Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1572

Prepare for the New Permanent Temp

The fastest-growing segments of America's job market — by far — are temporary and part-time employment. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of US part-time employees hit a record high of 28 million. Temporary employment has jumped 50% since the depths of the financial crisis. This "ephemeral workforce" phenomenon isn't just American; the UK has also set records in the contingently employed. Something profoundly structural is going on. Even healthier economic growth won't make it go away.

More companies want far greater flexibility with far fewer people. Their greatest human capital concerns have shifted. They seem increasingly focused on productively cultivating that core 20% to 25% of people who reliably generate the 70% to 80% of enterprise value. They're rethinking their economic relationships with the rest.

Workflows and innovation initiatives have been artfully reorganized around "projects" to facilitate faster, cheaper and easier contingent participation. Technology makes reviewing, refining, redesigning and revising both jobs and job descriptions as dynamic as a commodities trading desk.

Have people been commoditized? Of course not. But the ways people's knowledge, skills and expertise get plugged into the workplace has been. For roughly half of America's workforce, the role, rules and requirements of "the job" are dramatically different than they were even a decade ago. Just ask anyone working in the health care, financial services, automobile, retail, media, publishing, education, advertising, real estate or defense industries.

It's not that troubled economies and disruptive innovations inherently shed more jobs than they create; it's that ongoing global restructuring of markets makes temporary and/or part-time employment more attractive for more organizations. Outside of the enterprise core group, bringing full-time employees onboard is increasingly seen as a riskier and less rewarding business bet.

And higher education isn't offering the human capital cure. A recent McKinsey & Co. study suggests that almost half of recent college graduates are working in jobs that don't really require a degree. Do we really believe MBA or law degree credentials would better procure their full-time employment?

As this blog observed literally three years ago: "Most people looking for a job today aren't competing against each other. They're competing against alternative ways to getting that job done. For most organizations, people are a means and medium to an end. They're not hiring employees, they're hiring value creation. If they can get that value — or most of it — from contingency workers, outsourcing, automation, innovative processes or capital investment, why wouldn't they? If [technically] tweaking a process or program empowers three people to do the work of five, then tweakonomics is the way to go. The profound difference between today [2010] and 2005 is that good hires looked like better investments than great tweaks back then. In 2010, good tweaks look like better bets than even great hires."

The "New Permanent Temporary" has arguably been the biggest employment change since I wrote that post. Like Smartphones, part-timerism's global growth proliferates. In fact, temps with Androids and iPhones already use services like Gigwalk and LinkedIn to more profitably find and manage their part-time and/or temporary work. Amazon has its below-the-radar "Mechanical Turk" workplace market. For the gainfully underemployed, everyday is BYOD; their technologies are becoming their toolkits. Technology doesn't just facilitate automation and innovation; it makes contingent, temporary and part-time job markets more efficient and effective.

The economic irony for both sides of the enterprise equation is that maximizing the value of part-time employment has become a full-time job. Employers from WalMart to PepsiCo to Adecco to Microsoft pay premiums to assure their armies of independent contractors and temps cost-effectively get the job(s) done. Conversely, serious part-timers quickly learn that productively juggling several temporary positions requires more skill than luck.

Holding the uncertainties around Obamacare, government regulation, automation and/or economic growth responsible for full-time employment aversion misses the larger point. The rise of part time jobs means the absence of full-time commitment. Growing number of employers are increasingly committed to not being committed.

It's analogous to the demographic rise in cohabitation before marriage: the nature and expectations around formal commitment are being redefined. Just as cohabitation doesn't necessarily lead to marriage, temporary and contingent employment doesn't necessarily lead to full-time jobs.

The most serious question going forward is not simply whether or how more full time jobs return, it's whether or how part-time and temporary workers become more valuable. Will employers invest in developing the knowledge, human capital and capabilities of their contingent workforces and independent contractors? Or is the new "permanent temporary" merely about a fair day's work for a fair day's pay?

As Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation and Tom Malone's E-Lance Economy argued well over a decade ago, the innovatively self-employed can earn handsome livings if they're willing to adapt, invest in themselves and learn. But who invests in the not-as-innovative and not-quite-as-adaptable part-time worker? Who is their Salman Khan? What are their media and mechanisms for becoming more valuable?

As the brilliant economist, Treasury Secretary and former Harvard University President Larry Summers , "In the history of the world, no one has ever washed a rented car." If this implies that no employers will invest in the upgrade of their "rented" temps and part-timers, that bodes very poorly for this rising class of worker.

My bet? Underemployed assets are frequently undervalued assets. Undervalued assets attract savvy investors and entrepreneurs. Prepare for the next New Permanent Temporary.

The CIO in Crisis: What You Told Us

Enterprise IT is in crisis — no doubt about it. Our research, conducted in partnership with Harvard Business Review, The Economist, CEB (formerly the Corporate Executive Board), Intel, and TNS Global, finds that corporate leadership has lost confidence in the CIO as a strategic partner and views IT as a commodity rather than a difference-maker.

Clearly the roles of CIO and the IT organization need reinvention — and that's the conversation we've been having over the last few months in webinars and posts. (See also here, here, and here.) This conversation has generated a lot of interesting conversation via blog comments, emails, and face-to-face interactions at conferences and meetings and has revealed a few more insights that should factor into our evolving thinking.

