Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1579

Narcissistic CEOs Take Bold Action When There's an Appreciative Audience

Highly narcissistic CEOs were nearly 3 times more likely than very un-narcissistic leaders to take bold steps to embrace potentially disruptive technologies when media interest in the disruption was high. But when interest was low, the narcissistic CEOs showed no such heightened propensity to act, says a team led by Wolf-Christian Gerstner of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany. The research, which analyzed the U.S. pharmaceutical industry when biotech was disrupting it, measured such actions as acquisition of biotech firms as a function of CEO narcissism (calculated by factors including the leaders' prominence in annual reports). Narcissistic CEOs, who crave admiration, tend to take bold action when there's an audience that is likely to see their actions as daring, the researchers suggest.

How the Voice of the People Is Driving Corporate Social Responsibility

The business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is becoming easier and easier to make. You can argue that it boosts a company's brand, manages risk, and just plain saves money. But perhaps most importantly the general public is clamoring for companies to enact good, fair business practices — and most of that public pressure comes through social media.

There are plenty of (very public) examples of businesses moved into more sustainable practices by a social media backlash: Immediately following this year's factory collapse disaster in Bangladesh, companies who sourced materials from the country quickly came under fire; now retailers including H&M, Zara, and Abercrombie & Fitch have banded together to create a safety plan to improve conditions in Bangladeshi factories, and the Gap was not far behind. In another example, last year the Internet cried foul when the Susan G Komen foundation decided to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, and the outcry caused the non-profit to reverse its decision within days. And in 2010, Greenpeace attacked Nestlé with a viral video over its use of unsustainable palm oil. After 3 months of holding its ground against vocal naysayers on Facebook, the company finally agreed to cancel contracts with vendors who clear cut rainforests to make room for palm oil plantations. (Nestlé is now much more proactive about CSR.)

Feedback through social media is immediate, permanent, and extremely public. When individuals feel strongly about a company's performance on social or environmental issues, one small voice can quickly become a swarm, difficult for even the most shielded executive to ignore. For this reason, social has become a driving force in many companies' CSR agendas

One of the easiest ways to be on the right side of the social media tide is to be proactive — and personal — by listening to feedback and responding in an authentic way. Firms that are excelling in this regard have active, branded Twitter accounts, but they also encourage their executives to use Twitter as well. You can easily reach Dave Stangis, Campbell's Soup's CSR lead on Twitter, where he talks about the company's initiatives as well as global sustainability issues. Another great example is Bruno Sarda, Sustainability Operations Director at Dell. Both of these execs, and many more, make their company's corporate sustainability extremely personal, just by being present and approachable to the people of Twitter. To get a similar impact, make sure that the people in charge of your social media accounts understand what your CSR efforts mean for your brand, and empower them to act in a positive way to support your company.

One company that is leading the way on using social media to inform its sustainability program and communicate about its CSR agenda is Unilever. The personal care product and food conglomerate has dozens of brands and thousands of products, which makes its sustainability program both extremely important and difficult to communicate, because it spans issues from health and hygiene to greenhouse gas reductions. Yet, Unilever has managed to bundle them all under one umbrella, the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. The plan includes a multifaceted plan for communicating progress through a wide variety of methods, from video to Facebook to Twitter chats. It also includes traditional advertising tactics and public awareness campaigns from Dove's Real Beauty Sketches to a Lifebuoy hand-washing campaign delivered by roti in India.

Behind every great communicator is a great strategy. These campaigns and individuals are successful because they reinforce the company's brand and goals around both sustainability and consumer engagement. Unilever is an excellent example of a company with a bold, high-level strategy which informs all its sustainability communications. The company uses a variety of in-person and virtual strategies — like its online global dialogue, the Sustainable Living Lab, which in April had 550 attendees from 80 countries. Participants were extremely active, sharing 1,750 comments on all aspects of sustainability. Through these initiatives, Unilever has demonstrated that interactive communication through social media is one regular component of its CSR strategy. This comprehensive strategy also allows communication teams at far reaching brands from Dove to Ben and Jerry's to put the strategy into practice in a way that suits the individual brand, while supporting the company's overall sustainability mission.

