Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1576

Daft Punk Didn't "Get Lucky" When It Created This Summer's Biggest Hit

Get Nostalgic


When the new Daft Punk record came out recently, I was tickled by its seventies-inspired beats and catchy hooks. My delight was tempered, however, when a segment of a popular morning show declared one of the tunes, "Get Lucky," to be the official song of the summer. Wait a second: How did this French duo, which hasn't had anything close to a hit since 2000, end up with a No. 1 on the digital charts of 55 countries (and being touted between segments about celebrity style and tips for grilling chicken)? According to Eric Spitznagel, there are a few key factors. The first is the construction of the song itself, which was meticulously crafted with the help of veteran musicians over a span of five years. Another was a small-scale marketing campaign that focused on what Daft Punk's 38-year-old Thomas Bangalter calls "a seduction." "You cannot make people excited by giving them everything," he says. "It's a process of tempting, of teasing, of creating desire." This slow rollout involved billboards showing nothing but an image of the band members in their iconic helmets and TV commercials that contained instrumentals with no mention of the song or release date. The song also played to nostalgia – the music was made with real instruments (not computers), and the marketing strategy embraced old-school methods (billboards and TV) that eventually became fodder for online conversation. There's much more nuance in the Businessweek article, but suffice it to say that Daft Punk did pretty much everything right. And, yeah, I'm still listening. (For more summer hits from as far back as 1962, enjoy this list from NPR.)

Twitter Isn't a Cash Register

Email Is Crushing Twitter, Facebook for Selling Stuff Online Wired

Almost every company is on Facebook and Twitter. But that doesn't mean every company should try to sell products directly from those social platforms. New research from Custora finds that email — yes, creaky old email — beats both for making sales. The marketing-data firm discovered that online retailers’ rate of acquiring customers via email has quadrupled over the past four years to 7%. Facebook's percentage didn't even come close, and Twitter essentially flatlined. Of course, none of these ways to attract customers approaches the effectiveness of search: Custora found that Google and the like create 50% more valuable customers than average (i.e., people likely to buy stuff). Email customers clock in at 11% more valuable, Facebook customers are of average value, and Twitter customers are 23% less valuable than the mean. The problem may be that no one has come up with a good social-sales strategy yet; or maybe Twitter's role isn't product promotions at all.

Like the 1916 Giants

Big Business Continues Its Winning Streak in Health Reform Wongblog

Perhaps the Obama administration didn't think it was asking too much: Under its health care overhaul, each business employing more than 50 people would have to provide workers with health insurance. The fine for not doing so would land in the $2,000 to $3,000 range — pennies compared with the $16,000 it costs, on average, to insure one person on an employer-sponsored plan. And yet on Tuesday, the administration pushed this part of the reform package back for at least a year, with a continued fight from businesses and trade groups expected. Wonkblog's Ezra Klein, for one, hopes they succeed. He argues that the type of mandate in the plan isn't a very good one, as it doesn't incentivize companies to hire full-time workers. In fact, he doesn't think employers should be in the health-insurance game to begin with. But because, in the near term at least, we're stuck with companies being at the center of how Americans get care, Klein calls on Congress to really figure out how to do the employer mandate right. In the meantime, we wait.

Can Seaweed Rescue Us All?

A Green Alternative that Might Just Save the Planet The Guardian

It grows far more quickly, and turns sunlight into energy five times faster, than land plants. Farming it on a large scale for energy use won’t raise food prices. Its cultivation doesn’t require fresh water. And farmed at scale, it could provide hatcheries for fish and trap climate-warming carbon on the seabed. It’s kelp, and, reports The Guardian, it’s an industry on the threshold of taking off, since a Californian firm last year produced genetically modified bacteria that can produce about 1 kilogram of ethanol from 3 kilograms of dried seaweed. In Vietnam, shrimp farmers are raising their incomes by switching to seaweed cultivation. Europe is spending tens of millions of euros on nine pilot projects. Governments and companies in China, Chile, the U.S., and India are investing in projects of their own. Biofuel development can be bootstrapped by high-margin alternate uses, since seaweed is also used to produce cosmetics, plastics, and vitamin supplements—the huge Chinese industry was founded on providing iodine to the country’s growing population. The biggest barrier, says The Guardian, is that seaweed cultivation is labor intensive. Why is that a problem, exactly? —Andrea Ovans

