Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1588

Your Brand Is the Exhaust Fume of the Engine of Your Life

"How do you manage your brand?" I get asked that question really often, especially at public-venue speaking events. Typically, I sigh. It is not that the question is silly, or the questioner shallow, but because this question itself represents so much of what is stopping all of us from doing work that matters.

We talk about "reinventing your brand" when in reality the goal is to reinvent what you work on. We talk about the "brand called you" when we talk about being able to do more of the work you love to do. We talk about ways to "deliver on the impact equation" without asking first, "what is it you want to impact?" We are told by marketing gurus that "everyone now owns a media company!" — as if somehow this is, itself, the goal — rather than a means to an end. Marketing has become the default language — the lingua franca of the day — that we use to describe work, and it is distorting how we evaluate what matters.

Yes, it's true that web tools can let you be known for the work you do more easily and more cost effectively, letting you own how you present yourself to the world. But that's probably the least interesting thing about these social constructs and social media tools.

The much more relevant point is that you now get to create, share, and connect ideas with others to do work, ideally meaningful and impactful work. As in the person who was able to accelerate scientific research because of the online game, "Fold It." This particular game enables important research in the medical field, research that is usually conducted by scientists with PhDs. But making it a game that anyone could play allowed someone "unexpected" to help. A woman who worked as an executive assistant by day turned out to be the best protein folder in the world at night.

As I've written in more depth elsewhere, connected individuals can now achieve what once only centralized organizations could. The implications for this are huge. It changes the basis of market power for organizations because size no longer protects competitive advantage. It changes management because people can figure out for themselves what needs to be done to implement the larger strategy. It changes careers because we no longer need to belong to an organization to be able to create scale or impact. You don't even need to be "old enough" — five-year olds can invent consumer goods products. Today, what matters is the ability to create, not the ability to first prove you can.

So let's stop using the language of marketing to talk about meaning.

The truth is this: The brand follows the work. Your brand is the exhaust created by the engine of your life. It is a by-product of what happens as you share what you are creating, and with whom you are creating.

It is a sign, yes. Significant, yes. But the real signal comes from being able to answer these two questions:

What is it you care about? It takes courage to find and follow an individual path; finding our own path takes us off the path that others are following, in directions that can seem distinctly alone. Each of us is standing in a place no one else stands in as a function of our history, experience, vision and hopes. I call this onlyness, that thing that only you can bring to any situation. Go with it, and you end up being able to design your own life — and maybe redesign entire industries, too. At the very least, it lets you improve the results of any group you are a part of. Berkeley professors Charlan Jeanne Nemeth and Jack A. Goncalo have proven that "minority viewpoints" aid the quality of decision making by juries, by teams, and for the purpose of innovation. In other words, even when distinct points of view turn out to be wrong, speaking them lets everyone think better, create more solutions, and improve creativity. But if you don't know what it is you care about and why, you lack the ability to contribute meaningfully.

How will you find and work with allies? While it may be lonely to step into your own path, once you do, you attract those with affinity. The clearer you are in your onlyness, the strong your magnet for the right people for you (and possibly repulsion for others.) This is a good thing. It helps you find, filter, and formulate. It eliminates wasted effort to convince those who will never be convinced. It lets you know what kind of workplace is right for you, and it lets you find the right people for your projects. It lets you align in purpose with others. Esther Dyson points out that the "trick today is not just to find the right target (that is, a person), as social networks such as LinkedIn and search tools can do, but to enlist allies and manage the work to achieve a specific goal." (Emphasis mine.) Proximity used to reign supreme — where you lived, what school you went to, and whom your parents knew was more of a factor in what opportunities you had. Proximity is still one factor, but in the social era, the other four Ps of community end up growing in importance and power. Communities of passion who share a common interest (photography, or food, or books) can inform new product lines. Communities of purpose willingly share a common task to build something (like Wikipedia) together. Communities of practice, who share a common career or field of business, will extend your offer if it extends their expertise (like Intuit has with its accountant community). Communities of providence allow people to discover connections with others (as in Google+) and thus enable the sharing of information, products, and ideas.

Just recently, I passed up an opportunity to serve on a Fortune 100 Board of Directors. The company has a well-known history of dysfunctional board dynamics and it became clear to me that there was little one person could do to change it. When a friend asked why I was still considering the opportunity, I answered, "It would lend me legitimacy." When I heard those words come out of my mouth, I knew I had to turn it down. If I'd said yes, it would have been because of "brand" — because I'd want readers like you to see me with more esteem. But in truth, it wouldn't have meant I was doing more good work.

