Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1564

Your Moral Reasoning Is Influenced by Your Physical Senses

Research participants who were given 2 teaspoons of a bitter herbal supplement made harsher judgments of such actions as shoplifting and library-book theft, rating these behaviors an average of 78 on a 0-100 scale of "morally wrong," whereas people who had sipped only water rated the scenarios at just 62, says a team led by Kendall J. Eskine of the City University of New York. People who had sipped berry punch were even less harsh in their judgments. The research underscores that what we think of as purely "moral" reasoning can be strongly influenced by intuition and physical feelings.

Your Company Is Only as Good as Your Writing

Good writing: Businesses claim to practice it, support it, and value it. But more often than not, their money isn't where their mouth is. Poor grammar and jargon-riddled writing are rampant. We're great at inventing terms — the instruction manual for my toaster refers to the lever that pops up the toast as the 'Extra-Lift Carriage Control Lever' — but poor at communicating what we actually mean.

We could learn a thing or two about communication from our forefathers. One of the most effective speeches of all time, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, was only 701 words. Of those, 505 were words of one syllable and 122 had two syllables.

Great leaders consider communication a core competence, so why don't more businesses? Manufacturers spend millions on safety training to get people to wear hard hats, but spend very little to make sure their safety critical work instructions are written clearly.

That's not good enough. Effective writing must be a company-wide endeavor.

If my marketer misses a typo while writing about a product, I want my packaging staff to catch it before the design gets sent to print. If my technicians don't capitalize a tool's name consistently, I'd hope my videographer notices the error when he glances at the report on their desks. When I'm writing an essay, I always ask my software engineers for constructive feedback. (I'm not too proud to admit that many of them are better writers than I.)

Over the years, I've worked hard to foster an atmosphere where everyone has the right to critique, question, and suggest. Just because most team members don't have "professional writer" in their job descriptions doesn't mean writing is off limits to them. Everyone here is a writer.

In my experience, the practice of good, collaborative writing makes the difference between great business and bad business — a sale or no sale.

Last year, I kicked up a bit of a stir 'round these parts when I wrote "I Won't Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here's Why." I confidently declared myself a "grammar stickler," unwilling to hire qualified applicants if they couldn't pass a basic grammar test.

After the article was published, I heard back from a lot of different people. Some disagreed. One participant in a New York Times debate exclaimed that my "requirements that viable candidates write with Strunk and White on their minds are highly questionable." Others wholeheartedly shared my convictions. The range of feedback is to be expected. After all, the grammar debate tends to be divisive.

The feedback did prove one thing: It's not easy to talk about writing. Certainly not in business. Writing, even writing in public arenas, is always personal. It exposes the writer's ideas and ability (or inability) to navigate language. Writing is vulnerability.

Plus — and this is the frustrating part — there is no right way to write. Even the most basic rules are fuzzy. Prepositions aren't something you should end a sentence with. You should never start a sentence with "because." Why not? Because. Sentence fragments are unforgivable. Unless they're not.

We like to think that we learned everything there is to know about grammar in our 10th grade English classes, but the conventions are constantly changing. The standards shift. That makes writing hard — and difficult to talk about.

Writing is a tricky balancing act, juggling dozens of nebulous constraints. Writers have to think about audience, and about style, and about tone — factors that are hard to anchor down. In business, writing is inextricably tied to company identity: writers have to think about what a company stands for, where it's going, and how that company should be presented to the public. Difficult considerations.

I've found that topics that are the most uncomfortable are usually the ones that need the most discussion. Writing is one of them. It's a conversation that is crucial to have — with everyone.

For the last 10 years, iFixit has been writing and hosting free, open source repair manuals for every thing. We weren't always as good at it as we are now. Like many publishers, we didn't have an open dialogue about what we'd written — not within the company and not with the public. And, in our early years, our writing suffered for it. In fact, some of our initial instructions led users astray — resulting in broken computers and cameras and cell phones. That was our fault, and we knew it.

But we kept writing. And we rewrote. And we talked about writing with everyone.

We started collecting tips: Keep sentences short. Don't verb nouns. Using 'you' makes you seem friendlier. Our list grew fast. Together, we worked to nail down just how iFixit sounds. Writing — and talking about writing — with each other gave us a cohesive voice.

Soon, we realized we'd written a book. And we realized that it would be an incredible shame to keep it to ourselves. Today, since so many HBR readers wrote to us asking about iFixit's writing process, I have that handbook to share with you.

Our free Tech Writing Handbook is the culmination of years of practice, of continually sharing our opinions and perspectives. We found out that writing has unintentional consequences: it's revelatory. The more you write, the more you learn about yourself. Writing about our company, about our mission, and about our users helped us understand them better. It helped us understand our vision.

If good writing is important to you and your company (as it should be), feel free to share our book with your writers (which should be each and every member of your company). Crib from it, revise it, repurpose it. Or better yet, write your own — because you can't all be on the same page if it's a blank page.