Party Car

China's Luxury Car Could Make Foreign Automakers See Red China Economic Review

To make real money in China, you don’t want to sell to just the country’s emerging middle class. You want to sell to the Communist Party elite, whose members have a penchant for spending money. Back in the day, Chinese state-owned automaker FAW Group excelled in this market. Its sedans were often seen carrying leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. It was later eclipsed by foreign luxury brands, but it’s making a comeback: As part of his anti-corruption campaign, China’s new president, Xi Jinping, says government officials shouldn’t be seen driving high-end foreign vehicles. This at just the moment when FAW is launching a new version of its Hongqi, or Red Flag, luxury car. The biggest loser may be Audi, which had become a favorite of party officials. Trivia fact: If the 80-million-member Communist Party were a country, it would be the world’s 17th largest. —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITS:

Who Wants to Celebrate July 4th Anyway?

What's a Royal Baby Worth? To the British Economy, $376 Million (Christian Science Monitor)
Weird Wimbledon Threatens to Upset Ratings and Ads (Marketplace)
Jane Austen Could be Face of £10 Note (The Telegraph)

Successfully Integrate Your Work, Home, Community, and Self

You can be a committed A-player executive, a good parent, an attentive spouse, and a healthy person with time for community engagement and hobbies. How on earth do you do all that? Stop juggling and start integrating. Begin with a clear view of what you want from — and can contribute to — each domain of your life (work, home, community, and self). Carefully consider the people who matter most to you and the expectations you have of one another. Then experiment with some minor changes and see how they affect all four domains over a short period.

If an experiment doesn't work out in one or more areas, you can make adjustments or put an end to it, and little is lost. But if it does work out, it's a small win. Rack up enough small wins, and you're well on your way to a life that's less stressful and more productive.

Skeptical? Many people are when they first hear about this approach. But time and again, I've seen business professionals use it to find the greater harmony they're seeking. Working with Harvard Business Review, I've created a free interactive assessment test to help you identify misalignments between the amount of time you spend on one area and how important it is to you. The test also incorporates how satisfied you are, generally, in each of the four areas. Your results will highlight gaps between your values and your actions and ways to get started addressing those gaps. Click here to get started on the assessment.

One of the best ways to address the incongruities that may surface via the assessment is to structure an experiment focused on improving your well-being and performance in all four domains of your life. The assessment results will provide more detail on how to get started, but to show what an experiment can look like in practice, here's a story of a Target executive I worked with who experimented his way toward improving his well-being and performance.

David is a VP accountable for a multibillion-dollar P&L. (His name and title are disguised.) For years, he felt a relentless tension between the domains of work and home, as many of us do: "I spent most of my waking hours at work," he explains, "and I always shut down from work at home." But keeping things separate like this hurt his relationship with his wife. They talked about the kids, nothing more, because that was all they had in common. And at work, David never had enough time to prepare for all his meetings.

So he devised an experiment. Before leaving the office each day, he'd look at the next day's schedule and pick one big meeting to get ready for. On his drive home — at a decent hour — he'd think about what he could do and say at that meeting. When he got home, he'd run some ideas by his wife.

It worked beautifully: "This gave us something new to talk about each day, it gave her a much better understanding of what I do, it engaged her, and it enhanced our relationship because we were having richer conversations. My wife made good suggestions — and I've had better meetings as a result."

The experiment has also had a positive effect on David's team. After telling his direct reports he was changing his hours in the office, one of them approached him with a request to adjust her schedule, because it was aggravating a medical problem. Another employee said he felt empowered to take care of an aging parent during the day when he needed to. He didn't feel guilty about it — David's own actions made it clear that it was OK.

"The example I was setting before was work first, work first, work first," David reflects. "Now I might be in the office for fewer hours, but I'm making faster and better decisions. And my wife has more understanding when work does have to come first. In the long-term, this means that I'm a more engaged leader for Target without an unmanageable tension between my wife and my work."

Interested in identifying your own misalignments and structuring experiments to improve them? Let's get started.

Adapted from "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" (HBR April 2008) and content posted on hbr.org on February 21, 2013. Stew Friedman's thoughts on how to structure experiments to better your four-domain integration can be found in the HBR Press book, Guide to Managing Stress.