Ultimately, social media is just a communication tool like any other. But it is one consumers use to talk about brands, and the world is listening. It is easy to fear the tide of social media for the risks it can bring, but this onslaught of information can also be viewed as an opportunity. By listening to those early whispers of complaint, companies can act quickly to minimize the fallout — while also gaining important knowledge that can inform and improve a company's internal CSR report.

Three Rules to Make Your Company Exceptional

Michael E. Raynor, director at Deloitte Services LP, explains how to keep your decisions on track for long-term success. For more, read his article, Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great.

The Rise of UX Leadership

UX, as user experience is known, is the new black in business culture. Most of the executives I meet with, regardless of their industry, now promote UX as key to their product strategy. That's a big change from only five years ago, when UX wasn't on anyone's radar outside the tech world. For a designer like myself, it's easy to recognize which executives know their products intimately, and which manage from a spreadsheet. Thankfully, I'm seeing the emergence of a new generation of UX-oriented leaders with little patience for the hands-off approach. They recognize that as UX eclipses traditional brand marketing, they need to be more hands-on with their products.

The CEO as Lead Product Designer

Steve Jobs famously ushered in an era of the CEO as "Lead Product Designer," as described by one of his close collaborators, Glenn Reid, who worked with Jobs at NeXT and Apple: "(Steve) told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn't allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it."

Given Apple's success, it is not surprising to see many executives following Jobs' lead. I recently met a top executive at a major enterprise technology firm who runs an $8 billion dollar product line and describes himself as the "Chief Product Designer" for his division (even though his title is SVP and General Manager, and he has never before considered himself a "designer"). A few years ago, this characterization would have seemed like a step down for a senior executive. The nitty-gritty of product design has become a badge of pride in many organizations, like Facebook, which has embraced a "learn by making" executive culture.

This product-centric mindset is not entirely new. The auto industry invented the blockbuster product "reveal" long before Jobs, with auto execs unveiling new "concept cars" at auto shows in an annual ritual of one-upmanship that continues today. For example, the now ubiquitous and much beloved Fiat 500 was first unveiled by Sergio Marchionne, no stranger to showmanship, at the Geneva Motorshow in 2004 following the buzz generated by the 2001 re-launch of the Mini-Cooper by BMW. This spirit is exemplified by executives like Akio Toyoda, the CEO of Toyota, who worked his way up the through the ranks from the assembly line. In a 2008 New York Times interview, he said, "If I am going to be at the top of the car company, I want to be the owner-chef — with knowledge not just of its vehicles but their ingredients. I taste my car, and if it tastes good, I provide it to the customer." As Toyota CEO, Mr. Toyoda has lived up to his word, launching the radically redesigned Toyota Crown last year in a hot pink bubble gum hue that you could practically taste.

Photo courtesy of Morio, Wikimedia Commons

With consumer technology becoming such a status symbol in our culture, tech CEOs must put on a few good UX demos each year to reaffirm the connection to their products, or risk losing face with their peers and seeing their stock price plummet. This is a good first step, but it won't make corporate culture more sensitive to UX. For that, CEOs must move beyond showmanship.

Some CEOs do get UX. They use their products on a daily basis. I recently met a senior executive of a financial services company who is so obsessed with his corporation's product experience that he calls customer service with a new complaint each day, just to make sure the customer service representatives know their way around his product offering.

"Customers" Have Become "Users"

The opposite problem for some executives is that they can be too close to customers (for instance, IT managers who buy a solution) without understanding end-users (the people who actually use the solution on a daily basis) They get so much feedback from their sales teams that it leads to feature creep — adding features to satisfy every customer. Along the way, any semblance of a coherent user experience is lost. The result: a highly-reactive product development culture in which extra features are continuously bolted on, making the company vulnerable to more pro-active competitors who have a laser-like focus on UX, which can be a potent disruptor in many industries.

So, how do you know if your UX is actually working for your end-users? Start by conducting a UX audit that captures the sequence of interactions your customers need to take to complete basic tasks with key products, be it renting a car or checking into a hotel room. Most executive flinch when presented with stark visual evidence of the convoluted nature of their user experience.