For Corporate Cosmopolitanism, Start at the Top

If your company's management team isn't as global as its target markets, you aren't alone. Some 30% of U.S. companies admit that they have failed to fully exploit their international business opportunities because of insufficient internationally competent personnel. Could the problem start all the way at the top?

In my 2011 HBR article, The Cosmopolitan Corporation, I argued that a cosmopolitan leadership team just might be the critical organizational ingredient for firms to succeed in a world that is neither global nor local but rather a complex combination of the two (what I call World 3.0).

And now there's new data to support that.

Only 14% of the world´s 500 largest corporations by revenue, the Fortune Global 500, are led by a CEO who hails from a country other than the one where the corporation is headquartered, as Herman Vantrappen and I reported this June in Fortune. The percentage of non-native CEOs is significantly lower for smaller, less international companies — and the share of foreign CEOs and board members rises only to ~30% among the world's 100 corporations with the largest foreign assets (excluding financial sector firms). Among corporations in the U.S. S&P 500, a 2008 report from Egon Zehnder indicated that only 7% of board members were foreign nationals, 9% had degrees from non-U.S. institutions, and 73% had no international work experience at all!

Dig a few layers deeper into firms' management teams and the situation doesn't look much better. According to a recent survey, 76% of senior executives reported that their organizations needed to develop global leadership capabilities, but a mere 7% felt they were doing so effectively. A 2005 survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that only 7.5% of the top 200 managers in the firms sampled came from a set of 16 emerging markets where the firms intended to generate 35% of their growth over the next 5 years.

For Western MNCs, unglobalization at the top hurts most in the struggle to tap growth in emerging markets, where foreign MNCs are falling behind as local competitors grow their sales and profits almost twice as fast. Asking high-potentials in emerging markets to trust against visible evidence that their career progress will be unconstrained by home-country or home-region bias is becoming an increasingly tough sell. In 2010, Chinese professionals expressed only half as strong a preference for working in a foreign multinational over a local firm than in 2007.

Firms based in emerging markets are starting from even farther behind at cultivating cosmopolitanism. Only 1 of the 96 Fortune Global 500 companies from the BRIC countries has a foreign CEO. As they seek to differentiate and build brands in advanced economies rather than competing mainly based on low home-country cost bases, this will become an increasingly important problem. (The U.S. sits right at the global average with 14% non-native CEOs. Leading the list are small countries mainly in Europe, with Switzerland on top with 73%.)

Cosmopolitanism, of course, isn't only about top management diversity. Firms have implemented a variety of other techniques to try to become more cosmopolitan:

Recruiting, developing, and assigning bridging roles to bicultural individuals.
Broadening the current management team's mindsets. Rooted maps can help them see how the world looks different depending on where they're coming from and what they're trying to accomplish.
Educating managers to understand cross-country differences using concepts such as my CAGE (cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic) distance framework and tools like the CAGE Comparator™
Rotating country managers between countries (as opposed to only exporting managers from company headquarters), and allowing managers from other countries to spend time at HQ.
Rethinking cutbacks on expatriation. Yes, expats are expensive (on average 2-3x home salary), but it takes at least 3 months to become immersed in a new location and appreciate how business works there.
Broadening executives without relocating them by involving them in multinational tasks forces and cross border work, or even bringing the HQ experience to them by locating business unit headquarters outside of the firm's home country.
Managing career development to make sure non-natives and even returning expats don't systematically end up on the slow track.
Utilizing assessment tools such as my GAP Survey to track and manage your progress.

The Cosmopolitan Corporation, like cosmopolitanism in individuals, is something that requires continuous cultivation and nurturing. And like the personal journey of opening up to those who are different from ourselves, it's a deeply individual path, but one that can be eased and inspired by stories from others. The first step is to share them.

How Category Creation Is Reinvigorating Classical Music

I spent a decade of my life — from 6th grade through college — practicing and performing my viola. I loved the music itself, but I really enjoyed the relationships and experiences it provided. I got to tour the country performing or competing. I was part of a string quartet that earned $200-an-hour playing weddings, conferences and even cruise ships — not a bad gig for a 16 year old. But at a certain point, it became clear that it wasn't a viable career for me. The road ahead as a professional musician required even more investment in schooling with an uncertain payoff. Symphony spots were rare and competitive, and perhaps more to the point, I doubted I was good enough.

But the real challenge was the demand for classical music was dying, at least in the traditional way. Symphonies were bleeding money and becoming even more dependent on donations. Younger music fans seemed less interested in paying for expensive tickets, wearing fancy clothes, and committing two to three hours listening intently without coughing or falling asleep. For a generation that's come of age in the YouTube world, symphonies feel like an inefficient form of entertainment.

This is where folks like the Piano Guys may be saving classical music. They have created a new category for classical music: Fun, breakthrough innovation in the form of five minute videos that showcase their classical music skills, but also their CGI skills in creating fun, funny and funky parodies. Instead of selling tickets, they post their videos and sell advertising. (They also use the traditional model of selling CDs — they were just signed by Sony last year.) If you haven't seen the Piano Guys, watch a few of their videos and you may be hooked. You'll laugh at their Star Wars parody, be amazed at their rendition of Pachelbel's Canon, or cry at their Les Miserable tribute to our men and women in uniform...but I guarantee you won't fall asleep.

