Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1588

Marketers Are Not Publishing Enough Content

Most brands face a slippery slope when it comes to their engines of content creation. We live in a day and age when the term "content marketing" stumbles out of a brand's mouth almost as often as buzzwords like "big data" and "native advertising." Woe the brand that is not creating, publishing and curating relevant content, yet many brands struggle with precisely that. They struggle with everything from its creation to its strategy to its editorial content, and even the best places to publish and share it effectively. Many new media pundits claim that the most effective brands employ in-house newsrooms or former journalists to help uncover and spread interesting stories. Yet we also live in a time when the half-life of content is shorter than ever. In a river of tweets or a flood of a Facebook newsfeed, even the most interesting content will last only a few hours (maybe a day if you're lucky). This is further complicated by the fundamental nature of social media, a place where friends and acquaintances connect and not necessarily the ideal place for a brand to try to make some noise.

So what's a brand to do?

Gary Vaynerchuk has a solution. He built his initial following by producing an irreverent wine tasting video podcast that he converted into a massive Twitter following (closing in on one million followers), two best-selling business books (Crush It and The Thank You Economy) with a third one on the way, a lucrative speaking career and his ever-growing social media marketing agency, VaynerMedia. He responds to almost all of the inputs he gets (from tweets to blog comments) and created a tempest in a teapot last week by declaring that he plans to "triple down" on content - "because doubling down doesn't begin to describe how important he thinks it is," according to Forbes. He has also hired a social media content assistant to help him capture, create and nurture whatever is brewing under those eyebrows to keep up the pace. And that's where the tempest started brewing. Ford's global head of social media, Scott Monty, responded with a blog post titled, The Last Thing The World Needs, citing this as more "digital clutter" in a world where individuals are struggling to capture anything and everything they already have in their feeds. What are these poor consumers going to do if every brand follows the Vaynerchuk strategy of tripling down? Will this push consumers to the breaking point? Will this have them running for the virtual doors at Facebook, Vine, Tumblr, Google+ and beyond?

In a word: no.

Inevitable is the classic "quality versus quantity" debate. In rebuttal to the pushback that Vaynerchuk's comments received, he astutely asks, "why not both?" Why can't brands create a lot of high quality content? Sure, some of this content will work and some will miss the mark. Not all attempts will result in a viral homerun, but we live in a real-time world, where individuals are increasingly looking for more context from their content. Content providers are going to have to play a very different game. A personal case study comes to mind. On May 21st, I published my second business book, CTRL ALT Delete. Along with a digital experience to compliment the launch of the book, my digital marketing agency, Twist Image, took the interesting stats and data from this experience and created a SlideShare. Instead of simply tweeting and sharing the link throughout my online social spaces, I shared some of the unique stats (akin to Vaynerchuk's tripling down). I expected this deluge of content to upset my online community, provoking negative comments and pushback. Much to my surprise, the SlideShare quickly surpassed 100,000 views, and the number of new followers and friends coupled with the retweets and shares sent my overall analytics through the roof. Creating what Monty refers to as "digital clutter" seems to have been the most effective strategy to get the word out. How did this happen? People aren't "on the ready" just because I decided to hit a publish button. The frequency of posting matched with the quality created greater attention and focus on the message. It's a tough lesson for new media thinkers to hear: traditional tactics like frequency and repetition work.

Those who follow Gary Vaynerchuk respect him. They like him. They seem to want more. By creating more, he is not only appeasing his most heavy users, but he is also giving them (and even those who don't follow him) additional opportunities to find out more, share his thinking and help him spread his own gospel. Tripling down on mediocre content helps nobody. Tripling down on relevancy, being contextual and adding value will always help a brand to expand its audience. Is this hard to scale? Absolutely. Will every brand get this right? Absolutely not. Vaynerchuk and other successful content creators know the pulse of their audience. Through the years, the smartest content marketers have understood not only the pulse of their network, but how to distribute their content in a way that fits the audience. While some may rightfully see it as clutter, my guess is that Vaynerchuk (and other successful content creators) will be analyzing the results and tweaking until they uncover a formula more effective than their old one - a million times better than those with no vision, no formula and lots of worry about the clutter that they're creating.

