Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1571

The Innovation Mindset in Action: Shantha Ragunathan

This January, we met Shantha Ragunathan, an illiterate woman from Kodapattinam, a remote village in Tamil Nadu, India. Her story is at once heartbreaking and inspiring, showing that game changers can come from all walks of life, all over the world.

At six, Shantha lost her parents. By her twenties, she was stuck in a seemingly dark pit without a glimmer of hope: with two children and little financial support from her husband, she could not afford even one square meal a day. Although she was poor in resources, she possessed the innovation mindset shared by many game changers: they see and act on opportunities, use "and" thinking to resolve tough dilemmas and break through compromises, and employ their resourcefulness to power through obstacles. Innovators maintain a laser focus on outcomes, avoid getting caught in the activity trap, and proactively "expand the pie" to make an impact. Regardless of where they start, innovators persist till they successfully change the game.

Hopeless as her situation was, Shantha engaged in "and" thinking. She imagined a future when her family would be out of poverty AND her kids would start their adult life educated. Unimaginable as it may seem, she had no real-life role models in her village for this dream. Some of her neighbors had given up all hope and fallen into alcoholism; others exploited their kids with child labor to earn money; still others sacrificed their entire lives in an attempt to get their children out of the vicious circle of poverty—with few successes, despite their sacrifices and heroic efforts.

Shantha's "and" thinking powered her dream and kept her alert to opportunities. When Ms. Sasikala, a Block Development Officer (BDO), talked to the Kodapattinam villagers about microfinance, only Shantha, of all the villagers, saw the opportunity and took action.

To participate in a microfinance campaign, the village had to form a Self Help Group (SHG) of about 20 people, with each member contributing a certain amount of money every month. To keep the math simple, let's say $10 (although in this case the currency was Indian rupees): 20 people x $10 each = $200. The bank (in this case Indian Bank) would then loan a matching amount, bringing the available funds to $400. Any member of the SHG, either individually or as a team, could pitch a proposal to use the available funds to a microfinancing committee of bank officials and village elders.

For example, a member could propose to use the money to buy an income-producing asset, such as a cow. Selling the cow's milk would create an income stream, a portion of which would repay the loan; the remainder would lift the cow-owning entrepreneur out of poverty. The microfinancing committee decided which proposal to fund each month, giving out $400 month for approved proposals: $200 from the SHG contributors and $200 in matching loans from the bank.

While most folks who heard the Block Development Officer's presentation thought that microfinance was too much work and gave up, or froze into inaction not knowing what to do, Shantha's resourcefulness kicked into high gear. She went door to door, pleading and pitching. In her own words, "I had to go back over 50 times knocking on the same door because they wouldn't trust me enough to even give ten rupees [about 20 cents]. I talked to them about how we can work together to solve our problems." Undeterred, Shantha persisted until she persuaded the required number of people to sign up for the microfinance project.

Shantha formed the SHG and went to the bank, assuring the loan officers that her SHG would start fruitful businesses, like buying cows and selling milk, with the loaned money. She was awarded the bank's matching micro-credit loan. Then Shantha made her pitch to the microfinancing committee, describing how, with traditional bank loans, they would borrow at very high interest rates and get stuck in a poverty cycle, barely making enough money to repay the interest. The committee, moved by her courage and business acumen, approved her funding.

Shantha was driven, focusing on outcomes. She started with one cow, and with the income from the cow's milk she repaid the loan and also bought more income-producing assets: sheep, goats, small corner stores, sewing machines, and audio systems rented out for village events. Over a 14-year period, Shantha converted that first, tiny microfinance loan to wealth, including her own house and a college-level education for both of her children. (Her daughter is now a teacher and her son an engineer.) She was so successful that she was appointed by the BDO as a mentor and a consultant to rehabilitate unsuccessful SHGs.

Although she had no formal education, Shantha had strong business acumen and innate leadership qualities. When asked how she learned to manage a business, she said, "I watched the shops in my village. I noticed that those that had sales revenues more than their costs, succeeded. Those that had costs more than their sales revenues, failed. I knew I wanted to succeed. So I made sure revenues exceeded costs." She trained six other villagers to lead the SHG in her absence—clearly understanding the importance of building a leadership pipeline, without the benefit of an MBA education.