Here is an example of the sort of visual audit that usually turns heads with executives. This map provides a concrete picture of each step that is required to complete a simple task, in this case installing a home router for an IP telephony company (this map was created in 2005 and does not in any way represent the current state of their products and services). The map is divided into three key stages in the "Out of Box Experience": purchase and open, explore and setup, use and grow. We developed this map after observing a small set of novice users try to complete the process. We used quotes and anecdotes from these sessions to help make the case with executives for the need to overhaul the entire user experience around install, and not just redesign the physical router itself. (Click to see a larger image.)

The Next Wave (Put on Your Hoodie!)

The gap is growing between traditional sales-and-marketing-driven behemoths with their "customer-centric" approach and the new breed of organizations like Square and Zipcar, who have a "UX-centric" culture. Tomorrow's leaders need to be able to close this gap. Fortunately, there is a great training ground for new UX leadership: the startup market. MBAs and other aspiring professionals are seizing the opportunity to create something new, emulating start-up heroes like Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Dennis Crowley. Not all of these startups will succeed, but leaders who join their ranks will learn valuable lessons seeing products and ideas rejected by end-users firsthand. These new UX-minded executives will take top jobs elsewhere, seeding a new UX culture in corporate America. And they'll certainly be looking to join companies that "get" UX.

But what if you can't jump ship and join a start-up to learn UX skills? Many organizations are developing strategies to increase their UX capacity and promote product-centric entrepreneurship. Some large corporations, like Comcast, have launched venture investing arms. Others, like Google Ventures, are seeing these activities as more than just a way to make money, and rather as a way to engage the UX community. Design Staff, Google Venture's fantastic blog, has become an online hub for sharing lean UX methodologies. Similarly, organizations like GE are investing in innovation accelerators that pair product teams with outside experts (like Eric Ries, author of Lean Startup) to coach teams in launching new initiatives with a more entrepreneurial mindset. (We can only hope that this UX mindset migrates to Crotonville, GE's vaunted leadership academy.) You can learn more about these sorts of strategies in my previous post on "Scaling Your UX Strategy" in order to prepare your own company for the rising tide of UX leadership

Good Companies Are Storytellers. Great Companies Are Storydoers

Discussions about story and storytelling are pretty fashionable in marketing circles. I have ambivalent feelings about this. On the one hand, as a lifelong advocate for the power of story in business, I find this very encouraging. For all companies, having a story and knowing that story are crucial steps to achieving success. On the other hand, I'm worried that too many marketers think that telling their story through advertising is enough. It's not.

In fact, those that think this way do so at their own risk because there is a new kind of company on the rise that uses story in a more powerful way — and they run more efficient and profitable businesses as a result.

In my new book, True Story: How to Combine Story and Action to Transform Your Business, I call these new companies storydoing companies because they advance their narrative through action, not communication. Storydoing companies — Red Bull, TOMS shoes, Warby Parker, and Tory Burch, for example — emphasize the creation of compelling and useful experiences — new products, new services, and new tools that advance their narrative by lighting up the medium of people. What I mean by this is that when people encounter a storydoing company they often want to tell all their friends about it. Storydoing companies create fierce loyalty and evangelism in their customers. Their stories are told primarily via word of mouth, and are amplified by social media tools.

So how do you know a storydoing company when you see one? These are the primary characteristics:

They have a story
The story is about a larger ambition to make the world or people's lives better
The story is understood and cared about by senior leadership outside of marketing
That story is being used to drive tangible action throughout the company: product development, HR policies, compensation, etc.
These actions add back up to a cohesive whole
Customers and partners are motivated to engage with the story and are actively using it to advance their own stories

Recently, my partners and I at co:collective initiated a project to determine whether there is hard statistical evidence that storydoing companies are achieving superior results. We also wanted to create a tool that allows CEOs and other senior leaders to apply these criteria to an analysis of their own company.

One of the difficulties we encountered is many of the best examples of storydoing are privately-held companies, so the data on their financial performance is not publicly available.

So we chose 42 publicly-traded companies. This list spans seven business categories: retail, entertainment, food and beverage, electronic payments, consumer electronics, airlines, and IT services/products. Since storytelling companies outnumber storydoing companies, in each of the seven categories we chose five storytelling companies and one storydoing company based on the criteria we described above. The storydoing companies are Target, Walt Disney, Starbucks, American Express, Apple, Jet Blue, and IBM. More detail on the full methodology can be found here.