I've studied how actual value is created for over 10 years now, and what I know to be true is this: While what people think of us does matter, what matters much more is our ability to do and deliver. That's what makes the ultimate difference in the world. And that's what reputations are really built on. That's what will draw people to you.

Yes, we are in the middle of a vast sea change in which social can put the power of connection to work to solve meaningful problems. But in order to do that more meaningful work, we need to recognize what is holding us back. In a world of "personal brand" and "leadership brand" and "personal reinvention" and so forth, we should not forget: the real signal is the work itself, and the social signaling is just its echo.

Why I Phished My Own Company

Ten months ago, I was in charge of digital technology for the White House, where security was the top priority and it was inexcusable to let your guard down. Today, I make strategic and tactical technology decisions as the CTO of Atlantic Media. In a media environment, security is often trumped by functionality, convenience, or cost. It's frequently seen as peripheral or even an impediment to business operations.

In fact, many organizations face a similar problem: Tighter security introduces minor inconveniences into workflows, so employees don't comply. In Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report, 97% of breaches could have been avoided through easy, simple controls. According to one study, 91% of all cyber-attacks are the result of phishing emails, another completely preventable attack. From my position, those are horrible odds. I would be guilty of dereliction of duty if I didn't take steps to mitigate this risk.

But how would I go about it? Would it start with educating the employees at my company? The problem with this solution is that people are inherently fallible. They will make mistakes, regardless of awareness training. Unfortunately, for most people, the cost of modifying comfortable behavior is too high. To the average employee, fixing bad digital habits yields intangible benefits and often creates annoying inconveniences.

Another strategy is to issue a corporate dictum announcing tighter security policies, though it likely would be perceived as draconian. This policy would be more effective than a call to take personal responsibility, but still doesn't address the fact that most employees don't fully understand why they need to change habits. Digital naiveté leads people to believe that bad things won't happen to them. (I should introduce them to Matt Honan.)

What about mandating tighter security policies on your systems — stronger password requirements, for example? Increasing the length and alphanumeric complexity is more secure, but introduces the issue of employees not being able to remember their own passwords. This solution erects a barrier, which will be perceived as hindering daily operations. Employees will receive the (intangible) benefit of security — which, to many, will seem more like a costly burden.

None of these campaigns were going to sell the benefits of greater security — not until employees understood the threat's reality. The only way to affect systemic, lasting cultural change at the company was to make the cost of not changing bad digital habits greater than the perceived cost of changing them.

To do this, I needed to demonstrate the ease at which someone could be scammed into handing over their password by sending a fake phishing email to the entire company. I sent the phishing email on a Friday afternoon and two hours later, I had the empirical evidence. Almost half of the company opened the email, and 58% of those employees clicked the faux malicious link.

Rhetoric wouldn't resonate with the masses. But now, I had data to back me up. Through this experiment, we raised that probability of a data breach dramatically. Hacking was now a high cost and probable event. Through company-wide awareness, the experiment's outcome effectively increased the cost of not improving personal security.

The follow-up email I sent to the entire company was sobering and extremely effective. We had irrefutable evidence to support an upcoming policy change, which would have been viewed previously as constrictive.

The company would enforce 2-step verification for all employee email accounts, which requires a second action (like entering a six-digit code from a text message) after entering one's password. This is a vastly superior form of security: Even if someone steals your password, they will be unable to hack into your account without also stealing your phone. Major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn use similar log-in mechanisms.

The phishing experiment attained the crucial buy-in of employees; now that they personally understand the dangerous implications of not following the rules, they're more willing to take data security seriously. People are more apt to learn from an experience than listen to a recommendation or policy. Just like a regular office fire drill, senior leadership should be running random phishing drills to give them that experience. And, the experiential learning doesn't stop with these emails.

Placing someone in a cyber attack drill is the safest and most effective tactic to build the company's collective security intelligence. It successfully opens everyone's eyes and paves the way for a serious conversation about the initiatives I mentioned above — increased training, more effective policies — and this time, our employees just might listen.

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





How to Have the IT Risk Conversation
Rethinking Security for the Internet of Things
The Escalating Cost of Software Malice
Cyber Security Depends on Education

When Your Work Holds You Hostage. Literally.

