Marina Gorbis's Blog, page 1598

What Kind of Innovative Does Apple Have to Be?

Who's the target audience for the new iTunes Radio? Me. My family and I have a bunch of Apple devices, a WiFi network built around an Apple Time Machine, and not enough technological savvy (or time) to figure out workarounds. I signed up for Spotify a while ago, and like it. But I can't figure out how to get it to play on the multiple speakers hooked up to my WiFi network, so I imagine that when Apple's alternative is rolled out this fall I'll immediately start using it instead. I might even pay extra for the ad-free version.

So is iTunes Radio an innovation? Of course not: It's a Rhapsody/Pandora/Spotify copycat. But it's an improvement that will keep lots of affluent customers who don't want to hassle with technical stuff but do want to stream music on iTunes wrapped in Apple's cold yet comforting embrace.

Other new features announced at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference Monday, such as the iOS 7 and Mavericks operating systems, had a bit more actual newness to them. Waxing incomprehensibly poetic about iOS 7, John Gruber described it as "three dimensional not just visually but logically. It uses translucency not to show off, but to provide you with a sense of place." Sounds great, I guess, and probably even innovative.

The subject of whether Apple is still innovative has become an extremely touchy one over the past year. Partisans of rival mobile operating system Android, along with skeptical Wall Streeters, have been raising questions about the company's ability to keep innovating in the post Steve Jobs era. Apple fans of course bristle at these suggestions. So do Apple executives. "Can't innovate anymore, my ass," senior VP of product marketing Phil Schiller declared Monday after unveiling Apple's new Mac Pro.

The cylindrical black desktop is very cool-looking. But it's the latest iteration of a high-end niche product that Apple has been selling for years. It is a textbook example of what Clayton Christensen dubs a sustaining innovation, a product aimed at existing customers that improves on what went before it and is able to demand a premium price. Except for a few dark years in the mid-1990s, Apple has always been very good at sustaining innovation. The key to its phenomenal success over the past decade, though, has been — to use Christensen's terminology again — disruptive innovation. The iPod/iTunes combo, the iPhone, and the iPad all disrupted and redefined markets, and in the case of the iPhone and iPad created entire new ones.

The sustaining/disruptive dichotomy doesn't describe everything important about innovation. It's probably overused and certainly gets misused a lot. But it so perfectly fits the debate over Apple's innovation quandary that it's a little strange it doesn't come up more often in this context. As it is, Apple's critics and partisans mostly talk past each other. The former are bemoaning the lack of disruptive innovations; the latter are celebrating the steady flow of sustaining ones. To quote one Apple fan, Mike Elgan, writing on Cult of Mac:

In the two year period after the iPod, iPhone, iPad or whatever ships, everyone says Apple is innovative. In the years of iteratively perfecting the vision, everybody says Apple is not innovative. Then Apple comes out with the next market-creating product, and then they're innovative again.

But it's the "or whatever" that everybody's wondering about. It's been three years since the iPad was unveiled. Speculation about where Apple's next big move will be have centered around watches and TVs. It's hard to imagine either having the impact of the iPhone or iPad — but then most people had trouble envisioning at first how successful the iPhone or iPad would be. In 2007, Christensen called the iPhone "a sustaining innovation relative to Nokia" and predicted that it would flop.

Until Apple comes out with its next big new disruptive thing, and it succeeds, the "Apple can't innovate anymore" meme will live on, whatever Phil Schiller's ass thinks. The harder question to answer is whether Apple can remain successful and keep growing without another disruptive innovation. Obviously, if some other company disrupts it, it won't. The big threat at the moment is clearly Google's Android operating system, which undercuts Apple in price and seems to fit in with another Christensen framework that says that technology products inevitably evolve from integrated and closed to modular and open.

But while Android has rocketed past the iPhone in smartphone market share, its progress seems to have stalled recently while the iPhone marches on. We may not have reached the point yet where modular trumps integrated in smartphones and tablets; sustaining innovations may sustain Apple's fortunes for quite a few years more. They won't create new fortunes, though. It takes a different kind of innovation to do that.

The One-Minute Trick to Negotiating Like a Boss

Life is full of negotiations, big and small. We negotiate for raises, we negotiate with clients and providers over prices, and we negotiate for more staff, the best projects, and flex time. (Then we go home and negotiate with our kids about how old you have to be to get your own smartphone.)

To be successful, you really need to know how to negotiate well. But the truth is, this particular skill doesn't come naturally to many people. This is because a negotiation is an experience that is rife with conflicting motivations. When you haggle with another party over price, you need to somehow reconcile your desire to pay (or be paid) your target amount with your fear that if you push too hard, the negotiation may break down. You might end up empty-handed, humiliated, or out of a job. Negotiations are always gambles, and there is always risk.