Shantha expanded the pie. She helped other villagers form SHGs and found ways for SHGs to grow. For example, when she heard that a tissue manufacturer was having productivity problems because of constant power cuts, she convinced the company to invest in an SHG that manually assembled the tissue boxes. This resulted in jobs for many villagers as well as cost savings for the company: the tissue boxes were assembled for far lower cost than the machines, but at the same quality.

Shantha Ragunathan is truly a game changer. Shantha's success spread in a ripple effect from her family and her village to dozens of neighboring villages, ultimately affecting thousands of individuals. From the edge of society, unable to be a consumer, she got "into the game" by acquiring wealth. She brought along with her thousands of people, who also became active participants in the game. Even more important, by serving as a role model, she created the foundation for many more such leaders and game changers to emerge.

We can all make a difference in areas in which we are "poor." Shantha was poor in money, but others of us are poor in business, health, relationships, career, respect, relationships, or time. We can lift ourselves out of this poverty the way Shantha Ragunathan did: by applying the innovation mindset and changing the game.

Ride Sharing Disrupts the Taxi Business in Los Angeles

Ride-sharing services such as Lyft ask for "donations" that run about 20% less than cab fares in Los Angeles, says The New York Times. The services, which have ignored city regulators' orders to shut down, appeal to younger riders as a cheaper and more fun way to get around. Cab companies point out that ride-share services can charge less because their cars don't have to be accessible to the disabled or include safety partitions protecting drivers from riders.

"Alternatives" Isn't a Dirty Economic Word

There Is No Alternative. Margaret Thatcher and her allies in the "dry" wing of the British Conservative Party popularized the phrase three decades ago. TINA, for short. The name never caught on in the U.S. as in the UK and parts of Continental Europe, but the idea did. The most compelling statement of it may have come from Milton Friedman, talking to Phil Donahue in 1979:

There is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.

Put that way, it's hard to disagree with. There is no attractive alternative economic system out there that we could jump to if we got tired of this capitalism stuff. And we shouldn't want to — the capitalist era has coincided with a staggering increase in living standards.

But Thatcher was also saying that a specific set of financial-market-friendly, ownership-oriented, low-tax policies was the only path to economic success. By the 1990s, similar attitudes had taken hold in both major political parties in the U.S., at international institutions such as the IMF and OECD, and in the Zeitgeist everywhere. The newly globalized economy, policed by what Thomas Friedman dubbed the "Electronic Herd" of financial markets, just wouldn't allow for much freedom of choice in economic policymaking.

Yet look at the World Economic Forum's national-competitiveness rankings now. The top 10 nations are, starting at No. 1, Switzerland, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, the U.S., the UK, Hong Kong, and Japan — all capitalist countries, sure, but with dramatically different forms of capitalism and roles for government (government spending is
GDP (adjusted for purchasing power), which gives us Luxembourg, Macao, Norway, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, Switzerland, Hong Kong, U.S., Australia, and Austria. That last list does seem to indicate that it's best to be a small country (or autonomous region of China) that either has huge petroleum reserves or is a magnet for wealthy people from elsewhere, but that's not exactly helpful as an economic-policy roadmap.

One thing all the countries on these lists do have in common is that they participate in the global economy — they don't wall themselves off, as India and China tried to do for decades (with dismal results) before changing course. They also have economies driven by the profit motive (although that may be arguable in the case of Brunei, where oil and gas export pretty much are the whole economy). So successful economies do operate within certain bounds. They're just not nearly as narrow as a slogan like "There Is No Alternative" might lead you to think.

A classic example: As Thatcher took office as Prime Minister in 1979, booming oil revenue from the North Sea offered big opportunities and posed big decisions for the UK and Norwegian governments. Under Thatcher, the UK chose to spend the windfall as it came in and cut other taxes — a policy that her successors didn't really alter. Norway started out on a similar track, albeit using the money more to prop up its increasingly expensive welfare state than to cut taxes, but in 1990 established what was then called the Petroleum Fund, now a $720 billion sovereign wealth fund with significant global influence and hugely positive implications for the country's fiscal present and future. Now, not surprisingly, some in the UK are saying that's an alternative they should have considered.

The strength of TINA as a governing principle is that it's simple. But that's its weakness, too. It often doesn't tell you what you need to know, and sometimes it gives you the wrong advice (putting oil money straight in consumers' pockets surely seemed a more TINA thing to do than setting up a government-run oil fund). There are similar problems with the simple consensus on monetary policy that prevailed during the TINA years (set a low inflation target and keep to it, period) and the prevailing view in the U.S. and UK on how to run a corporation (maximize value for shareholders, period). The real world just isn't that simple. There are other factors at play. And there are alternatives.