Long Hours at the Desk


This week's "Seriously, that happened?" moment comes in the form of American medical-supply executive Chip Starnes being held hostage for six days by 80 employees at the company's factory outside Beijing. The hostage-takers, worried that he was in the process of shuttering the factory, were demanding severance. Starnes was released after both sides reached a financial settlement. The situation, while extreme, is a symptom of increasing worker nervousness about foreigners leaving them unemployed and unpaid on a whim. While there aren't hard numbers on how many times captive-taking has occurred, a thousand workers held a Japanese boss hostage earlier in 2013. Owners do have a nasty habit of walking away from manufacturing plants, especially given rising wages and labor shortages in parts of China. The Economic Information Daily newspaper says more than 400 bosses abandoned their factories in a single province in 2008. And because most of these operations were foreign-owned, there was little the employees could do to recoup losses. Legal analysts interviewed for this piece stressed that miscommunication is often at the root of such incidents, and that workers are often unaware of their rights. In the end, there's some fear that foreign companies will be less inclined to set up shop in China, though the perks right now for doing so seem to outweigh the risk of being confined to your office for a week.

TGIT

Why Four-Day Workweeks Are Best CNN

When the owner of a graphic design firm started giving herself and her employees four-day workweeks, she saw it as a temporary solution to a problem — namely, that she was having a hard time getting around after knee surgery. Three years later, her firm is still on a four-day schedule (her knee is fine). The company has grown by 20%, and she says the short week has "played a role for sure." A number of organizations have tried the four-day workweek and found that they like it: When the state of Utah introduced four-day schedules for many of its employees in 2008, the move boosted productivity and worker satisfaction (the state reverted three years later, after residents complained about not having access to services on Fridays). And software CEO Jason Fried wrote in the New York Times that when his firm is on a four-day schedule, from May through October, less time is wasted, and people focus more on what's important. Besides, we all work weekends anyway — what's the difference if the weekend is two days or three? —Andy O'Connell

Selective Bidding

How eBay Uses Data and Analytics to Get Closer to Its (Massive) Customer Base Sloan Management Review

There's Big Data and then there's Big Data at eBay. The site, which spans 30 countries, has more than 1.5 million sellers and 100 million registered users. Leading the daunting task of collecting all the data on these people, crunching it, and improving the customer experience is senior director of research Neel Sundaresan, who gave a lengthy interview to MIT's Sloan Management Review. Sundaresan stresses that employees in today's companies must be data driven. That doesn't mean everyone needs to handle the data, but everyone must understand where it comes from, how it's parsed, and what's significant about it (and what's just noise). "Otherwise,” he says, "you will make decisions that are not data-driven, which won't be correct in this new world." And in this new world, you have the power to not only ask your customers what they think but also to combine that information with knowledge about what they do. EBay's biggest challenges? How to manage the collection of more and more data, and how to figure out whether available analytics tools can keep up with the deluge.

Down, Down, Down

Opinion Briefing: Brazilians' Growing Discontent Gallup

For a granular look at what's eating Brazilians these days, check out this Gallup report on the state of the country's discontent. Satisfaction with services and quality of life started diving in 2011: Brazilians' satisfaction with the availability of quality health care in their communities fell to 25% in December 2012, down 16 percentage points since 2010 and a new low. Slightly less than half (48%) were satisfied with local schools, down nine points — again, a new low. The proportion satisfied with their local roads fell to 44%, down from 53%. For public transportation, the figure is 48%, down from 56%. Seven in 10 Brazilians believe corruption is widespread, up nine points, just 47% approve of the county's leaders, down from 68%, and only 36% feel safe walking alone at night, down 12 points. All this as Brazil is spending billions to host the world at the World Cup and Summer Olympics. Recent protests are sending the government a simple message: It’s misplacing its priorities. —Andy O'Connell

Hunt and Peck

Is Your iPhone Turning You Into a Wimp? Working Knowledge

Your contracted posture when you're hunched over a smartphone affects your behavior. In an experiment, people who had been using smartphone-sized iPod Touches were 47% less likely than desktop users to get up and try to find out why a researcher hadn't come back after leaving the room to fetch paperwork so that participants could be paid. Of those who did take this assertive action, the iPod Touch users took 44% longer to do it than desktop users. Working at a desktop computer for just a few minutes, in a (relatively) expansive body posture, makes you more likely to engage in power-related behaviors than people who have been tapping away on their itty bitty phones. Maarten Bos, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Business School who conducted the research with HBS Associate Professor Amy Cuddy, says he wouldn't go so far as to advise anyone not to fiddle with a smartphone just before doing something that requires assertiveness, mainly because people wouldn't listen to that kind of suggestion. "But if you realize that, 'Hmm, I'm pretty quiet during this meeting,' then maybe you should pay attention to how devices impacted your body posture beforehand," he says. —Andy O'Connell