CIOs need to understand business better, but the C-suite should understand technology's potential better. While the CIO needs to understand the business to add value, equally true is that senior leadership and the board of directors don't understand how to incorporate technology in their strategy, and some don't even see the need to do so. As gerajohm commented, "The best executives I have met have had a great understanding of how to use technology to gain competitive advantage and improve operations. They also worked with the CIO to help them to understand the business. They worked together to identify the technologies that could improve the company's competitive advantage versus technologies that were needed to support the business. Once this was done, the executive leadership and CIO focused on implementing technologies that improve the company's competitive advantage."



Every other function of the organization is as out of touch as IT. Victorio M. commented, "Reading this post is both humorous and disheartening. Humorous because, as a Human Resources practitioner, I hear similar calls for change within my profession. So it's not just us! Yet it's disheartening because it's yet another organizational function that appears to not be able to keep up with the pace of business, staying stuck in a transactional, as opposed to strategic, frame of mind." The Management Innovation Exchange is currently running a competition to "hack" the human resources function to enable organizational adaptability. As real space and cyberspace merge, do financial practices like budgeting provide value over their costs of time, money, effort, agility? All the parts of the organization have to come together and build a common language to discuss their markets and their enterprise. They need to have a common appreciation of each other's purpose. The CIO must step up and mentor the C-suite on the potentials, possibilities, threats and opportunities of information technology, but likewise, the HR lead needs to discuss the impact of a free-agent workforce, the head of legal needs to discuss the impacts of open innovation and IP sharing, and so on.



As IT steps up as mentor, it needs to mature as well. IT needs to step up, but collaboratively — not as the smartest guys in the room. One commentator said, "About 10 years ago, IT people suddenly became business process experts. Strategy in IT is one thing, but the process experts suddenly began giving advice about areas in which they were not experts and honestly felt they should lead strategic planning for the entire organization." If IT and the CIO come to the party talking like engineers, only offer convergent lines of thought (analytical, rational, quantitative, sequential, constraint driven, objective and detailed focus) and don't offer a more holistic, shaded divergent thinking point of view (creative, intuitive, qualitative, subjective, possibility driven, holistic with conceptual abstractions), then they have missed the point.

CEOs sense the problem perhaps more than CIOs do. This is a totally unscientific finding, but it is what I experienced during the two weeks of article-writing and the culminating webinar, in which I engaged directly or indirectly with a large number of CIOs, IT managers and CEOs. There were a significantly larger number of CIO/IT conversations that took place in conference or meeting situations, and the CEOs generally self-selected by reaching out to discuss or gather more information. Unless I pointed out the topic, many of the IT people were generally unaware or just tangentially aware. The CEOs were actively aware, concerned, looking at alternatives such as chief digital officers, or creating "not-so-shadow" IT organizations under the CMO. Few of the conversations originated with IT people, unless they were already engaged in trying to address the issues (another self-selection bias?). A number of the conversations started with the assumption that social engagement, collaboration and analytics were not part of IT, but the responsibility of marketing.



The bifurcation of IT and business is a myth. There have been two paths of discussion around this. One is the concept of alignment. The other is the idea that as IT socially enables companies, the actual concept of management and how we organize and structure work as practiced today begins to disappear. There were numerous discussions around COBIT and ITIL — popular IT process- and service-management frameworks — and there is a lot that COBIT in particular offers. But too often, it turns alignment into supplication or worse, subservience. The CIO must understand and execute on the differences among leadership, governance, and managing. The CIO must lead by showing the way IT can impact the organization both positively and negatively, sometime leading by how technology is applied in IT itself, then influence and guide the organization in making the right decisions. Then the CIO must direct and restrain the use of technology - how it is developed, sourced and applied in the best interests of the organization and its stakeholders with appropriate governance mechanisms. Lastly, the CIO must execute by managing the procurement, provisioning, monitoring and management of the delivery and application of IT to serve the organization. Several discussions focused in on understanding the difference between delivering IT and applying IT. If you are delivering IT, then you are a surrogate IT company that might not be aligned with the enterprise. If you are applying IT to the business, then by definition you have to be aligned with the business, or fail.

Multiple roles, one company versus one role, multiple companies. Historically, people got to the C-suite by progressing up the career ladder in one discipline, moving among multiple companies until they made it to an executive role in finance, sales, etc. Now, however, the model is changing. In successful companies, top executives rotate among multiple disciplines in increasing levels of responsibility until they advance to the C-suite. Leaders then have a multi-disciplinary understanding of the organization, rather than an exclusive, deep knowledge of just one area. And as we are learning, good leaders do not have to be discipline-specific if they engender trust and responsibility in their organization. Many CEOs expect their next CIO to come from marketing instead of their or another IT shop.

I started looking into the role of the CIO with the assumption that the onus was on CIOs to step up IT's game to enable their enterprise to succeed in the future. One observation from all this is that there is an endemic problem across the C-suite: there has been such a long-standing culture of domain and functional specialization focused on efficiency that the overall gestalt of the business and its efficacy at creating and maintaining a customer has been lost.