The early results we are seeing are quite compelling. As we expected, storydoing companies are generating a substantially greater number of mentions in social media:

Those mentions are also more positive:

This ability to light up the medium of people in a positive way allows storydoing companies to spend substantially less money on paid media per dollar of revenue:

And they wring more value out of that spend in the number of mentions in social media per dollar spent:

As a result, storydoing companies are growing faster than their storytelling counterparts in revenue:

...and share price:

One interesting side note is that it seems like the market hasn't recognized the structural advantage that storydoing companies have over their storytelling counterparts. Their superior results are not yet reflected in P/E ratios:

This is only a start to our research, and we can only imagine that adding some of the privately owned companies for which we're missing financial data would yield even better results than those reported here. Whether that turns out to be true or not, time will tell. But based on the evidence we have to date, our conclusion is that storydoing companies are on to something very compelling. CEOs who seek to deliver better financial results to their shareholders would do well to take heed.

In the spirit of collaboration and improvement we would like to invite anyone to help advance this thinking, by challenging our results to date, making suggestions to improve the methodology, or adding to the data set with data of their own. We think that over time the data set itself can become a valuable public source of inspiration and evidence for agents of change to begin to apply the principles of storydoing inside their own companies.

Four Suggestions as You Face Your Industry's Steamroller

Remember the scene in the first Austin Powers film where Powers, attempting to escape in a steamroller, warns one of Dr. Evil's henchmen to move out of its path? Despite its comically slow speed — and a huge distance between them, the guard stays rooted to the spot, yelling Stop! ... until it's too late. (The scene dissolves to his Donna Reed-like wife getting the news and noting tragically: "People never think how things affect the family of a henchman.")

On the industrial stage, something like that scene plays out all too often. A company finds itself in the path of an unstoppable industry disruption, can hardly fail to see it, yet simply fails to act. Only, it's not at all funny.

Consider the pharmaceutical industry, the focus of a recent global survey my colleagues and I conducted. We asked nearly 200 life sciences executives about long-term trends that posed fundamental threats to their businesses and how management was dealing with them. Despite the fact that all were able to foresee developments unfolding over the coming decade with the power to irreparably damage their companies, 76 percent of the European respondents and 81 percent of the American ones said their companies had made no significant changes to strategy to counter those threats. (Executives representing Asia-Pacific life sciences companies were more sanguine, with 56 percent indicating their firms had prepared for an industry shock).

In the face of knowable threats, is your own company making more than a futile effort to cry Stop? If you fear not, here are the suggestions we're sharing with the industry leaders we serve:

Inject a steady flow of timely information and (sometimes harsh) outside perspectives into your strategic thinking. This means fresh information heard on the street, not just more searches on Google, and the use of outside experts to identify oncoming threats that they see and you don't. I've seen this work wonders for a number of companies that want neutral, unvarnished views of their competitive position. A large pharmaceutical firm, for example, was about to make a big bet on a new class of drugs. But a panel of outside experts that had been assembled to critique the strategy warned management about an emerging risk. Citing early warning signals that were not being emphasized by the scores of industry newsletters and Wall Street analysts, it saved the company from the move that a competitor subsequently took — to its detriment.

Develop scenarios of how the world might look five or ten years from now. No one can predict the future, but by combining known trends in various ways it is possible to anticipate multiple possibilities — likely story lines about shapes the market could take — for good or ill. The few companies that have mastered this discipline have benefited mightily. A decade ago Oracle developed a series of scenarios that anticipated massive industry consolidation. Instead of waiting to be steamrolled, the company acted on this intelligence and went on a ten-year acquisition binge, acquiring over 90 companies from 2003 to the present at a pace surpassed only by Google. The result: Oracle became one of the most successful companies in back office database products and tools and has now moved onto advancing in the next market, the cloud.



Experience threats through war games. There is no substitute for feeling and "touching" the disruption before it arrives. War games translate arguments and assumptions about the future into a tangible setting, allowing rival contestants to play out roles and experience risks. A successful war game can anticipate the moves of market players with an uncanny degree of accuracy. Multinationals have used war games to align strategy in global markets, where regulations and competitors differ. In a number of instances, I have seen war games acknowledge the threat from changing government regulation, informing the company that it must proactively work with authorities to help moderate new regulations, which in turn softened or averted the disruption altogether.