Who Keeps Their Eyes on The Prize?

One quality that great negotiators possess is the ability to stay focused on their ideal target, despite the risks they are facing. As research conducted by Columbia's Adam Galinsky and his collegues shows, those most able to do it have what's called a promotion focus.

Promotion-focused people think about their goals as opportunities to gain — to advance or achieve, to end up better off than they are now. Whenever we think about our goals in terms of potential gains, we automatically (often without realizing it) become more comfortable with risk and less sensitive to concerns about what could go wrong. Prevention-focused people, on the other hand, think about their goals in terms of what they could lose if they don't succeed — they want to stay safe and keep things running smoothly. Consequently, when we are prevention-focused, we become much more conservative and risk-averse.

As Tory Higgins and I describe in Focus and in our recent HBR article, these different ways of looking at the same goal impact everything about us — our strengths and weaknesses, the strategies we use, and what motivates us. When the goal in question is to pay the lowest price or to get the biggest raise, our focus has profound effects on the way we negotiate.

In one of Galinsky's studies, MBA students performed the role of a job recruiter, whose goal was to hire a desired candidate (played by another MBA student) while paying the lowest possible signing bonus. Before beginning the negotiation, the recruiters completed an assessment of their dominant focus. (Want to try it? You can here.) The researchers found that the more promotion-focused a recruiter was, the less money they ended up doling out in the final agreement. Promotion focus and money paid were correlated an impressive -0.40.

Why were they so successful? Galinsky found that more promotion-focused a recruiter was, the more likely they were to report having kept their target price in mind throughout the negotiation. A prevention focus, on the other hand, leads to too much worrying about a negotiation failure or impasse, leaving the recruiter more susceptible to less advantageous agreements.

The Bold Opener

A second essential in negotiation is a strong opening bid, since that bid is the jumping off point as well as the frame of reference for the negotiation that follows. You are never going to end up paying less than your initial offer when purchasing a car or making a bigger salary than you asked for when starting your new job. But a strong opening bid takes a certain amount of confidence — and promotion focus helps us achieve this.

In a second study, Galinksy and his colleagues divided 54 MBA students into pairs and asked them to take part in a mock negotiation involving the sale of a pharmaceutical plant. Both the "seller" and "buyer" were given detailed information about the circumstances of the sale, including the fact that the "bargaining zone" would range from $17-25 million dollars.

The researchers then manipulated the focus of the buyers to be either promotion or prevention (I'll explain how you do that later). The negotiation then began with an opening bid from the buyer. Promotion-focused buyers opened with a bid an average of nearly $4 million dollars less than prevention-focused buyers. They were willing to take the greater risk and bid aggressively low, which ultimately paid off in a big way. In the end, promotion buyers purchased the plant for an average of $21.24 million, while prevention buyers paid $24.07 million.

This is one of those things that is worth taking a moment to think about — two negotiators, each armed with identical information, facing similar opponents, and yet one overpays by nearly $4 million dollars. The only difference was that one negotiator was thinking about all that he could gain, while the other focused too much on what he had to lose.

Making The Pie Bigger For Everyone

Promotion focus helps you get a bigger piece of the pie than your opponent. But of course, not every negotiation has to have a winner and a loser. In multiple issue negotiations, there is the possibility of outcomes that are beneficial to both parties, because each party may not prioritize every issue the same way. By yielding on lower priority issues, both parties can reach compromises that get them what they want most - a solution that, as Galinsky and colleagues put it "expands the pie."

Who is most likely to find these optimally beneficial solutions? It probably won't surprise you to learn that when the researchers placed both parties in a multiple issue negotiation in a promotion focus, they reached the maximally efficient outcome 79% of the time (compared to only 65% of the time when they were prevention-focused).

How You Can Become More Promotion-Focused

Even if you are naturally prevention-focused or if you tend to become prevention-focused when faced with the uncertainties of negotiation, you can become promotion-focused when you need to be. All you need to do is take a minute or two to focus only on what you have to gain and what you hope to achieve and banish all thoughts of what you might lose.

For example, to put his buyers in a promotion focus, Galinsky simply asked them the following :

Please take a couple of minutes to think about the aspirations you have in a negotiation. What are the negotiation behaviors and outcomes you hope to achieve during a negotiation? How you could promote these behaviors and outcomes?

It's really as simple as that. When you are preparing for your next negotiation, take a moment to list everything you hope to accomplish, and all the ways in which you will benefit if you are successful. Re-read this list just before the negotiation begins. And most importantly, shut out any thoughts about what could go wrong — just refuse to give them your attention.

With practice, this focus-training will become easier and eventually more or less automatic. Negotiating can become second nature to you if you think about your goals in the right way.

Who Owns Hackathon Inventions?