But that doesn't relieve CIOs of their responsibility to change IT to enable the business to better change. For aspiring CIOs, the best thing for your career is to leave IT and move to other departments — even if it involves taking a step back. Preferably, these roles need to be part of the value chain, facing either customers or partners, and eventually both. Then, step back into IT. This idea could be true for all departments — for instance, new business managers should come from outside the business function to encourage a holistic view of the business.

For existing CIOs, ask yourself a few questions. Are you generating customer value? Are you (or do you have the potential to be) the best in the world at what you are doing? Are you required to do what you are doing? Using the answers to those questions, what do you need to stop doing, start doing or do differently? Where are you spending your time interacting and relating to the rest of the organization? What resources should you have and how should you allocate them? What activities consume most of your efforts and what outcomes are you expecting from them? And lastly, what are you really focusing on and what questions are really driving you?

The point of all this is to pose these questions to everyone in the C-suite — not necessarily to be answered, but to start the collaborative, co-creative process to discover the answers and to continue the conversation.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





How to Compete When IT Is Abundant
Can UX Save Enterprise IT?
The Metamorphosis of the CIO
Shadow IT Is Out of the Closet

Increase Your Team's Curiosity

Does your team have a difficult time making decisions that everyone supports? If so, you may be suffering from a lack of curiosity.

Try this: Next time you're in a team meeting, count the number of times you make a statement and the number of times you ask a question. If you're like most team leaders, you'll find that you make many more statements than ask questions and some of the questions you ask aren't really questions.

Research shows that in effective teams, members share their own views and ask others their views. By combining transparency and curiosity, teams keep the discussion focused, get all the information on the table, learn why members have different views, and create solutions that take into account all team members' perspectives. As a result these teams have stronger performance and better working relationships.

When leaders learn that they aren't asking question, they often overcompensate by asking a lot of questions and withholding their own views. This leaves team members feeling interrogated rather than engaged.

Not all questions are created equal. To develop an effective team, it's not enough to ask questions. You have to be genuinely curious. When you are genuinely curious, you ask questions to learn what others are thinking. When you aren't genuinely curious, you ask questions to make a point: rhetorical questions.

See if you can tell which of the following questions are genuine and which are rhetorical:

"You don't really think your solution will work, do you?"
"If we implemented my proposal, what problems, if any, would it create in your divisions?"
"Why do you think I asked you to follow up yesterday?"

Questions 1 and 3 are rhetorical: they don't really ask for an answer but implicitly state the speaker's own views or ask you to guess what the speaker is thinking. Asking rhetorical questions demonstrates a lack of both curiosity and transparency.

Rhetorical questions can feel good to ask. They are a way to score some quick — and often clever — verbal points. But rhetorical questions undermine your team's working relationships and reduce its ability to make high-quality decisions. Rhetorical questions enable you to ask others to be accountable without being transparent about your own views, leading team members to feel insulted, defensive, or discounted. As a result, team members trust you less, withdraw from the discussion, and withhold relevant information that the team needs to make good decisions.

Here are a few questions you can ask yourself to determine whether what you are about to ask is a genuine question (like question 2 above.) If you answer yes to any of the following questions, the question you're about to ask isn't genuine.

Do I already know the answer to my question?
Am I asking the question to see if people will give the right (preferred) answer?
Am I asking the question to make a point?

Another way to figure out if you're about to ask a rhetorical question is to give yourself what I call the "You Idiot" test. Here's how it works:

Privately say to yourself the question you plan to ask. For example, during your team meeting your direct reports have just told you that they will miss the final deadline and incur additional costs on a key project, the very outcomes you were trying hard to avoid. Feeling frustrated, you're tempted to respond, "Why do you think I asked you to finish the work before the end of this fiscal year?"

At the end of your private question, add the words "you idiot." Now you're saying to yourself, "Why do you think I asked you to finish the work before the end of this fiscal year, you idiots?"

If the question still sounds natural with "you idiots" at its end, don't ask it. It's really a statement — a pointed rhetorical question.

Change the question to a transparent statement that shares your view, including your reasoning and your feelings. Then add a genuine question that helps you learn more about the situation. In this case you might say, "That really bothers me because it already puts next year's budget at risk. Help me understand; what happened to make project expenses spill over into next fiscal year?"

Shifting from rhetorical to genuine questions may be more difficult than it seems. That's because the questions you ask and the statements you make are driven by your mindset: the set of core values and assumptions that unconsciously guide your behavior.

If you're operating from a unilateral control mindset, rhetorical questions enable you to control your team, by telling them (implicitly) what you think and not allowing them to influence you.

If you're operating from a mutual learning mindset, you are both curious and transparent. You are curious: you see each team member as having a different piece of the puzzle you all need to solve, so you ask genuine questions to elicit information and ideas. You are transparent: you express your point of view, clearly and explicitly — not disguised in a rhetorical question. By being transparent about your own concerns and curious about your team members' experiences and perspectives, you improve working relationships, develop more creative solutions, and achieve more accountability and commitment to decisions from all team members.

So check your questions: are you asking rhetorical ones?

How Your Company Can Help Build Tomorrow's Sustainable Cities

By 2050 the number of people living in cities will have nearly doubled, from 3.6 billion in 2011 to more than 6 billion. Yet the world's urban areas are already overcrowded and, particularly in developing countries, suffer from shortages of clean water, electricity, and other resources essential to the support of their exploding populations and fragile economies.