Set trip wires for action. War games and scenarios should provide you with threads that you can track in order to determine which future world is emerging. You can spot these signals far enough in advance to change strategic direction — but you must regard them as imperatives to make timely decisions and to act on them.

Preparing for a future industry shock and anticipating its direction is all about honest, steady collection of intelligence and the readiness to alter your plans based on what you have learned. Plenty of executives lose sleep over approaching disruptions; a few vocally oppose them. Neither response will move you out of a steamroller's path. To survive, you'll need to watch, reexamine your position, make tough decisions, and take timely action.

You, Too, Can Move Your Company Into the Cloud

On April 1 of this year, the Department of Defense announced that the US Navy would embark on a strategy to migrate its services to the cloud. While there have been numerous cases of big and small companies making this leap over the past few months, this one struck a particular chord with me because of its sheer scope. The US Navy is an organization utilizing 1,400 systems and 7,000 applications to serve more than 500,000 employees. My company, which is approximately .017%, .019% and .00028% the size of the USN in relative scope, made the transition years ago and it was no small effort taking almost 3 years to fully make the transition.

While the USN is relatively mum about its specific strategies, there are references to the fact that they intend to cut their systems in half within 36 months, reducing some overhead cost and modernizing. This is similar to the approach that the CIA has undertaken in moving much of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. These transitions, even when scaled down to a company of 140 like mine, require a substantial amount of planning, commitment, resources and time with little room for error. So it comes as no surprise that whenever I spend time with industry peers who have yet to move to the cloud, there is a palpable sense of fear and overwhelming anxiety about how to even think about the process.

When I'm asked to advise people on how they might craft strategies to get to the cloud, I give a four-point overview based on my own experience. It will get you to the starting line, but beyond that each and every strategy will be different depending on a myriad of circumstances in your corporation.

Move only what you have to and start fresh wherever possible

The first thing is to dispatch with the idea that you are going to "move" all of your current resources into the cloud. That is just not possible, especially if you have invested heavily in distributed enterprise class systems and the infrastructure to support them. While it is certainly likely that a good portion of your environment can be virtualized and moved into a Platform as a Service (PaaS)/Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) environment like Amazon Web Services, the move to the cloud should be viewed as an opportunity to leave systems behind and replace them with systems that are lighter, faster and less expensive.

Tear down and rebuild your security model

If your Microsoft SysAdmin has convinced you that Active Directory is a viable solution for the cloud, or that because you use Active Directory you can only get into the cloud by sticking with solutions that support Active Director (AD)/Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD), you need to get a second opinion. When moving to the cloud you have to consider that many solutions do not allow for authentication off of Active Directory and instead rely on more common security protocols such as SAML1, SAML2, OID and OAuth. Identity Access Management (IAM) vendors have been forced to consider brokering authentication for Active Directory because companies feel like they must stay on it as an internal authentication platform. Nothing could be further from the truth and if you do your research, you will discover that there is a wealth of options out there. To get into the cloud you need the most robust and extensible authentication model you can possibly build and by doing so your options for solutions will increase exponentially.

Cost savings are a benefit, not a driver

If you think that you need to get into the cloud to save money, you need to think again. Yes, you will ultimately save money by migrating to the cloud, lots of money in fact, but it takes time to get there and there is the chance that you will actually spend more money upfront. When making your pitch to senior management, talk about the benefits of reduced infrastructure, resources, better uptime, business continuity enhancements, mobility and access ubiquity. If asked about cost savings, be ready to deliver your pitch on how you intend to reduce or eliminate capex spending, reduce personnel resources, move services to a pay by month model eliminating long term contracts and ultimately reduce your annual budget by a modest percentage year over year over a 3-5 year period of time. Do not get caught in the trap of making cost savings one of your drivers for going into the cloud. You will bring a level of scrutiny over your claims, on which you will most likely be unable to deliver.

Create a long-term flexible strategy

The last bit of wisdom is to develop the most thorough 1-, 3- and 5-year cloud strategy that you can put down. My 1-year strategy is very specific; my 3-year is slightly less specific because I find that even 3 years down the road is very hard to see. It's impossible to see five years in the future, but if you work backwards from 5 years you can, even at a very amorphous level, describe how you would want your environment to look at that point. These should be rolling strategies that are flexible enough to consider the dynamics of the industries you will operate in. Today's Identity Access Management vendor will be tomorrow's Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendor and a week from now, could be bought by a company in some entirely different vertical. By creating a flexible strategy, you can constantly adapt to these changing conditions in the industry over which you have almost no control.

