ice box cake" and also tried a new multi-step red quinoa salad recipe. When I asked Thad why we've never sampled his creations, he sheepishly mumbled that they weren't really that good and that he didn't want to ride the subway carrying a pink Tupperware container. Why not, I wondered?

In this era of celebrity chefs, foodies and foodists, reality TV cook-offs and locavore restaurants, why is it that virtually no men, and almost no professional women, would dare bake or cook anything for their colleagues? Are we still subject to the stigma, well illustrated by Hillary Clinton's much-publicized comment during her husband's 1992 campaign, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies" instead of pursuing a legal career, that domestic-based endeavors and a profession were mutually exclusive? Twenty years later, this view was supported by the majority of experts in an essay on Forbes.com, who agreed that baking "can do serious damage to your reputation and gravitas."

While my career has evolved through the era of women being intensely aware of, and concerned with, projecting an overly feminine office image, I do cook brisket twice a year, and can sense my colleagues salivating in anticipation days in advance. Or maybe that's just my imagination. So, I decided to survey men and women of different ages at businesses, law firms, and other enterprises to find out whether they or others ever baked or cooked for their workmates, and if they felt there was a stigma in doing so.

The results surprised me. I started with women and men who had at least 20 years of professional experience, some very accomplished cooks. They universally reported, with one exception, that they had never brought any self-cooked item to the office and the only people who did were support staff women who were seen as "motherly" or nurturing" and occasionally a man who brought something in that his wife baked. Angelique, a senior women at a financial services firm, who regularly comes in first in her age group in triathlons, said that "over a long career, I have never been comfortable making something for the office. I believe it would diminish me in the eyes of my colleagues." Most other women executives echoed this view.

Most men over 40 had a slightly different take on the topic. Jason, a mutual fund manager, described the payoff as asymmetric: a lot to lose with bad cooking and not much to gain with good. Only Joff, the owner of a furniture manufacturing company, had treated his office to his "killer pear tart," obviously confident in its charm and his executive standing. No man said they would think less of either women or men as professionals if they shared their cooking or baking. Repeatedly, the only concern they expressed was about quality. As Nat, a partner at a major Boston law firm, succinctly put it, "If the food isn't good, you bet there's a stigma."

A case began to emerge that some women, conditioned by past decades of gender bias, might be overly worried about a display of culinary skills, which younger generations saw as a positive example of competence. As Nina, a top executive at an international services company said, "I would think it's really cool, if someone had the skill and guts to bake something to share." Hobbies, whether mountain climbing, fly fishing, or marathon running, tend to generate respect; why not cooking?

The youngest among the twenty five responders were generally surprised by the stigma concept. Darrin, one of my colleagues, is highly respected for her incredible French macaroons. According to her, if a male co-worker cooked something tasty for us, it would "show he's talented as well as brave." One young male trader suggested any quality baked item deserves some kind of award. He ties fishing flies for friends and colleagues, which he sees as similar in that "once you make something by hand, it's an expression of yourself, and you're in a vulnerable position if it fails to impress."

Maybe it's because I'm a CEO, and have the luxury of not worrying as much about my professional status, but I believe that if you only share the food you're proud of, don't beg for compliments, and pay attention to whether people seem to enjoy your offerings, bringing home-made food to work is unlikely to make you seem unprofessional — whether you're a man or a woman.

Sharing food as a group is often a great way to reduce barriers and bond as a team. In fact, research has shown that sharing a meal while you negotiate actually increases the value of the final deal. So let's replace the stigma about homemade food being too "domestic" with respect for a wider skillset, a show of self-confidence, and the courage to be judged.

Now, who wants brisket?

The Debt Collection Company that Helps You Get a Job

Bill Bartmann, CEO of debt collection company CFS2, does things a little differently. Instead of just calling, hounding, and suing debtors to pay what they owe, he calls them "customers" and provides them with free job-search services, such as resume help and interview prep.

Perhaps the reason Bartmann runs his company differently is because he himself has never shied away from living life differently. A high school dropout who later put himself through college working at a hog slaughterhouse, he found himself $1 million in debt himself after his first business collapsed. He clawed his way back up by building CFS, the subject of this HBS case study — but then, that too, imploded. Now he's back (again), and doing things differently (again). What follows are edited excerpts of our conversation.

What's it like running a debt collection company that's so different from the rest of the industry?