The problems created by rampant urbanization are among the most important challenges of our time. They also represent one of the greatest opportunities — and responsibilities — for the private sector.

Before your company starts investing in this area, it's important to consider how your resource-efficiency initiatives measure up on both technological and financial sophistication. The products and services that new cities will require, and that provide the return investors and entrepreneurs need, optimize both.

Your potential offerings can be positioned according to these characteristics on an "efficiency matrix." The matrix is useful for determining the current strategic position of a company's products, services, and investments, but it's most valuable for envisioning where the company might profitably head. It's explained below:

For more, read my full article in this month's issue of HBR, "Building Sustainable Cities."

Hard Times May Make You More Likely to Gamble Away Your Money

Do people with bleak economic prospects hold more tightly to their money? No, they're more likely to gamble it away, says a team led by Michael J.A. Wohl of Carleton University in Canada. In an experiment, people were more than twice as likely to gamble $10 on slot machines if they first read an article warning of an unstable economic climate, poor job prospects, and higher costs. Periods of hardship can lead people to make risky and detrimental financial decisions, the researchers say.

Insourcing at GE: The Real Story

GE's "insourcing" of appliance manufacturing to the U.S. has been trumpeted as a major reversal of the trend of sending jobs abroad to lower cost locations, and has been characterized in the press as a kind of "onshoring" story. I see it differently: as a "NUMMI deja vu" story. You may recall that NUMMI was a joint venture of Toyota and GM, where Toyota took over one of GM's worst plants and turned it around with a new management system — using many of the same people and the same unions. GE's insourcing is actually quite similar. So, how did GE do it?



First, a little relevant history: In the 1950s economic expansion drove growing demand for appliances. To meet this demand, GE created GE Appliance Park in Louisville, Kentucky, which reached a peak of 23,000 employees in 1973. In the early 2000s, as part of a huge offshoring trend in the business economy, GE shifted manufacturing to suppliers such as Samsung and LG. But these suppliers became competitors and ever-harder to work with. Then at the end of 2007 the housing market crashed. By the summer of 2008 GE leadership wanted to sell the appliances business or spin it off.



During that difficult time Dirk Bowman, former GE Appliances General Manager of Manufacturing, went to GE Chairman Jeff Immelt with a proposal. Bowman aimed to increase manufacturing capability and bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. from Korea, China, and Mexico. Immelt asked why production should be put in old factories in a union environment. Dirk's answer was: "We can save on transportation and be closer to our customers. We can have engineering work more closely with production. We can work smarter than Korea, China, and Mexico, using 15-20% of the labor they use." Immelt was convinced, and GE Appliances got a $1 billion investment.



The challenges GE faced were daunting. If the goal was to leapfrog the competition in every product line while revitalizing U.S. manufacturing, management had to take a big swing. The $1 billion plan envisioned 11 new product platforms in six different manufacturing sites. GE needed to reduce new product development cycles from 3-4 years to 1-1.5 years. The plants had been on life support, so they needed major repairs. The workplace was divided into functional areas; no one knew how to work together. All the laboratory equipment had been given away. The only people left were tough survivors, so the bench was not deep. The company needed to rebuild expertise and capabilities. It needed to recruit huge numbers of people in a short period of time. It needed to invest in new development labs and to co-locate teams.



In the summer of 2009 management decided to bring production of a water heater back to the U.S. from an Asian contractor. GE manufacturing leaders started applying "Lean" thinking and tools to a "model line" for manufacturing in Appliance Park. They introduced a new cross-functional team structure for improvement — the "Big Room." Functions were seated together with a common goal: working on the value stream from consumer research to testing. They put the schedule up on the wall so everybody knew what was happening. There was a fishbone diagram of the production flow (the backbone was the main flow, and the branches were the sub-assemblies), and a cardboard mockup of the factory layout which also showed how the equipment would look. At 7:45 a.m. each day leaders met, then at 8:00 a.m. everyone met to review the prior day, and what they would do that day. Then at 4:15 p.m. everyone met again to review what they'd done. The water heater that resulted was a new design, with better performance: 20% fewer parts and 50% less labor. Inventory was reduced 60%, labor efficiency improved 30%, time-to-produce was reduced 68%, and space required for the line came down by 80%.

The development team was extremely cohesive. But the problem was, the culture needed to change outside the "Big Room" and very few cultural change efforts had been made since 1994. Employees were anxious: the business had been up for sale in 2008 and 2009, and there had been little to no investment in plants or training. The purpose of their work was being redefined through continuous improvement, but the clarity across functions and among the workforce was fuzzy.

As the leadership began to introduce a new way of working together it had to solidify trust in the workforce and instill a level of confidence that continuous improvement was not just another initiative that would pass. This would be a journey.

To spread the new culture more broadly, management decided to form another cross-functional team (a "Little Big Room") to define tenets about how they would operate. A team of 16 curious, honest, and bold people — including production operators and leaders from HR, engineering, purchasing, operations, and training — were selected. Everyone who joined the team had to leave his or her job for four months. They visited the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller and auto supplier Autoliv to see what mature Lean operations looked like. They saw hourly workers deeply engaged in reviews of operational performance measures, solving complex problems. The GE team developed a purpose and nine guiding principles — the "Appliances Performance System." The biggest shift was to focus on making work better for front line operators and put everyone else in support of operators...shifting the paradigm to support versus command and control.



