Changing the way you change

Involving Employees in Change

2011-12-07T10:22:00.001-08:00

Organizations going through change should involve their workforce as much as possible in the process. Stryker Navigation shows how.

by Marco Nink and Klaus Welte

Source: http://gmj.gallup.com/content/150932/Involving-Employees-Change.aspx

Employee surveys have now become standard in most organizations. Yet too often, the wrong questions are asked and the wrong things are measured. To make employees feel completely involved in the organization, "satisfaction" with the workplace alone is not enough. An employee who is satisfied with his salary or the amount of annual leave is not necessarily, of his own free will, going to lend full support to his employer and his employer's goals. Satisfaction can be connected to passivity -- employees can be satisfied and yet still be indifferent.

There is more value in optimizing the work environment, thereby increasing emotional attachment -- or engagement -- to the organization by rigorously fulfilling employees' core needs and expectations. The stronger the engagement, the more likely it is that the employee will act in the interests of the employer -- and the more engaged employees there are, the more productive the organization will be. It is possible to measure the degree to which these core needs and expectations of the workplace are met.
What to ask and where to start
Building on years of research, Gallup has developed 12 items -- the Q¹² -- and employee responses to these items give information about the state of employee engagement, which in turn correlates with organizational performance. It is crucial that the results are discussed at the workgroup level as well as with the leadership and that action plans are put into place and followed through. The results act as a focus point for intense discussion within the team. (See graphic "The Employee Engagement Hierarchy.")

To ensure that the process is sustainable, the survey should be carried out regularly. Also, changes in the survey results over time need to be discussed within the team, and both action planning and follow-through must be monitored. Only when this happens will the employees feel really included and get actively involved in action planning. The results of the employee surveys can also be correlated with key performance indicators (KPIs). By combining these two types of organizational data -- the "soft" employee engagement data with the "hard" KPI data -- we can demonstrate the direct economic benefit of the actions on costs and growth.

Stryker Navigation is an example of how this can be put into practice. As a company, Stryker is a global leader in the manufacturing of navigation systems for computer-assisted surgery. Stryker's machines help doctors and surgeons perform operations more quickly, more safely, and more accurately. Development and production for global markets is done at Stryker's site in Freiburg, Germany.

Decreasing motivation rang alarm bells
When the Freiburg management team registered that the engagement of its employees was decreasing, it set alarm bells ringing, as the company was facing some difficult technical issues that needed to be resolved. It was not going to be possible to produce some important products as quickly and economically as previously thought. This lack of engagement became particularly apparent in the cooperation between teams -- for example, between the Development and Production teams. While the individual departments were performing well in their own range of tasks, they were not prepared to view the manufacture of new products as a complete process that required their collaboration.

Stryker turned to Gallup to measure the employees' engagement and to help the company develop actions for improving the situation. In addition to the Q¹² items, questions were asked about the collaboration between teams. The results were analyzed at the project team level and at the department level. The advantage of this approach is that it allows many different opinions on a project to be heard and discourages siloed thinking. The employees involved in a project can then work together to produce a list of actions, which serves to strengthen connections beyond departmental borders.

The most striking results were gathered in a presentation. Using Gallup's database comparisons and benchmarks, Stryker was able to see the areas in which the company was performing at excellence and those in which it was below average. Each team received its own scorecard, and internal benchmarks were used to show the teams how they ranked within their department as well as within the company as a whole.

How employee engagement doubled

The results of the first Stryker Navigation employee engagement survey demonstrated the potential for improvement. With 32% engaged employees, Stryker Navigation Freiburg was considerably better than the total working population of Germany at that time but was below average when compared with other organizations Gallup works with in Germany. (See "A Threat to German Growth" in the "See Also" area on this page.)

The company tries to position employees where they can best use their talents.

Most notably, the employees had rated two fundamental questions particularly low: "I know what is expected of me at work" and "I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right."

So these items became the starting points for action planning and implementation. For example, Stryker concentrated on describing more clearly what was expected of employees on individual teams and projects. The frequency of feedback discussions was also increased. And to promote the idea of project-based working, changes were made to each team's composition, structure, and where team members were seated.

These actions quickly brought about improvements. The percentage of engaged employees doubled to 64% within a year. But the management wanted to embed these changes for the long term. With this in mind, they designed the follow-through process to be highly transparent because it is important that employees see what actions should be achieved and how far they've progressed in that process.

Recipe for success: a transparent follow-through process

Since then, Stryker Navigation has conducted regular monitoring of action plans, which are discussed with the team at monthly meetings. Responsibility for achieving individual points lies not solely with the management but is deliberately shared with the employees. When compiling and implementing action plans, collaboration between technical supervisors and the human resources department is very important. Therefore the company closely links employee engagement tools to additional personal development programs. Stryker, for example, considers selecting and promoting talent to be highly important, so employees should be positioned where they can best use their talents, which is a significant factor for employee engagement.

In Stryker's opinion, the transparency, continuity, and coordination of the individual tools is key to the success of the action plans. The atmosphere in the company has changed for the better. Employees and managers feel that together they can get things moving and make improvements. Since 2004, the percentage of engaged employees has stabilized at an elevated level of 70% and had reached 73% after the survey in 2011. Stryker Navigation Freiburg is thus overall in the top 10% of companies in Gallup's database of German organizations.

Positive effect on KPIs

There has also been a change of mentality as far as collaboration within projects is concerned -- individual teams now see their colleagues from other departments as customers. They want to deliver results to them that they can work with optimally. This speeds up the development of new products for the market.

There are other indicators that confirm that Stryker Navigation has set out on the right path. In the past 10 years, the turnover of products from the Freiburg site has increased tenfold. And the quality of new products has also increased tenfold when measured against the number of repairs or customer complaints. (See graphic "Employee Engagement and Key Performance Indicators.")

Stryker now faces new challenges. It is already clear that the company is set to grow rapidly in the next few years. This also means that teams are redefining themselves and that work routines and responsibilities are changing. In collaboration with Gallup, Stryker Navigation will prepare its employees for this organizational change, with the goal of continuing to gain the workforce's commitment to Stryker and keeping turnover at a low level.
This article originally appeared in Personalwirtschaft in September 2011. Reprinted with permission.

Marco Nink is a Practice Consultant for Gallup.

Klaus Welte is Vice President and Plant Manager of Stryker Navigation in Freiburg, Germany.

How You Change Is the Change!

2011-12-07T10:18:00.001-08:00

Interesting perspective on managing lean..

Source: http://www.industryweek.com/articles/how_you_change_is_the_change_26124.aspx?ShowAll=1

Lean management is not a change methodology. It is a destination, a desired set of practices and culture. How you get there will determine the outcome.

By Lawrence M. Miller, www.ManagementMeditations.com

There are far more failures than successes as companies attempt to implement lean manufacturing or lean culture. I believe that most of those failures are the result of the absence of sound change management strategies and skills. How you change creates a set of expectations for what will follow. You create a "pull" for adoption of the change, or you struggle to "push" the string of change up hill.

Most managers and most consultants do not make the distinction between the destination and the method of travel. The destination can be defined as maximizing customer satisfaction, eliminating waste in all its forms, reducing variances or quality problems, speeding cycle times through core processes, and it can be defined as a culture of continuous improvement and empowerment. But knowing the "what" is like looking at a photo of Mr. Universe and saying, "I want to look like that!" That's easy. But, getting there is something else. Most failures are not the result of failing to know what you want to look like. Rather, they are failures in the process of change.