How many other categories can't grow because they refuse to challenge the conventional wisdom of tradition, or this is the way it's supposed to be? Sports like baseball may find demand waning because fewer people have 3 hours to watch a sport. And just as consumers don't want to sit through three movements of a symphony for their favorite finale, categories that are highly bundled are being disrupted... even in car rentals by category creators like Zipcar.

There's another industry that seems to be begging for category creation: High-end dining. In the past, dining at top restaurants has required a certain kind of dress, a lofty price tag, and enough time for a leisurely experience. That's changing. Newer restaurants allow for more casual dress, and chefs like David Chang, founder of the Momofuku empire, are allowing people to come as they are and enjoy high end cuisine at a great price.

For too many years, classical music has required consumers to conform to its rules and regulations. Like the restaurant industry, it needs to consider changing its model to appeal to a broader population.

The Piano Guys are a move in that direction — and one I hope goes further. I long for the day I can wear shorts and a t-shirt, and pay $50 (or less) for a good seat just to hear short excerpts from Beethoven's 6th symphony, Brahms piano quartet, and the best of John Williams — all with a beer in my hand. Until that day, I have the Piano Guys.

The Growing Power of Inside Sales

The number of inside sales jobs has increased dramatically in recent years, far outpacing the growth in jobs for field salespeople. We spoke with Mike Moorman, a senior leader in ZS Associates' B2B sales and marketing practice and a leading authority on sales management, about how inside sales (which refers to sales positions done remotely from headquarters, without face-to-face meetings with clients) is transforming the way that B2B companies interact with their customers.

Mike, can you give us some examples of companies that are shifting resources into inside sales?

Yes absolutely, over the last several years B2B companies have been ramping up their inside sales investment.

Astra Zeneca has replaced virtually all of its field sales force support for its mature brand Nexium with a 300-person inside sales team. The team provides for most doctors' basic needs for samples and information at a substantially reduced cost.
IBM has invested in social media training, toolkits and personalized digital pages to help its inside salespeople generate leads and manage account relationships. Early results include a 55% increase in Twitter followers and a significant increase in the number of high-quality inbound leads.
SAP has refocused its large and growing inside sales team towards working with channel partners, rather than directly with customers, as part of a strategic initiative aimed at increasing channel sales to 40% of the company's total sales by 2015.

Many B2B companies are making inside sales a priority. I've seen companies investing to create new inside sales teams, adopt advanced analytics to measure and improve productivity of those teams, realign inside and field sales to optimize market coverage, provide value-based selling tools tailored to inside sales, and upgrade their inside sales customer engagement processes and skills.

Why do you think so many companies are turning to inside sales?

Three primary factors give momentum to inside sales. First, B2B sellers feel competitive pressure to cut costs, and they're seeking more efficient ways to sell. Second, B2B buyers are becoming more comfortable purchasing and collaborating remotely; they use the web to research product information, are comfortable communicating and collaborating with sellers using methods such as email, social media, and conference calls, and in fact prefer these methods over face-to-face communication for some sales tasks. Third, new easy-to-use online webinar and videoconferencing technologies make it possible for inside salespeople to create customer intimacy without field interaction.

What types of selling situations or tasks are most compatible with inside sales?

Most B2B selling models include both inside and field sales, and the challenge and the opportunity come in determining the sweet spot for inside sales within an overall selling model. Effective use of inside sales requires partitioning the sales job and dividing it among inside and field salespeople according to some or all of the following dimensions. Different companies divide it in different ways:

By market segment. Use inside sales for the entire sales process in small-to-medium-sized businesses that have straightforward needs and moderate-to-low potential. Use field sales to manage large accounts with complex needs and buying processes, and more opportunity.
By stages of the customer engagement process. Use inside sales to supplement field sales activities in large accounts, especially early in the sales process (e.g. lead generation) or late in the sales process (e.g. repeat purchases). Use field sales for tasks that benefit from a "high touch" approach.
By products/services. Use inside sales to sell transactional offerings and solutions with lower buyer risk that don't require on-site assessments or collaboration. Use field sales to sell more complex products and services that require a consultative approach and customization.
By geography. Use inside sales to reach non-strategic accounts in remote areas and field sales to cover accounts in metropolitan areas.

How does increased use of inside sales impact the job of field salespeople?

I see two main implications for field salespeople. First, many companies are experiencing a bifurcation of sales jobs. Inside salespeople are taking over more sales tasks to drive cost effectiveness. In conjunction, the bar is rising for field salespeople. Buyers are no longer interested in meeting live with "information providers"; they expect field salespeople to bring new ideas and to create and prove substantial value.