To further shift the culture, Dirk Bowman made a commitment that nobody would lose his or her job due to Lean, but that everybody's job would change every day. The union president echoed the same message. The union acted as a second set of leaders to help execute and reinforce changes. To demonstrate their deep commitment, in December 2011 GE rolled out team leader training. GE Appliances now has a dedicated learning organization that in 2012 trained 3,000 employees on the fundamentals of the Appliances Performance System.



So, while the macro story may be about jobs coming back "onshore," at its core this is really a process and a culture story. GE Appliances is proving once again that the balance of process and people, aligned with a clearly articulated and understood purpose and vision, is the source of improved performance and capability development. With leadership engagement and support, this system will thrive.

Leaders, Choose Your Words Wisely

Even a brief interaction can change the way people think about themselves, their leaders, and the future. Each of those many connections you make has the potential to become a high point or a low point in someone's day. Each is a chance to transform an ordinary moment into a touchpoint.

What is a touchpoint? A touchpoint is an interaction with one other person, a couple of people, or a group that can last a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, or a couple of days. Those Touchpoints can be planned or spontaneous, casual or carefully choreographed.

Every touchpoint is spring-loaded with possibilities. Each one can build — or break — a relationship.

For instance, when I was a first year graduate student at the J. L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University taking a Management Policy class. My professor, Ram Charan, noticed that my schoolwork was starting to slip. I was not only taking a full load of classes but I was also working two jobs. I was stretched pretty thin. One day, Ram called me aside and said, "You can do better." Those four words inspired me to hold myself to a higher standard. I remember those words as if they were spoken yesterday and that was over 35 years ago.

Shortly after I graduated, I accepted a job with General Mills. Like many people starting a new job in a new place, I was completely lost in the building. This older man saw me stumbling around and said, "Young man... you look lost. How can I help?" I asked him if he could help me find my way back to the marketing department. He pointed the way and said, "So you work in the marketing department. If there is one thing that I want to leave you with is that you've got to give it all you've got." We then went our separate ways. Ultimately, I saw this man's picture a couple of weeks later and discovered that he was Jim McFarland, the CEO and Chairman of General Mills. Those five words inspired me to lean into my work with greater intensity. I carry them with me today.

I had been with General Mills for six months and I was up for my first performance review. I was struggling to hit the ground running. I had never worked in an office environment before in my life. Here I was, unmistakably a rookie. During the performance review, my manager offered this observation, "Doug, you are clearly very determined to contribute here but, quite frankly, your work is very mediocre." That comment, in and of itself, was something I was able work through. Next, I was to receive feedback from my boss's boss. In this case, he had written six words down on a piece of paper to be read to me. Those words were, "You should look for another job." This was the first performance review I had received in my life and my boss's boss, whom I thought was a god, just told me to go look for another job. He wasn't inclined to give me the time of the day or the benefit of the doubt. I was devastated and very anxious but ultimately I played through it. Those six words reminded me that the corporate journey is not for the faint of heart. You must bring great resolve to your work. It's not all a bed of roses.

I persevered through some difficult times as I was starting up my career and I was promoted to Product Manager at General Mills in a very timely way. Within 48 hours of that promotion, I received a call from my wife's grandfather, Mr. R. T. Johnstone. R.T., a man I admired greatly, said, "I'm so proud of you." Those five words of encouragement reminded me that I was not alone on this journey, as difficult as it was. My family was, is and will always be with me. Those words ring in my ears to this day.

After six years of working in the General Mills food group, I transferred over to the General Mills toy group. Three years in, I lost my job. I've shared this experience in great detail here before. After I was let go from General Mills, I went to an outplacement counselor; a man by the name of Neil MacKenna. Every time Neil would answer the phone he would say, "Hello, this is Neil MacKenna, how can I help?" With those four words, "How can I help?" Neil changed my entire work life. He helped me see beyond my own agenda to discover the fulfillment of starting every interaction with a desire to be helpful. This was a very powerful lesson, delivered in four words. It took all of two seconds.

On July 2, 2009, I was involved in a very serious automobile accident. I was traveling to my home in Northern New Jersey for the Fourth of July weekend. I was in the back of a Lincoln Navigator asleep with my seat belt on when, while going at least 70 miles an hour, we ran into the back of a stopped dump truck on the New Jersey Turnpike. It was a very serious accident. I was taken to a nearby trauma center and went through an extensive array of surgical procedures. Understandably, I was pretty much out of it for 24 hours. When I woke up in the intensive care unit my wife, Leigh, who had been helping my daughter move into her apartment in Washington D.C., was right by my side. And all she said were three words. She said, "I'm right here." Those three words, said in one second, connected me in a powerfully indescribable way with my wife and my recovery. I'll never forget the moment.

Over the following 40 days, as I was recovering from the automobile accident, I had been moved from the ICU to the trauma center then to a hospital and finally to a rehabilitation program. I dealt with nurses in all four of these facilities that, time and again, reaffirmed for me the power of touchpoints — that they're not just about the words you say, they're about how you say them.