It's a little bit like telling everyone that the world is round, when they're still in that flat-earth society. The debt collection industry believes that you have to beat people up to get money out of them — that's in their DNA. We all know pleasure and pain are what motivate people, but the debt collection industry has only ever focused on pain. In our company, we've reversed that, and quite frankly it works wonderfully.

Maybe some of the people we work with made bad decisions, and maybe some you wouldn't want to hang out with, but most of them are people like you and me, and they just got swept up in an economic tsunami that literally knocked the blocks out from under them.

You've said the idea came from your employees. How did that happen?

Well, there was this emphasis on litigation by the debt collection industry. We saw that as a train wreck. The banks that sell these loans have so much reputational skin in the game, when the banks become aware of how exposed they are by the tactics of these agencies, we believe the banks will want to change course. So we had decided that we really needed to focus on the pleasure principle.

We knew we needed to be more than just nice, but we didn't know exactly what to do. I went to my employees. I said, "How do we create pleasure for the customer?" This was my plea to 120 employees at a company-wide meeting. What can we do to have them respect us, like us, to "friend them," for lack of a better term, to want to work with us? So ideas started coming from the audience. Some people suggested raise their FICO score, or help them get their credit back, get a credit card. So then we went to test these ideas with our customers: did they want these things? The customers did not. The customers said, excuse the French, "We want the damn phone to quit ringing." It was an epiphany. They didn't want the things we thought they wanted. Maslow's hierarchy? These people were not even on the bottom rung.

So we huddled everybody together again. They said, "The number one problem we hear from customers is that they don't have enough money to pay their bills." We realized if we help them get a better job, they'll have more money. It's one of those really simple things where you wonder, "Why didn't I think of that earlier?"

So how did you take that idea and actually put it into practice?



We tried a number of different approaches which didn't work early on. It was mostly advice and suggestions, things of that nature. So we huddled again. And then an employee said, "We're going to have to do it for them. They can't do the heavy lifting themselves — they're so beat down they have no get-up-and-go left." So now we get the customer on the phone, get their info, write a resume for them. We realized we were on to something, and we said, "OK, let's do more of that." We start with a petri dish and if something doesn't work, we don't do it anymore. If something does work, we replicate it.

So tell me about that. How did you take what you'd learned about the resumes and replicate it?

We started doing job interview prep. We put customers on Skype before their interviews, show them what to wear, do mock interviews.

Then we said, "We've got to do more than hope they hear about a job, let's help them find one." So we created a job network. We take their resume and look for openings that fit their skill set. We'd find one, call up the customer, and ask them if it's of interest. Then we'd fill out the application. We'd schedule an interview. And then we would do the mock interview. And then at 8:00 am on the morning of the interview, we call our customer to get them out of bed.

Our success rate has been phenomenal.

How do other companies that are hiring your customers see this? Do they know they're being helped by a debt collection company?

It never comes up. The companies do not know that's how that person ended up there, and nobody really cares where the application comes from.

Were there any surprises you ran into, in implementing some of these ideas?

Not all our customers have the same buttons to hit. We're all different. So one of my employees said, "Why are we trying to figure out what they want; why don't we just ask them what they need?"

Early on, requests came in for food stamps, child care, a new hot water heater, fixing a leaky roof, a new wheelchair. Someone wanted a tree in his backyard cut down. Someone needed a casket for their father's funeral. And we said, "OK, we'll do that."

We've now delivered 203 services that are just as eclectic as you could imagine. In the case of the leaky roof, we called up Habitat for Humanity. The guy who needed a water heater, we called up Salvation Army. Cutting a tree down in the backyard, that was even more simple. We now keep a database of 6,000 agencies around the United States so that whenever we have a customer that wants or needs anything we can find someone who cares about that customer. There are organizations that care about every race, religion, gender, military service, and so on. We care about one person, the customer. So find out everything about who our customer really is so that we can target the organizations that care about some aspect of who they are.

I know you said the point wasn't to have it make money, but I read that you actually do make good money with this model.

This company is only 3 years old, so we're still growing, but our results today are two times that of any peer in the industry. That is shocking. Note to industry: There is a better model.

So what if other debt collection agencies start copying your model? Would that be a good thing? How will you adapt?

First, I hope they do copy my way. I'm not afraid of competition. We really think the world is a better place if we could get every debt collector to follow this model.

Secondly, we think there's enough debt out there that we don't' have to worry about competition.

If somebody catches up to us, that's not their fault — that's our fault. We're first movers, and it's our job to stay ahead.

You know a few things about losing money, as well as making money. Advice for those out there who may be facing down failures, business or otherwise?