Why Women Should Ask Auto-Repair Shops for Discounts

Women who called auto-repair shops to inquire about getting a new radiator were quoted prices that averaged 6% higher than those offered to men, according to an experiment led by Meghan Busse of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Yet female callers who requested a price reduction were successful about 35% of the time, compared with just 25% for men. Shops may be caught off guard when women ask for discounts on car repairs, the researchers say.

Memo to JC Penney: Execution Is Not Strategy

It has been a surreal two years for shareholders, customers, and employees of J. C. Penney (JCP). On June 14, 2011, JCP appointed Apple Store star Ron Johnson as CEO to replace what activist investor Bill Ackman derided as the completely failed regime of then-CEO Mike Ullman, who had apparently badly mismanaged JCP for his seven years at the helm.

But after almost two years of plummeting sales, profits and stock price, Ackman and friends had to steal a line from The Who and ask shareholders, customers and employees to "meet the new boss, same as the old boss" with the reappointment of Ullman on April 8, 2013.

The narrative has generally been that Johnson was a brilliant strategist brought in to entirely overhaul the strategy of JCP and make it shine like the Apple Stores. But that focus on broad strategy did not work and Ullman was brought in to refocus on the basics — on execution.

The narrative is unsurprising given that the overwhelming view of strategy is that anything that involves big shifts accompanied by a lot of hot air must, by definition, be "strategic." Johnson certainly provided big shifts and hot air aplenty. However, as I have argued elsewhere, strategy is, in fact, a coherent set of choices about where-to-play (WTP) and how-to-win (HTW) and, if that WTP&HTW is significantly different than the current one, a credible path for getting from the present to the targeted state.

Under Johnson, JCP had nothing even vaguely resembling a worthwhile strategy and its path to get to where it wished was comically disastrous. JCP had a plan for betterment and not winning — one of the most common mistakes in "strategy." Johnson's "new JCP" boutiques, which were meant to exemplify what the whole JCP would eventually look like, had merchandise in them that some customers found somewhat compelling some of the time. Sales per square foot in these little boutiques (approximately 10% of the overall JCP stores) were reportedly twice that of the pre-Johnson JCP average.

But did JCP identify a set of shoppers with whom it could win — for whom JCP was their best alternative, to which they would look loyally for their shopping needs for some set of goods? Hardly. Even the "new JCP" served no compelling purpose for some set of shoppers. It was better than the old JCP but it is simply not strategy to seek only to be better than something that is definitively losing; it is deck-chair rearrangement.

And the path to this futile betterment was one of the most comical that I have seen in a long time. Think about it. You have a customer base that provides your $12 billion in current revenues. You tell that customer base, and everybody else who is willing to listen, that your current stores suck and you are going to reinvent them. The way you are going to do that is to convert approximately 10% of the square footage of each store into a "new JCP" boutique, which will demonstrate the awesomeness of the new "strategy." And over time when this shows just how awesome the new JCP is, that 10% will grow to 100% and presto, life will be roses.

So what happened? Some new shoppers came in and bought stuff only from the tiny new JCP space, helping to make that space perform much better than the old JCP. But of course, since they were told the old JCP sucked, they didn't even think of buying anything sitting on the shelves of the old JCP. Lots of old shoppers came in too, because with $12 billion of sales, you have lots of shoppers. Johnson managed to convince them with the huge contrast that he showed side-by-side in the same store between the hapless old JCP and the delightful new JCP that the old JCP was a lot worse than all of them thought. Thanks to Johnson's clear and compelling object lesson, they stopped buying the stuff they always bought in the old JCP — and some of them bought some stuff in the new JCP.

How do I know? That is the only way that 10% of the store can be up 100% in sales/square foot and the whole store can be down double-digits in sales/square foot.

That is not a strategy but a recipe for abject failure — which it took the board two years to figure out, a painful two years for shareholders, customers and employees.

JCP doesn't need someone who can "execute" successfully, get back to basics, or any such thing. Just as it needed two, five or ten years ago, JCP needs a strategy. It needs to decide where it is going to play — with what set of shoppers, in what range of merchandise, through what physical and digital spaces. And it needs to decide how is it going to provide a superior value proposition to competitive alternatives in that chosen space. This is a tough task. The department store business is a brutal one. This is not a business in which half-witted strategies can be profitable.

But if JCP doesn't figure out an answer to these questions, it will revert entirely to the retailing drug — the "low-price strategy." This is actually a non-strategy. There is a real strategy called "low-cost," which can facilitate more attractive prices than competitors. But low prices unaccompanied by low costs is an approach to liquidation — which is where JCP will be if it doesn't start to think intelligently about strategy.