One of the most convincing arguments for the superiority of free-market capitalism is that one size doesn't fit all. Tastes vary, and change. Information about the economy, as Friedrich Hayek wrote, is too widely dispersed for any one person or organization to know what the best course is. This observation is usually taken as an argument against government intervention in the economy, which is certainly how Hayek meant it. But in a world where there are lots of governments with differing policies and priorities, yet increasingly a single global financial market in which returns across countries and asset classes are ever-more correlated, it's not obvious to me that the Electronic Herd will always have better economic judgment than your local mayor.

What got me thinking about all this was President Obama's recent push to start a new economic policy conversation in the U.S. After actually sitting down and reading the speech that kicked off the campaign July 24 at Knox College in Illinois, and the one at an Amazon warehouse in Tennessee Tuesday where he proposed a reduction in corporate tax rates in exchange for more infrastructure and education spending, I cannot claim to have encountered a new economic paradigm. In general, the President's proposals seem designed to be reasonable-enough-sounding things that House Republicans will say "No" to (possible new House GOP slogan: There Is No Alternative to No).

Still, the tone is interesting. "Growing inequality is not just morally wrong, it's bad economics." Obama said in Illinois.

Because when middle-class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer consumers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy. When the rungs on the ladder of opportunity grow farther and farther apart, it undermines the very essence of America — that idea that if you work hard you can make it here.

The TINA take on inequality is that it's an inevitable byproduct of economic dynamism. You want growth, you have to accept inequality. That's surely true, up to a point. The anti-TINA argument is that beyond that point inequality starts dragging down the economy — that there's a Laffer curve for inequality, as economist Mark Thoma put it. What that point is, and what to do about it, are hard questions to answer. But that sort of is the point in a post-TINA world. There aren't always obvious answers. There are, however, alternatives.

The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google

They tweet. They showroom. They pin and like and yelp. And whenever they do, customers accelerate corporate IT's biggest challenge: to rethink and reinvent itself. The implications stretch beyond any one hot seat in the C-suite.

More than ever, customer experiences are based on a foundation of technology and delivered to a digitally-savvy population. Digital experiences come in many guises: mobile apps, web sites, how-to videos on YouTube, LCD screens on products (think of exercise machines that track calories burned). Some experiences come through channels that companies can influence but not control, such as social networks and review sites.

Digital experiences unleash more ways for companies to influence and satisfy the customer, and differentiate themselves from competitors. But there's a catch for CIOs and other tech-minded executives: to keep creating opportunities, companies must keep changing the experience or fall behind. Each generation of technologies raises customer expectations beyond the last.

In part, this is because customers will keep raising the bar for satisfaction and attention as they use the new technologies and services. But emerging technologies will also enable customer experiences that are far superior to those of today. For example, companies will anticipate customers' future needs, and act like personal advisors. Already, Google Now works on an "anticipate and deliver" basis: the technology delivers information that's needed before it's requested. Companies will assist customers as they cross back and forth between physical stores and the online world. Spanish clothing chain Desigual has moved part of the way there, creating flagship stores in Paris and Barcelona that only stock samples — the customer can try on different looks, then purchase the clothes online.

Tomorrow's digital experiences will offer new kinds of value, solving needs that did not exist before in locations that didn't exist before. When driverless cars roam the freeways, cars are no longer just vehicles. Their interiors will be designed to be whatever passengers want, be it a theatre, office or shopping mall on wheels. And who wants digital gift wrap? An MIT startup called "Delightfully" is betting people who give online gift certificates will appreciate it.

The problem for companies is that once customers see something cool, different or better, they expect to see it everywhere. This puts immense pressure on the organization to keep up with the competition while trying to innovate in its own right. It's a digital arms race, and corporate IT and other functions must be battle-ready.

How can companies exploit digital technologies to deliver compelling customer experiences time and again? Executives across the C-suite will need to work together with corporate IT and F.O.C.U.S.:



Frame strategy based on a new model of customer interaction. Traditional customer acquisition strategies won't work because the path to purchase is no longer linear. Customers now find, evaluate, discuss and buy products nonstop, bounce from one stage to another. A complaint on Facebook or a recommendation on a fan's web site can hasten or redirect a purchase. This upheaval requires a new way of thinking that spans the physical and digital worlds.