In considering these four concepts, keep in mind that they are applicable to any size organization and any cloud scope transformation. The more I have considered them, the more I have realized that they are applicable anywhere. It's no small task, but you can move your company into the cloud if you approach things with a new mind and put aside the technologies of the past.

One last thing to note...in the next five years, new employees coming into your company won't know (or care) how to use Outlook or mapped drives. They won't care for your PC laptop offering or why your firewall blocks Dropbox. They will have established methods for doing work and they will all involve the cloud. Seventy-five out of the top 100 universities in the latest US News and World Report college rankings use Google Apps as their primary backbone. Seven of the 8 Ivies are in the same boat. Do you really want to be the last one at the starting line?

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center





The CIO In Crisis: What You Told Us
How to Compete When IT Is Abundant
Can UX Save Enterprise IT?
The Metamorphosis of the CIO

A Call to Boycott U.S. Tech Platforms Over the NSA's PRISM Surveillance

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: this blog post is not an attack on the U.S., and my message is not anti-American. I have lived in the U.S. on and off for almost 12 years. I went to college in Boston (Berklee), my kids are both U.S. citizens as well as German citizens, and we have deep admiration for many American customs, traits, people and places.

But ever since 9/11, the U.S. government seems to have gone down a (until recently) secret path towards some kind of 'digital totalitarianism', with increasing disregard for other countries' mindsets and cultures.

The latest developments around PRISM and the NSA dragnet operations uncovered by Edward Snowden, in my view, severely damage the fragile fabric of the new global ecosystem, which we so sorely rely on in order to collectively tackle truly urgent global issues such as energy, pollution, food, climate change, (cyber-)terrorism and inequality.

Yes, of course, as more details about the NSA's mass surveillance activities are coming to light, it is also becoming clear that at least the other intelligence tribe members of UKUSA — i.e. the '5 Eyes' group (the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, Canada) are pretty much doing the same thing, with Germany and France not far behind. But still: at the heart of this global collusion to hoover up every bit of information about hundreds of millions of citizens under the pretense of fighting crime and terrorism sits the U.S. government, so let me start there.

The past few weeks have been game-changing for the U.S./Europe relationship, with the EU Commission already hinting at moving cloud computing centers to Europe, many parliamentarians proposing to review international trade agreements and data exchange practices, and German chancellor Merkel heading towards a pre-election show-down on these very issues. It is not actually the fact that surveillance is real that scares Europeans, it is that now, everyone apparently is a legitimate target — yes we scan, because we can!

Little is being done by the U.S. government to address Europe's concerns, and most Americans seem to consider this whole affair a non-issue. (Granted, this sentiment may be softening a bit.) See the charts below:

But, it is a big deal. And more people need to understand just how big.

For context, let's go back to 1788 and take a look at the words of James Madison, fourth president of the United States:

"There are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

The utter disrespect with which U.S. law enforcement agencies have violated the most basic international agreements on data security, basic citizens' rights and even diplomatic immunity is very worrisome, and will soon force people around the globe to rethink our relationship with 'all things USA' — whether it's President Obama and the U.S. government, or U.S.-based telecoms, technology companies and internet platforms such as Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo and even Dropbox.

Meanwhile, President Obama seems happy to preside over this Orwellian affair with a newfound disregard for the basic privacy rights of citizens, which he previously expressed with great vigor back in 2005 and 2007, when he was still just a senator (watch these NYT videos). This is incredible — life is indeed stranger than fiction!

Let's be clear about this: for Europeans, in particular, the American shift towards state-sanctioned 'data totalitarianism' will have significant impact on whether we will do business with U.S.-based companies that are in technology, media, cloud computing, social networking, telecommunications, e-commerce or 'big data', for they seemingly cannot do anything else than comply with the laws — and their extreme interpretations — as they are now (i.e. the Patriot Act, FISA courts, etc).

Therefore, some 50-75% of the worlds' largest digital communications and technology enterprises are now facing a seriously wicked dilemma: do they comply with FISA orders or do they protect their users (half of which are not even U.S. citizens)?