The Smartest Leaders Make Their Own Opportunities

We all know no one posts the best jobs. The really juicy positions usually get handed around like a treasured prize within social networks. Maybe you'll see a notice on LinkedIn, or a posting on your alumni listserv — but probably not. The most exciting jobs have an infinite number of aspirants, so unless you've been personally recommended by someone close to the action, it's difficult to get noticed.

But what I learned again and again during the course of researching my book, Reinventing You, is that the smartest, savviest professionals don't wait for a posting to appear. They make their own opportunities, and get rewarded handsomely for it.

When Joanne Chang graduated from Harvard in the early 1990s, she took a tried-and-true path on campus and joined a prestigious management consulting firm. The problem was, she hated it. Thinking back on her passion for cooking — in college, she'd become known as the "Chocolate Chip Cookie Girl" — she decided to give the restaurant world a try. But she didn't scour the help-wanted ads. "I sent a bunch of letters to chefs in town that I didn't know, but I knew their reputations," she says. "I wrote, 'I have no formal training, but I love cooking and I'm interested in getting into the restaurant world, and I'll take any position.'"

Impressed with her chutzpah, intrigued by her resume, and short an employee who had just left, Boston power chef Lydia Shire called Joanne literally the next day and invited her for an interview. Indeed, every single chef she wrote to eventually responded. She got the job with Shire and started as "a bottom-of-the-ladder prep cook." Two decades later, Joanne is one of Boston's most celebrated restaurateurs.

Kevin Roose, now a reporter for New York magazine, also made his own break by interning for A.J. Jacobs, a well-known author and editor at Esquire magazine. Kevin emailed him cold, explaining that he was in New York for the summer working as a waiter, they'd gone to the same college, and would Jacobs like a part-time personal intern? Jacobs probably would have been inundated with offers if he'd posted a notice with their alma mater. But he didn't — and Kevin's direct outreach made it easy to say yes.

Joanne and Kevin were at the start of their careers when they took a chance and reached out to those luminaries. But asking for opportunities, inventing your own, and seizing the ones that present themselves is something you can do at any stage of your career. Too many senior leaders are held back by concerns that they might lose face by trying something different or stepping outside of their comfort zone. But it can be a worthwhile process. Susan Leeds, a longtime investment banker who shifted into the energy efficiency field, told me you have to "accept the fact that sometimes you have to take one step back to take three or four steps forward. It would be incorrect if I said I made a lateral shift: I went backward. But because of the benefit of my years of professional experience in a competitive field, even though I went back, I was able to move forward fast — to leapfrog forward."

The truth is, because so many people limit themselves, there's often not a lot of competition at the top. If there's a senior executive at your firm you really admire, reach out and see if he'll agree to be shadowed for a day. Unless you're writing to the worldwide CEO, there's probably little demand and he'll be flattered. If there's an initiative you'd like to see at your company, offer to head it up. And if there's a skill set you'd like to cultivate, don't be afraid to make a lateral move (or even go backward, as Susan did) if you know it will serve the long-term interests of your career.

We're entering an era where the rules of business are both opaque and fast-changing. There's not one single playbook you can follow and expect to succeed. The only alternative is to be nimble and create your own opportunities, and your own success.

Why Would Hackers Target My Little Company?

If your business is relatively small, keeps a low profile, and isn't involved in financial services or national defense, you might assume that data security isn't a big issue for you. Why would someone in the presumably limited pool of hackers take the time to target your company? How would they even know about it?

And if by some strange chance a hacker did get in, so what? You might assume you could hire someone to clean up your systems. All of your employees would have to change their passwords, which would be annoying, but pretty soon it'd be back to business.

Five or 10 years ago, those assumptions would have been at least defensible, if not correct. Cyber attackers tended to be lone wolves who went after high-profile companies or government organizations. They were trying to score political points or show off their power to break in and disrupt. They weren't in business to siphon money out of digital commerce or trying to bring down governments. As they are today.

In recent years the lone wolves have banded together into syndicates that have acquired significant resources, and a lively international market for logins, passwords, medical records — pretty much any kind of confidential data — has sprung into being. Each pilfered name or number might not be worth much on its own, but a theft of millions of records can earn a hacker an enormous profit.