Successfully Integrate Your Work, Life, Self, and Community

You can be a committed A-player executive, a good parent, an attentive spouse, and a healthy person with time for community engagement and hobbies. How on earth do you do all that? Stop juggling and start integrating. Begin with a clear view of what you want from — and can contribute to — each domain of your life (work, home, community, and self). Carefully consider the people who matter most to you and the expectations you have of one another. Then experiment with some minor changes and see how they affect all four domains over a short period.

If an experiment doesn't work out in one or more areas, you can make adjustments or put an end to it, and little is lost. But if it does work out, it's a small win. Rack up enough small wins, and you're well on your way to a life that's less stressful and more productive.

Skeptical? Many people are when they first hear about this approach. But time and again, I've seen business professionals use it to find the greater harmony they're seeking. Working with Harvard Business Review, I've created a free interactive assessment test to help you identify misalignments between the amount of time you spend on one area and how important it is to you. The test also incorporates how satisfied you are, generally, in each of the four areas. Your results will highlight gaps between your values and your actions and ways to get started addressing those gaps. Click here to get started on the assessment.

One of the best ways to address the incongruities that may surface via the assessment is to structure an experiment focused on improving your well-being and performance in all four domains of your life. The assessment results will provide more detail on how to get started, but to show what an experiment can look like in practice, here's a story of a Target executive I worked with who experimented his way toward improving his well-being and performance.

David is a VP accountable for a multibillion-dollar P&L. (His name and title are disguised.) For years, he felt a relentless tension between the domains of work and home, as many of us do: "I spent most of my waking hours at work," he explains, "and I always shut down from work at home." But keeping things separate like this hurt his relationship with his wife. They talked about the kids, nothing more, because that was all they had in common. And at work, David never had enough time to prepare for all his meetings.

So he devised an experiment. Before leaving the office each day, he'd look at the next day's schedule and pick one big meeting to get ready for. On his drive home — at a decent hour — he'd think about what he could do and say at that meeting. When he got home, he'd run some ideas by his wife.

It worked beautifully: "This gave us something new to talk about each day, it gave her a much better understanding of what I do, it engaged her, and it enhanced our relationship because we were having richer conversations. My wife made good suggestions — and I've had better meetings as a result."

The experiment has also had a positive effect on David's team. After telling his direct reports he was changing his hours in the office, one of them approached him with a request to adjust her schedule, because it was aggravating a medical problem. Another employee said he felt empowered to take care of an aging parent during the day when he needed to. He didn't feel guilty about it — David's own actions made it clear that it was OK.

"The example I was setting before was work first, work first, work first," David reflects. "Now I might be in the office for fewer hours, but I'm making faster and better decisions. And my wife has more understanding when work does have to come first. In the long-term, this means that I'm a more engaged leader for Target without an unmanageable tension between my wife and my work."

Interested in identifying your own misalignments and structuring experiments to improve them? Let's get started.

Adapted from "Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life" (HBR April 2008) and content posted on hbr.org on February 21, 2013. Stew Friedman's thoughts on how to structure experiments to better your four-domain integration can be found in the HBR Press book, Guide to Managing Stress.

How Google Flu Trends Is Getting to the Bottom of Messy Data

Churning through, tabulating, and modeling millions of search queries every day, Google Flu Trends can measure, a full two weeks before the CDC, the incidence of influenza-like illnesses (ILI) across the U.S. Any official response to a flu pandemic, such as vaccine distribution and timing, could be greatly enhanced with such an early warning. And while not billed as an ersatz measure, Google Flu has had an uncannily high correlation with the CDC's own slower, yet more assiduously produced estimate of ILIs.

Until this past flu season, that is. The algorithm drastically overestimated the actual flu rate, in some cases by a factor of almost two, according to a report in Nature News. It's still not 100% certain why it failed, especially since Google isn't speaking publicly about it just yet.

Big data systems like Google Flu are complex and unwieldy beasts. They can (and sometimes do) fail to give us the insights we think they should. They're temperamental, messy, and can break down when the data or model changes unpredictably. So as your business adapts to making more and more data-driven decisions, from managing supply chains to hiring the best employees, how can you be confident in your big data decision making process?

I spoke to Rajan Patel, co-inventor of Google Flu, and he explained the two strategies in their assurance process: algorithms that detect and mitigate aberrations in search frequency that might throw their estimate off, and people to get to the root cause of system failures so that biases get rooted out of statistical models. The algorithms manage most of the day-to-day sanity checks before releasing estimates to the public, and the deeper systemic investigations by people are sparked by abnormalities like the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 and this past winter's flu season.

