Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1585

Research: Your Firm Probably Isn't an Equal Opportunity Employer

Anyone who has hiring responsibilities in 2013 would like to think that the U.S. is tackling diversity head-on. But how far have American companies really come? We have been examining what has happened to equal opportunity in the private sector since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Our data show that progress has stalled, many firms are showing signs of increased gender and racial employment segregation, and few firms monitor equal employment opportunity progress.

The reality is that while your company may manage diversity, it probably doesn't hold anyone accountable for whether your applicants and employees are treated fairly and without regard to gender, race, and ethnicity in hiring and promotion decisions.

Before 1964, employment segregation and discrimination were legal in U.S. workplaces. Black and white workers almost never worked in the same jobs in the same workplaces, and women of all races tended to be clustered in low status, low pay jobs. White males held almost all managerial and professional jobs, as well as most high-skill production jobs.

When Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, it also created the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to monitor progress and authorized the EEOC to collect annual data on race, gender, and the occupational composition of medium and large private sector workplaces. These are the data we analyzed.

What we found is that nearly all of the progress in private sector equal opportunity — in both federal contracting firms (those subject to affirmative action) and non-contracting firms — was made before 1980. CEO-backed affirmative action in particular provided significant benefits for blacks and women prior to 1980, stalled in the 1980s, and many indicators of employment integration into good jobs for blacks and women have worsened since the 1990s. Although workplaces continue to become less white and less male than they once were, desegregation — employment in the same jobs in the same workplaces with white men — has stalled, and minority and female access to managerial and high skilled production jobs have plateaued as well.

So why did equal employment progress stop? We see two primary reasons. The first is tied to national efforts to pressure firms to regulate equal opportunity. The second is related to what is currently happening (or not happening) in your workplace.

Starting in the late 1970s, there was growing white resentment in the courts regarding affirmative action and "reverse discrimination" in employment and education (see McDonald v. Santa Fe Transport and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke). And after the 1980 presidential election, the Reagan administration rolled out a deregulation agenda that included reducing the organizational capacity of the EEOC and the Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance to monitor and enforce equal employment opportunity legislation. Thus, federal court appointments began to interpret discrimination law more narrowly.

These shifts in the political and legal environments removed the political pressure on politicians and CEOs to address discrimination and practice affirmative action. And as political pressure for equal employment opportunity waned, so did private sector vigilance and progress. Indeed, many human resource managers who had hung their professional hats on affirmative action in the 1960s and 1970s rebranded their focus as "Diversity Management." What we show in our book, and others have shown in recent research, is that diversity management alone does not promote racial and gender integration or equal employment opportunity gains.

Today only about 1 in 6 firms hold their managers accountable for the progress of women or minorities in their workplaces. Instead, most firms rely on symbolic public commitments to equal opportunity, occasional diversity training, and defensive legal responses to discrimination complaints as their core diversity practices.

What's wrong with these approaches?

Diversity training often produces as much or more backlash as understanding and may increase discrimination claims and lawsuits. Defending discrimination lawsuits teaches your firm how to discriminate without consequence, in addition to producing little change. What would you find if you checked the employment statistics for departments in your firm that were involved in a discrimination lawsuit five years ago? The odds are that diversity is no better, and probably worse, than before you were sued.

Altogether, most firms are in the business of "managing" diversity, not promoting equal opportunity. Companies now celebrate the promotion of the occasional minority into senior management, but ignore hiring patterns or the turnover of talented people at lower levels. Resegregation is occurring because firms are failing to monitor progress toward equal opportunity.

But it's not as if companies don't know how to do this. How does your company innovate and achieve revenue or productivity gains? The odds are quite good that you set benchmarks and hold people accountable. The odds are also good that your firm's equal opportunity policy doesn't do either.