Many of these syndicates are sponsored by governments and have access to very, very smart people who are developing malware that doesn't even resemble the attack software of five years ago. It's now much more sophisticated, stealthier, and difficult to identify.

Some hackers pursue noneconomic goals such as crippling certain companies or governmental functions. Others are in it just for the money. They want data on credit cards, bank holdings, and investment accounts. And while you may be right that hackers wouldn't have much interest in your company per se, they're very interested in your connections.

Attackers are increasingly targeting small companies, planting malware that not only steals customer data and contact lists but also makes its way into the computer systems of other companies, such as vendors.

Hackers also might be more interested in your employees than you'd think. Are your workers relatively affluent? If so, chances are the hackers are way ahead of you and are either looking for a way into your company or are already inside, stealing employee data and passwords, which (as they well know) people tend to reuse for all their online accounts.

Your company is probably also vulnerable to being attacked through its partners. How much do you know about your vendors' or B2B customers' security capabilities? A lot of organizations enter into working agreements with other firms without auditing the partners' data protections.

It's literally true that no company is immune anymore. In a study we conducted in 2006, approximately 5% of all endpoints, such as desktops and laptops, were infected by previously undetected malware at any given time. In 2009—2010, the proportion was up to 35%. In a new study, it looks as though the figure is going to be close to 54%, and the array of infected devices is wider too, ranging from laptops to phones.

As for that assumption about the ease of cleaning up the mess and changing passwords: I wouldn't bet on it being a simple, straightforward process. Getting hacked (if you're even aware of it) is aggravating, time-consuming, and resource-draining, even if your monetary losses are insured. Your reputation with vendors and customers will suffer.

Meanwhile, the battle between hackers and organizations is continuing to evolve. It's morphing into something new all the time, and no one is sure where it's headed. Will nations develop the capacity to cripple one another, as in the nuclear era, and will they use that threat in an attempt to deter government-sponsored hacking? Quite likely. But even if the cyber version of "mutually assured destruction" comes to pass, we'll still be plagued by gangs of criminals and hacktivists — and they'll get smarter and more dangerous all the time.

Data Under Siege
An HBR Insight Center





Beware Trading Privacy for Convenience
Four Things the Private Sector Must Demand on Cyber Security
Does Your CEO Really Get Data Security?
The Companies and Countries Losing Their Data

What 10-Foot Noodles Have to Do with Competitive Advantage

"A properly integrated business model forms the essence of a company's competitive advantage," my colleague Mark Johnson advises. That quote ran through my head as I watched a young man in a track suit prance around my table twirling a 10-foot noodle.

I was in one of the Shanghai locations of a chain of hot pot restaurants called Hai Di Lao. If anything deserves to be commoditized, it would be a hot pot restaurant. The essence of the meal is cooking food yourself in close-to-boiling broth. The popularity of that cooking style in many parts of China means many nondescript restaurants compete ferociously for customers. Somehow in this crowded field, Hai Di Lao commands fierce loyalty; has expanded to 75 locations across China, Singapore, and soon the U.S.; and generates about $500 million a year in revenue.

On weekends, locals told me, the wait approaches two hours, and it's easy to see why. Going to Hai Di Lao is a unique experience from start to finish. A couple of weeks ago I went there on a Tuesday night with a client team. Even as we approached the building, wait staff ran up to us to make sure we found our way in. Once we sat down, I was given a towel to wipe down my glasses, a plastic case so my cellphone wouldn't get splattered, an apron to protect my shirt, and even plastic arm bands if I wanted to protect my sleeves (I declined).

There wasn't a wait on this mid-week night, but if we had had to, we could have played board games or gotten our nails manicured. About halfway through our meal, the noodle-swinging specialist appeared. He asked me to "help" him and my team members, and the client dutifully took pictures of me making a fool of myself before the specialist demonstrated his skills (noodle masters train for up to six months before they appear before customers).

The quality of the raw ingredients we put in our sauce seemed reasonable, and the restaurant provided a customized spicy broth and a bar where you could make your own dipping sauce out of about 30 different ingredients. But it isn't the quality of the food that makes the difference — Hai Di Lao creates value for customers by providing good enough, affordable food (our dinner for 11 in a ritzy part of Shanghai was less than $200) as part of a truly distinctive experience. That experience is what packs the house every night.

