Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1570

How Your Brand Can Flirt on Vine

The look is always the same: A seasoned marketer is cajoled into watching their first Vine video. Six seconds pass and it's over. The marketer gazes quizzically at the smiling young person that brought the video to his attention.

"That's it?"

Like any emerging platform, Vine (the short-form video app owned by Twitter) requires a recalibration for users to understand a new context within a new format. And for marketers who are used to their 15 second online pre-rolls, it's especially important for them to recognize that this burgeoning technology could one day deliver more value for them than YouTube. If a 60-second video is a dinner date, then Vine is the opening flirt across a crowded bar.

First, let's dissect the anatomy of the flirt: The wink, the blown kiss from a loved one. These familiar tactics are short-form moments that over-index with joy. At Virgin Mobile, we call these surprise and delight moments the "Virgin Touch." Our goal is to shower the customer with tons of little, metaphorical kisses, hoping that a few stick. Virgin flirts constantly with hopes that some of these moments are shared, which in turn adds to the mythology of our brand.

Now look at Vine. It's a platform invented to maximize joy in six seconds. People who post on Vine — or "Viners" — tend to be 15- to 30-year-olds who have perfected the art of telling a good story in the shortest amount of time possible. Viners may use a series of techniques to make you smile. Some, like Nicholas Megalis (the top Viner at 1.9M followers at the time I write this) use catchy jingles or songs. Others, like Meagan Cignoli, use stop-motion animation. Rudy Mancuso is the king of "looping" — the ability to manipulate your six seconds to create an endless loop (Vine videos auto-repeat after they end). Then there's Brandon Calvillo, an emerging Viner (and one of my personal favorites) currently hijacking our Virgin Mobile Vine account, who has invented a new technique inserting pop song lyrics as punchlines to mundane everyday situations. He's been especially clever with this technique when it came to commenting on our recently announced Virgin Mobile FreeFest.

Vine was brought to my attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, the internet maven who himself started his career as a YouTube wine celebrity. He had the bold idea, along with his co-founder Jerome Jarre (also a celebrity Viner) to start a new company called Grape Story that would solely represent Vine stars (similar to how CAA represents actors) and connect them with brands. At the time, he was putting the final touches on his new book, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, which focuses on the multiple touches a brand needs to do to break through and win a prospect.

What we at Virgin saw as kisses, Gary saw as punches. Both hope for the same result: a constant barrage of conversation with an engaged prospect about their values, culture, and sensibilities. Gary walked me through the explosive growth of Vine, which was approaching a tipping point after surging to 13 million users in the first four months after launch. Having seen a similar trajectory at Buzzfeed 18 months earlier, we decided to help him launch his new business. Virgin Mobile was the first brand that would partner with Grape Story on Vine and would attract top-tier talent to help bring awareness to our brand.

At its core, Vine is about "rubbernecking" — distracting your attention for a mere instant with hopes for a payoff. For some it's an attractive passing stranger. For others it's a car accident at the end of a long traffic jam. Either way, for a brand to break through on the platform, you need to reduce your message or brand essence to a simple beat, and then set up for the payoff of that beat. All in six seconds. Though this may sound daunting, there are considerable benefits. Vine videos automatically repeat after they play, so your moment's frequency will deliver roughly three times for a given user (if they enjoy the video, that is).

Within three weeks of launching our Vine relationship with Grape Story, we gained over 30,000 followers (and trending to hit 100,000 followers in a month or so). The lion's share of these followers were from a contest we called #happyaccidents, where Viners were encouraged to post videos of their phones distracting them from everyday life. Subsequent to this contest, we created "Resident Viners" — similar to resident DJs at hot clubs — where an emerging Viner would guest-Vine from our account for a few weeks, help build our base, then leave.

Currently, we're still testing the mechanics of the platform to understand what are the most reliable breakthrough methods. Based on our findings experimenting with the platform thus far, Vine feels ideal for what I call "Product Placement 2.0" — that is, a place where the brand or product can act as a character in the piece rather than just set dressing. Rudy Mancuso was successful at integrating Ritz crackers in this fashion.

At times, Viners have experimented to be more subtle with our branding. And at other times, less so. As the most influential Viners engage with our page, we start to see other junior Viners creatively interpret our brand in the form of contest entries. These moments are the "kisses" we most enjoy. "Brand Flirting" at its finest.