Despite the absence of regulatory pressure from the federal government or from social movements, many firms continue to embrace the idea of equal opportunity because they value both diversity and fairness. Diversity can lead to a wider range of ideas and problem solving strategies. Importantly for your firm, the U.S. is increasingly becoming a majority-minority country, and you probably will need to deal with real, rather than symbolic, equal opportunity sooner or later. As any good manager knows, embracing an idea is not the same as setting a goal.

Your company no doubt has a strong equal opportunity commitment in your employee handbook and on the company website. You may be thinking, "My firm truly values diversity, certainly my company can't be getting worse." How does your company measure equal employment opportunity? What does diversity progress look like? What benchmarks do you have in place? Without asking these questions, companies are unlikely to truly create equal opportunity environments — environments that are well worth embracing.

Is Anyone Really Responsible for Your Company's Data Security?

Protecting a company's critical information is a value proposition. Trade secrets, confidential business plans, and operational security depend on it. Losing that kind of information can mean a plunge in stock price and market share. So who's responsible for information security in your company?

To find out, I like to ask questions. But when I put the question to top management, well, they're busy — not their problem, that's for sure — and they refer me to the chief information office or the chief technology officer. So I knock on their doors and put the same question to them. Our job, they say, is making stuff work. If the stuff doesn't work, that's our fault. But security? They refer me to the chief information security officer, but she works for the CIO, who doesn't much like to hear what's wrong with the system he built. Besides, she says, I have nothing to do with who gets access to the system. I don't write the rules. And (she looks around nervously: you won't quote me on this, will you?) my budget is a joke.

So I walk down the hall and knock on the general counsel's door. Cyber security my problem? he says. No, no, he laughs; I write the contracts that lay off the liability for cyber security on our contractors. And insofar as some of that liability stays here, it's a technical problem.

Who's left? I walk down the hall and visit the HR director, who is trying hard to conceal her opinion that, for asking her whether she has any responsibility for any kind of security, I must be the stupidest guy on Earth. Nevertheless I persist. You control the HR manual, don't you? She does. And the manual contains lots of access rules, doesn't it? She concedes the point. And weren't you the chief opponent of the CISO's plan to require a click-through log-on banner stating that information on the company's IT system belongs to the company and can be monitored? Suddenly she remembers her next appointment.

Try the experiment in your company. If you get answers like this, it means that nobody in your company is responsible for information security. The truth is, unless all these people understand they own a piece of the problem and can be brought to deal with it together, you cannot manage information security.

Verizon's newest data breach investigations report for 2013 tells us — yet again — that cyber security depends on people as much as technology. Breaches are nearly always caused by multiple factors, and people are nearly always one of them. In this latest report, based on a larger-than-ever sample, 29% of breaches involved social tactics like getting employees to click on fake emails (phishing). And gullible employees aren't the only problem. Year after year Verizon has been reporting that most intrusions — 78% this year — are "low difficulty" and could have been prevented by simple or mid-level security measures. Failure to implement patches for weeks and months on end is a common problem. This is a management failure, not a technological problem.

When intruders get in to corporate systems, they tend to stay in. We still see smash-and-grab hacks, mostly after personal information, but they are becoming less common, especially when the goal is stealing corporate information. Most breaches take time to discover — usually months rather than weeks, and sometimes longer. In a major release early this year, the forensic firm Mandiant reported solid massive Chinese hacking of private sector clients — and showed that the median period of the intrusion was nearly a year. Often such breaches are discovered only by third parties — like the FBI or the media. Not a pleasant experience.

So why do so many companies treat cyber security as merely a technical problem that can be pushed down into the IT department?

Cyber security involves legal issues, human resources practices and policies, operational configurations, and technical expertise. But while each of these silo chieftains — the general counsel, the HR director, the chief operations officer, and the IT director — owns a piece of the problem, some of them don't know it, and none of them owns the whole thing. This makes information security a risk management and governance challenge, because unless these people attack the challenge together under a C-suite mandate, it can't be managed effectively. Unfortunately this rarely happens.