The Google approach suggests a certain data vigilantism comprised of smart people wielding smart algorithms to act as sentinels against faulty inference. Big data vigilantism can help your company cope with two of big data's main issues: messiness and sampling bias, and ultimately help contribute to growing your confidence in wielding big data in your decision process.

Messiness

At the core of the issue with flu measurement (and most projects involving large amounts of data) is ambiguity; both in the intent of a search query, and in the sense that the reference rate from the CDC measures influenza-like illnesses, which might include non-flu ailments that cause fever, cough, or sore throat. Search terms directly relating to a flu symptom or complication are conflated between people who actually have the flu and those that are expressing concerned awareness about it — and CDC measurements mingle people who actually have the flu and those that are just expressing some flu-like symptoms. Trying to determine the actual flu incidence requires some careful disambiguation. This is one place where smarter algorithms may come into data vigilantism: pulling out the information that you actually want to measure from your big, messy pile of data.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins are tackling an even more chaotic source of data for measuring flu: tweets. But by implementing some careful linguistic reverse engineering, their algorithm is able to take into account the context of the tweet and disambiguate the meaning. For instance, they noticed that when the word "flu" was used as the subject in a sentence it suggested that the message was more likely to be about awareness than infection. This pattern, or "template", then gets encoded into the algorithm as something predictive of awareness tweets, along with many other linguistic templates. Using the smarter algorithm their system was able to filter out the awareness messages and focus on the infection tweets, scoring a correlation much closer to that of the CDC.

Sampling Bias

Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford points out another pitfall of working with big data: sampling bias. But this again is something that smarter algorithms can also help correct for, if you make the effort to understand the bias in your data and adjust for it in the algorithm. For instance, we know from Pew surveys that Twitter usage skews towards younger age demographics. Any flu measurement based on Twitter messages would necessarily entail that demographic bias. To correct for this, we need to know the age of each person sending a flu-related Tweet, but thankfully we can estimate that from data too! In fact, researchers at UMass Lowell are already working out the details of integrating age-estimates into flu prediction from social media. So with a little bit of investigation to understand the bias of a sample, we can often correct for it downstream with better algorithms.

The Importance of "Why?"

Messy, ambiguous data and hidden biases underscore a growing need to hire and train data vigilantes to watch over and ask "why?" about our every interpretation from big data. Big data kitsch promotes a world of blissful ignorance in its focus on correlation without explanation. But the data vigilantes do need to understand "why", sometimes to debug a spurious correlation or systemic failure (like we saw with Google Flu Trends), and other times to be able to develop a smarter method to measure the thing that we really want to measure.

It can be tempting to use data as a crutch in decision-making: "The data says so!" But sometimes the data lets us down and that exciting correlation you found is just a by-product of a messy, biased sample. More advanced algorithms can sometimes help cut through the mess and correct the sample, and smart skeptics can help step back, reflect, and ask if what the data is "saying" actually fits with what you know and expect about the world. Hiring and training these data vigilanties as well as inculcating a healthy dose of data skepticism throughout your culture and team can only help bolster the quality of decisions you ultimately make.

A Performance-Appraisal Conundrum: What Would You Do?

After 30 years of consulting, I thought I had run across every question regarding performance management. But a client recently came up with an intriguing query that I hadn't encountered before.

Bob wrote:

Sometimes it happens in our business that a management employee may be involved in a significant incident immediately after the close of the annual performance appraisal cycle that impacts their performance rather negatively. This particular incident happened early in the month of April, right at the time that his manager was writing his performance appraisal. Since the incident was significant, the manager decided to include it in the performance review even though our standard performance review period is from April 1 to March 31.

The reason I ask about this is that the employee in question recently made a formal complaint protesting the fact that since our review period is from April 1 to March 31, and the incident happened in the second week of April, 2013, it never should have been discussed or even considered in the 2013 performance appraisal. The manager, he argued, should have waited until she wrote his 2014 performance appraisal a year from now to raise the issue on the performance review.

Do you know if this is a standard or common practice with other companies? How should this be handled? Who's right? Who's wrong?

I wrote back telling Bob that I don't know of any company that has a formal "rule" or even a clearly understood guideline on how to handle this kind of unusual situation. But, I told him, I know exactly what I'd do.