So how does Vine fit into your existing marketing ecosystem?

To make sense of it all, it's best to first temper expectations. Vine, at this moment, is not a brand that will increase sales. But its role in the ecosystem is no different than the traditional out-of-home assets you may have used in traditional campaigns. Think of a good, branded Vine video as the passing bus that carries a clever summer blockbuster film ad on it. And the true value of the medium is in its low cost. A typical sponsorship of a Vine video can run a mere few thousand dollars, yet it can gain tens of thousands of "likes" or "re-Vines". Marketers with lower marketing budgets can capitalize on this as one of many tactics to break through in a cluttered space with fickle Millennials.

Vine, of course, isn't the only platform out there for short-form video. Instagram recently announced their entry into the market. Though the jury is still out on which platform will win over brands, it's clear that both platforms will address different objectives for advertisers. Instagram videos will most likely feel more like pre-roll ads and look to formally begin a customer relationship with the prospect. Vine will focus more on brand voice and whimsy.

Viners have the unique ability to tell a breakthrough story in six seconds and can build an organic following because of this skill. According to our friends at Grape Story, there is no famous Viner that gained fame in another platform prior to joining Vine. Engaging fans in such short time is a talent. Brands can learn plenty from those who've mastered the art of digital flirting.

Should Your CIO Be Chief Digital Officer?

We've all seen it. CIOs who do great things in leading IT soon gain extra responsibilities. By helping business leaders to improve their businesses, the CIO becomes an obvious candidate to fill any open role that involves technology, process, or strong governance. Some CIOs become CIO-Plus-COO or CIO-Plus-Head of Shared Services. Others gain new responsibilities in strategy, M&A integration, or innovation. Still others move on to business roles including CEO. In the book, The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value, Richard Hunter and I coined the phrase CIO-Plus. In the four years since our book was published, the CIO-Plus idea has gained real traction, and there are numerous stories and cases studies on the phenomenon.

But there is another leadership role that has arisen in many organizations in recent years: the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). In many companies, "digital" is a cacophony of disconnected, inconsistent, and sometimes incompatible activities. One company had three simultaneous mobile marketing initiatives, conducted by different groups, using different tools and vendors. Other companies have multiple employee collaboration platforms with different rules and technologies. The problem is exacerbated as business units do their own things digitally, or as companies hire vendors who can only do things their own way. If your company has wildly different digital marketing activities for each brand or region, you know what I mean.

The CDO's job is to turn the digital cacophony into a symphony. It's OK to experiment with new businesses and tools, but experimentation must be coupled with building scalable, efficient capabilities. The CDO creates a unifying digital vision, energizes the company around digital possibilities, coordinates digital activities, helps to rethink products and processes for the digital age, and sometimes provides critical tools or resources. That's why Starbucks — an early leader in all things digital — hired a CDO last year. And it's why many other companies are naming CDOs before they get too far along the digital road.

The title CDO may or may not become permanent in your company. But the responsibilities of the CDO will be required. You may appoint a temporary CDO to get your house in order, or you may develop other ways to get the job done. Whatever approach you choose, you need to create appropriate levels of digital technology synergy, brand integration, investment coordination, skill development, vendor management, and innovation over the long term.

Is CDO the next step for the aspiring CIO-Plus? The answer is not obvious, but it's well worth considering. Many of the CDO's roles are challenges that great CIOs have already mastered in their own domains. But some, such as brand synergy, are new to the CIO. Diverse companies are responding to the digital leadership challenge in different and dynamic ways.

Although relatively few CIOs have an official CDO title, roughly 20% of CIOs in Gartner's latest survey said they played the role. At Codelco, the world's largest copper mining company, CIO Marco Orellana is helping to fundamentally transform the process of mining and selling through digital technologies such as real-time coordination, analytics, and autonomous vehicles. At Asian Paints, Manish Choksi managed the difficult step of centralizing and standardizing processes across a loosely-coupled set of regional units. Now, as CIO and Chief of Corporate Strategy, he leads the digital transformation of manufacturing, selling, and customer service.

In some companies, the CIO and CDO are deliberately separate roles. The CIO of an apparel company participates in digital decisions and supports digital initiatives while keeping the company's traditional IT unit running smoothly. He is not seen as a potential CDO, but the company values his skills in a strong supporting role. Meanwhile, Starbucks' CDO Adam Brotman and CIO Curt Garner work very closely as a team to drive digital strategy and execution.