Information security cannot involve not locking down information that must move quickly. It does involve figuring out where information must move, and where it must not move. And above all, it means making rules that don't stifle creativity in the business. Protecting critical information protects corporate value and is a core responsibility of the board and executive management. Best-in class companies view information security as a value proposition — not merely as a deduction from the bottom line.

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





The Public/Private Cooperation We Need on Cyber Security
Embrace the Complexity of Cyber Defense
Why Businesses Should Share Intelligence About Cyber Attacks
Why Your CEO Is a Security Risk

How TV Depolarized Politics in Mid-Century America

The middle-of-the-road, "mainstream" content of early television in mid-twentieth century America contributed to a dampening of citizens' extreme political views, say Filipe R. Campante and Daniel A. Hojman of Harvard. By studying Congressional elections as TV spread unevenly from 1946 to 1960, the researchers determined that television helped cause, rather than merely accompanied, the remarkable decrease in party polarization during that period. They estimate that TV induced approximately a 1-standard-deviation decrease in polarization per decade.

The Most Effective Ways to Make It Right When You Screw Up

After promising your boss you would complete an important assignment on time, you realize you're behind and it's going to be late. You unintentionally leave a colleague out of the loop on a joint project, causing him or her to feel frustrated and a bit betrayed. On the subway, you aren't paying attention and accidentally spill hot coffee all over a stranger's expensive suit. It's time for a mea culpa.

Apologies are tricky. Done right, they can resolve conflict, repair hurt feelings, foster forgiveness, and improve relationships. An apology can even keep you out of the courtroom. Despite the fact that lawyers often caution their clients to avoid apologies, fearing that they are tantamount to an admission of guilt, studies show that when potential plaintiffs receive an apology, they are more likely to settle out of court for less money.

However, as anyone can tell you, most apologies don't go so well. Ask John Galliano, for instance. Or John Edwards, or Todd Aiken, or Kanye West. (I could go on and on.) An apology is no guarantee that you'll find yourself out of hot water.

This is usually either because the person or persons from whom you are seeking forgiveness really aren't interested in forgiving, or because the transgression itself is deemed unforgivable. But more often than not, your apology falls flat because you're apologizing the wrong way.

In a nutshell, the problem is that most people tend to make their apologies about themselves—about their intentions, thoughts, and feelings.

"I didn't mean to..."

"I was trying to..."

"I didn't realize..."

"I had a good reason..."

When you screw up, the victim of your screw up does not want to hear about you. Therefore, stop talking about you and put the focus of your apology where it belongs: on him or her. Specifically, concentrate on how the victim has been affected by your mistake, on how the person is feeling, and on what he or she needs from you in order to move forward.

Thanks to recent research on effective apologies, you can fine-tune your approach even further according to your relationship with the recipient of the apology:

You Are A Stranger or Mere Acquaintance

The guy in the coffee-stained suit wants an offer of compensation. Offers of compensation are attempts to restore balance through some redeeming action. Sometimes the compensation is tangible, like paying to repair or replace your neighbor's fence when you inadvertently back your car into it, or running out to get your girlfriend a new phone when you accidentally drop hers into the toilet (which happened to me, by the way. Not cool.) Offers of compensation can also be more emotional or socially-supportive. (as in,"I'm sorry I acted like a jerk, and I'll make it up to you by being extra thoughtful from now on.")

You Are My Partner, Colleague, or Friend

The colleague you accidentally left out of the loop doesn't want compensation. When you have a relationship with the injured party, you will instead need to take his or her perspective and express empathy. Expressions of empathy involve recognizing and expressing concern over the suffering you caused. (e.g., "I'm so sorry that I didn't appreciate all of your effort. You must have felt awful, and that's the last thing I want.") Through expressions of empathy, the victim feels understood and valued as a partner in the relationship, and trust is restored.