Here are some of the keys to successful lean implementation and culture change from my experience.

1. Ownership is 80% of success - The first rule of change management is: People will implement and make successful that for which they feel ownership.

Too often, the very people who are required to implement a change in processes or culture have it imposed upon them and do not feel that they had any say in its creation. This will almost guarantee failure. The worst way to go about change is to hire a high- priced consultant and have him or her study, write a report, make a presentation, and leave the implementation to those who struggle with the day-to-day realities of life.

Habitat for Humanity knows something about managing change. Their program of building homes for the disadvantaged is not merely about putting up structures. It is about building human capacity and human dignity. When they build a home for a family they ask the members of that family to contribute "sweat equity", their own labor to the construction of the home. This has the effect of giving the new owners a feeling of pride in "their home" that they helped to build. The probability of the family caring for and maintaining the home goes up in proportion to their sense of ownership.

Most senior managers have insufficient appreciation for the human capacity within their own people. For many years I have been facilitating internal "design teams" comprised of both first-line employees and managers who are assigned the work of redesigning their work processes and their social system or culture. These are the people who have their feet on the ground and have true knowledge of how things work in the organization. They invite in their customers and listen to their concerns. They map out the current state of the work process and identify all the variances that cause waste in the process. And, they analyze the culture, the sources of motivation and decision processes. Then, they design the future state, an "ideal state" that transforms both the work process and culture.

I can honestly say that after doing approximately 100 redesign projects it has never failed that those who design the future will develop a passionate commitment to their own design and will fight for its implementation and success. There is this commitment because it is literally "their own" design. It does not belong to a consultant or to senior management. These folks will make it work! That is 50% of success.

2. Build Competence, Don't be Consultant Dependent.

Gaining ownership leads toward the development of competence in those who will implement the new design. But the building of internal capacity must go beyond that ownership. It must develop the skills of change management and skills and tools of training and developing people to live within a lean organization.

I am not anti-consultant. After all, I are one! However, consultants are very often misused. Consulting firms are all too happy to have you dependent on their consultants, the more the merrier, for a long time. That is, after all, how they make money. But, is that in the best interest of the client?

The longer a client is dependent on a consultant the less likely it is that the consultant is transferring his or her competence to the client organization and building capacity within the client firm. I recently completed an assignment at a Merck manufacturing plant where 71 teams are implementing lean practices in every department and function and at every level of the organization. Everyone is involved. My role was to work with the senior team of the plant and to train and coach 14 internal coaches, both salaried and hourly, who serve as coaches to all of the other teams. Who learns the most in this scheme? Of course, the internal coaches who have to turn around and train all of the other teams. They now have the capacity to carry on the process indefinitely. As a team of coaches they meet and learn from each other. This internal consulting team can now learn virtually any new practice that comes along and serve as vanguard for implementation. They don't need me anymore.

3. You Won't Get It Right the First Time -- Plan for Experimentation and Iteration.

When either Honda or Toyota have designed a new car and is preparing to manufacture that car, and even though they may have the world's best manufacturing engineers, they do not assume it will all go right the first time. An auto assembly plant may produce a thousand cars a day. But, when these companies are beginning production of an entirely new car they close the plant production to zero, install the required new equipment and programs, retrain all the employees on the new car and the new jobs around its production, and then they make ONE car. They watch that car go through the production process. Inevitably, they find things that don't work as planned. They may find machines that need to be re-adjusted or re-programmed. They may find workers who have not been fully trained. They will fix these things and then build another car. It may take months to gradually build up to full production.

Perhaps your managers implementing a major change are smarter than the Honda or Toyota manufacturing engineers, but I doubt it. The idea that we are so smart that we can design something that is complex to work perfectly the first time is pure arrogance, and arrogance is the worst enemy of continuous improvement. It forces managers to try to cover mistakes, inhibits learning and creates waste.

Design the new process and the new human systems as best you can. Then implement those changes with an "attitude of science," a willingness to try things out, then make adjustments and modifications. This attitude will drive out fear, maximize learning and maximize the rate of improvement.

4. Partner with Your Customers.

It is not you against the world unless that is how you choose to write the script. I am currently leading a couple of design teams that are redesigning the core work process of a service organization. They have major problems with unhappy customers. The design team invited in the managers of those customers, the very managers who are unhappy with the service they are receiving, and asked them for help. The design team asked the customers what improvements they would like to see. They asked if they knew of any best practices that they should adopt. And they asked the customer if they would help them in their effort to design the ideal service delivery system. It works every time! I have seen this over and over again. If you ask a customer for help in developing a better way to serve them, they always agree to help! Now you have a partner in your customer.

Every interaction with a customer is a sales call. Every interaction either increases or decreases the probability of future business. Asking the customer to co-create a solution to serve them is one of the best sales calls you will ever make. You have created a new partnership, a new co-owner of the house you are building for them. They will help you make it successful.

5. Invite In the Whole-System -- Embrace the Complexity.

Every organization is a complex system, an ecology, with a variety of sub-systems (people systems, financial systems, information systems) all interacting with one another to determine the course of the whole. Just like our economy, the human body or the culture of a country, the culture and competitiveness of a company is never the result of one system standing on its own. Yet, we hire a consultant to redesign the work flow. Another to implement teams or a motivation system. While another is redesigning the flow of information and another may be redesigning the structure. It is a prescription for the creation of waste. All of these systems must be aligned to the same principles and goals. They are all interacting and interdependent. If you don't approach major change with an appreciation for this interaction and interdependence, you are programming in failure.

Charter a design team to implement lean principles through the whole system, the core work process of the organization, and the enabling or support systems. If the human resource processes are not designed to enable the work of the core work process, you have reduced the chance of success. If you have not designed the IT/IS systems to provide those who do the real work of service to customers with the information they need, you have again reduced the chance of success.

6. Get in the Boat and Row; Stop Standing at the Shore!

Be the change! If you want change in your organization, LEAD! Lead doesn't mean writing encouraging memos. Leading is not simply deciding to go, or approving a budget. Leading is leading, being out front, doing what you want others to do. Be the model!

Twenty years ago Nevius Curtis was the chairman of Delmarva Power and Light. He wanted to transform his organization into a fully empowered, high performance organization. In my first meeting with him I told him that if he really wanted to succeed, he needed to make his team "Team No. 1." He needed to have his team go through the same training, do the same things he desired of every other team in the organization. He signed up and he signed up his team. In a few years Delmarva became recognized as a model for quality management and empowerment. That effort has sustained to this day. It worked because the leader provided true leadership. He didn't stand on the shore and yell "Row" or criticize the efforts of others. He provided a model.

If you want to create genuine and lasting change you will get in the boat and pull on the oars, and you will soon find that you have an army of rowers all pulling behind you, and in the same direction!

Lawrence M. Miller has been doing organizational change consulting for 35 years, beginning with his work creating a free economy in prisons. He has worked with Honda, Shell Oil, and dozens of other corporations. He is the author of nine books, most recently Lean Culture -- The Leader's Guide. His website and blog is www.ManagementMeditations.com.