Then again, executives in some companies feel their CIO does not have what it takes to be part of the digital conversation. The CIO of a business-services provider had little role in digital at all; the CEO asked him to focus only on legacy IT systems while a newly-hired CDO managed digital activities. Two years later, the company moved all IT functions under the CDO, and the CIO moved to a new firm.

So, should your CIO take on digital responsibilities? Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

Is your CIO great at the CIO role? Is IT clearly running well? Are IT costs and agility what you want them to be? If your answer to these questions is "no," then you probably want your CIO to focus on fixing IT, not expanding beyond IT.

Is your CIO ready for a CIO-Plus role? Do you see your CIO as a senior executive colleague or just a leader of the technology function? Has he successfully managed non-technical roles such as merger integration, process management, or shared services? Is your senior team smarter when your CIO is in the room?

Does your CIO have digital expertise? Can she talk the language of social media or mobile or analytics, and can she help you understand? Does she understand the digital threats and opportunities your company faces — from inside and outside its industry? Can she create a compelling digital vision for the firm?

Will your CIO command respect across the enterprise? The CDO role can require even more political savvy and communication skills than the CIO role does. Is your CIO up to the task of driving change across a strong-willed senior executive team? Can she engage a busy workforce to turn digital vision into reality?

In an increasingly digitizing business world, most companies need better digital leadership and coordination. You need to create a compelling digital vision, coordinate digital investments, drive appropriate synergies, build a clean technology platform, and foster innovation. You need to energize a busy workforce and generate shared understanding in your senior executive team.



If your CIO is good, look to him for help. Strong CIOs have already tackled some of the tough challenges of digital leadership. They understand the importance of governance and policy. They know the intricacies of managing across organizational units. They tend to be highly connected with senior executives, having helped them achieve their objectives over the years. They know the current business and the future opportunities technology can create. Plus, in any big company, it's difficult — if not impossible — to build great digital capabilities without linking to your existing IT capabilities and people.

So, should your CIO be CDO? You need to get the digital leadership job done, whether through a new C-level title or other methods. If you have a great CIO, give her some digital responsibility. You may not choose to make her your digital leader. But the skills and relationships of a great CIO will be an asset to any digital leadership team.

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

What Does Post-Bureaucratic Leadership Look Like?

Remember that classic New Yorker cartoon with Rover sitting in front of a computer? The caption read, "On the Internet, no one knows you're a dog." Well, on the web, no one knows you're a senior vice president either. That's why every leader is going to have to learn how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership.

As traditional hierarchies get supplanted by networked, or "social" organizations, leadership will become less a function of "where you sit," than of "what you can do." Any company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need more than a celebrity CEO and a corporate university that serves up tasty educational morsels to the "high potentials." It will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they're capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.

What does it take to dramatically enlarge the leadership capacity of an organization — and equip all of its people to lead without formal authority?

Those are the questions behind the Leaders Everywhere Challenge, the second leg of the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. And today we're proud to announce the eighteen finalists. This is a robust collection of real-world case studies and courageous experiments in rethinking the work of leadership, redistributing power, and unleashing 21st century leadership skills. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Biggest-Ever Day of Collective Action to Improve Healthcare That Started With a Tweet

Story by Helen Bevan, Damian Roland, Jackie Lynton, Pollyanna Jones

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders

Story by Mark Clare

Reweaving Corporate DNA: Building a Culture of Design Thinking at Citrix

Story by Catherine Courage

Teaming at GE Aviation

Story by Rasheedah Jones

The System of Leadership

Hack by Monique Jordan

Total Volunteer Force for the U.S. Military

Hack by Timothy Kane

A Tale of Two Captains: Making the Case for the Universal Applicability of Leaders Everywhere

Story by Charlie Kim and David Marquet

Don't Remove Their Igloos!

Story by Peter King

Co-Presidents: Distributed Leadership at The Nerdery

Story by Mark Malmberg

The Power of Employees to Overcome the Bank Crisis

Story by Valerie Martens

The 4-Hat Hack: How a Micro Change in Your Employee Portal Can Yield Mega Results in Leadership

Hack by Joel Modestus

Rap a Tap, Tap Tap, Join TITAN and You Are the Leader

Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan and Sumant Sood

What Goes Into Building a CEO Factory?