You Let Our Team Down

In the modern workplace, we often operate as teams. So when you fail to meet an important deadline, chances are it's not just your boss that's affected—it's your whole team, and possibly your whole organization. In team settings, people don't want compensation or empathy—they want an acknowledgement of violated rules and norms. Basically, you need to admit that you broke the code of behavior of your social group, your organization, or your society. (e.g., "I have a responsibility to my team/organization/family/community and I should have known better. I didn't just let myself down, I let others who count on me down.")

When you think about it, it's surprising that we're often so bad at apologizing. After all, we are frequently on the receiving end of apologies ourselves—so we should know what works and what doesn't. In reality, we often forget what it's like to be on the other side—whether we're trying to apologize, impress, persuade, help, or motivate.



So when crafting your apology, remember to ask yourself the following: Who am I talking to, and what is he or she looking for in my apology? The guy on the subway still dripping from your morning joe doesn't want to hear that you "feel his pain"—but when you forget your wife's birthday, she most definitely would like you to feel hers.

Reach Emerging Market Customers Through Their Own Networks

Navi Radjou, innovation and leadership strategist, suggests multinational companies rely on comprehensive networking to ensure successful expansion. He is the coauthor of Jugaad Innovation .

Beware Africa's "Middle Class"

If you have considered investing in Africa, you have no doubt been influenced by frequent recent reports on the continent's apparently large, burgeoning middle class. These rising Africans are said to be increasingly armed with the hard currency, and the taste, to pay for your goods and services.

But if you have actually taken some steps toward attaching hard numbers to this supposedly massive middle-class consumer base, you probably have also found a fair amount of confusion.

Part of that confusion stems from the tendency of commentators to postulate the existence of all-purpose middle-class African consumers (let's call them AMACs) who behave homogeneously regardless of where they are in Africa and what their backgrounds are. This approach can beef up the numbers, but it can also lead to some ridiculous arguments about what exactly is being talked about here.

The most popular view, supported by the likes of The New York Times, the African Development Bank, and the World Bank — all powerful influencers of how the world thinks about Africa — puts the number of AMACs at more than 300 million. They arrive at this number by counting all types: cattle-ranchers, roadside food vendors, taxi drivers, etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, Citigroup Africa economist David Cowan has actually said that there is no middle-class consumer segment in Africa. Instead, Africa has only two super-classes: the über-rich, and a large sprawl of poor people who nevertheless are inclined towards consumption.

Between these extremes is a multitude of other estimates. Top global consultancies Deloitte and McKinsey estimate the size of the African middle class at between 200 million and 300 million. A widely quoted economics commentator for a global bank with a huge presence in Africa has said there are 120 million AMACs. A consultant with the management advisory group Global Pacific says that only 5% of Africans earn enough to qualify for the "global middle class," bringing the number down to 50 million. The OECD, the so-called Paris Club of rich nations, puts the number at 32 million.

A nice spectrum we have here: from zero to 300 million with almost everything in between. It's a frustrating state of affairs if you are a busy investor hoping to play this 'expanding African consumer base' business. Unless there's a better way to approach the problem. Maybe it's a waste of time to quarrel over quantities when it is the AMAC idea itself that needs unpacking.

For a start, Africa's middle class is exceptionally heterogeneous. It is that fact — rather than the sheer number of middle class consumers or even the pace of growth in these numbers — that can have the most effect on the economic role and business significance of Africa's middle class.

Across Africa, incomes are rising fastest among those engaged in brokering trade in goods and services across fragmented markets. These are the people who shuffle goods from one trade-post to the other, braving tattered roads, noisome customs officers, leaking kiosks (serving as warehouses), clueless laborers, and even more clueless technicians. As economic conditions improve across Africa, these folks are the first to know and the first to scale up their operations.