BONUS BITS:

Supreme Courting

The End of DOMA Means the Beginning of Financial Equality for Same-Sex Couples (Quartz)
How the DOMA Repeal Benefits Businesses (Forbes)
The Supreme Court: Corporate America's Employees of the Month (Bloomberg Businessweek)

How Money Actually Buys Happiness

Warren Buffett's advice about money has been scrutinized — and implemented — by savvy investors all over the world. But while most people know they can benefit from expert help to make money, they think they already know how to spend money to reap the most happiness. As a result, they follow their intuitions, using their money to buy things they think will make them happy, from televisions to cars to houses to second houses and beyond.

The problem with this approach is that a decade of research — conducted by us and our colleagues — demonstrates that our intuitions about how to turn money into happiness are misguided at best and dead-wrong at worst. Those televisions, cars, and houses? They have almost no impact on our happiness. The good news is that we now know what kind of spending does enhance our happiness — insight that's valuable to consumers and companies alike.

Buffet recently penned an op-ed titled "My Philanthropic Pledge" — but rather than offer financial advice about giving, he suggested we give as a way to enhance our emotional wellbeing. Of his decision to donate 99% of his wealth to charity, Buffett said that he "couldn't be happier."

But do we need to give away billions like Buffet in order to experience that warm glow? Luckily for us ordinary folks, even more modest forms of generosity can make us happy. In a series of experiments, we've found that asking people to spend money on others — from giving to charity to buying gifts for friends and family — reliably makes them happier than spending that same money on themselves.

And our research shows that even in very poor countries like India and Uganda — where many people are struggling to meet their basic needs — individuals who reflected on giving to others were happier than those who reflected on spending on themselves. What's more, spending even a few dollars on someone else can trigger a boost in happiness. In one study, we found that asking people to spend as little as $5 on someone else over the course of a day made them happier at the end of that day than people who spent the $5 on themselves.

Smart managers are using the power of investing in others to increase the happiness of their employees. Google, for example, offers a compelling "bonus" plan for employees. The company maintains a fund whereby any employee can nominate another employee to receive a $150 bonus. Given the average salaries at Google, a $150 bonus is small change. But the nature of the bonus — one employee giving a bonus to another rather than demanding that bonus for himself — can have a large emotional payoff.

Investing in others can also influence customers. Managers at an amusement park were unable to convince patrons to buy pictures of themselves on one of the park's many rides. Less than one percent purchased the photo at the usual $12.95 price. But researchers tried a clever variation. Other customers were allowed to pay whatever they wanted (including $0) for a photo, but were told that half of what they paid would be sent to charity. Now, buying the picture allows the customer not only to take home a souvenir, but also invest in others. Given this option, nearly 4.5% of customers purchased the photo, and paid an average of more than $5. As a result, the firm's profit-per-rider increased fourfold.

Warren Buffett, happiness guru. Just as we have taken his advice on making money, research suggests we should now take his advice on making happiness. By rethinking how we spend our money — even as little as $5 — we can reap more happiness for every dollar we spend. And Buffett's happiness advice comes with a financial payoff as well. By maximizing the happiness that employees and customers get from every dollar they receive in bonuses or spend on products, companies can increase employee and customer satisfaction — and benefit the bottom line.

How Ideal Is Your Company?

Is your company getting your best work? Do you come in every day energized, enthusiastic, creative, and engaged? If not, you're not alone, at least in the U.S, according to the latest Gallup poll of employee engagement, which you can see if you scroll down through the wealth of data my HBR colleague Gretchen Gavett recently collated.

If you're among the less than enchanted, what are you missing? What would you need to be your most productive?

Professors Rob Goffee, of the London Business School, and Gareth Jones, of Madrid's IE Business School, asked this question to hundreds of executives, as part of their on-going research into authentic leadership. Here's a sampling of the replies they received:

"It would be great to be in an organization where I felt I really knew what was going on — where there were no corporate secrets — no spin."

"I'd love it if I was in an organization where I felt I was adding value as widely as possible at the same time as I was growing myself."

"I've been given too many mission statements and cards with corporate values on them. What I really want is work that fulfills me in many ways."

