Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1569

Jeff Bezos, John Henry, and the New Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IT's C-Suite Problem

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

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

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

1. Developing Employee-Focused Interface Roles

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

2. Adapting Product Marketing for IT

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

3. Making User Experience Design an IT Priority

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

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

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





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

Don't Make Decisions, Orchestrate Them

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

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

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

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

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

Do You Need a Résumé in the LinkedIn Era?

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

The answer is a highly qualified "yes".

The Value of LinkedIn

In the past, résumés have served several functions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blogs, Websites, and Landing Pages

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

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

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

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

Why You Still Need a Resume

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

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

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

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

Avoiding the Schizophrenic IT Organization

A pharmaceuticals company we've been studying decided to deploy more than 20,000 iPads and other mobile devices to the global sales force to improve its engagement with doctors in emerging and developed markets. Over the next two years, this change in how sales people interact with customers will redefine what the product content will be, how the sales staff will use a new CRM platform to record visits online, and how new insights will be derived from these interactions across sales, marketing, and brand management — ultimately driving decisions.

The impact on the company's IT organization has been significant. It has never before rolled out something at this speed. Welcome to the new world of IT.

Increasingly, business leaders are driving transformation projects in areas like digital marketing, multi-channel sales, and product-content and customer-information management, pushing the CIO and IT organization to respond in new, faster, and different ways. The timetable for implementing these projects is often months, not years.

For CIOs, the good news is that they're now finding themselves at the center of business change with the opportunity to directly impact front-line business results. The bad news (if it is bad) is business managers' expectations of the CIO and the IT organization are soaring; they have a "no excuses" view of IT responsiveness.

This is giving rise to a schizophrenic IT organization. One side is focused on running global-infrastructure and implementing big-system-application programs over three to five years, where the emphasis is on compliance, security, reliability, and effective 24/7 operations. The other side is focused on "making IT happen" rapidly without the complex plans and multi-year rollouts that have been institutionalized in large IT organizations.

The challenge for C-suite executives, including CIOs, is to avoid an either/or view of IT-enabled business change and to have the maturity to embrace both sides of the challenge at the same time. The logical response might seem to be to restructure and reskill the IT organization (again!) to accommodate the new demands — in particular, to acquire the skills to deploy emerging technologies like mobile, social media, analytics, and big data. This, we contend, is unlikely to achieve much. What is required is a fresh perspective and novel thinking.

The perspective we are advocating is shaped by shifting focus away from portraying the challenge as nailing the design, competencies and skills of a separate organizational unit. The fact is, IT use is pervasive right across the organization; so any response should reflect this. Executives must consider IT less from the standpoint of a factory (the current mind-set) and more from the perspective of how people are managed.

Just think about it: As a manager, you are intimately involved in hiring and managing your staff and appraising their performance; it is not something that you would ever consider delegating to the HR department. Your HR colleagues do have a role to play, but it's an advisory, coordination, and compliance role. They may, for example, liaise with recruiters in identifying potential candidates, help in positioning any advertisements, and work with you to develop talent. Given that you are likely to be critically dependent on information and IT in the performance of your job, why is information and IT treated so differently?

Based on our research, we think organizations should embrace three interdependent roles for managing information and IT: orchestrator, broker, and value realizer.

The orchestrator role involves coordinating how information will be used across the organization, determining where enabling investments will be made, defining the architectural standards needed for integration and process standardization, balancing agility and stability, and determining policies regarding the protection of information. The role also incorporates oversight function.

The broker role revolves around the supply of IT, applications, and services. These may be brokered from in-house resources, although it is increasingly likely that they will be provisioned from external sources. Even if all applications and services are come from the cloud, this must be done within a framework that takes into account both risk and architectural integrity. The role also entails continually assessing the economics and performance of supply to ensure that the organization continues to get the most bang for its buck.

The value realizer role is to ensure that the full value from IT investments is achieved. For new investments this is about managing organizational change and driving use of information. This change enabled by technology must then be sustained over the lifecycle of the investment for all the expected value to be delivered.

While the details of these roles may not be new, how each role will manifest itself in an organization most definitely will be. We don't see these roles necessarily aligning to a particular individual (e.g., the CIO); rather you should treat them as a set of connected behaviors, obligations, beliefs and norms that will affect a broad range of managers and staff in an organization. (For example, this thinking will accommodate Gartner's suggestion that the chief marketing officer will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017.)