These are the importers who have never heard of a "letter of credit," much less opened one, the "suitcase merchants" who travel to Dubai and the Far East every month to haul in cheap consumer goods on baggage trolleys, as well as their collaborators who stay at home to push the stuff in the open-air markets. These are the second-hand goods dealers and distributors opening up small towns to commerce. They are the vanguard of the African middle-class.

These people are rarely well-educated, though, and they share none of the cultural traits seen in the West and Asia as prerequisite to a middle-class life. Many young and educated Africans, on the other hand, share few of the economic traits associated with middle-class status elsewhere. Lacking a regular income and strong social networks, and bereft of the professional grooming and mentorship opportunities available to true middle-class types, they have become a monument to an educational system increasingly at odds with the social and economic realities of the new Africa.

This amazing contradiction in most African societies — of an expanding educated underclass and an 'uneducated' rising economic class — sums up why the African economy is struggling to acquire the characteristics one would expect of an economy bursting with middle-class vibes. Simply put, even were the number of middle-class people expanding as dramatically as some observers claim, there is no guarantee that market and consumer behavior would look anything like what emerged in other societies when their middle-class population begun to approach critical mass.



For the prospective investor in Africa, then, it is obvious that qualitative factors should matter more than quantitative factoids in shaping your strategy. Because even were you to find consumers interested in your products, you may struggle to serve them because your assumptions about customer-service skills in the local market may turn up to be completely flawed. Your assumptions regarding how quickly you may be able to 'educate' your consumers to embrace certain attitudes, expectations, or user skills (for example using your web-based tool rather than coming over to your brick and mortar joint) may be far off the mark.



The qualitative character of the middle class in your targeted African country has implications for your human resource strategy, public relations, government relations, corporate responsibility and citizenship, reliance on local financial instruments, operational effectiveness, and the overall sustainability of your market position.

It makes sense therefore to focus on your energies on understanding more about the unique contextual situation of the middle classes in your chosen country of engagement in Africa than to turn yourself into an amateur census-taker.

The Public/Private Cooperation We Need on Cyber Security

Not that long ago, cybersecurity was an issue for the back room. Now, it's made its way to the boardroom and the Situation Room.

In February, President Obama issued an executive order aimed at protecting critical infrastructure, adding the administration's voice to those of Congressional members and corporate leaders in the national conversation on cybersecurity.

Just as government and industry coordinated the telecommunications response after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the order enlists both public and private entities in assuring that critical infrastructure is continuously monitored and protected from attack.



Cyber threats are growing in intensity and scale. We've seen significant breaches at government agencies and in private businesses, including leading financial institutions and large U.S. media companies. Recent allegations of the theft of top-security information connected to the development of sophisticated weapons and air defense systems have only heightened concerns about the security of the nation's networks.

The public and private sectors need to work together to protect critical assets with confidence and trust — helping manage the risks we know, and getting ahead of those we don't.

There are two primary areas of concern. The first focuses on the concept of enhanced public/private information sharing and developing standards. The second is crafting a cybersecurity framework that addresses risks across government and industry — and to do so quickly. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) wants a preliminary framework in place by the end of this summer, with a final set of guidelines ready to go in February 2014.

The response to today's cyber threats can't be limited to Washington. Cybersecurity isn't just about compliance with laws and regulation — it's about guarding businesses from the increasing dangers of persistent threats. As importantly, an effective cybersecurity framework has to overcome barriers to continued economic growth — creating an environment that protects and nurtures innovation.

Certainly, the environment is complex. Critical industry sectors from energy and banking to transportation and health care answer to different government agencies or regulators. Therefore, it is imperative that any designated corporate cybersecurity officer sustain strong working relationships with appropriate government stakeholders.

It's encouraging that many business leaders understand the threat. A growing number of corporate boards are demanding regular updates from CISOs or CIOs on their states of readiness. Corporate executives should be asking themselves: how can public and private organizations work together most efficiently; how should a productive relationship develop between the two sides on key cybersecurity issues; and how can threats be addressed while protecting intellectual property and individual rights to privacy?