There was the same protocol over all four facilities. In this case, every nurse would come into my room and ask me the same question: "How is your pain?" When the nurses were fully prepared and exceptionally gifted at managing patients they could come into the room and dial-in in a very thoughtful and genuine way. But with nurses who were new to the profession, new to the facility, or who just felt a little bit uncomfortable getting into a conversation, I would quickly realize that those four words weren't about me; it was about how they were going to handle me. It was about them. Those conversations were always awkward.

So, those four words, "How is your pain?" opened up a world that was magical when it was well managed. But when not well managed, the resulting awkwardness could completely undermine the effectiveness of the nurse. Those four words reaffirmed the power of touchpoints.

There you have it:



Seven memorable touchpoints

32 words total

Less than five words per Touchpoint

Strung together, it's generously 20 seconds of conversation

That's approximately four seconds per touchpoint

Despite their brevity, those seven touchpoints have had a profound impact on my life. I encourage each of you to look for opportunities to have a profound impact on the next touchpoint you encounter. You have the opportunity to make a tremendous impact on the lives of the people with whom you work and live. Make the most of it. The next touchpoint is right around the corner — use it wisely.

Think Carefully About Where You Put the Office Bathroom

Working From My Bean Bag Chair Treadmill Desk


That's what everyone's favorite late CEO did when he designed Pixar's offices in 1986. Instead of putting the bathrooms (and café and mailboxes and gift shop) off to the side, Steve Jobs placed them in an atrium at the center of the workspace. And "although some were more than a little annoyed to have to traipse to the lobby every time they needed the loo — something remarkable started to happen," writes The Independent's Archie Bland. "Pixar’s employees started to bump into each other. They shot the breeze. Sometimes, the chatter would yield something useful, and one of the participants would head back to her desk with a new idea." And now everyone wants to be like Apple. Bland ventures into the West London headquarters of juice and smoothie maker Innocent to witness "a benevolent, juice-obsessed cult, teetering on the border between charming and insufferable; that is, like an Innocent smoothie bottle with desks in it." While perhaps an extreme example, this type of setup is prized by the likes of Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, who says that people are "more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from putting two different ideas together." And recent research found that people are happier when they have different options for where and how to work. But does that actually lead to productivity — and, perhaps most important, to profit? Maybe not. Dish Network is often cited as one of the most hostile workplaces in America and still boasts outstanding numbers. So goes this winding article, with no real answers but with lots of important questions that will shape how we work in the future.

Game Changer

Finally: SEC Lifts Ban on Advertising Fundraising Rounds Inc.

Until now, start-ups in the U.S. couldn't advertise themselves as investment opportunities through traditional media to nonaccredited investors. If they wanted to sell stock, they had to do it through official financial channels such as angel investor groups. That made it hard for start-ups to raise money from ordinary investors, and hard for ordinary investors, especially those outside VC hotbeds such as Silicon Valley, to put money into promising new businesses. But the Securities and Exchange Commission, prodded by recent legislation, voted this week to lift its ban on what's known as "general solicitation" of fundraising rounds. Now entrepreneurs will be allowed to solicit investments through new channels, provided they vet investors. The big complaint about the ruling is that it creates new bureaucratic obstacles to selling stock. But the upside is big: Entrepreneurs living outside tech hubs may find it easier to connect with investors and grow their startups without having to relocate, says Inc. Cue the Twitter jokes. — Andy O'Connell

Agree to Disagree

Strategic Controversy: Welcome the Dissent University of Michigan Ross School of Business

Why is it that when you attend a strategy meeting, everyone who isn’t nodding off to sleep seems be nodding in agreement, at least on the basics? It's not because everyone really does agree; it's because companies don't know how to handle reasoned disagreement, says Aneel Karnani of the University of Michigan. It's rare for companies to value internal debate. One positive example he cites is a company that typically identifies five pressing issues and assigns two managers to each, telling them to explore different avenues. In the end, one approach is chosen for each problem. The key to opening the floor to dissent is to depersonalize the discussion. Argue about ideas, not people. That way you get robust, constructive debate that can help your company choose the right strategy. "The 'Let's all be team players' and 'Let's pull together' thinking can be a trap," Karnani says. "Strategy comes from internal debate, even dissent." I don't disagree. — Andy O'Connell

What Happens When You Run Your Company Like "The Hunger Games"

At Sears, Eddie Lampert's Warring Divisions Model Amplifies Troubles Businessweek

Imagine, for a moment, the CEO of a major company sitting alone in his South Florida mansion. You run a division of his company and can only see him via video conference. Your job is to convince him to give you money to fund your retail operation, and not others in the company. He barely pays attention, until he disagrees with what you’re saying. Then he berates you for an hour. Now imagine that this is reality at Sears. In this fascinating and slightly hard-to-believe story, Mina Kimes explains why Eddie Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund, splitting the operation into 30 independent divisions with their own CEOs, CMOs, and boards. Former execs say it's created chaos and infighting. Lampert counters: "Decentralized systems and structures work better than centralized ones because they produce better information over time." Meanwhile, Sears continues to record losses while attempting to reinvent shopping on digital devices. There are also these tidbits: Lampert makes his first CEO entrance at a shareholder meeting to the tune of Maroon 5's "Moves Like Jagger." He created a social network for Sears employees on which he used the pseudonym "Eli Wexler." And he's really into Ayn Rand.