The Challenge of the Average Employee

2011-12-06T10:17:00.001-08:00

This an interesting post on how to manage the majority of our workforce... the work horse..

posted at http://blogs.hbr.org/tjan/2011/10/the-challenge-of-the-average-e.html by Anthony K. Tjan

CEO, Managing Partner and Founder of the venture capital firm Cue Ball and vice chairman of the advisory firm Parthenon.

Most businesses have a normal distribution of talent — a limited number, say top 10 percent, of high potential, rock star performers, a bottom decile of underperformers, and a thick middle of 80 percent of folks who get the day-to-day stuff done. In well-managed businesses, there are clear feedback mechanisms to ensure that the bottom of the talent pack gets managed out efficiently and objectively. While at GE, Jack Welch popularized the notion that it was good to fire the "bottom 10" of his managers every year. On the other end of the spectrum, the better companies manage the top-end of their talent pool, providing mentors to groom this group of next-generation of leaders and compensating them differentially in recognition of their superior performance.

The challenge lies in productively managing talent's fat middle. What is the right people strategy for the average employee — the stalwart who is performing well enough, but is not necessarily a standout? Here are a few of the challenges with the middle base of talent:

Almost by definition, they often get lost in the mix, lacking appropriate guidance and management attention. This creates an issue of not understanding who holds real potential to move up the talent curve with the right nurturing, versus those who have limited upward mobility, versus those who should not be at the company.
They can be a drag on those who truly are the best. While not everyone can be above average, the more mediocre talent you have in a business, the more likely it is to have a negative effect on those who can really make a difference. This creates retention and motivation issues for your higher performers. There will always be a distribution, even if it is a forced curve, of talent potential and capability in a business. But the goal should be to raise the overall average of the entire pool, and avoid letting it get pulled down.
In a similar vein, average talent can harm a firm's talent recruitment potential since those who are average tend to be more threatened by bringing in better people. The adage of "A's" attracting "A's" and "B's" attracting "C's" holds true.

So what should business builders do to better manage their talent base — especially in this middle area? Two simple ideas can help:

First, the best practice of conducting regular and specific performance feedback is critical. It is equally important to make sure that the person doing the review is capable and respected. Senior people who are responsible for managing the middle pool of talent should also be managed on their own ability to see, sift, cultivate, and retain the very best of that pool. How you grow and mentor organizational talent should be an evaluation criterion for senior managers' performance. Mentees and direct reports feel differently when they know their own managers are being evaluated (with real implications for good or bad performance) on their ability to effectively manage, mentor, and cultivate talent.
Second, at regular intervals of a person's career, there should be not just "performance reviews" but also what I call a "Fit Test Point." Too many times we see someone who can do the job, but if we are truly honest know that in the long-run they will be stuck in the middle of the organization. My sense is that companies spend more time discussing performance than they do "fit." Performance reviews are biased towards looking out for the best interests of a company — as long as someone is doing their job they have a place. A "Fit Test Point" is a tool to carefully consider the best interests of an employee. Is this person in product development really better served finding a position as an industry or market researcher, or is that analyst who can clearly make the next two rungs of the management track better served making a switch in her career now given the opportunity cost of time? We all know situations where instincts and experience alerted us that a job was not the best fit for someone, yet we let the person continue because they filled a short-term need or because we lacked the courage to have the honest "Fit Test" conversation. Consider key inflection points of one's career advancement and have the parallel conversation of performance and fit reviews.

Trying to serve everyone equally does not do anyone a service, but catering only to the top of the talent pool or overemphasizing the middle or bottom also does not work. An explicit strategy for managing each tier of talent needs to be in place. The public education system has shown that if we just settle, accept, and teach to the middle that is a formula for failure. As business leaders we should see how we can realize the full potential of each employee and help those who are not right for the business find other jobs where they can be more productive and happier.

Free tools for consultants

2011-11-09T10:20:00.000-08:00

As independent consultant we are always on the lookout of tools that help us to service our clients better... this post helps in answering some (10 tools) of my needs ... hope yours too..

Source: http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/features/guestopinions/blog/free-tools-for-consultants/?cs=46574 by Ken Hardin, Clarity Answers

Dia > The Dia diagram editor (current version, 0.97.1) is a GPL, v2 is very similar to Microsoft's standard Visio tool set. Dia supports layering, some advanced drawing methods such as Beziergon point manipulation, and AntiAliasing when you really want your output to shine. More importantly, it includes a menu of more than 30 conventional icon sets, and exports to a wide range of open and proprietary formats, including Visio XML and the LaTeX doc preparation system. Free, unlimited use.

PDF-XChange Viewer > Suggesting a free alternative to an already free product (Adobe's Reader X) may seem like a stretch, but PDF-XChange Viewer from Tracker Software is so feature-rich that Ken scores brownie points by recommending it to folks. You can actually create visible type inside a PDF with PDF-XChange Viewer, which makes filling out business docs a snap. There are also embedded screen grab tools, a slew of drawing tools (including one for "thought bubbles"), opacity controls, and a tabbed view for multiple docs. It even has built-in zip compression for sending PDFs via email. Tracker Software uses the freeware to upsell to a pro version (you still can't extract or combine files) and its development competitors to Acrobat, so you will see some menus for non-available functionality. Still, PDF-XChange Viewer is just great free software.

Express Invoice > Depending on the complexity of your business, a simple invoicing solution may be all you need to track billables without worrying about payroll or inventory. NCH Software offers a free version of its Express Invoice package for small shops with five or fewer employees (be sure to use the "Get it Free" link on the left of this page). The free version of Express Invoice is not as graphical as many of its competitors, but I've found it easy to create a simple database of customers, quotes and billable items, complete with presumptive tax rates. Minimal invoice customization is available, mostly in the form of logo insertion, and there's even a simple Web-based access to a backup of your account info.

GanttProject

There are a ton of free spreadsheet-based Gantt chart tools out there, but for Ken’s money, if the project is complex enough to merit a Gantt chart to begin with, he wants the data to be in a database, not a spreadsheet. The best free tool he has found for this joyous task is GanttProject, a GPL 2.0 freeware project. You can import resources from standard contacts, assign hard dependencies between tasks, and toggle views between Gantt and the friendlier PERT model. You can post the project to a Web server account, and most importantly, you can export to the MS Project format or CSV. A handy set of tutorials at the project's Web page can walk new users through the basics of Gantting out a project. Free, unlimited use.

Email & Calender

Recommending software from the Mozilla foundation is not exactly a bold move, but with the addition of the Lightning calendaring add-on (now in beta 1.0), Mozilla's Thunderbird 3.1 email client is now officially the best one Ken has ever used. Lightning integrates the retired Sunbird calendaring applet closely with Thunderbird, adding an Events and Tasks menu and a handy calendar sidebar to the intuitive tab-based Mozilla interface. Attachments, recurrence, event-level privacy for shared calendars – it's all there. The only drawback to Thunderbird now is that it does not play seamlessly with Microsoft’s messaging systems, but then again, what does? Ken just copies himself when using a client's Web-based Outlook account – inelegant, but it works. Free, unlimited use.