The way value is created, captured, and delivered links together smartly. Coupling a steady volume of revenue with affordable raw materials gives the business room to invest in its staff. One of the client team members explained that Hai Di Lao pays above-market wages and provides them with high-quality living accommodations, with amenities like WiFi and laundry.

It's generally hard to copy this kind of interdependent innovation. One thing can be copied easily; systems prove much more difficult. Interconnections between revenue model, cost structure, supply chain, operations, and employee selection and training typically emerge out of a fairly lengthy process of trial-and-error experimentation and are invisible from the outside. In a way, Hai Di Lao is like IKEA. That company has built its business model around providing affordable assemble-it-yourself furniture. Like Hai Di Lao, it has built an integrated, end-to-end system, featuring a unique retail store format, product selection, packaging, and supply chain. IKEA has followed the same model in essence for more than 50 years, and no one has replicated it.

To find some measure of lasting advantage in today's markets requires companies to look for non-obvious ways to innovate. Competitive advantage from devising products and services that have more features or do more things fades seemingly overnight. Companies need, instead, to be on the lookout for innovative ways to wrap services around products, deliver unique customer experiences, or devise entirely new ways to deliver value. The client team I was with was so inspired by Hai Di Lao that they used it the next day as a metaphor for a more customer-focused approach for one of the high-end medical devices in the company's portfolio of products.

I learned, when I returned to Singapore, that the first restaurant Hai Di Lao had opened here is just across the street from our offices. If you are in town, check it out. Not only will you have an enjoyable meal, but you might get inspiration for the next innovation that can transform your company.

Getting Naps Ahead of the Competition

People in every age think they're living in a time of transition (I'm sure Adam turned to Eve and said, "Darling, I think we're living in a time of transition"), but some ages really do usher in broad and deep change. Right now in American workplaces, I believe we're experiencing a transition with regard to well-being. An increasing number of employers and employees alike are acknowledging that the current model of success isn't working, and is in fact leading to burnout, stress, decreased productivity, and — an epidemic with especially personal resonance to me — sleep-deprivation.

Often, when I speak in public, my first mention of sleep elicits a bit of a laugh. But it's a knowing one, because all of us recognize on some level how sleep underpins our ability to function. And how does it in turn affect our organizations? Let me count the ways. Fatigue is the enemy of creativity and memory. It costs American businesses $63 billion a year in lost productivity. One study found that, because of its effects on decision-making and cognitive function, sleep-deprivation opens the door to unethical behavior. Another study found that sleep-deprivation is noticeably reflected in facial cues, enough so that other people are likely to register a sleep-deprived person as lacking energy and unhealthy. (Not the best face to put forward to a customer.) The worst costs arise from the fact that sleep deprivation causes safety lapses and contributes to other health issues. (For instance, the World Health Organization classifies shift work as a Class 2A carcinogen, due to the rates of breast cancer among women shift workers.)

Fortunately, many employers, in every industry imaginable, are learning to appreciate that the health of employees is directly connected to the health of the bottom line, and making concrete changes. At the Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine's Corporate Leadership Summit last month, Attacking the Sleep Conspiracy, companies like Walmart, Procter & Gamble, and Eli Lilly came together to discuss how businesses can partner with sleep experts and organizations to meet the health challenges associated with sleep problems.

Perhaps they are taking a cue from the world of sports. Olympians now get state-of-the-art nap rooms in addition to their highly monitored diets. In the NBA, stars like Steve Nash and Kobe Bryant have led the way, making pre-game naps part of their warm-up routine. Now, the NBA's deputy commissioner says, "Everyone in the league office knows not to call players at 3 pm. It's the player nap."

More conventional workplaces are catching up. Twenty-five percent of large U.S. businesses offer employees some kind of stress reduction initiative, like meditation or yoga. At The Huffington Post's office in New York, we've installed two nap rooms. At the beginning, our reporters, editors, and engineers were reluctant to use them, afraid that people might think they were shirking their duties. But it's a sign of our time of transition that, these days, our nap rooms are always booked. We have to change workplace culture so that what's stigmatized is not napping but walking around drained and exhausted.

As we approach a critical mass of awareness of the importance of sleep, we're also learning that some of our most admired historical figures have been in on the secret for a long time. So along the way to taking on the biggest challenges and seizing the greatest opportunities, let's hope the next generation of leaders will note the performance advantage enjoyed by some of history's famous nappers — from Leonardo DaVinci to Winston Churchill to John F. Kennedy.