"I don't want to sink in a quicksand of regulations and controls — I dream of a workplace where there are simple rules and we all know where we stand."

Some of these sentiments may resonate strongly, and some may not, certainly. But underlying the body of comments, spanning differences in circumstances, industries, and individual ambitions, Goffee and Jones found six common imperatives, which taken together, they suggest, describes the ideal organization — a place that enables people to operate at their fullest potential by letting them do their best work.

In a nutshell, this is a place where:

Differences are nurtured, so individuals can be themselves at work and contribute their unique talents.
Information is not suppressed or distorted, so people can find out what they need to know to do their work.
Individuals are given meaningful chances to grow, becoming more valuable to the organization in the process.
The company is a place where everyone feels proud to work, spurring them to go beyond their stated roles.
People's day to day work makes sense to them, and they understand how their own jobs fit in with everyone else's.
And they are not hindered by stupid rules.

Does any of this surprise you? Who wouldn't want to work in a company like that? And yet, Goffee and Jones found, few (if any) companies that live up to this ideal entirely.

I don't find that all that surprising either, considering how hard some of these aspirations are to pull off. Consider, for example, how difficult it is to design an organization in which everyone's duties fits seamlessly and perfectly with everyone else's. Or how challenging it is to create a strong company culture people feel proud of while also encouraging individuals to express their differences. Or simply how hard it is to keep everyone informed all the time.

How close is your company to the ideal? Goffee and Jones have developed a diagnostic that can give you a quick sense of how your organization stacks up and in what ways it might still fall short. You can click here, to take it.

One company that measures up well, they found, is Arup, the engineering and design firm that built the Sydney Opera House, the Centre Pompidou, and the Beijing Water Cube. As far back as 1970, founder Ove Arup, laid down a gauntlet to its directors as they considered what kind of company they wished to leave behind when they retired. It came to be known as the "Key Speech," which Goffee and Jones report, is still required reading today for Arup employees.

In it, he warned, that if someone becomes "frustrated by red tape or by having someone breathing down his neck, someone for whom he has scant respect, if he has little influence on decisions which affect his work, and which he may not agree with, then he will pack up and go. And so he should. It is up to us, therefore, to create an organisation which will allow gifted individuals to unfold."

When Your Start-Up Should Walk Away from a Deal

In the early years of a company's life cycle, an entrepreneur's ambition can be a double-edged sword. The drive to align quickly with marquee customers to establish credibility can sometimes cloud your judgment. At my company, TransPerfect, we have mostly been served well by our mantra of 20 years: "Listen to the clients and respond to their needs." But we have also learned that the desire to please a potential client at all costs can actually be a setback if you fail to fully evaluate all potential outcomes.

In our formative years, one of the vital lessons I had to learn was how to recognize when an opportunity was not a good fit for us. Signing the wrong deal can cost you time and money — two things entrepreneurs can't afford to lose. How can an entrepreneur eager to build their firm recognize when a deal is a bad idea? Here are some lessons I've learned to keep in mind.

1. When there's no escape clause in the contract. When we were a smaller company, a major retailer approached us with the promise of $15 million in business from a huge translation project. At first, our team viewed it as a way to put our company on the map, and we wanted to show how committed we were to winning the business. We formulated a plan to scale quickly, adding new personnel and even a new office location to cover all the work that would be coming in. Not long after incorporating all of these changes, the retailer pulled the plug on the entire project due to economic reasons. We realized that the contract we signed hadn't included any volume guarantee or kill fee, and as a result, we were not able to recover the lost revenue or the expenses involved with the staffing actions. That experience was a cold dose of reality, not only because of the revenue at stake, but also because it brought to light our own naiveté as an eager startup. But looking back, I can say that we learned a valuable lesson about preparation, caution and responsibility, and as a result, our company is stronger.

2. When you don't have the resources to complete the job to your standards. A major news publication approached us with the project of Spanish language translation for its largest magazine title. The speed needed to turn around a completely translated project on the publication's timetable would have required us to commit a full-time team of linguists to the project. After some serious analysis, we realized that taking the business on those terms would have meant compromising our high-quality translation standards. We thanked the publication for considering us and wished its team the best.