Likewise, executives are increasingly reluctant to invest in expensive field sales resources unless those resources clearly provide greater customer and company value. The role and profile of a field salesperson is becoming similar to the role and profile of a key account manager — someone who brings business acumen and problem solving skills, and that can help buyers define opportunities and tailor solutions. Field salespeople need to develop new competencies as consultative sellers, and often companies find that some field salespeople who were successful in the old world lack the characteristics required for success in the new one.

Second, although field salespeople still have a clearly defined role as face-to-face sellers, technology enables them to accomplish more sales activities remotely to optimize efficiency (smart use of time) and effectiveness (impact with customers). Increasingly, field salespeople are selectively leveraging email, social media, webinars and video conferencing to maximize their own productivity and enhance the customers' experience. In this regard, the line between field sales and inside sales is blurring. For field salespeople, this means developing new technology and communication competencies.

What kind of results can companies expect?

When appropriately utilized, inside sales reduces cost-of-sales by 40-90% relative to field sales, while revenues may be maintained or even grow. Benefits include:

Reduced sales force cost-per-contact and increased number of contacts per day
Increased revenues in accounts that were lowest priority for field sales, but are high priority for inside sales
Greater access and faster response times for customers
Increased effectiveness by specializing inside salespeople by industry, product or activity, without the increased territory size penalty that specialization creates for field sales teams
Flexibility to scale up the size of inside sales teams without relocation of salespeople
Better coaching and development for inside salespeople who share a working location with their manager, resulting in shorter ramp-up and more apprenticeship.

When focused on the right market segments, stages of the customer engagement process, and product/services, inside sales drives huge sales force efficiency improvements with little or no effectiveness loss. As customers get more comfortable buying in this way, I expect the impact will become even greater.

To Make Innovation Stick, Try Trying

There Isn't an App for That


Why do some innovations flourish while others flounder? Atul Gawande tackles this question in The New Yorker, using the medical field — arguably one of the places where innovation is most important, given its life-saving capabilities — as ground zero. He analyzes the different paces at which antiseptics and inhalant anesthesia were embraced by doctors and patients, as well as the more modern challenges of fighting cholera and infant mortality. Gawande argues that invisibility of the target problem is one of the biggest obstacles facing innovation on a global scale. "This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas," he writes. "They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful." Ultimately, this means that the future of innovation isn't in the latest app or mobile platform. It's in taking the time and money to make very real human connections, "the key force in overcoming resistance and speeding change." In other words, you can't simply ask people to change their behaviors, or even require them to. You have to use mentorship to make an innovative idea the norm.

Turn the Page

The End: Barnes & Noble in Silicon Valley Businessweek

"He was a Silicon Valley dreamer in charge of a bookstore chain." This line from Businessweek's Susan Berfield is a darned good summary of what went wrong for Barnes & Noble and its former CEO, William Lynch. The piece analyzes the company's reluctance to get in on digital until it was too late, showing how that hesitation led to an unwinnable battle against both Amazon and Apple. For Berfield, Lynch's decision-making involved a strategic error: trying to compete with the iPad after the early success of the Nook. The development of the Nook Color, which took place in Silicon Valley, proved divisive for the company, which is based in New York. And as Lynch tried to wrangle 300 developers and designers, Nook's sales dropped 26% in a year amid talk that the company should be split up. Then Lynch resigned, and the Nook may be no more. "It's an expensive accessory for a shrinking bookstore chain," notes Berfield. Perhaps the company should have focused on its bread and butter: books and people who like to read them.

Be the Change

Gazing into the Future of American Business in China On Leadership

Once upon a time, American companies thought they were being global if they had manufacturing plants in China. Then the companies that considered themselves truly global went a step further, staffing their Chinese operations with Chinese managers. Now leading U.S. companies such as Honeywell are taking globalization to another level: They're trying to get their Chinese units to operate and compete just like Chinese companies, says Christian Murck, the outgoing president of the American Chamber of Commerce in China. That means being as quick to market as Chinese companies. It means shifting new-product approvals to China to speed response times. It also means matching Chinese companies' cost structures — no small feat. Essentially, U.S. companies are now trying not just to prevail against their Chinese competitors but to "become the Chinese competitor," Murck says. Worth a try, at least. —Andy O'Connell

RIP Backup Plan

The Last Days of Big Law The New Republic

We've already bid our goodbyes to stable careers in manufacturing (and, well, long and stable careers in almost everything). Now we lay to rest the promise of being a well-off lawyer for life, because "there are simply many, many more high-priced lawyers today than there is high-priced legal work." The New Republic's Noam Scheiber describes this drastic shift in the profession through the lens of Mayer Brown, a big Chicago law firm once known for its collegiality and benevolence. Now, squeezed between ever-more-frugal corporate clients and rainmaker partners who want to keep all the money to themselves, it sounds like a terribly unpleasant place to be (that is, if they'll even take you for more than a contract position to read documents). The rest of us, it seems, can no longer reassure ourselves by saying, "If this doesn't work out, I can always go to law school." —Justin Fox