Times of major transition are often precipitated by "perfect storms" combining powerful forces. Behind American's growing concern with well-being are at least three elements: a dysfunctional health care system, an abundance of new technology, and a new ability and desire to monitor and take control of one's own health. As this perfect storm hits the American workplace, and the movement responding to it takes hold, expect great change to happen.

A New Framework for Customer Segmentation

Her confession was blurted out in the midst of our first conversation about the new digital marketing strategy which we would eventually advise them on: "You know, I don't think I believe in segmentation anymore." She said it fast and softly, almost in hope that the sounds around us would make it inaudible. But we did hear it, and responded, "Well, we don't either."

For us, this exchange was the culmination of a reflection that had started in the classroom and in client engagements, where we were finding an increasing disconnect between telling people about segmentation, targeting and positioning on the one hand, and about the increasing shift of control from brands to consumers, on the other. Clients and students questioned it increasingly: here we were, advocating a rigid methodology that carves out the market because "we can't be all things to all people," while preaching the gospel of co-creation at firms, such as Lego and Starbucks, that enter into a dialogue with their customers, giving them more access, sharing risk, and advocating transparency (see Prahalad & Ramaswamy's book The Future of Competition).

In one presentation, we were exuberant about Big Data and Little Data, and in the next, speaking what seemed to be 1960's voodoo psychographic language. To resolve these contradictions, we had begun pleading with students and clients to look for "jobs to be done." The approach echoes Ted Levitt's famous comment about selling ¼ inch holes rather than ¼ inch electric drills, and advocates a mindset shift away from selling products to "doing jobs" that solve customers' problems. In Clay Christensen's words, customers "hire" products or other solutions because they have a specific job to fulfil, not because they belong to a certain segment.

Once the taboo was lifted in our minds and in our conversation, our client, a senior marketing executive in the telco sector, with decades of operational experience, explained that in some of the countries she managed, her marketing teams were simply shelving the results of the segmentations they felt obligated to perform out of routine, or because they felt it was expected of them as serious marketers. They just ignored them. In others, marketers were still adamant that segmentation was the only way to go, but couldn't explain its benefits. Voodoo indeed.

We agreed to work on a new kind of segmentation based the combinations of jobs that customers need to get done. Here's how the "jobs done" segmentation works:

Step #1: Identify the contexts in which customers are using the company's products. Examples of such jobs in the mobile telco realm might include: "being in touch with family and friends while roaming,""choosing the best entertainment and dining opportunities on the go over the weekend" and "becoming more confident and secure in the use of a smartphone." A mobile service provider using multiple research techniques might find that there are fifty or more jobs to be done across their customer base. One person might typically get several jobs done by a given provider or brand.

Step #2: Combine information about transactions and customer behaviour in the contexts to describe each of the jobs to be done. For our weekend entertainment example, we would look for a combination of weekend searches for entertainment information, searches for local restaurants, movie reviews and social behaviour such as tweets about movies, concerts or restaurants. The "becoming confident and secure" job might use data from call centre interactions and detect unused features on a new smartphone. The actual relevant data for each of the "jobs to be done" is selected during the initial research as a function of the different contexts to be explored and the data available. This is very different from traditional behavioral segmentation which focuses on a wide set of individual variables such as the percentage of voice calls. Here we need a holistic view of the data required to characterize a context.

Step #3: Map individual customers to jobs, using the data. Each customer would be scored according to the relevance for him or herself of each of the jobs done. A specific customer may need 20% of the entertainment job, 2% of the confidence job and 40% of the being-in-touch job. The customer profiles would be spread across all jobs. From there it's a simple step to cluster customers on their mix of jobs to be done rather than on their "raw" behaviour, demographics or attitudes. For each segment, there may be only three or four jobs to be done that are crucial. This then allows the development of specific solutions for each segment.

Setting the job done framework as a basis for customer segmentation allows us to use all the relevant data for customers in a meaningful and structured fashion. Firms can see how customers are hiring solutions for the jobs important to their lives and observe customers in the action of getting the job done (or in some cases, not getting it done). As brands access unprecedented amounts of data about consumers' activities and are able to use them more efficiently and productively, they find broad patterns and trends and can indeed get better at detecting "the person behind the data" and the jobs that person needs done. Another element of relevance for customers is that they now expect that the data which they are implicitly sharing with brands will result in a positive impact on their own personal experience rather than in lumping them into new, irrelevant buckets.