Optimize marketing efforts to achieve influence at scale. Word of mouth still influences purchasing behavior. Only now, social networks increase that circle from a few trusted friends and family to hundreds of people online. By studying what customers do with social media, and identifying their sharing patterns, companies can provide attractive online social content at the right time to the right people.

Create new digital experiences by adopting Silicon Valley's approach to innovation. The tech staff at companies like Google, Facebook and LinkedIn use agile, iterative development techniques to deliver improvements fast. They quickly test new services and features with actual customers and data. And by tapping crowdsourcing and open source communities, they bring more ideas to the table and turn them into products fast.

Use in-depth analytics to understand customers better. Creating digital experiences built on cloud and analytics will rewrite how marketing and sales teams work and break down internal silos. For example, when companies capture and analyze their customers' interests, and integrate it with data from other sources, marketers and developers can better predict and influence consumer behaviors and deliver more personalized experiences. Social media and marketing data can also be integrated with warranty data and post sales and service feedback.

Set up enterprise IT that can design, build and run digital experiences. The bottom line for CIOs: to serve the accelerating demands of digital customers, IT organizations will have to behave more like Amazon or Google, and less like their traditional competitors. Legacy systems often prevent it. They are unable to manage unstructured or non-numeric data, or too inflexible to develop new features at Valley-like speed. But that won't be acceptable to other executives. They will wonder why their IT organization can't be more like Facebook's "hackers" and make thousands of bug fixes, improvements and new features each week. For corporate IT to remain relevant, it must get its house in order now or risk irrelevance. If rethinking corporate IT leads to a fresh start for corporate IT, so be it. The business side cannot afford to wait while today's customers tweet, like and yelp.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





Today's CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms
Are We Asking Too Much of Our CIOs?
Is Your Organization Ready for Total Digitization?

Want to Know What Really Makes You Happy? Try Tracking It

Throughout our careers and lives, the big decisions we have to make usually lead back to a single, overriding concern: What really makes me happy? Too often we try to answer these questions without knowing or understanding the real data from our lives. Our self-analysis devolves into speculation or wishful thinking.

Over the past month or so, I've been collaborating with Harvard Business Review to develop a quick self-test to determine individual readiness for understanding your own data through the world of auto-analytics. Auto-analytics is a method of using new self-tracking tools to help answer key professional (and personal) questions: How do I boost my productivity? Am I in the right career? How can I improve my work routines by altering my health habits, like sleep and exercise?

To get a sense of how auto-analytics can be used enrich our decision making, I recommend three distinct approaches:

1. Quantifying reflection is the practice of spending a few moments each evening to rate (or rank) that day on a numerical scale, and also to provide qualitative information on daily activities. This method not only begins to habituate reflection but also creates a repository of personal data to inform decisions on which sorts of behaviors to embrace or avoid.

Author Ashish Mukharji's use of this method shows that we don't have to be a professional philosophers or positive psychologists to think systematically about happiness. For the past three years he's been rating his days on a scale of 1-10, also jotting down some associated thoughts, "a restaurant, movie ... whatever made that day special."

Through this exercise he has learned that his average happiness is a seven and he has uncovered some unexpected sources of happiness. For example, in the experience of accomplishment, "actually getting to a goal" is less apt to make him happy than the process of working toward that goal.

With his personal data in hand, he now resolves his existential puzzles with small, practical interventions — idiosyncratic methods to lift his daily happiness. For instance, no matter how much fun he might be having at night, he retires early to avoid missing sleep, since feeling tired invariably makes him unhappy, according to the data.

2. Theory testing uses auto-analytics tools as a way to quantify happiness in terms of an established model. Take the well-known study on happiness by academic Carol Ryff, which includes a theory of psychological well-being. Ryff posited that well-being could be measured on a model with six factors: self-acceptance, personal growth, purpose, mastery, autonomy, and positive relations with others. Researcher and statistician Konstanin Augemberg decided to test Ryff's theory in this short case study. Using the programmable rTracker app on his mobile phone, Augemberg sampled himself three times a day on sliding scale with a simple question: How happy do you feel right now? He also rated himself at that moment on the six factors in Ryff's model.

After a month, he ran the analysis of his data. "Out of 6 [variables] only 4 turned out to be predictive of happiness; the most influential of those were mastery and autonomy — being in control of the situation and being independent," he found.