3. When it involves a bidding war. Years ago, a law firm asked us to translate a large international project. We wanted to work with the company because it was a major firm, so we offered our best price for the scope of work. However, the firm informed us that it had received a much lower bid from a competitor. We had carefully examined the level of work required and found it hard to believe that another company could handle it for such a small budget. As much as it pained us, we expressed our concern about the quality of work produced for such a low fee and wished the firm luck. The firm ended up returning to us a week later with a horror story: the less-expensive competitor had botched the job. At that point, we began the project on our terms. Since then, the firm has become a regular client, and we've been conducting increasingly larger volumes of translation on a regular basis.

4. When taking the deal might compromise your reputation. Compromising for the sake of a potential client's happiness is one thing — but yielding your principles to the point that your quality of work is impacted is quite another. For example, if a potential client wanted us to provide translation and localization for an international ad campaign using only machine translation without a team of language experts, we would have no choice but to walk away from the opportunity. Our experience tells us that the technology of machine translation just hasn't progressed to the point where we can deliver a finished product that the end client would find acceptable. It might be tempting for a start-up to accept a large, lucrative project if they only consider the dollar amount and the boost that would give the business — but that is a short-sighted decision. If you expect your company to have staying power beyond this one deal, remember that your professional reputation is worth protecting.



For a young, hungry business, the idea of walking away from a deal is anathema, especially when the budget involved is significant. However, especially in a company's early days, its leaders need to build more than the bank account. The choices your organization makes about how and with whom to do business will set the foundation for the company's future — its reputation, its quality of work, and its ultimate success.

How to Have the IT Risk Conversation

I run a course at the MIT Sloan School called Essential IT for Non-IT Executives. Every time my colleagues and I come to the end of the course, we ask people what they considered the most important thing they learned. Surprisingly, many people say it was "how to have the IT risk conversation."

As one CFO told me, the phrase "IT Risk" contains two dirty words. The word risk makes him feel uncomfortable. And the word IT makes him feel incompetent. Not a good way to feel ready for a productive dialogue. But being able to talk about IT risk is essential if you are going to make the right decisions about how you use technology in your business.

Fortunately, there is a way to talk about IT risk — and understand risk — in terms that make sense to every manager. If you can remember four A's, you have the framing for a productive conversation with your IT counterparts. You can come to common understanding about what IT risks are most important, what causes them, and what you'll do about them.

From a business standpoint, IT risks affect four key objectives:



Availability: Keeping business processes running, and recovering from failures within acceptable timeframes

Access: Providing information to the right people while keeping it away from the wrong people

Accuracy: Ensuring information is correct, timely, and complete

Agility: Changing business processes with acceptable cost and speed

If you're like managers in most companies, you tend to have conversations about these four A's in silos, if at all. You never talk about all four together. That means experts in each risk silo tend to focus on optimizing their own risks, not optimizing across risks.

For example, ask yourself: do your security people think about agility risks? When security people veto your requests, they really mean that you're introducing unacceptable or unnecessary risks. But their veto can slow or stop the changes you need. If you don't talk about all four risks, then how do you know what risks are really acceptable?

In the best companies, security people think about all four A's. They consider agility as well as access risks. They will suggest ways that you can do what you want more safely. They'll even work with other silos — IT operations, application development, compliance, legal, HR, etc. — so they're ready for you when you want to do new things.

When your security people focus on all four A's, you can move quickly to adopt new mobile devices, launch digital businesses, or exploit social media. But unfortunately, too many security people focus only on the risks that matter to them. In protecting against access failures, they fail to help the company move forward.

Getting Started on the Risk Conversation

When you don't explicitly talk about the four A's, people make assumptions about what's most important. Those assumptions will vary from person to person. Conversely, when you talk openly about the four A's, you can fix false assumptions, and you can make better decisions. But you have to start the conversation.

Try the following exercise: Find your favorite IT person. Tell him how important each of the four risks is for your part of the business. Tell him how you think he's doing at managing those risks. Then listen. I guarantee that you'll both learn something.

If your experience is typical, you'll find that you and your IT people place different importance on the four A's. For example, in a global survey of 258 executives, IT and business executives agree on the relative importance of availability and access risks. But business execs put far more importance on agility and accuracy risks than IT execs do.

What's going on? Why don't IT people share your love of accuracy and agility? It's easy to think it's an incentive problem. IT people get the blame when systems go down or hackers succeed. But when projects move too slowly or you don't have a unified view of your customers, you may feel more pain than them. But this incentive answer is only partially correct, if at all.