Peter Drucker once said, "The customer rarely buys what the business thinks it sells him." The problem is we don't know what kinds of jobs customers are going to need done unless we follow each customer's journey. Big Data now lets us observe that journey. This type of of segmentation is more important than ever as technologically empowered customers have more choice and the ability to craft their own solutions. It represents the new job to be done for us all of us in marketing.

Your Company Doesn't Need a Women's Network

Another women's conference finds another predominantly female group of HR Directors seeking to improve the gender balance in their firms. In reality, women are working far too hard at an issue actually beyond their power to solve. Corporate leaders must recognize that additional women-dominated efforts are not the way to get companies to take the gender issue seriously. Rather, the solution requires action by those in leadership positions, still frustratingly rare, as hundreds of women at the recent JUMP Conference in Paris acknowledged.

How much longer must we witness the following scenario repeat itself?

A group of men who decide (or are told by government) that they need more women in their teams turn to the few women in senior roles and task them with finding a solution. The women, delighted with this glimmer of interest in their fate, duly throw themselves (in their free time, on top of their day jobs) into launching usually unfunded corporate women's networks and draft a business case on the corporate advantages of gender balance. A senior woman is put in charge and sent to every external conference as a corporate representative. This results in a women's conference with lots of motivational speakers and a few male 'champions' to encourage the girls. Sound familiar?

At first, everyone is happy. The women are delighted to have some time to themselves. As one senior woman in a Magic Circle law firm told me, "It's the only place where we can, just momentarily, be ourselves." The men are delighted that they are 'doing something' for women.

But after a few years, the ladies grow embittered, pointing out how little progress has been made in the actual balance of leadership. The gentlemen reaffirm that, despite 'all that they have done for women', the ladies still aren't able to make it.

This sidesteps the real issue: that the men currently in power may not actually have the skills and knowledge to effectively manage across genders (not to mention across nationalities, the other global elephant in the room). Women's networks and activities end up as politically savvy deflectors for blame. At the JUMP Conference, the lead on Accenture's global women's networks had the courage to agree with me that women's networks were used more to placate women than to promote them.

This was also the consensus view of my three male co-panelists. There was vociferous agreement that until today's male-dominated and masculine-normed leadership teams decide to proactively change the balance by pulling women into power, most corporate women's networks will remain nice places to hang out — and a noose for the gender-balance effort to hang itself on.

Different results require different actions:

1. Use existing women's networks to lobby for real change. Get each woman in the network to sign a petition requesting that the Executive Team accept accountability for gender balance - with targets, KPIs and a budget, like any other business initiative. Evaluate managers on their performance in building more balanced teams. (So, for example, at Facebook, Sandberg wouldn't be tasking women to 'lean in', but rather evaluating the majority of men on their ability to promote balanced teams. The focus should be on the management skills of developing balance, not on the candidates in an unconsciously biased system).

2. Redefine women's networks as 'balance networks' that include both men and women. Their goal becomes skill- and bridge-building around gender understanding rather than segregation. HSBC bank in London was converted at its first meeting. Their 'Balance network' inclusively involves 100% of employees in learning about the differences between male and female employees, customers and careers.

3. Get men to lead the charge, as some are starting to sound ready. Identify male leaders brave enough to confront other men with the need for balance - and perceptive enough to understand the skills necessary to do so. Some of them are even starting to go public, like Warren Buffett, John Chambers at CISCO or Paul Polman at Unilever.

I'm not against women's networks per se. In fact, I founded one of Europe's largest. External women's networks serve many vital purposes including lobbying, information sharing, education, and mentoring. It's just that internally, they inadvertently (or manipulatively, depending on the company) marginalize women into a separate group from the one currently in power. And keep them there.

Good News Boosts the CEO's Pay; Bad News Has No Effect

If shareholders think a CEO has done something good to boost profits, they reward the boss with a pay increase amounting to 48.9% (on average) of the perceived contribution to higher profits. But when the CEO is seen as causing a profit decline, there's a zero effect on his or her pay, Lucian A. Taylor of The Wharton School reports from his study of more than 4,500 chief executives. This "downward rigidity" of CEO pay is pervasive in companies, whether their governance is good or bad. CEOs are in effect insured against bad news about their abilities, Taylor says.