The bottom line is that currently all non-U.S. citizens seem to have no real protection, no recourse, no oversight... no power, and no rights. This is totally and utterly unacceptable and cannot be swept under the rug as 'business as usual'.

Sure, variations of the same plots are happening in China and in Russia, but who would have thought that the formerly alleged bastion of liberty and freedom, the United States of America, would resort to these sorts of global dragnet activities? This is wrong and that's all there is to it.

I believe that if this situation is not resolved very soon, non-U.S. internet users will be left with pretty much one option: some kind of a boycott or 'strike' — i.e. the explicit non-participation in those platforms and services that are subject to the totalitarian application of laws such as the U.S. Patriot Act.

The future of U.S.-based technology companies is at stake here, as is the future of U.S./EU relationships.

To remedy the situation, the leading U.S. internet and technology companies, led by Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook need to:

Unequivocally side with their real stakeholders — i.e. their users — and specifically assure us Europeans that they will act on our behalf, and seek to protect us against the abuse that has surfaced in the past few weeks.
Mount a strong campaign to urge President Obama and the U.S. Congress to stop these global mass surveillance activities, immediately, and put appropriate approval, remedy and redress mechanisms in place that are more in line with EU provisions, i.e. requiring actual cause for data surveillance activities, needing individual warrants, and informing the public on what the procedure is.
Urge the government to agree to a public trial of Edward Snowden that could take place in a neutral location such as at the International Court of Justice in the Hague.

The U.S. government needs to:

Acknowledge the mistakes and rights violations that have occurred as far as the mass surveillance of global citizens are concerned, and uncover all additional instances. Dismissing the Director of National Intelligence (James Clapper) seems like another plausible step towards resolution, as well, given the fact that he pretty much lied to Congress.
Immediately discontinue the practice of spying on global citizens without individual warrants, and only in strict congruence with international laws and regulations.
Agree to a fair, public and open trial of Edward Snowden (see above).

If no action along these lines is taken, I think that the international community and hereto faithful users of American technologies and internet platforms will have no choice but to consider taking serious and possibly quite dramatic action to safeguard against this 'totalitarian surveillance creep'.

Some such actions for the international community may include:

Temporarily halting the EU-US data exchange programs for travelers (PNR and TFTP), which could potentially lead to a significant disruption of commercial air traffic between the U.S. and Europe (the review was already scheduled before the Snowden affair and is already in progress at the Commission).
Cut or significantly reduce ties with U.S.-based internet portals and service providers and shift business to providers based in other countries that are subject to international laws and explicit supervision (i.e. that can guarantee that appropriate processes and safeguards are in place). By extension, this would also concern the rest of the "5 Eyes" group, i.e. the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Pause or even halt the current Trans-Atlantic Free Trade Agreement discussions until these demands, above, are met. Yes, I know, this could be quite painful for some EU countries but ... would they rather be 'collateral damage' now or take collective action to address potential long-term issues?
Open or expand cloud computing facilities in Europe (Luxembourg and Switzerland seem like good locations) and around the world. Until now, the U.S.-based providers have dominated the global cloud business because of faster innovation and much larger investments in this sector — Europe needs to catch up urgently.
As global consumers, we just may need to stop using all U.S.-based services that won't voluntarily comply with international standards of data protection.
Offer a United Nations-supervised trial location and some kind of asylum to Edward Snowden, perhaps in the EU.

This is a game-changing moment, and it's time for global citizens to act. America: we love you, but enough is enough!

Joining Boards: It's Not Just Who You Know That Matters

For many, a corporate directorship is a career capstone. But attaining one is far from easy. No one can say for sure how to get on a corporate board, but many people point to two routes: the first is to break into the "right" network and the second is to seek a progression of board seats that begins with, for example, a seat on a not-for-profit or community board and eventually results in appointment to a corporate board.

Both paths are problematic — neither is particularly transparent or relies on objective measures and given that many boards are stubborn bastions of white masculinity, pursuing the "right" network can be fraught, especially for women and other diverse candidates. Indeed, our research reinforces that concern: many boards still rely on their own (mostly white, mostly male) networks to fill seats.