If the individual's manager came to me for advice, I'd advise her to handle it exactly as was done in the incident he described. Include it in the performance appraisal for the April, 2012 - March, 2013 period, even though the incident happened a week or two or three after the end of the appraisal period. Appraisal periods are always arbitrary, and in this case it happened close enough to the 4/1 - 3/31 period to make it justifiable to include it, particularly since it was a "significant incident."

The purpose of the performance review is to provide the employee with the manager's opinion of the employee's performance, based on that performance over the past year. This incident is certainly on the manager's mind, and it would be a mistake of serious obfuscation to force the manager to wait 12 months to include it in a review. In that 12 month period the impact of the incident will have either totally been forgotten, or the seriousness of it will have been lost in the fog of faulty memory (which is precisely what the employee is hoping for). Why let that happen?

I'm also concerned, I told Bob, about the character of an individual who raises the smokescreen of, "This didn't happen until immediately after the close of the appraisal period so you can't use it against me." What kind of employee—particularly a management employee—does a response like that suggest that we're dealing with? Certainly not one I'd want on my team.

So I say, go ahead and include it. There's no question about the fact that it happened and it needs to be part of the record.

Incidentally, I pointed out to Bob, the reverse is also true. If an employee does something in early April that represents a singularly remarkable achievement, I sure wouldn't wait 12 months to include it in the performance review. And I doubt that any individual would complain that her boss included a reference to medal-of-honor-worthy performance in her performance appraisal, even though this particular triumph happened a week after the appraisal period closed.

Make Good Decisions Faster

In her recent HBR article "Transient Advantage," Rita Gunther McGrath describes how "fast and roughly right decision making will replace deliberations that are precise and slow." While most leaders couldn't agree more, the challenge is how? How do you know the difference between "roughly right" and "not at all right"? And just how much time can elapse before "fast and roughly right" becomes "precise and slow?" Hours? Days? Months?

A simple, flexible Know-Think-Do framework can enable leaders and their teams to immediately start making these fast and roughly right decisions. To paraphrase Einstein, this framework is "as simple as possible, but not simpler."

1. Know the ultimate strategic objective. The biggest hurdle to fast and roughly right decisions is criteria overload. Trying to weigh every possible objective and consideration from every possible stakeholder shoots the decision process in the foot before you even get off the starting line. Of the seven or eight possible objectives you would love to meet with this single decision, which one or two will make the biggest positive impact? Of all the possible stakeholders which one do you least want to disappoint, and what is the objective they care most about?

2. Think rationally about how your options align the ultimate objective. The vast majority of judgment errors can be eliminated simply by broadening our frame of reference. The quickest, easiest, most effective way to do this is by "consulting an Anti-You" before you make every decision. As one banking executive explained, "It's amazing how many poor decisions can be avoided simply by asking one other person for their opinion." An impressive amount of empirical research backs up his observation. (The article "How Decisions Can Be Improved," spearheaded by Katherine Milkman of Wharton, provides an excellent summary. [PDF])

Consulting an anti-you works in two ways. The act of explaining your situation to another person often gives you new insights about the decision before the other person even responds. And the fresh perspective they offer in response is the second bonus.

3. Do something with that knowledge and those thoughts. After you've clearly defined the primary strategic objectives and laid out your research and thinking with one or two key Anti-You's, it's time to call it quits on all of the planning, strategizing, number-crunching, and critical thinking. You simply must select one option while letting go of all the other "good" options. It is helpful to remember here that in the real world, "perfect" options are a myth. Decision-making will always be an exercise in coping with an unknowable future. No amount of deliberation can ever guarantee that you have identified the "right" option. The purpose of a decision is not to find the perfect option. The purpose of a decision is to get you to the next decision.

What makes the Know-Think-Do framework particularly powerful for organizations ranging from tiny startups to behemoth banks and software makers is it's scalability across every level of an organizational hierarchy. For example, a "fast and roughly right decision" might mean two weeks for the division heads at a Fortune 500 bank to decide how to remain competitive while also being compliant with a new government regulation. Or "fast and roughly right" might mean no more than 20-30 minutes for sales managers at the same bank's commercial lending team in Chicago trying to make a customer account decision.

Regardless of where you are or how big you are, this framework enables all corners of an org chart can share a common language and approach for making sound, timely decisions. So get started.

Does Using a Smartphone Make You Less Assertive?