Story by Stephen Remedios

Empowering Intrapreneurs within the Federal Government at NASA

Story by Kevin Rosenquist

Integrity, Rationality and Collegiality: Ingredients for Greatness

Story by Marcus Ryu

Who Do People Report to Here?

Story by Richard Sheridan

Project 10X: Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations

Hack by Max Shkud and Bill Veltrop

Quit Email and Start Leading

Hack by Kim Spinder

Please explore the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings — they'll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We'll announce the winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge the week of August 19th.

Three Differences Between Managers and Leaders

A young manager accosted me the other day. "I've been reading all about leadership, have implemented several ideas, and think I'm doing a good job at leading my team. How will I know when I've crossed over from being a manager to a leader?" he wanted to know.

I didn't have a ready answer and it's a complicated issue, so we decided to talk the next day. I thought long and hard, and came up with three tests that will help you decide if you've made the shift from managing people to leading them.

Counting value vs Creating value. You're probably counting value, not adding it, if you're managing people. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value. If a diamond cutter is asked to report every 15 minutes how many stones he has cut, by distracting him, his boss is subtracting value.

By contrast, leaders focuses on creating value, saying: "I'd like you to handle A while I deal with B." He or she generates value over and above that which the team creates, and is as much a value-creator as his or her followers are. Leading by example and leading by enabling people are the hallmarks of action-based leadership.

Circles of influence vs Circles of power. Just as managers have subordinates and leaders have followers, managers create circles of power while leaders create circles of influence.

The quickest way to figure out which of the two you're doing is to count the number of people outside your reporting hierarchy who come to you for advice. The more that do, the more likely it is that you are perceived to be a leader.

Leading people vs Managing work. Management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. Leadership refers to an individual's ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success. Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers, not power and control.

In India, M.K. Gandhi inspired millions of people to fight for their rights, and he walked shoulder to shoulder with them so India could achieve independence in 1947. His vision became everyone's dream and ensured that the country's push for independence was unstoppable. The world needs leaders like him who can think beyond problems, have a vision, and inspire people to convert challenges into opportunities, a step at a time.

I encouraged my colleague to put this theory to the test by inviting his team-mates for chats. When they stop discussing the tasks at hand — and talk about vision, purpose, and aspirations instead, that's when you will know you have become a leader.

Agree?

The Problem with Procurement

Back in 1983, in a Harvard Business Review article, Peter Kralijc called for the procurement function to take on a larger and more strategic role in managing the supply chain. Thirty years on, sales people in most large companies are still being trained in ways to actually bypass procurement folks in their customer companies. This is not evidence of people taking the function seriously. What went wrong?

To find out, we conducted a survey with close to 200 procurement executives, in Asia and in Europe. We found pretty conclusively that procurement managers are their own worst enemy, both with external suppliers and within the company, with internal customers and other stakeholders.

Let's begin with supplier relationships. Nearly half our respondents claim they spend time with suppliers asking them for updates on the markets and new business suggestions. This is not great, perhaps, but it certainly sounds encouraging.

Poke a little deeper, though, and you'll find the picture looks less rosy. As the chart below shows, only about a third of managers are actually bringing any supplier intelligence into their organizations by advocating for suppliers and facilitating new connections for them, which is what you would expect someone managing the supply chain to do. Just 20% claim to be communicating business insights shared by those customers; only 17% could even tell us in segment their supplier put their company. No wonder suppliers don't want to spend time with these folks.

Let's turn to what's going on inside the company. As the second graphic shows, many procurement managers are trying to demonstrate internally that they have strategic value. They're gathering intelligence systematically about the company's stakeholders and communicating their successes. But it isn't getting much further than that. Less than 30% of the time do we see procurement managers customizing value propositions for internal customers and stakeholders, tracking satisfaction levels and setting targets for satisfaction.

If this sample is representative, then we can hardly be surprised if many c-suiters think that procurement is a backwater. And we can hardly expect young high-flyers in most industries to see it as a career path of choice.

Looking ahead, procurement managers will have to change the way they approach suppliers and business peers; being a strategic business partner means so much more than negotiating a discount.

People with Higher Status Live Longer

Nobel Prize winners live an average of 1.6 years longer than nominees who aren't selected, a finding that's consistent with a causal link between status and longer lifespan, say Matthew D. Rablen and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in the UK. The mechanism for the link is unclear, but it may have to do with higher-status individuals' greater control over their work lives. Lack of control in the workplace is associated with stress, and high levels of stress hormones damage immunological processes.