I recently served as a mentor at a hackathon and came away shaking my head. In hackathons, teams compete intensively, typically for just a day or two, to create software (and sometimes hardware) solutions. What struck me was that most of the participants — young, tech-savvy programmers, engineers, and others — seemed largely uninformed or unconcerned about intellectual property. Participants tend to come from many different organizations, and often view hackathons as recreational social events, so perhaps they can be forgiven for not focusing on IP. But the companies they come from need to pay attention — or risk losing valuable IP.

Hackathons have tremendous potential to create disruptive technologies, attract young talent, and identify leaders. Twitter and GroupMe both originated in hackathons. A savvy, forward-thinking business might therefore run its own hackathons internally. Whatever inventions come out of an internal hackathon are clearly owned by the firm and go into its win column.

But suppose those same creative, talented employees like to relax by participating in public, external hackathons. They are going to form teams with people they may have never met before, brainstorm together, generate at least a proof-of-concept prototype product, and then publically disclose it, all in the course of one weekend. The disclosure may torpedo any chance of patenting, at least outside the US, whatever they invent. Short of that, it may be unclear who contributed what, and who has proper claim to the invention.

So in addition to, or in lieu of, running internal hackathons, a savvy business will take a proactive approach to its employees' participation in external hackathons.

One option is simply to prohibit employees from participating in external hackathons. This approach probably makes the most sense for certain types of businesses, such as those concerned with software development. But for many businesses the danger of such a strict policy is that it can alienate talented employees interested in participating in hackathons on their own time.

An alternative is to be proactive and reasonably liberal about employees' participation in external hackthons while still managing potential IP risks and opportunities of the business. For example:

Prior to participation



Review employment agreements to be sure they include confidentiality and post-employment non-compete provisions that would extend to hackathon participation, as well as an obligation to assign inventions to the firm;

Make clear that the firm has a right to know or be informed in advance of participation in any external hackathon, including identities of the organizer and sponsor of the hackathon, and its official rules;

Offer or require training by IP counsel concerning the IP risks associated with public disclosure. For example, IP counsel can advise participants regarding the absolute novelty requirement for patentability outside the US, whereby certain types of public disclosure made prior to filing for patent protection preclude entitlement to patent protection in those countries;

Determine whether the hackathon's focus is likely to be related, possibly related, or unrelated to the firm's business interests, and limit participation to hackathons in the "likely to be unrelated" category; and

Determine if the hackathon organizer and/or sponsor has expressly disavowed any claim to ownership of, and any compulsory license to, inventions made in the course of the hackathon. If not, consider barring participation.

Following participation



Review whether the new technology is in fact related, possibly related, or unrelated to business interests;

For new technology that is deemed to be related or possibly related to the firm's business interests, IP counsel should record the date, mode, and content of any public disclosure, as well as the identities, affiliations, and intellectual contributions of each of the team members. This may be very difficult to accomplish if the participant was not trained and engaged to gather this information; and

Consider further development and/or filing for patent protection; or consider making formal release to the participant of any IP interests the firm may have in the invention. This is the point at which issues of ownership and control of new IP get really interesting, for example when co-inventors have different affiliations and obligations. Firms will have to approach further development and IP protection strategically. The firm may not want to disclose its interest in the technology to another party; it may then seek to design around or improve upon the initial invention so that it can take full or effective control of the IP. Alternatively, it may be necessary to investigate inventorship and obligations of co-inventors outside the firm. Such investigation will likely signal to outside co-inventors, and the firms to which they may be obligated to assign their inventions, that the firm views the technology as valuable. There may be paths forward to collaborate, such as a cross-licensing agreement or joint research/development agreement, or a real party in interest (outside co-inventor or assignee) may choose to let another such party take the lead in investment of energy and resources. In yet another scenario, a real party in interest may be unwilling or unable to cooperate, thereby complicating protection of IP. A formal release of interest by the firm to the participant may seem distasteful, but it may be beneficial to the firm-participant relationship, and such release will, of course, be subject to employment agreement provisions alluded to above.

Internal hackathons may be one way to focus and exploit, in a highly productive way, the phenomenon of "stealth innovation" — in which employees develop solutions to problems outside of formal channels. See the HBR blogs "The Case for Stealth Innovation" and "Stealth Innovation Is Not a Solution." This approach is attractive and rewarding for both the organization and its innovator employees. The message of internal hackathons is: We're interested in what you are thinking and we value your creative drive.

The challenge is to maintain such goodwill when it comes to managing participation in external hackathons. Whereas internal hackathons may generate a credit in goodwill for employees who are forbidden to participate in outside hackathons, if internal hackathons are not feasible, then a well-thought-out and well-communicated hackathon policy is crucial to managing corporate intellectual property interests and employee relations.