Oh Shush

The Art of Silence Psychology Today

You don't often hear that being quiet can help you get ahead, but think about it: Only by shutting up can you force yourself to listen, and listening might be the best thing you can do to become more effective in your job, writes Alex Lickerman. How else can you be sure that the solutions you eventually propose will really solve the problems you’re working on? Lickerman, an internist, says that when he silences himself and listens to his patients first, he often discovers that his preconceived notions about them are wrong. He had assumed that a patient was objecting to cardiac catheterization out of fear of complications, but it turned out the patient was simply worried he couldn't lie flat for the required six hours afterward. Listening is far more powerful than speaking, he says. When you speak, you're not learning. And how often do you really influence people by your words anyway? —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITS:

In Retrospect...

Not Even Silicon Valley Escapes History (The Atlantic)
Lance Armstrong Is Right: His Sponsors Should Have Known He Was Doping (Quartz)
Intern Dressed as Royal Guard Stands in Stifling Heat Outside Pizza Hut (Gawker)

Research: How Sensory Information Influences Price Decisions

Words are not simply the flat, black-and-white letters as depicted in the dictionary. They are three-dimensional objects that contain feelings, sounds, and pictures when they are said or read. We use words to represent the sensory experiences of sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. The map we use to describe and interpret an experience is based upon one of three channels of information — visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. "Visual" refers to pictures and imagery, "auditory" to sounds, and "kinesthetic" refers to touch and tactile feelings.

The conversations salespeople have with prospective customers involve these visual, auditory, and kinesthetic channels. Can different amounts of visual, auditory and kinesthetic information influence the price customers will pay for an item? Recently, a sales linguistics experiment was conducted in order to answer this question. Sales Linguistics is the study of how customers and salespeople use language during the complex decision-making process.

Sensory Information Price Test

Study participants were separated into three groups and six items were presented to them in a classroom setting. All participants were business professionals and university graduates between the age of twenty-four and fifty-seven. The groups were asked to estimate the price of each item and rank whether they had a low, medium, or high level of comfort with the answer they gave.

The first group would be presented only visual information consisting of a picture of the item and a brief description. The second group would be shown the same visual information as the first group, but the description would be read to them with dramatic emphasis and accentuation, creating an auditory connection. The third group would be shown the visual information, read the description in the same manner as for group two, and also be provided the opportunity to hold and inspect the item before making their guess, creating a kinetic bond..

The participants were presented with an eclectic mix of items. In order, they were shown a baseball hit by famous home run hitter Manny Ramirez of the Cleveland Indians, a six inch wooden penguin honoring Admiral Byrd's expedition to the south pole, a black plastic stapler, a copy of Rudyard Kipling's second Jungle Book published in 1915, a vintage brass letter opener from Italy, and a 1886 Morgan United States Silver Dollar.

Understanding the Test Results

While the test results provide many different revelations about how people interpret information, two high-level metrics underscore the impact sight, sound, and touch can have when making a decision about price. Below are the average answer comfort scores for each group (with three being the highest score). You'll notice the scores increase with the addition of more sensory information by approximately 20 percent. The third group who received the highest amount of information from all three sensory channels had the highest sense of comfort with their answers.

The next point of comparison is average total overall price, which is calculated by adding the estimated price together for each of the six items. The average total overall price for each group varied greatly with group two (visual and auditory information) being the highest at $325,000. In addition, 29% of group two members estimated all the items cost over $250,000 whereas none did in group three.

Clearly, the test results show that different amounts of visual, auditory and kinesthetic information influence the perception of the item's price. The experiment also provides other important lessons for sales and marketing professionals.

Customer Miscommunication



The mind does not treat all information equally. Information is ignored, misinterpreted, and generalized based upon surrounding experiences. For example, study participants misinterpreted that the baseball hit by Manny Ramirez was a home run ball when it was only a foul ball. You should never assume prospective customers have received the message correctly.

Verbal Suggestion Susceptibility

The mind is quite susceptible to verbal suggestions. Group two's average total price was nearly seven times that of group one and close to twenty times the average of group three. The tone, tempo and demeanor of what you say can have more impact on a prospective customer than the actual words you speak. This is a particularly important point for salespeople who sell primarily over the phone.

E-mail Communication Dependency

Salespeople have increasingly grown to rely on e-mail for their primary method of communication with prospective and existing customers. There is a down side to this dependence since the persuasiveness of verbal suggestions is forfeited. Check your sent box and examine the last twenty e-mails you sent. Where would a phone call or in-person conversation have been better suited?

Avoid Product Evaluations



No salesperson typically wants to slow down the sales cycle by having the customer conduct a lengthy product evaluation. This study provides an entirely new reason why they should be avoided. The results suggest that hands-on familiarity with an item actually lowers the perception of its value. For example, the average price for group three who handled the brass letter opener was $100 while group two's average was nearly $10,000.