A good model like Ryff's may have broad appeal, but as Augemberg's experiment demonstrates, all of its six factors may not be relevant to each individual — an overly complicated model may be likened to a universal remote control with superfluous buttons. Through this experiment, Augemberg was able to remove the extra two components, allowing him to better focus on those factors that, according to his data, directly influenced his happiness. He observes, "n=me, so the model may work differently for others."

3. Experience sampling gently nudges users at random intervals throughout the day to log how they're feeling. Over time, the method creates a detailed happiness dashboard so participants can make fact-based decisions or change their habits based on their numbers.

Auto-analytics tools in this area, like trackyourhappiness, represent a new type of research approach, one that advances both scientific learning and individual progress toward happiness.

An interesting dimension of trackyourhappiness is its measurement of mind-wandering. The tool helps people work out tough questions like this one: As I'm performing a task I consider unpleasant, say collating monthly business travel expenses, is it better to focus on the task at hand or to imagine something more pleasant while mindlessly grinding through it?

To resolve this type of conundrum, users are asked three questions at various points throughout the day: (1) How do you feel now? which they answer on a sliding scale from "very bad" to "very good"; (2) What are you doing?; and (3) Are you thinking about something other than what you're currently doing?, to which they can answer "no," "yes — something unpleasant," "yes — something neutral" or "yes — something pleasant."

After using the tool for a while, most begin to discover through data that they are much more happy when they are focused on the present than when not. As lead researcher Matt Killingsworth's analysis of more than 15,000 users shows, people are measurably less happy when they are mind-wandering, no matter what they are doing. "For example, people don't really like commuting to work very much, it's one of their least enjoyable activities. And yet they are substantially happier when they are only focused on their commute than when their mind is going off to something else," he says in his research presentation.

A possible cause for the negative effects of mind-wandering may be that our minds most often wander to worrisome topics like job stability or declining sales this month. Yet on the flip side, the data also show that even when we are imagining something neutral or pleasant, we are slightly less happy when our mind is diverted from its main task than we are when it is attentive.

Killingsworth sums up: "If mind-wandering were a slot machine it would be like having a chance to lose $50, $20, or $1. You'd never want to play."

Each of the three approaches is really about adding a dose of science, gathering, and acting on data to inform personal change. Whether you're interested in addressing your happiness, your work productivity, or something else important, you can begin this data-gathering process by taking this short assessment.

The Perils of Being a Social Media Holdout

There are conversations taking place about your company or brand 24 hours a day, seven days a week in social media. Are you a part of these conversations? Or are you hoping that if you don't hear them, they don't exist?

Social media offers a variety of opportunities for brands to understand and participate in those conversations. While participating in social media is not without risk, not participating might prove to be the greater risk — especially to reputations.

Here are three risks of not being in social media for big companies or major brands, small business owners, and service providers:

Having your reputation defined by others: People are talking about you, your company and your brand, and your stakeholders expect you to be paying attention in real time, especially when they have a customer service complaint or positive feedback to give. You decide whether to participate in this conversation or not, but at least you are aware of what is being said. This is the new frontier for reputation risk management. If you don't tell your story, others will tell it for you.

Being invisible and less credible: The social Web is changing how people communicate and access information. With a smartphone or tablet in hand, you can search for and find almost any information you seek, within seconds, whenever and wherever you are. People are looking you up. Not having a presence means you are not easily "findable" and perhaps leads people to question whether yours is a credible business. People are increasingly turning to social networks as the easiest way to get their questions answered. Potential buyers are going online to research products or services before they purchase them, or new contacts before they meet them. On average, buyers progress nearly 60% of the way through their purchase decision-making process before engaging with a sales representative, according to Corporate Executive Board (link is PDF). If people are looking for information about you or your business, what are they finding? A social page or profile at its most basic level enables you to provide accurate and helpful information about what you or your company does to your intended audience. Additionally, social media pages typically appear with prominence in search results — without these online presences, relationship managers and organizations risk not being present in the search results when an interested prospect goes looking.

Being perceived as behind the curve: As consumers embrace new technologies, they expect businesses to do the same. Companies (and their representatives) that aren't using social networks will not be perceived as forward-thinking and, in the long term, will risk losing customers who want business partners who speak their language. Would you create a new personal checking account with a bank that doesn't have an online portal? Today, we depend upon online access to data, including our finances, so that seems unthinkable. Soon customers will feel this way about having a social connection with businesses.