Women Say Yes to Advancement but No to the C-Suite

Although about the same proportion of midlevel female and male managers say they'd like to advance to higher levels in their companies (69% and 74%, respectively), only 18% of women say they'd become C-level leaders "if anything were possible." That's just half the proportion of men, according to a McKinsey study of 60 leading companies. Numerous women said they were put off by the corporate politics of the C-suite.

Why Your CEO Is a Security Risk

Don't underestimate your cyberattacker. He's patient and meticulous, adept at targeting the weakest link in your network's security: Your organization's employees. He analyzes his targets in great detail and probably knows your employees better than you do. He studies them on social-networking sites to understand what they care about, what they respond to, how they behave, where they went to school, who their friends are, where they live, and what their hobbies are.

Hackers have proven themselves to be astute "social engineers," to use the creepily euphemistic term that's current in the world of data security. They understand that if they can create some sort of emotional trigger and deliver it in the form of an email message, people will pull it.

"There was an error in your W2," a message might say. Click. "We're migrating our payroll system — follow this link." Click. They prey on people's undying interest in anything that appears to promise a reward or that might cost them money, and they're practiced at using an authoritative tone that seems to insist on compliance.

And, of course, once someone clicks, or opens the file attached to the email, the hacker is in. These links and files appear innocuous, but they're often laden with malware that compromises your computers and provides hackers a crucial foothold in your organization's network.

I've found that in simulations of such attacks, on average, 58% of people will click an email hyperlink that could have led to a malware infection. Typically, these are people who have been through years of conventional security-awareness programs that have included poster campaigns, mandatory annual computer-based training, and brown-bag sessions on topics such as how to choose a strong password.

The dismal figures on user naiveté have led a lot of security professionals to give up on the human factor and focus instead on creating increasingly sophisticated detection systems. But the human factor remains critical for stopping attacks. A report recently published by security company Trend Micro indicates that 91% of all cyber attacks start with a targeted phishing email.

Providing users with more and better information about the risks is an obvious way to address the problem, but too much of that information goes to waste. At an investment firm I'm familiar with, the security team sends out a monthly newsletter addressing multiple security topics, but one employee got so sick of the messages she set up an automated rule to route them to her junk folder. Her thinking was: This is IT's problem; why should I have to read all that?

People can be taught to fly fighter jets and perform brain surgery. Surely they can be taught to recognize and report suspicious emails. But how can a company overcome the not-my-problem mind-set?

There's a lot to be learned from educators and marketing people. Training should be bite-sized, focused on the most relevant issues, and based on immersion in experiences. Traditional methods like newsletters and PowerPoint presentations are too passive. In today's world, where most of us unknowingly suffer from some degree of ADD, training needs to be more engaging. One approach that has worked really well is simulating attacks against employees and, at just the moment when they "fall prey," presenting a short training module. Other suggestions: Don't harp on people's bad behavior. Instead, be entertaining, make sure your message is perceived as relevant to the audience, and reinforce positive behaviors. Use case studies and anecdotes to tell about break-ins and discuss what could have been done to prevent them. And, of course, measure the outcomes.

Teaching executives can be particularly tricky. It's often a given that they don't have time to participate in security training. One technique that works is telling executives that you want them to see what the rank-and-file are going to experience in the training. Show them what happens when they click on a link in a phishing email, and then discuss the consequences.

Training is particularly important for executives, because they represent a vulnerability in the company's defenses. For one thing, their high-profile positions make it easy for hackers to dig up a lot of information about their activities and interests, and that data can be used to craft fake messages. For another, they're always hurrying through their inboxes; if they see a message that contains an emotional trigger, such as "Company XYZ is filing a lawsuit against your company. Please find attached the details," they'll click. For another, because they so often exclude themselves from security training, they may lack a basic understanding of threats.

With immersive training, companies can reduce average employee susceptibility to targeted attacks to below 10%. Not only are trained employees better at avoiding the traps of phishing, but they can be your eyes and ears too, alerting relevant members of the organization's security teams to attempted break-ins.

Still, you always have to think about the timing of any training: How long will new hires be on the staff before they're taught to avoid clicking the wrong links and opening potentially dangerous attachments?

And you have to be aware of changes in the threats. On the near horizon are attacks that employ "conversational phishing," in which a very-real-sounding but computer-generated conversation lulls you into thinking you're interacting with someone you know. You'll get an email from an address you recognize, saying, simply, "Great talking with you." A few hours later, you'll get another, saying something equally innocuous. Pretty soon you'll get one with a link.

Click.

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

The Problem Is the Oversight, Not the NSA's Data Gathering

So now it has been revealed: the U.S. National Security Agency may know as much about you as Google does.