Inkscape

Ken has found that a picture is often worth at least several hundred words, and the best free tool he has found for doing mock-ups is Inkscape, an incredibly sophisticated open source vector drawing tool – so sophisticated, in fact, that you can actually buy a user's guide for it. The comparable proprietary tool is Adobe's Illustrator, but the interface most reminds Ken of the late, great FreeHand. On the most rudimentary level, you can combine simple shapes and join text to paths or shapes to spice up your PowerPoint presentations. The tool goes a lot deeper, supporting cloning of linked objects, glyphs, and of course a slew of embellishments and filters. It can import and export virtually every format (including Illustrator and Corel DRAW), and if you ever need to do a flowchart, it has a neat "connectors" function to create persistent binds as you shuffle your label boxes. It's actually way more drawing power than the typical consultant needs. Free, unlimited use.

Antivirus

Microsoft – yes, Microsoft – actually gives away a real-time AV solution that, by most accounts, is quite viable. And it's already in version 2.0.657.0. Of course, since Microsoft's operating system is constantly under attack, most folks might say it's about time Redmond protected its own turbulent ecosystem. All the expected features – real-time updates, removable drive scanning, process exclusion – are there, and Security Essentials also can be set to check for anomalous patterns. The one knock on Security Essentials tends to be resource consumption; the malware agent runs at about 65,000K on Ken’s Windows 7 laptop, but he has seen no real lags in overall system performance.

Free, unlimited use.

Screen Capture

Little things mean a lot sometimes, and DuckCapture from DuckLink Software succeeds where so many screen grabbers fail – it can catch scrolling Web pages in any browser you may be using. (Ken’s guess is that it's because it requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2010, but so be it.) The interface is very simple – captures queue up in a preview window where you can annotate them and even snap a second image for composite before saving your grab. There is a paid version of DuckCapture, but unless you want to extend it with your own scripts, there's no need – the free version is quite robust. Free version with no upsell, unlimited use.

Backup

FBackup Even in the era of "the cloud," backing up your important data to a local source (i.e., a cheap USB 2.0 hard drive) is always a good idea. Ken really likes FBackup from Softland, now in version 4.5. You can set regular backups to either zip files or true mirrors locally or on a network resource. (Actually backing up a network resource, or posting your backup remotely via FTP, requires an upgrade to the paid version.) Managing multiple backup jobs for specific tasks is a snap, and there are handy tutorials about setting up jobs for common applications, such as Outlook. Really, there's nothing to complain about with Fbackup. Free, unlimited use.

HTML Editing & Site Manager

Ken first came across Trellian WebPage when he was looking for a handy tool to do some very basic HTML content editing inside a page that was loaded with scripts. Trellian became his editor of choice because it is stable – other "free" editors tended to crash. A lot. In addition to its stability, WebPage has a built-in script editor, absolute positioning of HTML elements, embedded image editing tools, and a generally usable layout reminiscent of the Windows "ribbon" interface. And of course a built-in FTP client, etc. Trellian uses its freeware editor to upsell to SEO and keyword marketing services, and some buttons led to a sales pitch, but all the functionality you need is there for simple page/site management.

Free with some upsell, unlimited use.

http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/community/features/guestopinions/blog/free-tools-for-consultants/?cs=46574

Interesting Twist - Idolize Bill Gates, Not Steve Jobs

2011-11-09T07:38:00.000-08:00

Read this interesting post in HBR blog.. when every website, blog and news mag is talking about Steve.. this is a refreshing post

Apple is undoubtedly the gold standard of today's tech world. In fact, it's probably the gold standard of American industry at the moment. Its innovative design, user interface, and ecosystem make it a titan in any category it enters. And it's clear that Steve Jobs was the reason Apple rose to its current heights from the brink of bankruptcy. In the wake of his death, HBR espoused his greatness — something I've done as well. And he was great. Steve Jobs has likely been our generation's most important leader in the world of business. But Steve Jobs is not the most important leader from the world of business. While Jobs should be who MBAs and industrial designers try to emulate, I'm not sure he's who we should idolize. That respect should be bestowed on someone we talk less and less about, Bill Gates.

Both Jobs and Gates had immeasurable impacts on the world. Apple ushered in the era of personal computing in many respects. Microsoft's platform made it possible for a generation of computer scientists to learn and flourish. Apple seems to have perfected the art of delivering fantastic consumer products. Microsoft has worked diligently to make the enterprise more and more efficient. Regardless of which camp you fall in today, it's impossible to deny each corporation's contribution. Jobs and Gates each deeply respected each other's contributions.

But at the end of his life, Steve Jobs worried about Apple, Inc. Walter Isaacson quoted the wizard of Cupertino saying, "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands. But now it's being dismembered and destroyed. I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple." At the end of his life, Jobs saw his legacy as Apple.

Bill Gates stepped away from Microsoft in 2006 and, despite the company's growing troubles in the face of the mobile disruption, has devoted his genius to solving the world's biggest problems, despite the fact that solving those problems doesn't create profit or fame.* Gates committed his talents to eliminating diseases, increasing development standards, and generally fighting inequality.

Since 1994, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation amassed an endowment of over $31 billion in funds to fight the world's most difficult issues. But it hasn't merely accumulated funds, the foundation has already given away over $25 billion. Those aren't trivial numbers. In seventeen years, the foundation has raised and given away more than one-tenth of Apple's extraordinary market capitalization. While the developed world takes things like clean water, basic healthcare, and the availability of food for granted — there are billions of human beings that don't have such fundamental resources.

Gandhi famously said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." I don't doubt that, in recent years, both Gates and Jobs did just that. Jobs made the world more beautiful and the billion of us with resources loved him for it. Gates is making the world ideal, and the billions of us with no voice will be forever impacted.

Yesterday, I read a note Gates wrote to members of the Harvard community. It speaks for itself:

I hope you will reflect on what you've done with your talent and energy. I hope you will judge yourselves not on your professional accomplishments alone, but also on how well you work to address the world's deepest inequities, on how well you treat people a world away who have nothing in common with you but their humanity.

Those are not the words of a leader of business. Those are the words of a leader of people. Those are the words of an idol.

As much as I love Apple, Inc, I would happily give up my iPhone to put food on the plates of starving children. Steve Jobs turned his company into a decade long leader in the truly new space of mobile computing. Bill Gates decided to eliminate malaria. Who do you think we should be putting up on a pedestal for our children to emulate?

*While you might disagree with that claim, a quick reference of Google trends shows that since leaving Microsoft, Bill Gates star has dramatically faded — and in 2010 was eclipsed by that of Jobs.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/idolize_bill_gates_not_steve_j.html

Nine Things Successful People Do Differently

2011-09-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/02/nine_things_successful_people.html

Why have you been so successful in reaching some of your goals, but not others? If you aren't sure, you are far from alone in your confusion. It turns out that even brilliant, highly accomplished people are pretty lousy when it comes to understanding why they succeed or fail. The intuitive answer — that you are born predisposed to certain talents and lacking in others — is really just one small piece of the puzzle. In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.

1. Get specific. When you set yourself a goal, try to be as specific as possible. "Lose 5 pounds" is a better goal than "lose some weight," because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there. Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal. Just promising you'll "eat less" or "sleep more" is too vague — be clear and precise. "I'll be in bed by 10pm on weeknights" leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you've actually done it.

2. Seize the moment to act on your goals. Given how busy most of us are, and how many goals we are juggling at once, it's not surprising that we routinely miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice them. Did you really have no time to work out today? No chance at any point to return that phone call? Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance. Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., "If it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, I'll work out for 30 minutes before work.") Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your chances of success by roughly 300%.