Praise Be

How to Escape from Bad Decisions Huffington Post

Praising people makes them — and you — feel good, so why not be liberal about doling out the ego-buffing compliments? Because if you praise people the wrong way, you can prompt them to unconsciously increase what's known as "escalation of commitment" — the tendency to stick with a course of action even after it's been discredited, writes Wharton professor Adam Grant. In an experiment, when people who had been praised for their decision-making skills made a choice about whether to keep investing in a bad choice (in this case, a bad hire), they were 40% more likely to escalate their commitment to the new employee than people who hadn't been praised. Makes sense: If you've been told you're a great decision maker, you must have made a good decision, so you'd better stick with it. But people who had been praised instead for their creativity were 40% less likely to escalate their commitment than those who hadn't been praised. Since they had been induced to feel good about something other than their decision making, these people were willing to admit to having made poor choices. Any time you give positive feedback for a particular skill or trait, the praisee is at risk for becoming overconfident in that domain. — Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITS:

Can I Interest You in a Snack? Perhaps a Beverage?

9 Vintage Vending Machines From a Time When They'd Sell Anything (Gizmodo)
7 Ways the Utensils You Use Change the Taste of Food (Fast Company)
Coca-Cola’s New Bottle Is Made of Ice (Time)

When You've Done Enough, Do More

How do you become truly influential? We've found that the most highly respected leaders avoid techniques to gain short-term compliance; they also steer clear of a self-centered "How can I get people to do what I want?" mindset. Instead, they take a different approach altogether.

We interviewed over 100 high-impact influencers from a wide range of industries and organizations for our recent book. To achieve real influence, they tend to follow four steps that turn typical persuasion strategies upside down. These steps are action guidelines all of us can use to get things done with people in ways that not only yield great results, but also strengthen relationships and enhance credibility.

In previous articles we covered Step 1: Go for great outcomes, Step 2: Listen past your blind spots, and Step 3: Engage others in "their there."

In this post we cover Step 4: When you've done enough... do more.

Think back to the last time you helped someone very important in your life achieve a goal. Maybe you helped a friend with a business venture, participated in planning a wedding, or pitched in when a son or daughter moved to a new city.

When you offered your help, we bet you didn't say, "I'll take a few minutes to offer some advice, but for more than that you'll have to do something for me."

Instead, you spent hours running errands, hanging decorations, or moving furniture. You volunteered for messy, difficult, or time-consuming chores like cleaning the fridge or carefully writing 300 names on 300 place cards.

Why? Because you automatically do more for the people you care about deeply. In fact, you usually don't even stop to think about it. It comes naturally to you because your relationships with these people matter and you want to strengthen them.

Of course, these relationships are special; they mean more to you than a business connection or a relationship with a casual friend. But in any relationship, you can go beyond what's expected. When you do this, you make a statement about who you are as a person and a professional.

Our friend Kouji Nakata describes it this way: "It's about not being the main attraction. You look for the angle of help; look for the angle of assistance. It's like being a caring relative, like an uncle who really is taking an interest in his nephew. Look for the way that they can shine and help them do it. Don't be the important piece. Step aside, get alongside them, and help them do great things and help them be happy."

When you do this, you set the stage for positive influence both now and in the future. "Overdelivering" makes you stand out in the moment and makes people remember you later. You become locked in as someone who deserves to be listened to, and people don't wonder whether you have ulterior motives or hidden agendas.

Doing more isn't just a onetime thing but an ongoing practice. For maximum effect, you'll want to focus on three distinct times when you can do more: before, during, and after an interaction.

When you begin interactions in this way — by doing more, and sometimes even taking a risk in the process — you form instant bonds with people who are tired of being ripped off, manipulated, or given the bare minimum of service. You prove immediately to these people that you have integrity. And they tell other people, who tell still more people.

In fact, you can "do more" for people who have no connection with you at all. Think of this as committing "random acts of doing more."

David Bradford, former CEO of Fusion-IO, fell into a great outcome by doing exactly that. Here's the story behind his break-through addition of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to Fusion-IO, which helped drive the organization's phenomenal success.

David didn't target "Woz." Instead, one of David's random acts of doing more led to a cascade of positive results.

David, who at the time was living in Utah, had a friend whose son was moving into the state and could use some help setting up his law practice. David obliged, helping get the young man connected and raising his visibility in the state.

A few months later, because of this connection, David received a request to speak at the Utah Bar Association. It was in Sun Valley, a five-hour drive for him, and he'd be speaking to a relatively small group. Many people would have considered it a complete waste of time. But David cheerfully agreed.

After the speech, he stayed for lunch. As it turned out, the keynote speaker was Steve Wozniak. Chance led Wozniak's executive assistant to sit right next to David. She observed that Wozniak would probably enjoy the opportunity to speak with him, joking that he'd welcome "a kindred spirit from the information technology world in a room full of lawyers," and she was right — they struck up a conversation.

It turned out that Woz had his eye on solid-state trends that Fusion-IO was exploring. Later David sent him materials and asked if he'd like to be a part of the advisory board. Wozniak said yes, and then went on to take the role of chief scientist.

Just random chance? Maybe. But in the bigger picture, the David Bradfords of the world don't think of it as blind chance. They think, "That's how it works." It's about a mindset that starts not with results, but with relationships. You may not have any clue where those relationships will lead . . . but that's part of the excitement of real influence.