Google (and Facebook, and other Internet companies) use this information to better target ads and services. The NSA is out to find people on the verge of doing bad things.

That private companies and governments are doing this shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This is the promise of big data, after all. To cite two authorities:

We can measure and therefore manage more precisely than ever before. We can make better predictions and smarter decisions. We can target more-effective interventions, and can do so in areas that so far have been dominated by gut and intuition rather than by data and rigor.

Yes, the availability of all this data about how we communicate, what we buy, and how we do our jobs may feel a little disconcerting, or creepy. But it also delivers all sorts of good things: excellent free e-mail and document-storage services; new ways to connect to people and find products we might want; better-managed companies; a stronger economy. And yeah, maybe it helps catch a terrorist here or there.

The issue really isn't whether companies or governments should partake of these data riches — of course they should. As pundit David Frum put it on Twitter today, "An advanced society is vulnerable to terrorist attack in many ways. Why throw away its technological advantage?"

What is an issue is how the data is gathered and used. What are the rules of the game for the big data revolution?

On the private-enterprise side, the reality is that there aren't any clear rules yet. Companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple keep adjusting their practices in ways that are mostly opaque to users. There's a movement to rein these companies in while retaining the benefits of big data by shifting the ownership of data to individuals and the management of it to a new set of "vendor relationship" service providers. The Obama administration has been pushing a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights," and others urge even stronger protections. But the momentum of the current company-dominated approach is strong.

When it comes to government, there actually are rules and procedures in the U.S. for determining what sort of surveillance is permissible. The problem is that the structure set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is so shrouded in secrecy that it's pretty much impossible for anyone outside the security establishment to monitor what's being done. Security insider Edward Snowden decided to leak details of the NSA's operations in part because he didn't think the rules and procedures were strong enough. "The only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state [is] policy," he told The Guardian. "Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather than a stipulation of law." Policies can change without notice, Snowden continued, leading to the potential for "turnkey tyranny."

That's meant to be alarming, and it is alarming. If Snowden's revelations lead to a real debate over how the U.S. security state is governed, that'll be great. But outrage over the NSA's surveillance programs isn't going to stop the exploding availability of data about our lives — and it probably shouldn't.

How to Reduce 'Infant Entrepreneur Mortality'

Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, intellectuals have had to ask themselves, 'Does Capitalism Still Work?'

I have explored this question for several years now, beginning with a seminal column I wrote for Forbes: Capitalism's Fundamental Flaw. Two particular problems stand out. First, Capitalism has been hijacked by speculators. Second, the system enables amassing wealth at the tip of the pyramid, leaving most of society high and dry. Both problems have resulted in a highly unstable, volatile world order that jitters and shocks markets periodically, leaving financial carnage and mass scale human suffering.

So what is the solution? Can the ideals of democracy and capitalism be combined to establish a more robust, stable system?

I believe so. Here's how.

We need to use the fundamental principle of capitalism — the creation of value that people are willing to pay for — and apply it to the middle of the pyramid on a global scale. In other words, we need large numbers of entrepreneurs who are willing and able to build products and offer services that address demand from certain specific segments of customers. We need to teach them how to build businesses that can become sustainable — profitable — and create jobs. We need to also teach them to grow by applying the same kinds of methodology and discipline that, traditionally, a venture-funded company may use.

Everybody talks about the role small businesses play in growing economies and creating jobs. However, as it stands, in America alone, 600,000 businesses die in the vine every year. This colossal infant entrepreneur mortality is a product of colossal levels of ignorance about how to build and sustain businesses.

I have studied some of the reasons behind this mortality.

One reason is that entrepreneurs have been fed a myth that entrepreneurship equals venture capital. The media, business schools, incubators — every part of the eco-system that is supposed to teach good business practices — reinforces this myth.

The reality is that over 99% of entrepreneurs who go out to seek financing get rejected.

There are two primary reasons behind this phenomenon. One, most business opportunities seeking venture capital are too small, and too slow growth to fit the venture model. The second, entrepreneurs often go to VCs too soon, without doing adequate homework.

There is actually a method to the madness of entrepreneurship. And while the 'character traits' that support entrepreneurship — courage, tolerance for risk, resilience, persistence —

cannot be taught, the method of building businesses can and should be taught.

In fact, it should be taught not just at elite institutions, but at every level of society, en masse.

If we can democratize the education and incubation of entrepreneurs on a global scale, I believe that it would not only check the infant entrepreneur mortality, it would create a much more stable economic system.

Why? Because this middle of the pyramid — large numbers of small and medium businesses — is outside the reach of the speculators. If they produce something of value that their customers want, they can build stable businesses. They may not grow 300% a year. They may never become billion dollar enterprises.

That's okay.