It is critical that the public and private sectors work together to build a cybersecurity framework that takes into account the very legitimate business concerns of maintaining individual privacy obligations, securing corporate proprietary information, and safeguarding competitive positioning, while promoting an efficient exchange of information.

Not all attacks rise to the level of a Page One headline. In fact, many breaches can damage businesses in significant ways without triggering news attention. Vandalism of websites to full-fledged short-circuiting of networks lead to theft of intellectual property, fraud, and in the most extreme cases, threats to corporate survival.

Take, for example, the energy industry: According to one recent Congressional report, the computer systems that drive the U.S. electric grid are under frequent — even daily — attack. That survey of corporate officials found striking examples of ongoing attempts to steal critical information; one company reported experiencing 10,000 attempted attacks a month.

Every C-level executive has a role in stemming the tide of cyber-attacks. It's not the responsibility of the CIO or even the CEO alone; COOs, CFOs, CROs, CPOs, and the corporate board should be equally invested in sharing active responsibility for the effort. A comprehensive corporate cybersecurity strategy is required.

To that end, all business leaders should adopt the following four steps:

Understand the challenge: An organization's threat profile must be top of mind for all leaders. Creating ongoing monitoring methods and finding resolutions to reporting challenges would allow executives to see well ahead of the curve. Risk intelligence is perhaps more valuable in 21st century business than conventional business intelligence.

Establish accountability: Company management should be requesting quarterly reports on the organization's most pressing cyber threats, to ensure that executives develop, track, and chart metrics which would enable them to quantify the impact of any intrusion. One designated leader, whether the CIO or other senior-level executive, could serve as the nexus for all cyber activities.

Coordinate efforts: A unified approach needs to be exactly that — unified. Assure that cyber security is well-managed not only through company headquarters, but all along the supply and value chain. Developing an effective national system to secure our critical infrastructure requires the coordination of key elements: protocols, sharing of sensitive data, and IT strategies.

Communicate: Government regulation and corporate risk management activity is at a high level. Cyber security officers should maintain regular communication with their industry associations and government contacts to make sure that industry perspectives are heard. Given the pervasive, business-critical role of IT and value of high-tech assets, the case for increased transparency and dialogue among stakeholders has never been stronger.

Nationally, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars on detecting, neutralizing, and recovering from cyber-attacks. There is perhaps no more important financial aspect of running a business these days than data maintenance and security.

While the cost of building an effective cyber defense system could be high, the cost of not doing enough may be even higher. One thing is certain: cyberattacks won't stop while we discuss how to build a protective network, who should run it, and the price tag for implementation.

The solution starts with cooperation across public and private lines, and collectively putting the greater good — America's national security and economic competitiveness — at the top of our priority list.

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





Why Businesses Should Share Intelligence About Cyber Attacks
Why Your CEO Is a Security Risk
Beware Trading Privacy for Convenience
Four Things the Private Sector Must Demand on Cyber Security

Battle-Tested Tips for Effective Explanations

You probably know the famous scene in the movie Glengary Glen Ross where Alec Baldwin's character tells his team to "Always be closing." I wish it were that simple. These days closing the deal, or even getting close, comes with more prerequisites — the biggest of which is understanding. People will not buy what they do not understand. Quality explanations are the key to getting prospects to become customers. I suggest a new motto for today: "Always be explaining."

We rely on explanations so often that we rarely consider how to make them better. Our explanations just... happen. Unfortunately, these organic explanations can fail, especially when we're explaining a complex idea. Often the problem is what Chip and Dan Heath, in their book Made to Stick, call "The Curse of Knowledge." We ourselves know so much about our product or service that we can't imagine what it's like not to know. The curse causes us to make inaccurate assumptions about our audience's level of understanding. The terminology and references that sound right to us come across as confusing jargon to others, and our explanations fail.