The real cause of this misalignment lies much deeper; a legacy of risk-unaware decisions and poor communication across silos. Improving agility and accuracy typically requires cleaning up a spaghetti-like mess of systems and processes built up over decades. They can't be fixed just by buying a new device or devising a new procedure. When your IT people seem to value agility and accuracy less than you, they may have simply given up hope of fixing them. The solution may lie beyond their sphere of influence. Or they may be so busy keeping things running that greater agility feels like a pipe dream.

This is where communication matters. You can only fix the legacy problem by jointly understanding the risks that matter now, the risk tradeoffs in each decision, and the actions required to resolve your risks. Discussing IT risk does more than help you make better project decisions. It also helps you understand when it's time to rework some of the mess your organization has accumulated over the years.

So, make IT risk part of your conversations every day. Discuss the four A's whenever you make a big IT decision. If your security people talk only about security, they're missing important risks — and useful opportunities. But when you ask for unnecessary exceptions, or ask your IT people to move too fast, you're inappropriately favoring agility over the other three risks— and setting yourself up for trouble later.

One thing is sure. If you don't talk about IT risk, you only make your risks worse. How do you manage your IT risk conversations?

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





Rethinking Security for the Internet of Things
The Escalating Cost of Software Malice
Cyber Security Depends on Education
Cyber Security in the Internet of Things

Discover Your Personal Narrative

I recently had coffee with a senior partner at a large consulting firm. He'd just had a "milestone birthday" and now hoped to shift into roles that felt more meaningful to him — speaking, writing, teaching, and becoming a thought leader. He had great contacts; newspaper columns and teaching positions could be his for the asking. The only problem, he told me, was he didn't know what he wanted to say.

Should he focus on the industry practice areas where he'd made his name? Global leadership, since he had so much international experience? Education or healthcare, topics of great personal interest to him? He had no idea where to begin.

"Message development" is a process I'm certainly familiar with. As a former presidential campaign spokesperson and political consultant, I've worked with innumerable candidates to hash out their visions for America and their policy stance on the issues of the day. But I don't think a top-down process is generally the best way for executives — or candidates, for that matter — to determine what they really stand for.

Oftentimes, we're too close to our own experience to be able to distill the common strand — the narrative thread that's implicitly guiding us. That was the case for Chris Guillebeau, an eclectic entrepreneur who has written books including The Art of Non-Conformity and The $100 Startup. "Is there a larger narrative [to my life]? Yes, but it took me a while to find it," he told me in a recent interview. "The larger narrative stems from the central mission: 'You don't have to live your life the way others expect'...[but] it took some time to get specific on what this looked like. In the beginning I floundered a lot."

John Hagel, the co-author of The Power of Pull and co-chairman of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, agrees. Even among corporations, he told me in a recent interview, "Narratives can't be handed over to the PR department; they emerge from shared experiences. The first step for businesses is saying, 'What's our narrative?' Because even if you don't have a conscious one, you've been living one."

We've all, as individuals and as corporations, been living an implicit narrative. But articulating it, as my consultant friend found, can be devilishly hard. There is a pathway to discovery, however. One strategy I developed in the course of writing my book, Reinventing You, is for executives to block out time to write down their "war stories" — the anecdotes that best capture their experience, successes, failures, and views of the world. Whether it's insights about how to build a team or launch a new product, those recollections often contain the kernels of what matters most to them.

Sure, your personal brand and your message can be focus-grouped and wordsmithed by others. But the best place to look, at least initially, is at the stories you tell, to yourself and about yourself. You'll start to see patterns and themes — if most of your most meaningful experiences are centered on global leadership, or if the "moral" of most of your stories is about the need for better executive communication, then you're on your way to finding the essence of your brand.

After a recent lecture at Harvard Business School, a 20-something student came up to me. "I want to start blogging," she said, "but I'm not sure what I should write about. What should my topic be? What if I change my mind and decide I want a different brand later on?" My advice to her — just like to the senior consulting partner — was to get started, try it out, write things down, and iterate (an approach definitively articulated by Len Schlesinger, Charlie Kiefer, and Paul Brown in their book Just Start.) You'll only find your voice, and your authentic brand, by seeing what stories matter to you most.

Do You Work While You Eat?

People who were making and tasting lemonade while memorizing a seven-digit number ended up with a 50% higher sugar concentration in the drink than people who were memorizing just one number, say Reine C. van der Wal of Radboud University Nijmegen and Lotte F. van Dillen of Leiden University, both in the Netherlands. This and other experiments suggest that dealing with a cognitive load dulls the experience of taste (not just sweet but also salty and sour), leading people to drink or eat more in order to obtain a pleasurable experience. Abstaining from cognitive activities during meals may enhance taste perception and limit overconsumption, the researchers say.