In an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touch devices were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up to try to find out why a researcher hadn't come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. And of those who did take action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer than desktop users to get up and look for the researcher. The research suggests that your hunched posture as you use a smartphone-sized device for just a few minutes makes you less likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been using desktop computers, say research fellow Maarten Bos and Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School.

The Faustian Bargain of Online Services

Three years after I wrote an article on the Athens 2004 wiretapping case, which involved Greek government officials, I found somebody snooping on my own email as I served the next Greek administration. (The concept of irony was, after all, invented by the Greeks.)

Guarding our privacy is becoming increasingly difficult (some say futile), even for a technically sophisticated and security-conscious person (and even if service providers don't hand out our personal data to governments on request). Yet the complexity of cloud-based technology also helped me catch the perpetrator.

In November 2009 I took leave from my academic position to serve as the Secretary General for Information Systems at the Greek Ministry of Finance. Six months later I found out that others were reading my email without my permission: the result of a combination of misplaced trust, a shared password, the cloud service provider's aggregation of services, and my misunderstanding of the working of the particular cloud-based email system.

The platform the perpetrator used to read my email was a cloud-based email provider corporate account. It was set up by the Minister's team for issuing ministry email addresses to his reports. As I was already using a different address in my department, I set up the ministry-wide account to "forward and delete" all incoming messages to my main account. I assumed this would have kept the ministry account empty. While busy fighting the Greek debt crisis, we were also issued smartphones so that we could respond to email on a 24/7 basis. At that time I decided to move the calendar that my assistant was then editing in a spreadsheet onto the cloud-based platform to interoperate with the smartphone. The correct approach would have been to set up an account for my assistant and give her full access to my calendar.

However, because we had run out of accounts, I gave her my ministry account's password. I reasoned that my assistant was unlikely to read my (transient, I thought) email, because it would require overtly changing the email's forwarding settings. This amounted to crossing the line between, say, browsing what was lying on my desk and rummaging through my drawers. Under the system I thought I had set up, all emails in the main account would be forwarded and deleted immediately so that my assistant wouldn't be able to read them, for I hadn't shared with her the password to the account the messages were being forwarded to.

On the night of May 14th, however, I got an email notifying me that I had used the link "Open as a document" to view an attachment, and that the provider had helpfully saved the attachment as a cloud-based document. I spent half an hour trying to understand what this message meant, until at last it dawned on me that somebody was reading my emails through my cloud-based account.

Instead of "deleting and forwarding," the service actually copied the forwarded emails to the Trash folder. Emails that the perpetrator had read appeared in grey; it was obvious she was reading the juicy stuff, ignoring boring messages like calendar notifications. I also found that all the email I had sent through the email provider's server was also copied in the Sent folder, a surprising behavior for such a service.

Identifying my nosy assistant was easier than expected. The email system provided details of the account's activity, which allowed me to pinpoint, through the so-called IP address, the snooper's locations on the internet: One within our organization, and another from a residential broadband connection. By sending a booby-trapped email to each suspect I obtained a matching location identifier and thereby the perpetrator's identity.

The incident reaffirmed my view that guarding your privacy and the confidentiality of your data on the cloud is nigh impossible. After a couple of months on my new job I disabled my profile on a social networking site after becoming inundated with "friend" requests from people in my department. Despite the fact I wasn't actively using the site to share private information, I didn't feel confident about what accepting a friend request meant for my privacy. For instance, was I sharing information about event invitations I accepted with all my friends? I didn't know, it wasn't easy to find out, and I therefore decided that the safest option would be to disable my profile.

Similarly, it turned out I had misunderstood how the email provider's "delete and forward" really worked. I can easily reason about the confidentiality of data on my computer's hard disk. Whole disk encryption and a carefully-selected password mean that it requires non-trivial effort to get at the data I store there, while sharing a file requires explicit action on my part, like emailing it or putting it on a USB stick. In contrast, with the cloud-based email offering, merely protecting information requires effort. It required me to order and pay for a separate account, correctly understand that the "delete and forward" option would copy my sent messages to a folder, accept the risks of having a common password protect both my email and my calendar, and perhaps even more.

For the convenience of using an online service that we don't have to manage, we trade our privacy and risk the confidentiality of our data. To me, this looks like a Faustian bargain.