Too much energy in the business world today is being spent on high-growth businesses that go after very large business opportunities. All of the startup incubation eco-system of the world focuses on the venture-fundable businesses only. As a result, less than 1% of the world's entrepreneurs are able to access high caliber incubation support.

My thesis is that the other 99% entrepreneurs hold the key to Capitalism 2.0: a system of distributed, democratic capitalism. Still focused on creating value, generating wealth, creating jobs, but not so focused on speculation.

Mercantile capitalism has hit its limits. Democratic, distributed capitalism will allow the pendulum to swing back and hand power back to the value creators.

The good news is that in this era of high bandwidth connectivity, most parts of the world can access online learning, and use online channels to build businesses. Let's say, we digitally teach and incubate millions of online businesses over the next few decades.

We teach them fundamentals like Entrepreneurship = Customers + Revenues. Financing is optional. Exit is optional.

From Africa, to Indonesia, to Colombia to Maine, generations of entrepreneurs proliferate. They all are given the opportunity to access certain methodology and knowledge.

What do you think will happen?

Infant entrepreneur mortality will drop. Larger number of entrepreneurs will learn how to grow their businesses. An entrepreneur who would have otherwise done $1 million a year, with proper support, will perhaps do $5 million a year.

And quite possibly, larger numbers of entrepreneurs would qualify for venture capital because they would not go too soon to seek capital. They would go only when they are ready, when their ideas are validated, when investors are likely to invest in them.

A more robust pipeline of fundable businesses will develop. These, then, can attract capital and grow faster.

Seven Questions to Ask Your Data Geeks

Using data to manage is nothing new. But using big data to manage IS new, offering unprecedented challenges, opportunity, and risk. Senior executives need to learn and learn quickly. They must be prepared to ask penetrating questions when their data scientists bring them a new idea. Those who ask the following questions will be better prepared to both exploit the valuable insights and avoid the disasters that can arise from big — but bad — data.

When your data scientists bring you an idea, ask them the following:

1. What problem are you trying to solve? It is far too easy for data scientists (and others for that matter) to go on extended "fishing expeditions," seeking "interesting insights" that aren't tethered to the business. While a certain amount of exploration is healthy, most innovation is of the small-scale, one improvement at a time, variety — even with data. Encourage your data scientists to focus initially on known issues and opportunities, as well as more tangible insights. As confidence grows, your data scientists should be less restrained. And you should develop a keen eye for the difference between "exploring a difficult path" and "wallowing around."

2. Do you have a deep understanding of what the data really mean? Too often people gather data without complete understanding of the wider context in which the data were created, and misunderstandings find ways to hide themselves until it is too late. All data, even well-known quantities like "force" are subtle and nuanced. NASA (which truly has "Rocket Scientists") crashed a Mars lander because one team used the English measurement "foot pounds " and another used the Metric measurement "Newtons." The potential for such problems only grows the less familiar the data — especially through social media, automatic measurement devices, etc. — and the more intermediaries that touch the data.

3. Should we trust the data? Untrustworthy, inaccurate data is all too common. Just as a car can be no better than its parts, so too analytics can be no better than the data. Some data is inherently inaccurate (GDP forecasts); other data becomes inaccurate through processing errors. All too often, data collection is just not up to snuff. For example, far too many credit reports contain inaccuracies. Unless there is a solid quality program in place, expect the data to be poor!

4. Are there "big factors," preconceived notions, hidden assumptions, or conflicting data that could compromise your analyses? There is a lot going on here. First, it's natural to expect a return from our investment in data and analytics, but there's a sneaky side effect. People will "find" what they think you want. Saying upfront that you expect a 10% uptick in revenue can cause people to find a short-term 10% growth that's not there for the long-term, to be so busy looking for the 10% that they'll miss a potential 100% gain, or miss negative correlations entirely.

Second, advanced data analytics involves considerable judgment. Data scientists may have included some data sets and excluded others, from their analyses. You need to make sure they've not done so in unfair ways. The clarity and completeness of the answer correlates with the weight you should give to their conclusions.

Third, analytics is essentially about developing a deeper understanding of how the world works. False assumptions are crippling. For example, the assumption that home prices were uncorrelated across markets was a major contributor to the financial crisis.

5. Will your conclusions stand up to the scrutiny of our markets, moderately changing conditions, and a "worst-case scenario?" Don't confuse data science with classical physics. Verifying your conclusions is not as simple as repeatedly dropping uneven weights from a tower. You want your data scientists to be skeptical; to challenge each other; to test, test, and test again ; and to quantify, or at least fully describe, the uncertainty in their conclusions under normal situations and to make clear when uncertainty explodes! This is critical because your data factory will almost certainly operate outside the purview of the data scientist.