China's Impending Slowdown Just Means It's Joining the Big Leagues

China's era of spectacular economic growth is coming to an end. That's a popular theme at the moment, with any number of culprits cited — an overleveraged financial system, pollution, too little consumer spending, corruption, anti-corruption campaigns, and of course bad driving. It's reached the point that the Chinese government's International Press Center felt compelled to gather a group of reporters in Beijing earlier this week just so that Justin Yifu Lin, the former World Bank chief economist who is now a professor at Peking University and a government adviser, could tell them that he's "reasonably confident the Chinese government has the ability to maintain a 7.5% to 8% growth rate."

Here's the thing: a 7.5% to 8% GDP growth rate already is a significant slowdown from the nearly 10% annual pace at which China's economy had been growing until last year. And while all the economic issues cited above are real, the big issue confronting the Chinese economy is something simpler and more encouraging. The country is on the cusp of succeeding in its epic quest to break into the ranks of the world's affluent nations. When that happens, growth tends to slow.

That's been the finding of economists Barry Eichengreen of UC Berkeley, Donghyun Park of the Asian Development Bank in Manila, and Kwanjo Shin of Korea University in Seoul in two recent studies of growth slowdowns in emerging markets around the world. In the first, published in Asian Economic Papers last year, they reported a marked tendency toward slower economic growth when per capita incomes reach around $17,000 a year (in 2005 prices). In a newer working paper with more-complete data, they revise that to report two inflection points, one in the $10,000-$11,000 range and another around $15,000-$16,0000.

China, with a per capita GDP of $7,827 in 2011 (in 2005 dollars, according to the latest edition of the Penn World Tables), is getting close to that first landmark. It also has a couple of other characteristics that Eichengreen, Park, and Shin have found to be identified with growth slowdowns — an aging population and an economy that has favored investment over consumption. Basically, it's due. Or, as Eichengreen put it in an email when I asked him about it:

Financial systems, deleveraging, and environment and political problems all differ across countries, but all fast growing, late developing countries slow down once the low hanging fruit has been picked. China can add several percentage points of growth a year by shifting 20 million workers from rural underemployment to urban employment, but once the pool of underemployed labor is drained it's, well, drained. If you're a technological latecomer, you can grow fast by importing foreign technology, but once you've succeeded in that you have to start investing in and developing your own, which is a harder task.

Remember, these difficulties are the fruits of success. At 7.5% annual growth, China would cross the $10,000 per capita threshhold in 2015, and $15,000 in 2020. Well before then it would pass into the ranks of the world's "high income" nations, according to the World Bank's classification.

Not that stuff couldn't go wrong along the way. Eichengreen and Shin are co-authors (with Dwight H. Perkins, an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School) of the 2012 book From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy (no, I haven't read it, but you of course should), and Eichengreen sees important parallels in the Korean experience:

Korean governments attempted to resist the inevitable slowdown. Their legitimacy derived from delivering growth, and there was the external threat from North Korea that caused them to further prize economic strength. Our estimates there show a break-point in growth potential in 1989. But Korea sought to keep the old growth rates going by boosting investment. That worked for about 7 or 8 years, but no longer. And they ended up with a financial crisis in 1997-8. The Chinese have studied this history too, which is part of the explanation for why they are prepared to accept the current lower growth rate and, not incidentally, are in the process of clamping down on financial excesses.

None of this means there aren't big risks inherent in such a slowdown for the Chinese government (which, unlike South Korea's in the late 1980s is showing no signs transitioning towards democracy) and for the global economy (for which a Chinese slowdown will have an impact that earlier slowdowns in Korea and the other Asian tigers did not). But it is important to remember that for an emerging market, slowing down can mean you've arrived.

How to Reward Your Stellar Team

You've been told that getting the most from your team depends on rewarding and recognizing them collectively. But it's tough to do that, especially when most management systems are so focused on individual performance, undermining the very teamwork you're hoping to encourage. Luckily, you don't have to overhaul your company's evaluation process or pay structure. As a team manager, you can support the right behaviors with things that are in your control.