Somebody once told me that failure is not final. I thought that was just another cute little cliché thing. I didn't give it much shrift. But then I had the good fortune of failing a couple of times. And here's what I found out: he was right. Failure is not final. It is an awkward, uncomfortable, anxiety-filled portion of your life; it is not your whole life. It isn't who you are, it's what happened to you, and once you get that distinction, then you realize, "I can change that. I can come back. I can do again." Isn't that was capitalism is all about? We have the freedom in America to try anything we want to, and most of them do not work. But entrepreneurs say, "I just want some of them to work."

I really hope I end up being a role model for businesses and businesspeople who failed. Then I would look back at all of my failures and scuffed knees and bruised elbows and know it was worth it.

A Board Director's Perspective on What IT Has to Get Right

Over the last 30 years I have served a large range of organizations as either a director or a trustee with the specific role of helping them exploit IT for competitive advantage. From my experience, I believe that there are four highly interdependent categories of contributions the CIO and IT function should make.

1. Generating Top-Line Growth

I'm often struck by how many articles exclusively focus on new or emerging technology and their productivity or efficiency effects. Every discussion on the role of IT and CIOs should start with the question: "What are the potential uses of this technology that will guarantee we stay in business?" This question attempts to tease out an unconscious assumption that "we will always be in business." (Note that the high-profile C-suite executives at firms like Borders, Jessops, and Bank of New England had large IT budgets, but no longer have a company to make more efficient today.)

The best answers to this question generally protect or generate top line growth. Recent, well-documented examples include Progressive Insurance's use of predictive modeling in the property and casualty insurance space and the many industrial manufacturing companies that are generating almost all their margin and profit from after-sale, value-added services based on information generated by embedded sensors.

As many companies move from exclusively internal focused R&D to distributed-innovation systems (e.g., P&G's Connect and Develop) to increase velocity and quality of their new product introductions, the IT infrastructure support for this business process change is critical.

A new component of the IT function must be developed to support this category of work: the Distributed Innovation Group (DIG). DIG is responsible for emerging technology, collaboration methods and technology (e.g., online idea markets), the center of expertise for innovation support, and analysis across the enterprise.

2. Improving Operational Efficiency

IT has been primarily used to significantly increase productivity and reduce communication and coordination costs as measured in money and time. For mature, large-scale, multinational companies, there is a virtuous cycle of efficiency improvements that frees up resources, which can then be deployed for growth and innovation projects. The biggest opportunities for these companies are simplification and horizontal integration projects. These projects reduce time, cost, and variability while improving quality and transparency. They frequently are anchored by the establishment or enhancement of shared-services organizations that cross traditional organizational boundaries.

The biggest challenge is identifying the associated cost savings and headcount reductions and ensuring these funds or resources are allocated to growth and innovation projects. Frequently, movement of storage costs from in-house to a public cloud, or replacing an in-house sales support system with an external software-as-a-service (SAS) vendor are not measured and captured for purposes of reinvestment in Category 1 projects.



A second new component of the IT function should be dedicated to this category of work: the Enterprise Integration Group (EIG). EIG is responsible for enterprise architecture, the center of expertise for simplification and integration methods, process and program management.

3. Ensuring Effective Corporate Governance and Controllership

The spread of capitalism and the associated growth in emerging markets provide organizations of all sizes with an opportunity to participate in globalization. The geographic dispersion that accompanies these opportunities frequently challenges traditional management-control systems and controllership.

Additional challenges come from "localization" requirements in many countries. IT-based management-control systems, starting with finance and human resources and including distributed-innovation systems, are critical to ensure the policies and governance guidelines are effectively implemented in geographically dispersed locations. The EIG through its enterprise architecture work will require the embedding of controllership functions in applications and process design.

4. Participating in Strategy Formulation

Whether formal or informal, all large-scale companies have strategy-formulation and strategy-implementation processes. Many IT functions are only involved in the implementation phase. The pervasiveness of IT requires more organizations to describe the role and effects of IT during their industry and competitor analysis (ICA), which is more robust when the most technically literate professionals in the company are involved. In most, but not all, organizations, these people are the leaders of the function. However, they are required to also have significant ICA literacy and communication skills to help generate strategic options for the organization. Primary responsibility for this input lies in the DIG.

In summary, the challenge of closing the gap between emerging IT and the ability of companies to exploit it requires two new capabilities: the Distributed Innovation Group and the Enterprise Integration Group. They can help companies exploit rapidly evolving information technology and implement a virtuous cycle of revenue growth and operational-efficiency improvements.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





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