Sales Presentation "Talk Track"

The "talk track" that accompanies sales presentations and product demonstrations plays a critical role in shaping the prospective customer's perception of value. In this regard, many companies don't take the time to ensure the fluency of their sales organizations by providing them compelling written scripts and testing them to ensure they are able to delivered persuasively.

it was Rudyard Kipling who said "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." He was right. Your most important competitive weapon is your mouth and the words you speak. This test proves it's not only what you say, but also how you say it!

The Art of Irresistible Email

Virginia was ready to pull out her hair. Why wasn't anyone responding to her email?

As the director of training for a global professional services firm, she'd recently sent out a note explaining important changes to the summer training schedule and asking office directors to respond with their preferred locations. But only a few had done so. Training was a huge priority for her firm, so why were they ignoring her request?

Corporate employees receive and send more than 100 emails a day on average, according to tracking sites like Pingdom and Radicati. Competition for attention is fierce. So, no matter your title or department, you need to master electronic messaging to get your job done.

Luckily, crafting emails in a way that encourages people to read and act on them is relatively easy. You just have to apply some age-old techniques of persuasion.

Before you start typing, consider:

The objective. What do you want to achieve with this email? Is your purpose to inform? Request input? Ask for help?

What-who-when. Your objective will inform the message, including what to write, who should receive it and when to send it. Also think about whether it should come from you, or someone with more seniority.

Visual logic. Clear structure and typographical signalling will boost the odds that your reader will get your message quickly and respond in ways that meet your goal.

Let's look at Virginia's original, unrequited email.

To: Blue Corp Office Directors

From: Virginia Brown, Training Director

Date: Friday, May 30, 2013

Time: 5 p.m.

Subject: New Hire Training

Dear Colleagues,

I'm writing to let you know about significant changes to our new hire training schedule. Instead of running training from August 15 - 20th at our New York location, we'll be hosting regional trainings in New York, San Francisco and Cincinnati on three different dates. And we'll be bringing our best trainers to every location. For those office directors with new hires, we'd like to hear which training location you prefer and how many new hires you'll be sending. If for some reason the timing, which will be August 10-14th in NYC, 15-19th in SF and 20-24th in Cincinnati, doesn't work, please contact my assistant, Francine Nordell at x2345, and we'll see if there is enough demand for a make-up session. We need to put the calendar for training together by June 30th, so please get back to me by June 15th. I think you'll be pleased with our new approach and your new hires will benefit tremendously from getting to know a smaller group of colleagues as they participate in the training.

Best,

Virginia

Virginia's message isn't long, but it's a muddle of mixed signals. Her opening line sounds like her goal is to inform office directors of a new approach to training. But in reality she's requesting input: preferred training locations. That's hard to quickly recognize, and the urgency isn't clear.

There are several things she can do to better telegraph her intent, thereby prompting a better response:

Put the subject line to work. Most of us already use our subject line to predict the "what," e.g. "Re monthly financials." But it's also the place to build a personal bridge: "Re monthly financials, per Peter's request," and to indicate urgency: "Re monthly financials, per Peter's request. Need feedback by Tuesday."
Visually highlight the key message. Structure your email so the most important request or information is at the top, then put it in bold. This may seem like a, "duh," but people often "bury the lede", as journalists like to say, several paragraphs down. If you are sending to multiple readers, also bold the names of anyone you address directly, so they immediately connect to content that's relevant to them. If you're making multiple points, use indentations and numbers or bullets.
Use links to go deep; voting buttons to get answers. If you want someone to act on your email then make it concise and jargon-free. Use links to let readers go deeper or access forms, and voting buttons to get folks to sign up.
Time the delivery for maximum impact. Never send an email at the end of the day or the start of a weekend. Make sure people are opening it at a time when they're at their desks and have time to read it.
Add clout by having a superior co-sign. We may be moving into a less hierarchical work world, but the boss's name still gets attention. If you need help, ask for it.
Leave the ball in the reader's court. If you want people to get back to you or take action, make sure you put the request in bold as well. Make clear what you need from them.

Let's apply this to Virginia's email.

To: Blue Corp Office Directors

From: Gordon Boss, SVP Human Resources and Virginia Brown, Training Director

Date: Thursday, May 29, 2013

Time: 9 a.m.

Subject: Need Your Site Registration for New Hire Training by June 15th

Dear Colleagues,

We are converting from national to regional sites for our new-hire training and offering three dates. We need you to register your trainees for a venue by June 15th to accommodate all. Please click on one of the following sites to register and enter the number of trainees.

New York: August 10-14

San Francisco: August 15-19

Cincinnati: August 20-24

If the timing doesn't work, please contact my assistant, Francine Nordell at x2345, who will gauge demand for a make-up session.

We'll be sending our best trainers to all locations. We anticipate that getting to know a smaller group of colleagues will strengthen relationships and spark collaboration.

Thanks in advance for registering.

Best,

Virginia

What are your challenges in email communication? And what tactics have you found to be irresistible?