Nor are these roles likely to reside in a single organizational unit (i.e., the IT function). The challenge is to reconfigure resources and accountabilities across the organization to meet the remit of these roles. This is where the shift in mind-set provides the foundation. This will not be easy, but it's the challenge business leaders face if they are to avoid the schizophrenic IT organization.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
Today's CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms

Univision's Ratings Win Underlines the Power of Hispanic Marketing

It's been a good summer so far for Univision. The Spanish-language network hit the number-one spot in the sought-after demographic of television viewers aged 18 to 49 in July. It beat out channels like Fox, NBC, and CBS. It's the third summer in a row the network has bested its English-language counterparts.

Univision's success comes as little surprise. The Hispanic market continues to grow in importance to the future of American businesses — especially in the domains of advertising and marketing. A compilation of the latest findings we prepared at Smartling shows that the Hispanic population currently accounts for 16.7% of the U.S. population, or 52 million people, and will have $1.5 trillion in purchasing power by 2015.

Plus, the Hispanic market is young. The "youth demographic" is desirable across platforms and brands and generally represents the next generation of customers. By 2050, Hispanics will account for at least 30 percent of the total U.S. population — even if there are sharp declines in immigration.

Advertisers continue to take note. Many companies are changing their strategies to remain competitive and better reflect the ethnic and linguistic realities of this evolving consumer base. Target recently launched a popular bilingual television ad, featuring a version of the song, "If You're Happy and You Know It" in both English and Spanish. Kraft Foods now has an entire Spanish-language site designed specifically for the tastes of Latinos, featuring a noted Latino chef, a range of recipes with familiar ingredients from home, and party planning tips for quinceañeras (birthday celebrations for 15-year-old girls).

Marketers don't necessarily need Spanish to reach all Hispanics — many, especially children of immigrants in the U.S. — are English-dominant. However, most brands prefer to build brand loyalty with Hispanics early — in their home countries and among first-generation immigrants. With that in mind, providing content in Spanish has become a best practice.

The Hispanic advertising industry is now worth more than $5 billion, and is outpacing all other sectors of advertising, with four times the amount of growth. As of June 2012, ad spend growth rates had increased by 20.7% for the Hispanic market compared to just 1.7% in the non-Hispanic market. Companies like Procter & Gamble, McDonald's, AT&T, Verizon, Toyota, General Mills, and General Motors spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each year in Hispanic advertising. Savvy advertisers are able to build two-for-one brand loyalty, reaching both customers living in Latin America and Latinos who reside in the United States.

The landscape is changing fast on this issue and there are a few new trends worth watching:

The upscale Hispanic market is booming. Makers of luxury products are beginning to turn their attention to the Hispanic market. Nearly one quarter of all U.S. Hispanic consumers are now defined as "upscale consumers," with an annual income of $75,000 or more. By 2015, their buying power is estimated to be worth $680 billion.

The Hispanic market also matters for marketing to business buyers. B2B advertisers are beginning to turn their attention to the rising number of businesses owned by Hispanics in the U.S. In 2007, Hispanic-owned businesses generated $350.7 billion in sales, a trend that stands to grow with time.

Hispanics are more mobile-savvy than other segments of U.S. consumers. Hispanics are 28% more likely to own a smartphone than non-Hispanic whites. One study showed that 47% of Hispanics used a handheld device to go online, compared to just 28% of non-Hispanic whites.

Every business needs to understand its customers well. As these trends show, it may no longer be a viable option to put off a strategy for marketing to Hispanics until mañana.

Women Overestimate Their Willingness to Confront Harassment

In experiment, 83% of women said they would confront a job interviewer who asked such sexually harassing questions as "Do you have a boyfriend?" And the more confrontation they predicted for themselves, the greater their contempt for women who didn't protest. Yet past research shows that most candidates who face such harassment do nothing to protest, says a team led by Kristina A. Diekmann of the University of Utah. People underestimate the costs of confrontation, such as impaired reputation and social status, if they don't experience the harassment themselves.

Build a Career Worth Having

We live in a time of chronic dissatisfaction in the workplace. Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace study found that as many as 70% of working Americans were unfulfilled with their jobs, 18% to such an extent that they are actively undermining their co-workers. This is a marked increase in workplace dissatisfaction from 2010, when Conference Board found that 55% of Americans were dissatisfied with their jobs.

How can we explain this? Certainly factors like the sluggish economic recovery and stuck wages play a role, but I think the real answer is even more straightforward: It's not clear how one designs a satisfying career in today's professional culture, especially if lasting fulfillment (as opposed to salary maximization) is the goal.