6. Who will be impacted and how? The increasing volume of data available about people makes privacy a very touchy subject — both inside and outside of your organization. The line between helpful and creepy is gray and very thin. Data scientists can produce startling insights, but they are not fully-equipped to think through the implications. It's important to ask this question not only to the data scientists you're working with, but your executives as well.

Be careful that you are not the affected party by making your operations highly sensitive to uncontrolled data. You need look no further than the NYSE 'flash crash' or the drop caused by hacked Twitter messages. Imagine what that type of error could do to your business.

7. What can I do to help? Quite obviously, there is no need to ask this question if the answers to the first six questions don't satisfy. Bear in mind here that any important discovery will have implications across the organization. We're particularly concerned about change management. All change is difficult and resistance to counterintuitive results will prove far too strong for most data scientists.

Except for the first and last questions, we are well aware that simply asking these questions will stretch most executives' thinking. But take heart — they will stretch all but the most experienced data scientists' thinking also! Demanding cogent answers will help executives and data scientists deliver real benefits from Big Data.

What "The Internship" Gets Right (and Wrong) about Mid-Career Internships

Let's establish up front that Billy and Nick, the two 40ish, out-of-work salesmen played by Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in the new movie The Internship, are unlikely to land a coveted summer spot at Google. But in Hollywood, the place where Cameron Diaz can be an orthopedic surgeon (in There's Something About Mary), anything is possible. So let's suspend disbelief (and put aside the question of whether or not it's funny) and consider what the movie gets right about midcareer internships.

College internships are well established, but the strategy of opening up internship programs to non-traditional candidates is gaining currency. It provides a cost effective and low-risk way to engage with mid-career professionals seeking to return to work. (I wrote about this trend in the November 2012 issue of HBR.) Sometimes, as in The Internship, the non-traditional candidate turns out to be the best choice.



No matter the age of the intern, internship programs give both employer and intern an opportunity to try each other out before committing. In the movie, only the best team will be offered full-time employment, giving Google a unique chance to see its future employees in action.



Despite Billy's Flashdance references, the movie underscores that the "older" generation can collaborate constructively with millennials. In fact, as the movie progresses, their differing perspectives and skills help them form an effective team, with each age group relying on the other to provide what it lacks. My own experience bears this out. When I returned to work at an investment firm at age 42, after 11 years out of the full-time workforce, I was the grandmother of the operation. Humor and a willingness to admit what I didn't understand enabled me to establish productive working relationships with my younger colleagues. They in turn would seek me out for advice that only someone "more seasoned" could offer.



Mid-career professionals returning to the workforce or transitioning, whether as interns or not, will have a better chance to succeed if they are "coachable." In the movie, Nick is initially more coachable than Billy, and he excels earlier because of it.



Mid-career professionals should not make assumptions about who may be "on their side." (Warning: Spoiler Alert.) In The Internship, the manager overseeing the internship program appears hostile to Billy and Nick until the very end, when he discloses that he cast the deciding vote to admit them. Lacking the fancy education of so many Googlers, he had prevailed through hard work and saw the same tenacity in Nick and Billy. Career transitioners and returning professionals may be surprised by who will relate to their backgrounds. The unapproachable 64-year-old senior partner may have a daughter returning to the workforce after a career break, or the 45-year-old middle manager's husband may be transitioning to a new career.



The movie caricatures middle-aged technophobes, and Billy's repeated references to being "on the line" (rather than online) are hilarious. But in fact, technological ignorance among mid-career professionals is rare today, and most understand that employers expect them to come to the table with basic technology skills in Excel, PowerPoint and Word, and some familiarity with social media. Serious candidates for employment make it a priority to update skills before applying for jobs. Yet the movie also shows Billy and Nick moving quickly up the technology learning curve, demonstrating that mid-career professionals can achieve a level of technological proficiency necessary to survive even at Google (or at least the Hollywood version).



One skill that is sometimes undervalued among younger professionals is sales. In The Internship, Billy's exceptional sales prowess saves the day for his team.

When I left the theater after seeing The Internship my initial reaction was how unrealistic it was. The idea that two watch salesmen who had recently enrolled at the University of Phoenix would even make it as far as the Skype interview for the Google internship is pretty far-fetched. And how convenient that Billy and Nick are both single with no other commitments and could relocate at a moment's notice. Yet, setting all that aside, the movie offers a number of lessons.

Will it inspire companies to hire more mid-career transitioners or returnees? Hard to say. But just maybe some employers will get the message. Maybe even Google.

Five Reasons Social Media Won't Consolidate

"I wish there was just this one-stop tool for all things social."

"It would be great if we had one tool that would do everything."

"There is no one good tool."

Talk to the head of social media at any Fortune 500 company, and you're likely to hear comments like these. It's not that social media professionals are lacking software options: on the contrary, "there are a hundred different solutions for aggregating discussion, tweets, et cetera," Miguel Moreno Toscano told me.