3. Know exactly how far you have left to go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress — if not by others, then by you yourself. If you don't know how well you are doing, you can't adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly. Check your progress frequently — weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

4. Be a realistic optimist. When you are setting a goal, by all means engage in lots of positive thinking about how likely you are to achieve it. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation. But whatever you do, don't underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal. Most goals worth achieving require time, planning, effort, and persistence. Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill-prepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.

5. Focus on getting better, rather than being good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability. Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed — that no matter what we do, we won't improve. As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong — abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential. People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.

6. Have grit. Grit is a willingness to commit to long-term goals, and to persist in the face of difficulty. Studies show that gritty people obtain more education in their lifetime, and earn higher college GPAs. Grit predicts which cadets will stick out their first grueling year at West Point. In fact, grit even predicts which round contestants will make it to at the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

The good news is, if you aren't particularly gritty now, there is something you can do about it. People who lack grit more often than not believe that they just don't have the innate abilities successful people have. If that describes your own thinking .... well, there's no way to put this nicely: you are wrong. As I mentioned earlier, effort, planning, persistence, and good strategies are what it really takes to succeed. Embracing this knowledge will not only help you see yourself and your goals more accurately, but also do wonders for your grit.

7. Build your willpower muscle. Your self-control "muscle" is just like the other muscles in your body — when it doesn't get much exercise, it becomes weaker over time. But when you give it regular workouts by putting it to good use, it will grow stronger and stronger, and better able to help you successfully reach your goals.

To build willpower, take on a challenge that requires you to do something you'd honestly rather not do. Give up high-fat snacks, do 100 sit-ups a day, stand up straight when you catch yourself slouching, try to learn a new skill. When you find yourself wanting to give in, give up, or just not bother — don't. Start with just one activity, and make a plan for how you will deal with troubles when they occur ("If I have a craving for a snack, I will eat one piece of fresh or three pieces of dried fruit.") It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier, and that's the whole point. As your strength grows, you can take on more challenges and step-up your self-control workout.

8. Don't tempt fate. No matter how strong your willpower muscle becomes, it's important to always respect the fact that it is limited, and if you overtax it you will temporarily run out of steam. Don't try to take on two challenging tasks at once, if you can help it (like quitting smoking and dieting at the same time). And don't put yourself in harm's way — many people are overly-confident in their ability to resist temptation, and as a result they put themselves in situations where temptations abound. Successful people know not to make reaching a goal harder than it already is.

9. Focus on what you will do, not what you won't do. Do you want to successfully lose weight, quit smoking, or put a lid on your bad temper? Then plan how you will replace bad habits with good ones, rather than focusing only on the bad habits themselves. Research on thought suppression (e.g., "Don't think about white bears!") has shown that trying to avoid a thought makes it even more active in your mind. The same holds true when it comes to behavior — by trying not to engage in a bad habit, our habits get strengthened rather than broken.
If you want change your ways, ask yourself, What will I do instead? For example, if you are trying to gain control of your temper and stop flying off the handle, you might make a plan like "If I am starting to feel angry, then I will take three deep breaths to calm down." By using deep breathing as a replacement for giving in to your anger, your bad habit will get worn away over time until it disappears completely.

It is my hope that, after reading about the nine things successful people do differently, you have gained some insight into all the things you have been doing right all along. Even more important, I hope are able to identify the mistakes that have derailed you, and use that knowledge to your advantage from now on. Remember, you don't need to become a different person to become a more successful one. It's never what you are, but what you do.

Purusartha and Project Management

2011-08-27T11:46:00.001-07:00

Am blogging after a long time... more into twitter as I have to write less than 140 characters making life simple

Today I was reading about Purusartha or Human Purpose or aim or end
As per our great religion human purpose are four fold
Dharma - righteousness or right action
Artha - perusit of meaning or purpose
Kama - pleasure
Moksha - liberation

When thinking through this I realised that Project Management was all about Purusartha. These tenets can be applied to project management. Am making a start at doing it
Dharma - Right Action - Activities or Tasks we do to complete a project incl Governacnce
Artha - Purpose - Milestones or goals towards which we do dharma. Actions without a Purpose has no meaning
Kama - Pleasure - We all need to derive pleasure in doing Action with a Purpose. Celebrate success
Moksha - Liberation - Go-live or attaining completion of project whereby we all receive our liberation.. to start the cycle of Dharma to Moksha again...

Only difference is that for a project manager, there is no Moksha

The Global Innovation Interest Index

2011-06-26T12:13:00.001-07:00

How interested are people in innovation — and how does that change cross-culturally? What do users across the worldreally want, how can we uncover and design for their unmet needs, and what services can we attach to products to stay close to our customers? We've found that these questions point to a new need for innovative cultures in the world today (distinct from innovative companies).

To start measuring the innovation culture in its pure form, we used Google Insights for Search, which is a keyword optimization tool that reports what people are searching for on the internet. We developed a small lexicon of terms that represent a wide spectrum of innovation activities outside of the core R&D and patent area. For example, we used innovation-linked terms like "design thinking," "Six Sigma," "open innovation," and "product design," among others. We then checked and cross referenced interest in those terms across country lines*. Here are the results — the countries we found to be most interested in innovation:

We found India to be a convincing leader, with the United States trailing second and Singapore, Canada, S. Korea, and the United Kingdom following. Note that even without data from China, Asia is bubbling with interest in innovation. However, we will admit the important qualitative differences in the interests of Asians and the English-speaking West that the data does not account for.

The United States, Canada, and the UK owe their place in the table to their interest in the funding and exploitation of innovation, and in terms that include the root term "create."

For example you can see in this chart indicating regional interest (below), the prominence of the search term "creative talent" in the US especially. "Creative talent" is represented by the orange bar, whereas the red bar represents the term "innovation process" and the blue "innovation and creativity."

Source: Google Insights for Search

By contrast, India's interest in innovation (and Singapore's is similar) stretches across the range of terms. Interest is high in Six Sigma, ideas management, innovation management, product design, and in strategic terms like "adjacency."

Also notable, open innovation has visibly become more interesting globally, with a heavy concentration of data in Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, interest in Six Sigma is an area where the United States scores highly. From the data it appears that people across the world are catching on to open innovation strategies; and even though open approaches originated in the United States, the US is not as interested as competitor regions.

Digging a little deeper into the US-specific data, we can also see that the more future oriented term "Open Innovation" and the current in-vogue term "Design Thinking" are beginning to close on the very tools-based term "TRIZ" in the United States. TRIZ is a technique for orienting companies to future economic states as a starting point for invention today, and is widely deployed across Asia by companies like Samsung. Over the last few years, we found interest in TRIZ is losing ground to the less formal open and design paradigms, as you can see in the chart below:

TRIZ (Green) vs. Design Thinking (blue) and Open Innovation (red)

Source: Google Insights for Search

As you can see, exploring innovation through web interest has value. The enthusiastic interest of Asian users should send an important signal that Western companies — like those based out of America, Canada, and the UK — should do more to promote a broader base for their innovation cultures. However, this study is itself a signal that we can measure innovative cultures in ways that reflect real interest.

*Google Search does not operate in China, and therefore China's data is omitted from the results.

Haydn Shaughnessy is editor of Innovation Management, and a Visiting Fellow at nGenera Insight, where he writes on ecosystem management. Nick Vitalari is the Director of the Moxie Insight Enterprise Research Program.

http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2011/06/the-global-innovation-interest.html

Building a Resilient Organizational Culture by

2011-06-26T11:34:00.001-07:00

George S. Everly, Jr.