At my company, ReWork, we connect talented professionals to meaningful work opportunities at companies that are making substantive social, environmental, and cultural progress. Based on our conversations with over 12,000 professionals and hundreds of hiring managers, we've gained insights into what's lacking in the traditional approach to career planning, and how professionals can create careers with an ongoing sense of purpose. Here's my advice:

1. See your career as a series of stepping stones, not a linear trajectory.

There's an implicit view that careers are still linear. Sure, many people accept that the career ladder is broken, but most still attempt to somehow increase the "slope" of their career trajectory.

They wait until they are unhappy, look around for opportunities that seem better than their current job, apply for a few, cross their fingers, and take the best option that they can get. Then, they toil away until they are unhappy again, and the cycle repeats. Though this approach can increase your salary over time, studies show that, once you make more than $75,000, more money doesn't correlate to happiness or emotional wellbeing.

Most people end up with a career path of somewhat arbitrary events that, at best, is a gradually improving wandering path, and, at worst, is just a series of unfulfilling jobs

The solution to this dismal cycle? Let go of the idea that careers are linear. These days, they are much more like a field of stepping stones that extends in all directions. Each stone is a job or project that is available to you, and you can move in any direction that you like. The trick is simply to move to stones that take you closer and closer to what is meaningful to you. There is no single path — but rather, an infinite number of options that will lead to the sweet spot of fulfillment.

2. Seek legacy, mastery, and freedom — in that order.

Research from authors such as Daniel Pink (Drive), Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You), Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman (Startup of You), and Tony Hsieh (Delivering Happiness) shows that there are three primary attributes of fulfilling work:



Legacy. A higher purpose, a mission, a cause. This means knowing that in some way — large or small — the world will be a better place after you've done your work.

Mastery. This refers to the art of getting better and better at skills and talents that you enjoy using, to the extent that they become intertwined with your identity. Picture a Jedi, or a Samurai, or a master blacksmith.

Freedom. The ability to choose who you work with, what projects you work on, where and when you work each day, and getting paid enough to responsibly support the lifestyle that you want.

The order is important. People are fulfilled most quickly when they first prioritize the impact that they want to have (legacy), then understand which skills and talents they need to have that impact (mastery), and finally "exchange" those skills for higher pay and flexibility (freedom) as they develop and advance.

People don't typically have just one purpose. The things you're passionate about — women's health, early childhood education, organic food, or renewable energy — are likely to evolve over time. And it's important to develop a high degree of freedom so that you're able to hunt down your purpose again when it floats onto the next thing. This means being able to do things like volunteer on the side, go months at a time without getting a paycheck, or invest in unusual professional development opportunities.

3. Treat your career like a grand experiment.

In my experience, people who are successful in finding — and maintaining — meaningful work approach their careers like a grand experiment.

All of the things you think you know about what you want to be doing, what you're good at, what people want to hire you to do (and at what salary), how different organizations operate, etc. are hypotheses that can be validated or invalidated with evidence — either from the first-hand experience of trying something (including bite-sized projects), or second-hand from asking the right questions of the right people.

The faster and cheaper that you're able to validate your career hypotheses, the sooner you'll find fulfillment. You don't have to take a job in a new industry to realize it's not for you. You can learn a ton about potential lines of work from reading online, having conversations, taking on side projects, and volunteering.

And a bonus — by doing your homework on what's actually a good fit for you, you won't waste your time applying to jobs that you aren't competitive for. And like any good scientist, you'll achieve a healthy detachment from your incorrect hypotheses — they are just par for the course, after all.

I use the word "grand" to describe this experiment because the reality is that your career is not just a way to earn a living. It's your chance to discover what you're here for and what you love. It's your best shot at improving the world in a way that is important to you. It's a sizeable component of your human experience, in a very real way. As such, it should be an adventure, with a healthy bit of magic and mystery along the way.

So if you're one of the many who find themselves on the path to meaningful work — remember to enjoy the journey, don't give up, and don't settle.

How to Schedule Time for Meaningful Work

An interview with Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, coauthors of the forthcoming article "Make Time for the Work that Matters."

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by August 9.

Being the World's Largest Ad Agency Might Not Be Something to Brag About

Google's All "Who Cares?"