Toscano is marketing communications director at Coca-Cola, and he's one of half a dozen enterprise social media leaders I've spoken with in recent months, beginning with several at the annual SXSW conference. In those conversations, one concern was repeated by all: the embarrassment of riches (in terms of social media software options) has given marketing, communications and customer relations pros a major integration headache.

"We are almost having tool fatigue," said Jay Bartlett, vice president of global social marketing for Xerox. "These tools are developed in a very fragmented way; I wish there were some integration. You can see how they could work together, but they are all very niche-y."

"I'm using one tool for monitoring and listening, another for monitoring and reporting, another for engagement," said Carla Saavedra Kochalski, manager of social media and digital for Samsung Mobile USA. "Then I've got one for case management, one for content management and another one for reporting. I wish those companies would focus on making a more cohesive ecosystem."

Nor is the fragmentation problem limited to the tools: the ecosystem of social media platforms is fragmented, too, and growing more so.

"The critical mass of consumers is on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, but there is a whole other range of networks with different types of content, and it a huge challenge for brands to engage there, too." Coke's Moreno said. "The long tail of networks is starting to be very important."

"The question is, how do you let customers get the content they want from you in the place where they want it?" asked Sam Weston, vice president of communications for Huge, a digital agency. "Companies have embraced Facebook and Twitter, but now Facebook and Twitter own those relationships instead of the business itself. Now, if you want to get your post to the people who want the brand then you have to pay premiums to do it. Ideally you are able to get this content to individuals, but it's about how efficiently you can get your content to the people who follow your brand."

If companies are experiencing so much pain from the proliferation of social tools and platforms, why is there no one-stop option that can deliver the full range of functionality required? After all, we're now a full decade into the social media revolution: there's an established market for social solutions, particularly those that solve pain points for corporate CMOs.

Andy Levey, senior manager of new media and analytics at Cirque de Soleil, sees integration just over the horizon. "We're starting to see those all-in-one tools that are more encompassing," he told me. "I know that is the path we are going down."

Big players like Salesforce and Oracle are indeed beginning to roll out software tools that offer something closer to one-stop shopping. For companies that have gradually consolidated their purchases of other kinds of enterprise software needs like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and database systems it may feel intuitive to expect a similar consolidation in social media purchasing.

But there are good reasons to doubt that the proliferation of social media software and platforms will give way to integration. Among them:

Low barriers to entry: If I want to sell you my new financial software platform, I've got to dummy up some data for that demo, with enough quantity to convince you that I can support an enterprise of your magnitude. But with a social platform, I can aggregate much of your social data as easily as you can, simply by pulling in your social mentions across platforms. That makes it easy for me to show you exactly how my platform will work in tracking your social universe...and significantly reduces the competitive barriers to later entry.

Ease of migration: Barrier to migration is similarly low. Yes, there are always costs associated with changing platforms (especially in terms of the learning curve of your employees). But unlike ERP or database migration, changing social platforms often requires no data migration, but simply the effort to move a bunch of keyword searches and social network authentications.

Fragmented needs: Social media tools are fragmented in part because businesses' social media needs are fragmented. You've got marketing people trying to push out campaigns, customer relations people trying to say on top of customer issues, business analysts trying to gather appropriate metrics, human resources teams trying to recruit off of social...and that's just the tip of the social iceberg. Any integrated tool is likely to represent an imperfect compromise between these units' very different needs.

Consumer demand: You don't need your customers' buy-in to push different divisions of your company onto the same ERP system. But your customers, not your staff, decide which social networks they'll use...and you'll have to go there to meet them. So far, consumers (goaded by the tech and business press) seem prepared to embrace at least one new social platform a year (this year, it's Vine...last year, it was Pinterest). Enterprise social media managers must prepare to do the same.

"Startup" mentality: The reliable emergence of a new platform or two each year means that working in social media will continue to attract people who have not just a tolerance for novelty, but a hunger for it. These are the kind of people who will happily sign up for a dozen new social web platforms or services each month, just to see what they're about (I'll raise my hand if you will). Toscano called this a "startup mentality" — a willingness to "use a combination of tools, and use new tools as they pop up."

So for that desired "integrated solution" to take hold, it has to undertake continuous and aggressive innovation so that it can support each major new social network and compete with newly emergent social tools. Tall task, to say the least. While there will surely be enterprise clients who value the efficiencies of integration over the features offered by having just the right tool for each job, the companies and professionals who have clear and high expectations for their social media performance will continue to explore and adopt the most effective platforms and services. Since these are likely to be the companies who will be most innovative and effective in their use of social media, expect their example — including their fragmented toolkit — to be the imperfect best practice in social media.