Given the ubiquity and practicality of online services, what are our options? Here's my take. Those of us who are IT-savvy can adopt solutions that don't rely on the cloud. For instance, you can store your private email messages, contacts, calendar, and photos on your PC and use your home's network to synchronize your various devices. (Keep in mind that you're then responsible for securing your data by taking regular off-site backups and keeping your data always encrypted.) If messing around with computers isn't your cup of tea, limit the data you share through web services. Consider all data you upload to the web as something that will sooner-or-later become public. Don't bad-mouth anyone on an online forum, and if you have some photos of your wild youth hidden at the bottom of a drawer, just keep them there. This stance also allows you to relax regarding services where everything is open by default. I'm therefore perfectly happy to share my thoughts on Twitter or publish open-source projects on GitHub, because I've decided I've got nothing to hide there. Also, use social networking sites on your own terms. For instance, although I use LinkedIn as a way to keep up with the details of my contacts, I clarify on my profile that I don't read direct messages sent through it and I don't play the endorsements game.

For larger organizations the challenge is more difficult, because their interests are not aligned with those of their employees. IT departments want to keep data secure, while staff simply want to do their job in a convenient fashion. Educating users about the perils of web-based services can only work up to a point. It's more productive for an organization to actually offer secure attractive alternatives to the offerings it wants its employees to avoid. For instance, an IT department can deploy a private cloud using open-source software, such as ownCloud. As a counterexample, I recently heard an employee lamenting that people were sharing documents with sensitive data through a cloud-based service, because the IT department wasn't providing them with a common file storage area. Determined IT staff can also arrange to lock-out particularly risky web sites and services, but there are always way to circumvent such restrictions.

Service providers should also chip in. As embarrassing leaks from banks and spooks have amply demonstrated, keeping data secure isn't easy, even for dedicated pros. Yet there are some technical solutions that can make cloud-based offerings less vulnerable. One involves putting the user in control. If most user data is kept encrypted on the provider's premises and is only decrypted with your password on your device, it's much less likely for millions of juicy records to find their way to a crook's (or Big Brother's) hands. If a conversation or chat session is encrypted on your device and decrypted only when it reaches the person you're communicating with, it's difficult for someone to eavesdrop on your conversation on a whim. Also, those providers that need to look at your data to serve ads or recommend films and books, should aggressively anonymize data and segregate them from personal details. Finally, providers who thrive by letting you inform your friends on the color of the bra you're wearing should make as easy for you to verify and control exactly who sees what as you can do in the physical world.

So, there are ways to control our online data. Not all endings of Faust result in his eternal damnation, and neither should online service adoption necessarily condemn us to digital grief.

Make Time for Growth Assignments in Your Daily Work

Your job probably includes some responsibility for researching new trends or dreaming up innovative ideas. Lucky you! Alas, if you're like most people, you probably never feel like you have enough time to devote to those important projects. Often the activities with the most learning opportunity get squeezed out of the schedule by project meetings, administrative work, e-mail, and other day-to-day items.

Of course you need to set aside some time to simply do those tasks. But if you think more strategically about the way you tackle the creative growth assignments, you can find the time to work on them and increase your personal fulfillment — as well as your value to your firm. Here's how:

Step 1: Find the Growth Opportunities

Brainstorm the development opportunities that either currently fall within the scope of your role or could if you asked for them. To come up with possibilities, try these techniques:

Look over your job description for activities that you would love to pursue, but haven't gotten to yet.
Think about some of the dreams that you had for your current position before you started. What did you hope to accomplish?
Set up a lunch or coffee with people in similar positions, either at your company or at a different company, and ask how they invest in learning.
Survey your current area of influence and jot down opportunities for improvement.

Step 2: Look for the Greatest Value

Once you've determined what types of development you could pursue within your position, you'll need to decide where to focus. One of the best ways to do this is to look at the value created by additional investment. For example, you may find it interesting to research best practices on internal communication systems, but improving communication between external customers and internal staff may produce a much higher return on investment by increasing client retention and sales. Evaluate each of your ideas in terms of the value generated for your organization. Then, decide on one or two that have the most potential to stretch your skills and have a meaningful organizational impact. (This important step will not only help you to focus but also assist you in explaining your reasoning to your boss.)

Step 3: Clarify the Related Actions

Part of the fun — and challenge — of development projects is that you get to define the path to reach your end destination. But if you just have stretches of a couple of hours — or less — to make meaningful progress, you should always have a clear sense of the next few steps on your projects. I recommend jotting them down in a place you can find later.