When you do more, always remember that you're not "giving to get." Never see your actions as a prelude to springing an uncomfortable request on another person. Instead, understand that your goals are to build long-term relationships and to make things better.

If you've noticed in yourself a "zero sum" mentality, work to move beyond it. It's holding you back. Instead, think of the times in your own life when people have done more for you. How can you pay forward to others the positive influence these people gave you? How can you do more for people before, during, and after the projects you're currently planning?

When you find ways to help other people learn, grow, gain, avoid problems, make progress, and achieve their goals, you achieve something far more important than near-term gain. You form the basis for ongoing results, enriched relationships, and an integrity-based reputation.

And that will lead — in wonderful ways you can't even begin to predict right now — to real, lifelong influence.

Rethinking the Work of Leadership

In 1973, Peter Drucker stated in his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, "Management is not culture-free, that is, part of the world of nature. It is a social function. It is, therefore, both socially accountable and culturally embedded."

Some thirteen years later, Tom Peters remarked in the article Managing As Symbolic Action: "It requires us, as managers, to get people to share our sense of urgency in new priorities; to develop personal, soul-deep animus toward things as they are; to get up the nerve and energy to take on the forces of inertia that bog down any significant change program."

Yet, here we are in 2013 with organizational leadership models that continue to deny the social nature of organizations and wallow in inertia.

Our leadership practices remain authoritative. People are disengaged, distrusting and perhaps even disenfranchised.

According to the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer, fewer than 20% of respondents believe leaders are actually telling the truth when confronted with a difficult issue in their organizations. Furthermore, a study conducted by the Human Capital Institute and Interaction Associates in 2013 found only 34% of organizations had high levels of trust in the places they work. And, a paltry 38% reported that their organizations had effective leadership running the show.

To cap off a small sliver of dismal data points, research firm Gallup found that over a twelve-year period between 2000 and 2012, the percentage of engaged employees in the workforce has shifted between 26% and 30%. That is, roughly 70% of employees in today's organizations have spent more than a decade essentially collecting a pay check, an almost Shakespearean spectacle of tragic ambivalence.

What if our approach to leadership was to evolve into Drucker's vision of "socially accountable and culturally embedded" management?

Cam Crosbie is the CIO of Equitable Life Insurance Company of Canada, represented by more than 10,000 independent producers across Canada and Bermuda. Cam completely understands the need to "lead without authority." He does so, quite simply, by asking questions rather than barking orders. Before moving forward with a big decision or a large project, Cam makes a practice of asking lots of questions, including, as he says, "even the so called 'dumb ones'".

As a CIO, Cam believes it's important to reach out to others and inquire before pushing ahead. Cam said, "I hope that in some small way if people see the CIO unashamedly asking the simple questions, it clears the way for clearer and more meaningful discussion." Perhaps the first step toward a better future for your organization is to acknowledge that you don't necessarily know the way there — and, just as important, to understand that by asking questions, you not only awaken and engage people, you stand to collect more valuable perspective and ideas than you would by starting from a position of authority.

Leadership isn't a 9-5 job — it's communal, it's holistic and it's accretive. It's time to abandon the long-held notion that the "leader" knows all and should decide everything. A fancy title doesn't put you above others — it puts you in their service.

TELUS, a national telecommunications company in Canada, with $11 billion of annual revenue and more than 40,000 employees worldwide (and where I am head of learning and collaboration), has worked incredibly hard over the past five years to raise employee engagement from 53% to 80%. It did so through myriad actions including the launch of the TELUS Leadership Philosophy. The TLP is an enterprise-wide leadership framework that cultivates a collaborative, social, open and engaging mindset among all employees regardless of rank or title. It encourages all employees to "engage and explore" with one another before "executing." It defines key behavioral attributes such as communicating, collaborating, learning, deciding and adapting such that everyone can speak the same leadership language.

In mid-2010, an internal program was born at TELUS entitled Customers First. The overarching goal of the program was to improve the likelihood that TELUS customers would recommend the company. As the program began to gain traction, another idea surfaced: Customer Commitments. Think of the commitments as customer promises — specific actions that any TELUS team member would carry out to help a customer regardless of role.

Instead of locking its most senior executives in a room to decide what the Customer Commitments were going to be for the organization, we designed a collaborative process that involved the entire organization. Over 1,000 different examples surfaced over a two-month period. Through focus groups, interactive online polling and voting, the 1,000 were whittled down to a final four.

If the culture at TELUS was one that relied on authoritative leadership, the Customer Commitments would have been created in a couple of hours by a few authoritative leaders. Because the culture was healthy, open and participative as opposed to dogmatic and ruthlessly hierarchical, the organization collaborated without authority. This is the work of leadership today: asking questions, involving people, connecting them to each other, creating a platform for their insights and ideas to make a real impact — in other words, unleashing leadership behavior everywhere.

In this moment of reflection, as we seek to redefine the work of leadership, let us remember the words of Nelson Mandela:

"[Ubuntu is] the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others."

If you're lonely at the top, it's time to start recognizing and amplifying the contribution of those around you.

Tell us how you're rethinking the work of leadership. What are you or your organization doing to escape the limits of top-down power structures? What are you doing to equip and energize individuals to exercise their leadership gifts, wherever they are in the organization? Learn more about the Leaders Everywhere Challenge and share your ideas and stories here.