Understanding the basics of explanation can serve as a remedy for The Curse of Knowledge and help us think differently about how we explain ideas. This is especially true in the sales process. Whether it's on the convention floor, in the executive suite, or during a product presentation, honing your explanation skills convinces your audience that you understand their needs.

As a professional explainer — I've worked with LEGO, Ford, Intel, and Dropbox to make ideas, products, and services easier to understand — I've spent the last decade digging into why business explanations so often stymie customers and send prospects running. What I've found is that most people have never considered what makes an idea easier to understand or how to approach the process of explaining ideas.

To help, I've provided seven tips to create effective explanations that will work for prospective customers:

1. Make Your Audience Feel Smart, Instead of Making Yourself Look Smart

We want others to think we're smart because in most cases that's rewarded. But when it comes to making an idea easy to understand, simple trumps clever. Fancy vocabulary and extensive background information might impress customers — but, more likely, will just confuse them. Stop trying to look smart and start making your audience feel smart by building their knowledge and confidence. Dazzle them with clarity; it's another kind of brilliance.

2. Explain the Forest, Not Just the Trees

Focus only on features and you'll miss an opportunity to invite your audience to see the big picture. Prioritizing the details of this year's coolest product features isn't an explanation. Customers won't care about the bells and whistles if they don't understand why your product exists and why it matters to them. By zooming out and focusing on context at the beginning of an explanation, you can build a world around your product that enables it to make more sense.

3. Add Details Sparingly

Has this happened to you? You're meeting with prospects about a new product and it's obvious that they just aren't getting it. They stare blankly and stop asking questions. No problem, you think, you can still bring them around with a few more points. It's a tempting move. After all, sometimes one small detail turns that lightbulb on, right? It may seem counterintuitive, but more information won't help someone who's already confused. Imagine being lost and having someone give you directions that include every possible route and landmark to your destination when all you want to know is north or south, left or right. The antidote to confusion is often less information. Don't add detail; come back to one or two big ideas you know they'll understand. Once their heads are nodding again you can proceed, but with caution.

4. Write Less Copy, Use More Visuals

Prospect not getting it? Write more marketing copy, right? No. Jon English said it best: "words are not enough." We're communicating in the YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram era to audiences who are more visually literate than ever. Though often more difficult and expensive to produce, infographics, videos and diagrams can do the heavy lifting of making explanations work. For example, the popular crowdfunding platform Kickstarter encourages every new project to use a video to explain their idea. The company has established that projects with video have a better rate of success (30% vs. 50%). Videos offer potential funders a simple and compelling way to understand a new idea and why it matters.

5. Remember Your Audience is Human

If you think stories are for campfires, not your state-of-the-art product, then you're forgetting that your audience is human. Stories provide a way to see how a product works in the real world, with real people. And you don't have to be a storyteller to make stories work. In fact, the most effective stories simply illustrate a person in pain who found a solution and now feels relieved. These simple stories offer a way for the audience to empathize and imagine themselves solving similar problems.

6. Focus on Why

The best explanations answer one question: why? Why does this idea, product or service make sense? Why should I care about it? Why does this matter to me? By answering the "why" early in a meeting or presentation, you create a foundation for understanding on which to build more complex ideas. Think of an explanation like a recipe. Recipes are usually focused on "how" to create a dish. The list of ingredients and instructions work, but you may not know why. By understanding why yeast and baking powder are used, for instance, you can start to see the process from a new perspective and make the next dish your own.

7. Your Job is to Inform Smart People

No one likes to be talked down to, and if you approach explanation with the wrong attitude, it can be destructive. Science writer Steven Pinker once shared advice he got from an editor concerning condescension. She told him to treat his audience as if they are as smart as him, just not as informed. Use this important point to set the tone of your explanation. Your job is to inform smart people, not help the slowest people catch up. Remembering this will help you achieve an informative, not condescending, tone.