For example, if you have the goal of researching other companies' website brand strategy in preparation for a redesign, give yourself these kind of directions:

Find the top five highest traffic websites in our niche using Alexa.com
Look at:

The structure of the pages
The overall design
The imagery
The color
The typography
The messaging
The opportunities for customer engagement
The advertisements
The checkout process.

Make note of anything that might work for our company and take some screen captures.
Present findings to our redesign team.

By writing out exactly which actions you need to take to move forward on the ultimate goal of a redesign, you make it much easier to use spare minutes effectively.

Step 4: Decide on Acceptable Minimums

For both myself and my time coaching clients, I've found that it's too easy to keep moving important, non-urgent activities from week-to-week, because even when you have them on your calendar, you know you can put them off without major short-term repercussions. To remedy this situation, "acceptable minimums" do wonders. Here's what that means: For the one or two key areas for development in your job, decide on the minimum amount of time you want to spend on the related actions each week. For example, you could decide that you spend at least two hours a week moving ahead on the website redesign project and one hour a week reading about trends in your industry. Then, either make these blocks of time recurring events or schedule them in each week. (Ideally these blocks of time fall early in the day and early in the week so they don't fall off the edges of your workday.) Although an hour or two may seem like too short a time to make real progress, you'll amaze yourself at how much you can get done when you invest your time consistently in these areas. Plus if you have more time certain weeks, you can always do more.

With the right strategies, your daily work can provide consistent opportunities for growth and development. Now's the perfect time to head over to your work calendar to book an appointment with personal growth.

If Your Company Is in Crisis, Escape by Going Forward

Good management often requires that you go against all your instincts because, according to my experience, what we call instincts are often unreliable and even dangerous.



Consider what happens when a company gets into trouble. Managers typically respond by reverting to doing what they feel most comfortable with. In nearly every situation, what they feel comfortable with is cutting costs. Therefore, they'll lay people off, cut benefits, and so on.



They understand that these actions impose harsh penalties on hard-working, willing employees who almost certainly bear no responsibility for the crisis. But, they argue, the company is in crisis mode and everybody needs to take their share of the burden. Besides, what else can they do?



The employees, for their part, fall into a similar trap. They freeze and revert to doing what they know best and feel most comfortable doing — more of the same, in other words.



If you look at almost any company in Greece today, where economic conditions are exceedingly harsh, you will see this dynamic in action.



And yet, if you were to ask people at these same companies, managers and employees alike would almost certainly agree that any solution to the company's problems involves doing something different. In Greek we call it "escape by going forward".



So what might that involve?



At one company I know a salesman managed to close a deal with an upmarket hotel chain in the Aegean that they were supplying with linen by accepting part payment in nights at the hotel. The company then offered the bartered nights to top performers in lieu of bonuses, including the salesman who thought of it. The company made a sale it would otherwise have failed to land, its people got to have an attractive perk, and the hotel got some occupancy.



Another company I worked with, a supplier of electric appliances, invested in retraining. Faced with empty showrooms they decided to get their store salesmen to go door to door with cheap offers in middle class districts. This is well known to be a hard way to land a sale and the sales force needed some coaching. So the company hired three experienced door-to-door salesmen to provide it by going out on the streets with the store salesmen.

The store salesman found it hard to adjust. One of them described to me to me how ashamed he felt when knocking on people's doors. But the coach was there to remind him about the empty showroom and to show how to make a pitch on someone's front doorstep. It took three days before the salesman was able to muster up the courage to go out by himself, and a week before his first solo sale but what a deep satisfaction it was!



Outreach also becomes important in a time of crisis. Another company I know organized an evening cocktail-and-lecture series for employees and their spouses on the economics of crisis in an effort to make people understood that the bad times would eventually come to an end.



Details also matter. Managers at this company would greet their subordinates by saying "better day" instead of "good day." There was a contest for the best joke of the week. Gallows humor, however, was strictly prohibited; the spirit of communication was not around adapting or living with the economic harshness but rather around identifying opportunity and reasons to celebrate. The company wanted to encourage innovation, change and cohesion rather than just survival. It also offered Spanish language lessons and, in a while, people were greeting each other in Spanish.



Obviously not all these gestures worked, and some were even rather silly. But overall, management actions of the kind I'm describing tend to increase solidarity within the organizations. The result is a lot more positive knowledge sharing and innovations that more than justify the relatively small financial commitments involved.