There's a different way — one that is more measurable, controllable and offers greater transparency. It starts with a focus on skills. Although many boards continue to select new members from their own networks, our research suggests that more are beginning to implement objective processes to select members based on the skills and attributes that boards need to be effective. Our 2012 survey, in partnership with WomenCorporateDirectors and Heidrick & Struggles, of more than 1,000 corporate directors across the globe, found that only 48% of the boards had a formal process of determining the combination of skills and attributes required for their board and, therefore, for new directors

We know this approach can work because we've seen it: We studied a large corporation that was being split into two public companies for which two new boards had to be created. The chairman wanted to create two balanced boards, with the mix of skills, knowledge, and experience each company needed. He appointed a special team to create an objective, transparent method for selecting the directors. After reviewing the roles and responsibilities of each board and the natures of the new businesses, the team derived lists of the skills each board needed. Then it created a model containing the dimensions critical to a high-performing board, from functional and industry expertise to behavioral attributes. This approach led both companies to recruit board members that were diverse in needed strategic skills. Both boards are on to a good start — demonstrating that when a firm builds a board using a rigorous assessment of the qualities it needs to carry out its governance task, rather than personal networks, the board is better equipped to execute its functions.

In our survey, we also asked about specific skills. We wanted to know which were the strongest skills represented on boards and which were missing. Directors named industry knowledge, strategy, and financial-audit expertise as their strongest skill sets.

And 43% cited technology expertise, HR-talent management, international-global expertise, and succession planning as the skills missing most on their boards.

We also looked at results by industry and region. The industry with the greatest skills gap was IT & telecommunications, whose boards are in serious need of international-global expertise and HR-talent management.

The region with the greatest board-level skills gap is Asia, where risk management and M&A adeptness are sorely needed.

Based on our research and experience with boards, we believe that the future of director selection is becoming increasingly objective and skill-focused process. Networks aren't going away, but aspiring directors may want to approach their search by asking not only, "what skills do I need to get on a board?," but also by looking at what skills boards already possess and what skills boards need. One strategy might be investing in your own human capital to become the board member corporations need.

Methodology

We surveyed more than 1,000 board members in 59 countries. (U.S. boards made up 37% of the sample while 62% of boards represented were from outside of the U.S.) We analyzed the data along several dimensions including geography and industry. Specifically, we did a geographical breakout by eight major world regions: Asia; Africa; Australia and New Zealand; Eastern Europe & Russia; Latin America; the Middle East; North America; and Western Europe (due to low sample size or domination by one or few countries in a region we have excluded three regions, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, from our findings).

The industry breakout was done using eight major sectors (similar to those in the Global Industry Classification Standard system): Consumer Discretionary (e.g., consumer durables & apparel, retailing, education, media, hotels, restaurants & leisure); Consumer Staples (e.g., food, beverage & tobacco, household and personal products); Energy & Utilities (e.g., oil, gas & consumable fuels, electric, gas and water utilities); Financials (e.g., banking & financial services, insurance, real estate); Health Care (e.g., pharmaceuticals, biotechnology & life sciences, health care equipment and services); Industrials (e.g., aerospace & defense, construction & engineering, industrial conglomerates, professional services, textiles); IT & Telecommunications (e.g., computers & peripherals, electronic equipment & components, semiconductors, wireless telecommunication services); and Materials (e.g., chemicals, metals & mining, paper & forest products).

The following multiple choice list of 14 skills was used in the survey: Compensation; Evaluation-Assessment; Financial-audit; HR-Talent management; Industry knowledge; International-Global; M&A; Operations; Regulatory, legal and compliance knowledge; Risk management; Sales & Marketing; Strategy; Succession Planning; and Technology. Participants were asked to choose one (or a write-in option of "other") for the strongest skill set or area of expertise that they brought to the board. They could choose as many as applied for skill sets or areas of expertise missing from the board (including a write-in option of "other").

Empowered Teams Get a Slow Start, But Soon Zoom Ahead

In a war-game simulation, newly formed teams whose leaders encouraged collaborative decisions were at first quickly surpassed by groups with "directive" leaders. But the "empowered" teams learned more rapidly, and by the end of the simulation, they had bested the other teams by about 20% of total points scored, says a research group led by Natalia M. Lorinkova of Wayne State University. Why do empowered teams get off to a slow start? At first, members go through a period of role identification, creating what may be inevitable early performance delays, the researchers suggest.