What Experts Say

A few decades ago, companies were struggling with how to measure and reward individual performance. But in their quest do so, many overreached, says Michael Mankins, a partner at Bain & Company and coauthor of Decide and Deliver: Five Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization. "The pendulum has swung too far, and now those measures are getting in the way of forming good teams," he explains. At the same time, compensating people for collaboration can be tricky, says Deborah Ancona, a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and coauthor of X-Teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed. "The boundaries are often blurry and people work on multiple teams at the same time, making it hard for the manager." Still, both she and Mankins agree, it's worth the effort to get it right. "Rewarding a team dramatically improves not only the team performance but also the individual's experience," says Mankins. Here's how to do it effectively.

Set clear objectives

Team members have to understand and agree on what success looks like. "You need to have some way of assessing the group's performance — a common set of objectives or aspirations," says Mankins. He advises bringing everyone together to discuss goals and metrics. Have them answer the question: What would it take for us to give ourselves an A? "Having this sort of dialogue can be motivational and lays the groundwork for collaboration in an objective way," he says.

Check in on progress

Once the team knows what it's supposed to do and how the work will be evaluated, check in regularly. Pose questions that help the group assess its progress: How are we performing as a team? What obstacles can we remove? You can have this conversation in a meeting or do it anonymously. "Use a service like SurveyMonkey and ask team members to give themselves a collective grade. If everybody agrees that it has been a C week for the team, then you can discuss how to improve," Mankins says. "If you give yourselves an A, it's something worth celebrating."

Use the full arsenal of rewards

Most managers don't have the power to change how salaries or bonuses are handled at their organizations. If you do, be sure to tie a portion of the discretionary compensation to team or unit performance — the bigger the percentage the better. But if you don't control the purse strings, don't fret. There are lots of non-monetary rewards at your disposal. "Think beyond team dinners and social events. Those are just table stakes," says Mankins. Ancona has studied hospitals where administrators put pictures of groups that have drastically lowered infection rates on prominent display to recognize them for a job well done. You can also give your team exposure to senior leaders. "Teams like to be seen as part of a project that contributes at a high level," Ancona says.

Get to know your team

Of course rewards are only motivating if you give the team something it wants. This can be challenging because what makes one person feel appreciated may have no effect on another. Spend the time to get to know your team members and look for things they all value. If you're at a loss, ask them for input.

Focus discussions on collective efforts

Ancona says that many companies include teamwork as a core competency in their leadership development models. As a manager, you can further encourage your people to collaborate by talking about them as a team, not as a set of individuals. Be sure to celebrate successes and discuss setbacks collectively. "The less you talk about individual contribution the better," says Mankins. Instead, praise the behaviors that contribute to the team's overall success such as chipping in on others' projects and giving candid peer feedback.

Evaluate team performance

In addition to completing individual performance reviews, consider conducting a team review as well. Mankins says that companies like Apple and Google have made this part of their formal processes, but you can do it on your own too. Every six months or so, take a close look at the group's progress, noting its accomplishments, where it has succeeded, and how it can further develop. Don't mention individuals in this appraisal but focus on what the team has done — and can do — together.

Principles to Remember

Do:

Agree on what success looks like

Bring the group together to discuss progress against goals and how to improve

Consider doing a formal evaluation of the team

Don't:

Only think of rewards as money — there are lots of non-monetary perks that people appreciate

Focus on individual performance — emphasize the team's accomplishments

Reward your team with something they don't collectively value

Case study#1: Set a team purpose and measure against it

To help launch PfizerWorks, a productivity initiative that allows employees to outsource boring parts of their jobs, Jordan Cohen put together a small team including his two direct reports, Tanya and Seth, and started by devising a collective purpose. Following the advice of David Collis and Michael Rukstad in "Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?" the group worked together to come up with a strategy statement of no more than 35 words. "These were the words we were going to live by and we struggled over every clause," he says. Next, they developed metrics tied directly to their strategy. "We had measures for inputs, outputs, and customer satisfaction, all of which we agreed to," he says. Meeting those goals was a reward in itself because team members could see how their actions contributed. "It was a source of great pride. It made them feel like they could win everyday," he says.



Jordan also found ways to make sure his team members were publicly recognized for their work. When PfizerWorks launched, he stopped going to meetings with senior leaders and let Tanya and Seth handle them instead. They became the face of the program. At a meeting with Gary Hamel, just before the famed management thinker was about to give a speech referencing PfizerWorks at the World Business Forum, Jordan asked if he'd be willing to mention the team by name. He did, leaving Tanya and Seth "somewhere between paralyzed and over the moon."