Get Your Budget Ready for the Upturn

Most budgets for 2013 were made in 2012, when the prevailing economic outlook was grim. But here it is midyear and the signals are decidedly more positive. Don't let yesterday's mindset prevent you from seeing what is about to unfold. Those who fail to recognize that the economy is improving are likely to play defense for too long, leaving opportunities for top-line organic growth on the table.



There is ample evidence that things are better, trader-driven stock price gyrations notwithstanding. Housing prices have stabilized and are increasing in some regions. Personal debt has declined. Manufacturing is on the rise, exports are picking up, and the US continues to be the top target for FDI.



And there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about the economic outlook for the next five years. The shifting energy equation, for example, sets the stage for growth. Shale gas will allow the US to be energy independent, create an export industry, and reduce energy costs. Lower costs are already making some industrial sectors more competitive.



Another compelling if intangible reason to believe that the economy has turned the corner is America's resilience. The societal factors that have made America strong in the past continue today: its diversity, thirst for innovation, entrepreneurship, and institutional support for risk taking. Banks are now adequately capitalized and are beginning to lend, and venture capitalists are as hungry as ever. Even gridlock in Washington has not stopped the economy from progressing.



Granted, it's not a perfect picture. Europe, excluding Germany, is still struggling, it's unclear whether Abenomics can pull Japan out of its slump, and the shrinking Yen could nick the US auto industry. The big drop in demand for major commodities like iron ore and copper has exposed excess capacity and caused painful plant closures, hitting Australia especially hard.



These and other countervailing forces will not, however, stop the US recovery and the synchronized recovery of economies around the globe. Even a small increase in US personal consumption is a huge absolute number — and that spending can spur exports from China, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Europe, South Korea, Mexico, and Singapore. The rating agencies reinforce this point of view. Just this month Fitch raised its rating on India's sovereign debt and Standard & Poor's raised its long-term outlook on the US. Ratings on other countries and companies are more likely to improve than deteriorate.



If your budget was created for economic headwinds, then now is the time to revisit your assumptions. Here are some steps you should take to build for 2014-2015:



1. Position yourself in market segments that will grow. The landscape has undergone major transformations since the global financial crisis. The recession eliminated some market segments and redefined others. This is the time to revisit the market spaces you occupy and position yourself to ride the uptick. You should be exploring new segments and experimenting with new ideas to expand your brand and occupy the space. For example, the wealth effect from rising equity and real estate prices might make premium product segments more attractive in the coming years. Get there ahead of the competition, and be sure your assignment of resources matches up with your growth prospects.

2. Increase your R&D spending. If you didn't cut the budget for innovation, technology, and product development over the past five years, good. If you did, then take action now. Be sure you are investing enough in innovation and focusing on the right R&D projects, so you have interesting products to meet the rising consumer demand.

3. Reset your goals and KPIs. You may have to make some upward revisions as the economic picture changes. Lack of ambition allows mediocre performance.

4. Set funds aside for growth. Even as you loosen the purse strings, keep some money on hand to invest in marketing or advertising as the market turns. You don't have to spend it ahead of time but be ready to pounce and outspend competitors segment by segment as consumption rebounds.

5. Rethink outsourcing. Market growth has shifted to the US, and change happens faster than ever requiring smooth coordination. It may be wise now to source domestically or to bring some functions back in-house. Being close to the market, you'll be able to move faster and also protect your intellectual property.

6. Upgrade skills. Letting talent become obsolete is a terrible thing. Some farsighted companies never cut back on training in the downturn, but many did. This is the time to revamp it for the new game. What new skills and capabilities will you need to succeed in the emerging landscape?

7. Keep the pressure on productivity. People often take their foot off the productivity accelerator in good times. Don't become lax on cost as you begin to sense rising demand. Keep a laser sharp focus on gross margin.

8. Prepare for inflation. While commodity prices and inflation are subdued, be on the alert for inflation's expected return. If you anticipate it over the next two years, as many experts do, develop a methodology to ensure that your pricing policies and purchasing contracts keep in step.



I'm not suggesting businesses should over-expand without appropriate controls, but remember that the marketplace doesn't run on a calendar year. If the context changes, you should adjust now, not on December 31st. Your leadership is crucial. What are you waiting for?