Current events teach us that crisis and even disaster occur far more frequently than previously anticipated. Japan's post-tsunami crisis and repeated tornadoes of the Southern and Midwestern US demonstrate the vulnerability of modern infrastructures to the forces of nature. Wall Street's meltdown, the subsequent recession, and the consequent demise of discretionary spending remind us that human-made disasters can be devastating in other ways.

The key to not only surviving such events, but to prospering during such upheavals, we argue, is human resilience. While human resilience may be thought of as a personality trait, in the aggregate, groups, organizations, and even communities can learn to develop a "culture of resilience" which manifests itself as a form of "psychological immunity" to, or the ability to rebound from, the untoward effects of adversity.

My colleagues and I have observed human resilience in individuals ranging from accountants to law enforcement personnel, and even former US Navy SEALs. After the first Gulf War, we saw the power of human resilience transform a broken and burning nation of Kuwait into a leading economic power.

Our observations have led us to believe that, just as individuals can learn to develop personal traits of resilience, so too can organizations develop a culture of resilience. We would argue that a culture of organizational resilience is built largely upon leadership, what we refer to as "resilient leadership." Consistent with the "Law of the Few" described in Malcom Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, we believe key leadership personnel, often frontline leadership, appear to have the ability to "tip" the organization in the direction of resilience and to serve as a catalyst to increase group cohesion and dedication to the "mission." They do this, we argue, by demonstrating four core attributes of optimism, decisiveness, integrity, and open communications while serving as conduits and gatekeepers of formal and informal information flows throughout the organization and enjoying high source credibility (ethos).

All of these can be learned. Simply said, when a small number of high credibility individuals who serve as visible informational channels demonstrate, or "model" the behaviors associated with resilience, we believe they have the ability to change an entire culture of an organization as others replicate the resilient characteristics that they have observed.

Using the insightful and well researched formulations of Albert Bandura, we employ the construct of "self-efficacy" as a framework to operationalize many of the aforementioned attributes of resilience. Self-efficacy may be thought of as the belief in one's agency and the ability to be a catalyst for change. He argues that the perception of self-efficacy shapes key human behaviors:

The courses of action people choose to pursue,
How much effort they put forth in given endeavors,
How long they will persevere in the face of obstacles and failures,
Their resilience to adversity,
Whether their thought patterns are self-hindering or self-aiding,
How much stress and depression they experience in coping with taxing environmental demands,
The level of accomplishments they realize.

All of the aforementioned behaviors we believe are not only essential in resisting (developing immunity to) or rebounding from adversity, they are the foundations of a resilient organizational culture and can be used to increase resilience throughout the organization

Our evidence suggests that optimism and self-efficacy can be learned employing a simple yet powerful framework in the organization:

First, understand that people prosper from success. Create an environment wherein they are successful, especially early in their career. Utilize a process of successive approximation wherein success is achieved in tasks of increasing difficulty and overall complexity.

Second, people learn while observing others. Assign new personnel to successful workgroups. Let them begin to experience "vicarious success." Simply possessing membership in successful, or elite groups, may create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Elite colleges and occupational groups thrive upon this principle.

Thirdly, provide encouragement, support, and even mentoring. Research suggests that the single most powerful predictor of human resilience is interpersonal support.

Lastly, using the latest finding from the neurosciences, provide basic training in how to manage personal stress. In our training programs, we refer to this as developing "psychological body armor".

Here are how some companies have employed resiliency traits at the organizational level:

Resilient organizations invest in their client base. At a time when the travel industry was undergoing a dramatic decrease in demand, American Express Platinum Travel Services sent a gift to loyal customers as a way of saying "thank you." Such frequent customers were given several hundred dollars worth of travel-related items including carry-on luggage, an iPod, earphones, and a digital video camera.

Resilient organizations are innovative in times of adversity. Innovation typifies Apple. At a time when the music player and phone industries were commoditizing their products, Apple introduced radically simple and beautifully designed products that remade the company.

Resilient organizations invest in their leaders. In a time when government agencies are demanding more and more from their contractors, one government contractor gave 30 departmental managers two entire days off, at a location away from work, in order to attend a training program that taught skills in resilient leadership as well as "psychological body armor" (the latest advances in how to manage personal stress).

Resilient organizations invest in all levels of their workforce. In 2010, the Wisconsin Governor's Council on Physical Fitness and Health awarded Kimberly-Clark Corporation in Neenah, WI a Gold Medal for promoting employee health and wellness. Kimberly-Clark has been a pioneer in occupational health promotion since the early 1980s fielding truly seminal programs in physical fitness, nutrition, and stress management for not only workers but their families.

To say we live in challenging times is an understatement, but crisis may also be understood as an opportunity. Those who cultivate a resilient organizational we argue will be better positioned to prosper when others falter.

Dealing with the Ghosts of Change Management

2011-06-26T11:24:00.001-07:00

Transitions that left scars in the past can hurt new initiatives.

Title: Haunted by the Past: Effects of Poor Change Management History on Employee Attitudes and Turnover (Subscription or fee required.)

Authors: Prashant Bordia (Australian National University), Simon Lloyd D. Restubog (Australian National University), Nerina L. Jimmieson (University of Queensland), and Bernd E. Irmer (Queensland University of Technology)

Publisher: Group & Organization Management, vol. 36, no. 2

Date Published: April 2011

Changing the direction of an organization is like driving a car, write the authors of this paper. While moving forward, managers must also pay attention to the “rear view.” This means understanding that employees’ past experiences with organizational change help dictate their attitudes and behavior regarding the current transition — including whether they trust the company enough to remain.

Organizational change can occur in a variety of ways. Firms shift their strategies and processes, undergo mergers and acquisitions, restructure or downsize, and introduce new technologies. For employees, the resulting uncertainty often creates stress and additional work demands.

The researchers studied two organizations to test the relationship between previous change initiatives and employee attitudes.

The first study involved a property and development firm in the Philippines. Unable to meet the demands of a booming population and increasing competition, the company’s executives had decided to merge with another firm. At the time of the study, the organization had announced the merger to its employees and begun the transition — including the evaluation and redefinition of jobs.

In interviews with the human resources department, the researchers learned that the company had a poor history of change implementation: In the past, senior managers had created satellite offices and reassigned employees without consulting them, leading to resentment among those affected. With the help of HR, the researchers split employees into two groups — those who had reason to resent upper management for previous actions and those who didn’t.

Two months after the merger was announced, 155 employees at the firm completed surveys assessing previous change management projects, their perceptions of the current transition, and their level of trust in the organization. The results of this first study confirmed that employees who had had poor experiences with change in the past felt more cynicism about the current transition as well as less trust.

The second study took a deeper look at the issue, examining how change-related attitudes affected employees’ job satisfaction, openness to change, and decisions about whether to leave. The organization in this case was a midsized university in the Philippines whose vice president had recently proposed a comprehensive overhaul of the education process for freshmen; the curriculum would be revised and teachers would be reassigned, relocated, or laid off.