Case study #2: Let them improve their skills

When Christopher Lind worked at a software company, he led a team of eight people who were responsible for training the company's sales force. Most of them had been with the company for a while, but many didn't have formal skills in instructional technology and design. Still, "I was fortunate that everyone on the team had a strong desire to learn," Christopher says. "They wanted to grow their skillset and familiarize themselves with new technology."

The team made great progress, exceeding every goal Christopher set and then asking for new ones, so when it came time to reward them as a group, more advanced training seemed to be an obvious choice. He purchased a multi-license agreement to instructional design software. "I had spent enough time with my team to know they were eager to expand their experience and technical abilities," he explains. "I knew it could lead to them moving on to more senior jobs," he says. But "I ultimately decided that providing them with a valuable development opportunity outweighed that risk." In fact, he hoped it would give them a reason to stay. And he was right. Several team members told him that his investment, of both money and time, made them feel valued. It also gave the team something extra to work on together.

Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT

Reinventing corporate IT requires recognizing deep differences between what we have today and what we need in the future. These differences go to the foundation of the modern corporate IT department — the infrastructure — which includes the software, hardware, communications, facilities, data centers, operations, and other technical resources a corporation operates. This infrastructure sits on top of a publicly available substructure of assets and resources — telecommunications and the Internet, for example. Infrastructure and substructure support the information, processes, applications, rules, and channels that are the face of corporate IT.

Infrastructure largely determines the IT organization's structure, its budgeting, how the corporation goes to market, its legacy, and its capacity to change. It embodies the long tail realities of major business and technology decisions, resulting in an IT department struggling to manage multiple costly and incompatible infrastructures.

The days of seeking a single, one-size-fits-all, one-price-feeds-all IT department are numbered. Infrastructures are under assault technically, functionally, and financially. New digital technologies like mobile, big data, analytics, cloud, social, and sensors represent fundamentally different types of solutions than the proprietary transaction technologies such as Enterprise Resource Planning. Consider:

Standards-based (rather than proprietary) technologies in mobility, Internet protocols and open API's demand shorter application and infrastructure development cycle times. Standards reduce not only the amount of technology but also the risk associated with bringing new and legacy technologies together.
Functionally, digital technologies are front-office, customer-facing, and demand-generating. They're the business's brand. Digital demands move at the pace of the market, competition, and customer expectations rather than the upgrade cycles of IT vendors.
Financially, infrastructure is simply too expensive and consumes too much in its present form. CIOs need to provide infrastructure at a lower cost and with more agile capability. Even current cloud and virtualization technologies, which often lower unit costs, don't change the drivers and structures of those costs. It is only a matter of time before growing digital transaction volumes overwhelm these technologies in their current form.

Increasing needs for speed, creativity, low cost, and flexibility demand that we move beyond infrastructure to platforms. A platform is the collection and integration of common resources that support multiple business operations. Financial services companies have platforms that allow them to release new products without having to replace their infrastructures. Facebook, Google, and other digital companies invest in similar capabilities giving them a seemingly endless stream of innovations and experiments from a single platform.

"Plures ex uno" — or many out of one — is the goal of a digital platform. Note this is the opposite of the motto of the United States — "e pluribus unum" or one out of many. The comparison is apt as corporate infrastructure is federated in nature with limited viability in the digital future.

A platform is more than service-oriented architecture on steroids. Platforms look at technology with a business view organizing around specific business actions like one-click sales, search, description presentation, and pricing. These common actions treat information rather than business logic or code as the source of specialization. This enables platform companies to add new features and functions once that are available to all or just a part of their customers giving them the flexibility and adaptability required in modern business.

Platforms reflect the heterogeneity of digital technology, allowing each part to change without disturbing the peace across all components. Platforms are critical for a world of consumer-driven technology, multi-vendor competition, and standards wars fought in the marketplace rather than the lab.

Platforms fit the economics of digital business. They provide a means to gain scale efficiencies from across the enterprise rather than trying to drive them across individual infrastructures. This is essential in a world where IT transaction volumes grow faster than business purchases. Consider online banking where many transactions are free of charge but have a real cost to the bank. Platforms provide a way to drive down transaction costs and preserve company margins.