Social media is perhaps best thought of as a set of new and innovative ways for businesses and customers to do what they have always done: build relationships, exchange information, read and write reviews, and leverage trusted networks of friends and experts.

As you contemplate the risks and rewards of social media, we would suggest that the key ingredient for evaluation is simply to experience it for yourself. There are many low risk ways to do this, even if you work in a regulated industry. One of the best suggestions we have is to take on a "reverse mentor," a more junior colleague who has grown up with social media, and have them share their knowledge with you.

Today's always on, social-mobile world is challenging all businesses, brands, and professionals to adapt — or at least make an informed decision not to. As you consider the full set of risks associated with being or not being in social media, it is important not to overlook the rewards and opportunities.

How E-Mail Marketers Can Survive Gmail's Tabbed Inbox

Last week, I got an e-mail from one of my favorite e-list masters, Chris Brogan, imploring me to "shake [his] newsletter free from the clutches of the [Gmail's new] Promotions tab."

Why did Brogan have to ask me to take charge of my Gmail? It was in response to Google's newly formatted, tabbed inbox. For those who have not yet switched over to the new format, Gmail's new inbox automatically triages incoming e-mails into five categories: primary, social, promotional, updates, and forums. Instead of a single inbox with all incoming mail, the new inbox is separated into these five tabs (or fewer, if you choose). Though users will be able to manually move messages between the categories, Gmail will automatically filter them as they come in. The onus is on the user to keep an eye on each inbox area.

Of course, users can set up filters within the service already, giving them control over what lands directly in their inboxes and which messages get shuffled into various folders (per Brogan's plea). But the system isn't perfect and takes an initial investment of time to set up.

So is this trouble for marketers?

When I got the new Gmail inbox, I panicked a little. I run a blogger network that connects online influencers with nonprofits and socially responsible businesses. We depend heavily on e-mail marketing to keep in contact with our bloggers, and we're pretty good at it — our e-mails are regularly opened by a relatively large percentage of our network members. But now these messages are being shuffled off into the shadows of a separate "forums" or "updates" inbox. Will our messages ever see the light of day? How will users interact with the new inbox and how should marketers react?

Though the full impact of the new inbox remains to be seen, the e-mail marketing company MailChimp posted to its blog last week stating they had seen a decrease in open rates across their service since the new inbox's rollout. Looking at open rates of 1.5 billion e-mails sent over six weeks since the rollout, MailChimp found a small but marked decrease in open rates of e-mails received in Gmail. Though they're "not willing to declare an emergency just yet," this trend shows that it is important for marketers to think more strategically about what they're sending and why. As MailChimp notes, any e-mail with markers such as headers, footers, and "unsubscribe" buttons will be filtered into the updates or promotions tabs; there's no way to escape the tabs if you're sending mass e-mails.

But before assuming we're all doomed, let's remember Priority Inbox.

In 2010, when Gmail's Priority Inbox was introduced, marketers were similarly worried. Priority Inbox pushed what it believed would be users' most important e-mails to the top of their inboxes. Marketers feared that their e-mails would be pushed to the bottom of the inbox, never to be seen. However, this worry turned out to be largely unfounded. If a user made a habit of opening an organization's e-mails, those e-mails were deemed important by the algorithm and pushed to the top of the inbox. Gmail's new inbox is somewhat similar, though blast e-mails still get pushed to a non-primary tab, regardless of how much a user loves the content, until the user filters the message to be sent to the primary inbox.

The key takeaway for marketers is not new or groundbreaking, though it is more important than ever before. E-mail content must be engaging, relevant, and interesting to users. I love the community I find in my listservs. If those messages don't appear in my primary inbox, I'm going to go hunting for them in the other tabs.

To the extent that Gmail's tabbed inbox does interfere with e-mail marketing, it will render social media more crucial than ever, as curated content on users' social feeds constitutes a new inbox of sorts.

As Beth Becker, Partner & Lead Digital Strategist, Indigo Strategies, put it to me, "Long term, this is going to make true engagement and community building on social platforms all the more important. If [your audience] is invested in you in some way, they will read your e-mail no matter where it is because they WANT to." Marketers who are seeing a dip in their open rates may want to take a page out of Brogan's book and instruct their community members on how to alter their filters. But even more important is to craft e-mails your subscribers want to open.