This week's merger announcement between Omnicom and Publicis, two ad and marketing agencies with a combined 2012 revenue of $23 billion, involved glasses of champagne. But perhaps a jug of water would have been the more appropriate thirst-quencher for these industry giants' long road ahead, even as the biggest agency in the world. This commentary from The Economist is both a primer for those who haven't been keeping up with the news and a witty analysis for those paying attention to only a particular segment of the story. The bottom line, of course, is that the companies merged in an attempt to solve a couple of major problems: the growth of digital advertising that bypasses agencies’ traditional role in placing content and, secondarily, an ongoing succession conundrum at Publicis (Maurice Lévy, who heads the company, is 71). The new agency also promises to cut $500 million in costs, and because it will represent 20% of ad spending and 40% of some publishers' ad slots, it could be in a great position to help clients get better rates. But there may be more bad news than good. Aside from the whole "We have to get this approved by antitrust authorities in more than 40 countries" issue, the stumbling blocks could include client dissatisfaction (several competing brands are now being represented under the same mammoth umbrella); cross-cultural differences; and the challenge of catching up to the nimble Google, which controls a third of all online ad spending. Perhaps, the article argues, the change is akin to what happened on the Wall Street trading floor when everything became automated: "The move toward buying ads on exchanges will mean that their margins are squeezed and life gets a lot tougher." Cheers?

The Limits to Self-Interest

A Manager's Moral Obligation to Preserve Capitalism Working Knowledge

Most people think of capitalism as morality-neutral, at best. Others think of it as downright immoral. Karthik Ramanna of Harvard Business School differs with both views. True, capitalism unleashes people's self-interest. But in order to let them pursue their goals, it has to enable individual freedom and fairness of opportunity, which are among society's important moral "goods." This delicate balance shouldn't be taken for granted, however. In a new working paper, Ramanna and Rebecca M. Henderson, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, say executives in the financial industry have the capacity to do a lot of harm to capitalism's moral framework if they give in to the temptation to structure the rules of the game around maximizing their own profits — something that's fairly easy to do when practically no one understands the esoteric markets and instruments that big banks have been brandishing lately. Pressure from industry groups can help these executives recognize that they have a responsibility to set aside their self-interest "in order to preserve the interests of the system as a whole." Ramanna believes the executives will eventually get the message and do the right thing. "CEOs are usually not immoral people," he says. —Andy O'Connell

Strip-Mining People’s Lives

The Trouble with Zuckism PandoDaily

Facebook (finally) traded for over $38 a share this week, the magic number it initially went public for back in 2012. To some extent this shows that fears about the social network's ability to make money may have been overstated. But it's the way they make money — mining user data to generate ad revenue — that's the focus of Kevin Kelleher's piece. Most users, he says, don't love the social network, but the cost-benefit proposition of connecting with people easily across the globe is too good to pass up. It's under this condition that Zuckism flourishes: "Zuckism says that if you can tap a deep enough need at a big enough scale you can strip-mine a billion intimate lives for profit." The question going forward, Kelleher says, is what will happen when Facebook's two constituent bases — its users and its investors — grow further and further apart as user enthusiasm wanes and investors make more money.

You Can't Eat a Check

In Lieu of Money, Toyota Donates Efficiency to New York Charity New York Times

Kaizen, Japanese for "continuous improvement," is Toyota's self-described business model. Sure, it can help Toyota make great cars and trucks, but can it also help feed hungry New Yorkers? In a rebuke to the traditional practice of cutting a check to support a charity, Toyota offered the Food Bank for New York City some strategy consulting instead. And despite some initial apprehension, it worked: Toyota engineers were able to cut down the dinner wait time from 90 minutes to 18 minutes. And after Hurricane Sandy, a Food Bank warehouse lowered the time it took to pack boxes of supplies for victims from 3 minutes to 11 seconds. This efficiency gets food to more people, sure. But it also saves the Food Bank time and money. So next time your business is thinking of donating money to a cause, you might want to consider just how far your expertise can go instead.

Live and Let Die

How Link "Suicide" Could Save the Web Wired

A link is a link, right? Nope. There are web links that are relevant, useful, and significant. And then there are all the rest. The relevant-slash-useful-slash-significant ones are great and deserve to live on in perpetuity, but the rest should die, writes Jeff Stibel. In fact, the web should be structured so as to let pointless links disappear automatically after a while. Same with unused sites, for that matter. Summary executions of useless links and sites would prevent the web from becoming ever more cluttered with things no one needs. A cleaned-up web would be more meaningful and, ultimately, more useful. But how to distinguish the good from the bad? A start might be for users to agree that one-way, and thus weaker and less significant, links (I link to you but you don't link to me) should appear in a different color or font size from two-way, and thus stronger and more significant, links (we both link to each other). "There’s no reason we can’t eventually build this facet into the web’s very fabric," he writes, making it sound oh so easy to unleash a web-crawling killing machine. —Andy O'Connell

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