Follow all of these steps and you too can enlighten clients and win prospects. The first real step in creating great explanations is realizing that improvement is possible. You can become a better explainer and use explanation skills to solve problems and motivate others to care about your message. By employing the tips above, you'll be well on your way to making explanations that work.

New York Incentive Program for Teachers Falls Flat

A recent teacher-incentive program aimed at boosting student performance in New York City had no effect at all, according to a study of 200 public schools by Roland G. Fryer of Harvard. Experiments in Kenya and India have shown positive effects of incentives, but the New York program, under which schools were eligible to distribute up to $3,000 per teacher, may have been so complex (due in part to union influence) that teachers couldn't predict how their efforts would translate into rewards, Fryer says. The U.S. government has established a Teacher Incentive Fund to provide $1.2 billion in rewards to schools in 27 states.

Data is Worthless if You Don't Communicate It

There is a pressing need for more businesspeople who can think quantitatively and make decisions based on data and analysis, and businesspeople who can do so will become increasingly valuable. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report on big data, we'll need over 1.5 million more data-savvy managers to take advantage of all the data we generate.

But to borrow a phrase from Professor Xiao-Li Meng — formerly the Chair of the Statistics Department at Harvard and now Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — you don't need to become a winemaker to become a wine connoisseur. Managers do not need to become quant jocks. But to fill the alarming need highlighted in the McKinsey report, most do need to become better consumers of data, with a better appreciation of quantitative analysis and — just as important — an ability to communicate what the numbers mean.

Too many managers are, with the help of their analyst colleagues, simply compiling vast databases of information that never see the light of day, or that only get disseminated in auto-generated business intelligence reports. As a manager, it's not your job to crunch the numbers; but — as Jinho Kim and I discuss in more detail in Keeping Up with the Quants — it is your job to communicate them. Never make the mistake of assuming that the results will "speak for themselves."

Consider the cautionary tale of Gregor Mendel. Although he discovered the concept of genetic inheritance, his ideas were not adopted during his lifetime because he only published his findings in an obscure Moravian scientific journal, a few reprints of which he mailed to leading scientists. It's said that Darwin, to whom Mendel sent a reprint of his findings, never even cut the pages to read the geneticist's work. Although he carried out his groundbreaking experiments between 1856 and 1863 — eight years of painstaking research — their significance was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century, long after his death. The lesson: if you're going to spend the better part of a decade on a research project, also put some time and effort into disseminating your results.

One person who has done this very well is Dr. John Gottman, the well-known marriage scientist at the University of Washington. Gottman, working with a statistical colleague, developed a "marriage equation" predicting how likely a marriage is to last over the long term. The equation is based on a couple's ratio of positive to negative interactions during a fifteen minute conversation on a "difficult" topic such as money or in-laws. Pairs who showed affection, humor, or happiness while talking about contentious topics were given a maximum number of points, while those who displayed belligerence or contempt received the minimum. Observing several hundred couples, Gottman and his team were able to score couples' interactions and identify the patterns that predict divorce or a happy marriage.

This was great work in itself, but Gottman didn't stop there. He and his wife Julie founded a non-profit research institute and a for-profit organization to apply the results through books, DVDs, workshops, and therapist training. They've influenced exponentially more marriages through these outlets than they could possibly ever have done in their own clinic — or if they'd just issued a press release with their findings.

Similarly, at Intuit, George Roumeliotis heads a data science group that analyzes and creates product features based on the vast amount of online data that Intuit collects. For his projects, he recommends a simple framework for communicating about each analysis:

My understanding of the business problem
How I will measure the business impact
What data is available
The initial solution hypothesis
The solution
The business impact of the solution

Note what's not here: details on statistical methods used, regression coefficients, or logarithmic transformations. Most audiences neither understand nor appreciate those details; they care about results and implications. It may be useful to make such information available in an appendix to a report or presentation, but don't let it get in the way of telling a good story with your data — starting with what your audience really needs to know.