The university had a history of failed change initiatives, including “poorly managed organizational restructuring which resulted in a string of lawsuits,” according to the authors. As with the first study, employees were split into two groups: those who felt resentment because of past mishandled transitions and those who did not. A total of 124 staff members completed the surveys, which were distributed three months after the change process began. The researchers also obtained turnover data two years after the survey and matched that data with the survey responses.

The researchers found that when employees had less trust in the organization because of the previous failed change initiatives, they also had lower levels of job satisfaction and stronger intentions to leave. In fact, 19 percent of the employees in the second study left the university after two years. Using the survey responses, the researchers were able to predict which employees would leave with 87 percent accuracy.

When embarking on a new change program, senior managers need to be acutely aware of the organization’s history in this area, the authors conclude. If managers begin to sense that certain employees have become jaded about change, the researchers urge them to act quickly. Although influencing employee attitudes is never easy, managers should hold open discussions during which staff members learn about upcoming changes and the company acknowledges past mistakes and explains how the process will work better this time around. An engaged leadership, one that stresses personal relationships and inspires the troops, has also been shown to cut down on cynicism about organizational change.

Bottom Line:
When organizational change has been managed poorly in the past, the effects linger, lessening employee trust and creating cynicism about new change initiatives. To minimize turnover and morale problems in periods of transition, managers must be aware of past mistakes and take them into account in any new initiative.

20 Powerful Management Truisms

2011-06-14T11:09:00.001-07:00

Strategy and execution complement each other; neither works without the other.
If you’re your own worst enemy, you’re sure to lose.
If you set out to build an empire, you’ll fail. All empires have humble beginnings. Just put one foot in front of the other, try not to stumble, and when you do, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try again.
If you’ve got loads of strengths, it’s okay to ignore your weaknesses. If you’ve got loads of weaknesses, you better work on them.
You don’t know squat. Once you think you’ve got things figured out, you’re in big trouble. Only fools have all the answers.
There are times to study and analyze and times to act decisively; the key is to know the difference.
A big ego is sufferable if the person delivers the goods.
Fear and desperation are powerful motivators, but they don’t always result in good or the right behavior.
One who actually gets things done is worth a dozen good-intentioned can-do attitudes.
Principles are a personal matter. Having them is good, pushing them on others, not so much.
Don’t take yourself too seriously or nobody else will either. Self-important people are just that - only important to themselves.
Leaders who make excuses and blame others don’t deserve their authority.
Coming in second is still losing. Still, learn from it.
What you think doesn’t matter half as much as what the other guy thinks. Better to listen than talk.
You get what you pay for. It’s true of goods, services, executives, employees, everything.
It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, only if you win or lose.
If everyone’s out to get you, there’s probably a good reason for that. Look in the mirror.
Success depends on adapting quicker than your competitors do. It’s like the movie title The Quick and The Dead. Those really are the only two options anymore.
Play nice with the other children. It’s okay to spat as long as you apologize and make up. Playground rules work in organizations. Really.
Problems should be solved by those who discover them. An organization where nobody passes the buck is powerful.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/ceo/20-powerful-management-truisms/7668?tag=fd-river11

Bosses Behaving Badly

2011-06-11T12:30:00.001-07:00

A Conversation with Barbara Pachter by Gardiner Morse

How to Tell the Boss His Fly Is Down

2011-06-11T12:28:00.001-07:00

by Barbara Pachter | Comments (17)

I've coached executives around the world on the finer and grosser points of protocol — from who holds open the door for whom to how not to tell a joke. With clients ranging from Merck to Microsoft, I've seen every type of etiquette blunder. The common thread: lack of self-awareness. You probably don't mean to be rude — but you don't know any better.

Consider this one, the vice president of the bank I was consulting for who arrived early for a meeting. Some junior people were already there. He put his briefcase on the table, opened it up, took out a stick of deodorant, unbuttoned his shirt, and put it on. Nobody said anything they were so stunned. And the VP seemed oblivious. But the cost to this guy will be high. If the people around him think he might at any moment whip out his deodorant, figuratively speaking, he's never going to have the full consent of his followers.

Most bad manners arise because the perpetrator isn't paying attention. Drinking too much at business events is surprisingly common. Everyone knows it's a bad idea, but people do it anyway. Then there's the whole class of behaviors that fall somewhere between bad manners and bad mannerisms. I once coached a director whose colleagues thought she was condescending. Turns out, part of the reason people saw her that way was because of how she wore her reading glasses. She kept them on the tip of her nose and peered over them. It made her look skeptical and disdainful. She had no idea. And how about people who mangle paper clips when they talk? If you're meeting with a visitor from another company and you're dismembering paper clips, you probably don't know you're doing it, and you're probably sending a message you don't want to send.

I've given more than 1,600 seminars to over 100,000 people, and no one in any of my classes has ever admitted to behaving badly. It's always the other guy. It's the same psychology that makes everyone think they're better-than-average drivers. Many people are worse than average, by definition. But they'd never admit it. So the starting point is to acknowledge that, chances are, you're making etiquette mistakes that you'd want to correct if only you knew about them. How do you find out? Easy. Get feedback. In general, the higher up you are, the less you can count on people to tell you what you're doing wrong. Getting honest feedback is always tough. Frankly, most high-level executives have major egos. They don't think they need this sort of feedback, and they don't want it. But they do need it. The best thing to do is get a coach. Failing that, create an environment that encourages feedback of all types, and get videoed. I can tell a client her expression looks disdainful until I'm blue in the face. But when she sees it on video, it really hits home.

Getting etiquette right is doubly important, and doubly hard, in international business. The old adage "When in Rome..." still applies. But unless people are really attuned to and practice the etiquette of their own culture, they're probably not going to do a good job modifying their behaviors for another culture. I heard about an American executive traveling in Japan who took a Japanese colleague's business card and then absentmindedly picked his teeth with it. That's a big mistake even in the United States, but you can imagine the Japanese executive's reaction. It's not enough to read a book and take a one-day course on Japanese business etiquette before you go. You've got to nail your own culture's etiquette first. Then you step out of your culture, look back at it, and compare it with the other culture. Bear in mind also that humor doesn't travel well across cultures. It can bomb badly. Here's a mistake I made. I was in Kuwait, and I was invited to my agent's home for dinner. I walked in, and on the dining room table there was food laid out from one end to the other. They must have been cooking for a week. And I said, "Do you think there's enough food?" Oops. My agent thought I was serious. Fortunately, we were able to talk about it later and have a good laugh. The point is, unless you know exactly what you're doing, don't try to make a joke.

So, to return to the question of how you tell your boss his fly is down (or that she has lipstick on her teeth): The mistake to avoid is to not say anything. The cost of not telling could be high if it appears that you knew and kept quiet. It's simple. Just give him the facts, quietly if possible. "Bob, your fly is down." If you're embarrassed, get someone else to do it. Everybody wins: The boss is saved from embarrassment, and you'll go up a notch in his estimation for your nerve and for limiting his exposure.

Barbara Pachter is President of Pachter & Associates, a consultancy specializing in business communications and etiquette. This blog is adapted from her HBR article Bosses Behaving Badly.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/how_to_tell_the_boss_his_fly_i.html

Six Rules to Master The Power of Framing Context

2011-06-11T06:40:00.001-07:00

June 10, 2011

by: Kevin Sheehan

All those years ago, when I was spending halcyon days in business school, our professors would occasionally simulate important leadership situations, and ask members of the section to role-play how they would handle them. One bright spring morning in communications class, our instructor opened a case study about a company in crisis. It had released a product that was being recalled for especially egregious flaws.