Well-Being Rebounds 1 Year After a Rise in Gasoline Prices

Why don't today's gasoline prices bother Americans as much as they did when prices were just as high, but on the ascent, in 2008? Research by Casey Boyd-Swan and Chris M. Herbst of Arizona State University shows that subjective well-being deteriorates when gasoline prices rise, but almost fully rebounds 1 year later and changes very little in each additional year subsequent to an increase. The effect of rising gasoline prices on well-being, which applies even to nondrivers, may stem from people's tendency to interpret movements in gasoline prices as indicative of macroeconomic conditions, the researchers suggest.

If You Want to Raise Prices, Tell a Better Story

Ask a CEO if they want to spend a pile of money on an analysis of their company's story, and they'll probably throw you out of their office. But if you tell them that you have a powerful insight that can help them raise the prices on all of their products, they might ask you over to their house for dinner. Money talks, in other words. Unfortunately, in most companies, the power of story to affect pricing still remains unknown, or at least it's vastly under-utilized.

Pricing strategy usually follows one of four tracks. Bottom up: calculate the cost of everything that goes into making the product, and add a fair margin on top. Sideways in: analyze and adopt the price of competitors' products. Top down: target a demographic or economic segment, and engineer the product to meet that price. Or dynamic: use a complex, real-time calculation to gauge supply and demand, usually with the help of an algorithm.

What you almost never hear about is a fifth track, which I call story analysis: an analysis of a product's capabilities to fulfill a profound human need, to tell a story that gives your customers' lives richer meaning. In a world of abundance, what your product does for your customers is important, but not nearly as important as what your product means to them. And this second part — the story of your product — is what yields the greatest pricing power of all.

Not convinced? Consider this story.

Back in the summer of 2006, New York Times Magazine columnist Rob Walker was mulling the question of what makes one object more valuable than another. What makes one pair of shoes more valuable than another pair if they both deliver on the functional basics of comfort, durability, and protection? Why does one piece of art cost $8,000,000 and another, $100? What makes one toaster worth $20 and another worth nearly $400 if they both make toast? As Walker turned these questions over in his mind he concluded that it is not the objects themselves, but the context, the provenance of the objects, that generates value. In other words, the value isn't contained in the objects themselves, but in the story or the meaning that the objects represent to the owner.

Walker decided to test this conclusion in a simple and direct way. With the help of a friend, he began buying random, worthless, or low-value objects at tag sales and thrift shops. The cost of the objects ranged from one to four dollars. An old wooden mallet. A lost hotel room key. A plastic banana. These were true castoffs with little or no intrinsic worth.

Next, Walker asked some unknown writers to each write a short story that contained one of the objects. The stories weren't about the objects, per se; but they helped to place them in a human context, to give them new meaning.

When Walker put the objects, along with their accompanying stories, up for sale on eBay, the results were astonishing. On average, the value of the objects rose 2,700%. That's not a typo: 2,700%. A miniature jar of mayonnaise he had purchased for less than a dollar sold for $51.00. A cracked ceramic horse head purchased for $1.29 sold for $46.00. The value of these formerly abandoned or forsaken objects suddenly and mysteriously skyrocketed when they were accompanied by a story.

The project was so successful (and so interesting) that they have now repeated it 5 times and put all the results up on the web. It is also a book.

Walker's experiment reminds us in a clear and extremely tangible way how the concept of value works in the human brain: a can opener is a can opener is a can opener until it is a can opener designed by Michael Graves and a part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. A shoe is a shoe is a shoe until it is a pair of TOMS shoes. For every pair that I buy a child who has never been able to afford shoes gets a free pair as well. Suddenly, these objects are part of an inspiring narrative — one that I can use to reveal something meaningful about myself to others. That's something I am willing to pay for.

That's where real pricing power comes from.

And as the number of products and brands in the world proliferate at an ever-accelerating pace, the power is only increasing. In 1997, there were 2.5 million brands in the world. Today? The number is approaching 10 million. So the trend is toward rapid commoditization of just about everything. In a world of almost overwhelming abundance, an authentic, meaning-rich story becomes the most important ingredient to drive a company's margins up.

Dinner anyone?

Four Methods for Corporate Innovators

Matt Kingdon, cofounder of ?What If!, explains how to make your new idea stick. For more, read his book, The Science of Serendipity .