The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms

An unusual — and unusually rich — funding opportunity inspired researchers at MIT and several other top-tier research institutions to improvise a comprehensive multi-media proposal on a tight deadline. While the schools' own IT infrastructures and apps proved disconcertingly incompatible, Dropbox and skillfully edited Skypes facilitated exactly the kind of real-time and asynchronous coordination and "version management" needed to deliver a "knock-their-socks-off" plan fast. They won eight-figure funding.

More humbly, incompatible communications networks and a less-than-proactive IT department drove a company's supply chain and procurement teams to use LinkedIns, private Tweets and cut-and-paste Sharepoints to quickly coordinate go-to-market product changes with key vendors. The ad hoc network enabled suppliers to transparently coordinate and collaborate with each other as well as respond to their customer's requests.

These real-world vignettes highlight social media's underappreciated and undervalued impact within and between organizations: the power to self-organize. For completely understandable reasons, enterprise social media tools and platforms like Yammer, Chatter, Jive and Sharepoint have been branded as great ways to communicate, engage, collaborate, coordinate, update and share information. That's largely accurate. But those pretty verbs obscure where the real action is taking place.

Initiators and intrapreneurs aren't just using social media to make their efforts more transparent and accessible, they're using these platforms to improvise and organize new ways to get the job done. They're using these tool and technologies to add value to existing processes or, indeed, to create new "just-in-time" processes (and programs) that the C-suite and other senior managers had never envisioned. Social media inside the enterprise and out lower the costs and increase the power of individuals to productively coalesce and coordinate on their own initiative.

In other words, social media tools enable "gray markets" in enterprise self-organization unanticipated by the organizations that provide them. Sometimes, organizations even experience "black markets" in social media-enabled "self-organization" when their people use unauthorized or unsanctioned platforms like Twitter, Dropbox, Skype, LinkedIn, Google+ and even Facebook to share ideas and coordinate their activities.

Why? For reasons healthy and dysfunctional alike. More than a few organizations provide such poor communications and collaborative tools that the only way people can really do their jobs is to create and maintain their own collaborative networks. Even worse, some individuals and teams in troubled organizations use external social media platforms to facilitate their own "Enterprise Spring" so they can accommodate and counterbalance the perceived incompetence and/or poor behaviors of their bosses.

Where IT once confronted the spectra of "shadow apps" and "gray market computing," the rise of social media platforms inside the enterprise and out now means that entire managements now see "emergent" leaders and processes. These aren't designed for or planned; they materialize directly from the perceived needs of concerned individuals and teams who now have the ability to self-organize inside the firewall and out because of these media.

That's (potentially) revolutionary. That's also why so many organizations are understandably suspicious and/or wary of what enterprise social media platforms might truly represent. Yes, they're about communication, coordination, collaboration and transparency. But they're also about power — the power of individuals and teams to reach within and across enterprises to effect meaningful change.

At Fortune's recent Brainstorm Tech Conference, retired General Stanley McChrystal

observed that technology had fundamentally changed how America's special operations command managed its special forces warriors. The technologies of situational awareness put soldiers at the front lines — not the Generals in the command centers — in the best positions to decide how to best prosecute their missions. The General recognized that these technologies were better used to empower rather than to second guess.

The bottom line: the most important impact of social media technologies comes from who — and what — they empower, not just the information they exchange. Do organizations appreciate and understand that these tools put them in the "empowerment" and not just the "better communications" business?

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





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SAC and the Strange Focus on Insider Trading

Five years after a financial crisis that, as best anybody can tell, had almost nothing to do with insider trading by hedge funds, the two biggest post-crisis criminal crackdowns on the financial sector in the U.S. have centered on ... insider trading by hedge funds.

First up was Galleon Group and its founder, Raj Rajaratnam, brought down in an investigation that also resulted in the conviction of former McKinsey chief and Goldman Sachs board member Rajat Gupta. Since then, Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the man behind the Galleon prosecutions, has been building up to a full-on assault on an even more prominent fund, SAC Capital Advisors. Bharara has not filed charges (yet?) against SAC founder and chief Steve Cohen, but on Thursday he charged the hedge fund itself with "insider trading that was substantial, pervasive, and on a scale without known precedent on the hedge fund industry."

It may seem strange that Wall Street's top cop has chosen to attack Galleon and SAC instead of the institutions at the heart of the mortgage meltdown that brought on the financial crisis. It may seem even stranger when you consider that a lot of legal scholars don't think insider trading is fraud, and a few even think it should be encouraged.

It is strange. That said, it's pretty clear why it happens: Bharara and his predecessors (Rudy Giuliani held the same job in the late 1980s) have taken on insider trading cases because they can win them. Thanks to a half century of SEC opinions and court rulings, insider trading is much easier to prosecute than other dodgy financial behavior. The question, really, is whether this amounts to a perverse miscarriage of justice, or just a somewhat convoluted way of enforcing norms for good behavior on Wall Street.