Platforms require more than stitching together existing infrastructures. More interfaces, more integration and more condition-specific logic may be an interim step, but it only adds cost, complexity and core rigidity in the corporation.

Achieving the functional and financial benefits of a platform involve going back to basics of business — not transactions. Yes, the devil is in the details. And yes, we have tried service-oriented architecture and virtualization before with mixed results. Reinventing corporate IT requires more than changing the role of CIOs and IT in a digital age. Reinvention at scale must extend down into the fundamental drivers of IT cost, quality of service, and future flexibility. That starts with reinventing the foundation of IT and abandoning the infrastructure model.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





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Why HR Needs to Stop Passing Over the Long-Term Unemployed

One of the very bad things about the Great Recession is that those who were not doing well already got hurt the worst, and that also seems to be the case for the economic recovery. Hiring has picked up, but not for the long-term unemployed, those out of work for more than more than 26 weeks. We'll get a new look at the data when July jobs numbers are released Friday.

The revelation last year that many job requirements for open positions mandated that candidates already be employed seemed a bit like a joke, but the evidence that employers screened out unemployed applicants was so widespread that the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission began investigating it.

A couple of interesting studies examined the extent of discrimination against the unemployed. These studies are unusual in that they involved real efforts to find real jobs. One created 3,000 pretend candidates and sent their resumes to a random sample of job openings. They varied one item among otherwise identical applications: whether the individual was currently unemployed and, if so, how long they had been unemployed.

Only about 4.5% got callbacks, which suggests that the typical unemployed applicant has to apply to a little more than 20 jobs to just get a positive response from an employer indicating that they are still being considered for the job.

Surprisingly, the call-back rate was slightly higher for those who had just been laid off than for those who currently had a job. What happens after you are unemployed for more than a month? At that point, the probability of getting any positive response from employers falls sharply and declines further with each month, hitting a plateau after about eight months. A person with an otherwise identical set of skills and experiences is about half as likely to get a positive response from employers after eight months of unemployment as compared to a person just being laid off.

The other study (PDF) is similar, with an important twist. They compared applicants on two dimensions: How long they were unemployed and whether they had relevant job experience. This study also found a sharp drop-off in employer interest for candidates with around six months of unemployment, but it also found that recently unemployed candidates with no relevant experience for the position were more likely to get employer interest than were those with relevant experience who were unemployed for six months or more.

What's going on here? At least at present — and perhaps because of the depth of the recession — there doesn't seem to be much stigma associated with being unemployed per se. But there is a really big reluctance to hire those who have been unemployed for a while. It's so big that it trumps the concern about having the relevant skills, which news reports constantly suggest is the big challenge employers face.

Here's the point: Hiring managers are only human. They don't have much support in doing their jobs. If you think hiring decisions are based on careful evidence about what attributes make the best hires, think again. Few employers have the time or resources to do any studies of what predicts a good hire, let alone looking at the specific evidence concerning prior unemployment. There is no evidence that I have seen anywhere suggesting that the long-term unemployed make worse candidates.

Hiring managers are going with their gut feel or what they think are "sensible" ideas about what makes a good candidate when the resist hiring the long-term unemployed. We know that going with your gut in hiring decisions means going with all kinds of unstated and in many cases unconscious prejudices. That's what kept women and minorities out of many jobs and now keeps older workers out of them as well. How about these sensible ideas? "If they were good, someone else would have hired them" — not when other employers think like you do and when there are so few jobs to go around. "Their skills are rusty" — one doesn't forget how to do a job in six months, and all new hires require some time to learn how your operation works.

What we do know about job candidates who are long-term unemployed, which is related to job success, is that they are persistent. Millions of other unemployed facing this job market gave up looking and dropped out of the labor force. We also know that they will likely be very grateful to have a job, and gratitude is associated with many aspects of good job performance. They are also likely to be cheaper and easier to hire because you don't have to woo them away from their current employer.

The way to get hiring of the long-term unemployed started is to recognize that there is no objective case in this economy for not considering a candidate who has been out of work for a while. Therefore, excluding them out of hand is a form of prejudice. The people at the top of organizations need to point out that excluding such candidates is likely costing us money because we are ignoring potential good hires, just as it costs us money to exclude women, minorities, older individuals, and anyone else who has the potential to do the job.

It's the right thing to do in terms of our social impact, it's the right thing to do to make our organization inclusive and looking like our society, and it's also the financially sensible thing to do.