The modern era in insider trading law dates to 1961, when Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Cary (a Columbia Law School professor before President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the SEC) wrote an administrative order declaring that insider trading amounted to a violation of the anti-fraud provisions of federal securities laws. Before then insider trading was handled as common-law fraud in state courts, and cases were hard to win. That's because, as Georgetown Law Professor Donald C. Langevoort put it in a recent article, "no one has ever been able to articulate a robust theory of harmful marketplace deception arising from insider trading." That is, it's hard to say who exactly is being defrauded. Those who sell shares to or buy them from someone with inside information are certainly at a disadvantage, but it's not clear that they're harmed. And other shareholders aren't directly affected at all.

Cary argued that insider trading — or just passing inside corporate information to others who might trade upon it — was illegal because that information belonged to the corporation. A few years later, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals adopted and expanded upon his reasoning to hold that the law was intended to ensure that "all investors trading on impersonal exchanges have relatively equal access to material information."

Since then the insider trading prohibition has been elaborated through Supreme Court decisions and SEC orders in the U.S., and has spread to many other countries as well. It has also been the source of unending discussion and controversy among legal scholars. Just in the past few months, the Columbia Business Law Review has come out with an entire issue devoted to the topic (based on a symposium held at Columbia last fall), and Edward Elgar has published a 512-page Research Handbook on Insider Trading (list price, $240) edited by UCLA Law Professor (and prolific blogger) Stephen Bainbridge.

I will not claim to have read all or even most of the contributions to these volumes (law professors write long), but just dipping into them is an educational if bewildering experience. (The Langevoort article cited above is from the Columbia Business Law Review; my brief history of insider trading law is partly cribbed from Bainbridge's introduction to the Handbook.) The main lesson I learned is that the case against insider trading is much less about specific harms than a belief that it's bad for financial markets in general.

This belief is, as already noted, not universally held. The most famous argument against prosecuting insider trading was set out by the influential and irrepressible law-and-economics scholar Henry G. Manne in his 1966 book, Insider Trading and the Stock Market. Manne believed (and believes) that since it's in society's interest for information about corporations to get out and be reflected in share prices, we should be encouraging corporate insiders to trade on what they know, not punishing them for it.

That reasoning, while it continues to inspire law professors to write articles, has never taken hold in court. Cary's original claim that corporate insiders have no business profiting from (or helping others profit from) information that belongs to the corporation as a whole has more or less prevailed. In fact, it has expanded: The traders at Galleon and SAC weren't corporate insiders — they were investors (or speculators, if you prefer) scrabbling for information about corporations whose shares they were thinking of buying or selling or shorting. This activity helped speed the flow of information to financial markets, thus enabling more efficient and accurate pricing of the shares of corporations. Finding out things about corporations that management would rather not disclose is something professional money managers are supposed to do.

But in doing so, Galleon and SAC (allegedly at this point in SAC's case) caused insiders at corporations to betray their fiduciary responsibility and generally made the country's financial markets more cutthroat and amoral than they were before. And that, really, is the core of the crime. To quote again from Langevoort's article, the "central premise" behind insider trading laws is that "manifestations of greed and lack of self-restraint among the privileged, especially fiduciaries or those closely related to fiduciaries, threaten to undermine the official identity of the public markets as open and fair."

The connection between the insider trading cases and all the other unsavory behavior that went on in financial circles in the years leading up to 2008 (and surely still goes on, if perhaps at reduced volume) would seem to be, then, that they're all manifestations of greed and lack of self-restraint among the privileged. And because, for various reasons, we seem unable to throw people in jail for hawking toxic collateralized debt obligations or giving those CDOs triple-A ratings, going after insider traders is the best our criminal justice system can do.

The SEC has, of course, brought a fraud case against Goldman Sachs bond trader Fabrice Tourre that is related to the 2008 crisis and is being tried right now. It's a civil case, and most indications are that it won't be easy to win. The SEC must show that Tourre intended to dupe investors, and jurors must be convinced that the dupees weren't so sophisticated that they should have known better than to buy into a synthetic mortgage CDO that Goldman Sachs had assembled in large part so hedge fund manager John Paulson could bet on its failure. Goldman itself already settled in the case with a $550 million fine and an admission that its marketing materials "contained incomplete information," so that's something. But it's not nearly as big a something as going to jail for insider trading.

So that's where things stand. Insider trading of shares in publicly held corporations has been criminalized, but few other dubious financial practices have. Perhaps that's as it should be — insider trading does feel icky, and prosecuting it sends the signal that there are lines that market participants should not cross. Also, trying to jail everybody who sells investments that go bad (which is really what most financial fraud amounts to) would probably grind financial markets to a halt.

But the emphasis does seem to be off. The ban on insider trading dates to an era when the stock market was the biggest financial show in town, and small investors still controlled a big percentage of it. Now institutions dominate stock trading, and publicly traded stocks are a relatively small part of a burgeoning financial universe of private equity, debt, commodities, derivatives, and more. Yet most government investigative and prosecutorial energy seems to remain focused on insider trading in stocks — because that's where cases can be won.