The issue in the case was how to handle the press under pressure. The company’s future was on the line, with the CEO’s performance at a press conference that day being the critical moment. The fate of many employees and stakeholders depended on the leader managing the press conference. It was an exciting exercise to listen to the different styles and different framing strategies that my classmates used to work their way through the case.

I remember one colleague doing a particularly effective job. He role-played the CEO in the cross hairs. After his time in the spotlight, our professor, who specialized in business communications, asked him how he had managed the mock press event so well.

“I drew an imaginary circle around myself,” he said. “Everything inside the line I knew I would comment on in detail—everything outside the circle, I would recognize, but not delve into any real details. These were the issues I determined were outside our communications strategy and tangential to the important dimensions of the topic. I didn’t want to wander off into territory that might put the organization at risk.”

BecomeALeader has presented a series of articles about leadership mindsets that are critical to understand as you develop your capacities. The next step is to frame a situation and communicate it well; this is a powerful tool that can help you with your interactions with a variety of core constituents.

In her recent book The Power of Framing, Gail Fairhurst presents an important series of rules for how to manage and frame communications as a leader. “People know what they say,” she explains, “and they usually know why they say what they say. What they do not understand is what what they say does.”

It’s important, in other words, to understand not only the content of our communications, but also the powerful effect those communications have on the people with whom we work. Leaders’ communication styles fall into three basic categories, says Fairhurst: expressive, conventional, or strategic. Expressive leaders automatically say what’s on their mind. Conventionals say what they believe is proper. Strategic leaders understand that most communications have important meaning and impact, and approach them accordingly. Fairhurst’s six rules for framing your communications take these different styles into account.

Rule 1: Control the Context. Leaders often cannot control events, but they can control the context under which events are seen—provided they recognize the framing opportunity.

Rule 2: Define the context. At its most basic level, framing reality means defining “the situation here and now” in ways that connect with others.

Rule 3: Apply ethics. What people perceive to be reality is often subject to much disagreement. Framing a subject is an act of persuasion by leaders, one that is imbued with ethical choices.

Rule 4: Interpret uncertainty. It is the uncertainty, confusion, and undecidability of “the situation here and now” that opens it up for interpretation and provides an opportunity for the more verbally skilled among us to emerge as leaders.

Rule 5: Design the response. Ultimately, leadership is a design problem. Leaders must figure out what leadership is in the context of what they do and, through framing and actions, persuade themselves and other people that they are doing it.

Rule 6: Control spontaneity. Effective framing requires that leaders be able to control their own spontaneous communications.

God's MBAs: Why Mormon Missions Produce Leaders

2011-06-11T06:36:00.001-07:00

Many of the men who trained to be Mormon missionaries have gone on to become among the most distinguished persons in American business and civic life

Left to right: Eric Varvel, Jon Huntsman Jr., David Neeleman Illustrations by Brandon Bird

By Caroline Winter

Before setting out in orderly pairs to spread their gospel door-to-door, nearly all U.S. Mormon missionaries pass through the Provo Missionary Training Center. Inside the sprawling brown-brick complex, thousands of 19- and 20-year-old men in oversized black suits work alongside women in below-the-knee skirts and brightly colored tops. All of them wear name tags.

For one to three months (depending on the language challenge ahead), their days begin at 6:30 a.m. and end at 10:30 p.m., and include 10 hours of class and study time. On their one day off per week, missionaries-to-be do laundry, write home, and stock up on supplies at the training center store where pre-knotted ties ($15-$20) and key-chain rings with screw-top vials for carrying consecrated oils ($3.50) hang beside highlighters, alarm clocks, and hymnbooks translated into roughly 50 foreign languages. The grounds are under tight security, and no one leaves without permission. This is the last stop for roughly 20,000 young Mormons each year before they're driven 45 miles north to Salt Lake City International Airport and whisked off to one of more than 150 countries to make converts.

The Provo Missionary Training Center (MTC) and its curriculum are designed to render all trainees equal servants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), yet many of the men who prepared for their missions here, or at the center's earlier incarnations, have gone on to become among the most distinguished and recognizable faces in American business and civic life. There's Mitt Romney (mission: France), who as of 2007 had amassed an estimated $190 million to $250 million as head of Bain Capital, rescued the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from a corruption scandal, spent four years as the governor of Massachusetts, and announced his second run for President on June 2. His potential rival for the Republican nomination is Jon Huntsman Jr. (Taiwan), a former Utah governor who negotiated dozens of free-trade agreements as a U.S. trade representative and served as ambassador to China from 2009-2011. The list also includes JetBlue (JBLU) founder David Neeleman (Brazil), Credit Suisse Chief Executive Officer Eric Varvel (who confirmed training at the Provo MTC but would provide no more information), self-help mogul Stephen Covey (England), author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Kim Clark (Germany), former dean of Harvard Business School, and Gary Crittenden (Germany), who's served as CFO for Citigroup (C), American Express (AXP), and Sears Roebuck.

Gary Cornia, dean of Mormon-run Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management, is often asked what makes Mormons so successful. "I'm not going to say we beat everybody out, but we do have a reputation," says Cornia. "And one of the defining opportunities for young men and young women is the mission experience." Reflecting on his own mission to the mid-Atlantic states, Cornia adds, "When I left, the son of a relatively poor mother and a father who died when I was young, I frankly didn't know if I could do anything. I came back with the confidence that I can accomplish most hard things. I may not have had that otherwise."

The Mormon Church is 181 years old, and its adherents compose less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, according to a 2009 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS). Yet Latter-Day Saints hold, or have held, a seemingly disproportionate number of top jobs at such major corporations as Marriott International (MAR), American Express, American Motors, Dell Computers (DELL), Lufthansa, Fisher-Price (MAT), Life Re, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Madison Square Garden, La Quinta Properties, PricewaterhouseCooper, and Stanley Black & Decker (SWK). The head of human resources at Citigroup is Mormon, and in 2010 Goldman Sachs (GS) hired 31 grads from BYU, the same number it hired from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

There's a risk of stereotyping in drawing conclusions about any religion based on a sampling of its exceptional adherents, but church leaders and Mormon businessmen embrace the idea that there's a relationship between the missionary experience and success in business. "The mission is like a crucible experience [and] a lot of people come out with the capacity to lead," says Clark, who left HBS in 2005 to preside over BYU-Idaho at the request of the LDS Church's then president, Gordon Hinckley, regarded by Mormons as a living prophet; as Clark tells people, "It was like getting a phone call from Moses."

Almost all of the Mormon businessmen contacted for this story—the teachings of the church encourage women to stay home—see a connection between their faith and their work. (Romney and Huntsman did not respond to interview requests.)

So far the church has sent over 1 million missionaries into the world. All young Mormon men, referred to as "elders," are asked to serve a mission if they are in good standing. Young women, called "sisters," serve voluntarily and make up about 20 percent of the missionary force. Roughly 50 percent of U.S. Mormon missionaries go abroad to countries as disparate as Albania, Ghana, Micronesia, and France, with each individual's placement a matter of "divine inspiration," according to the Provo MTC's director, Richard I. Heaton. Young Mormons submit their medical records and basic CVs to the "Twelve Apostles," who in stature rank just below the church's president. The group then prays to find out where each individual is needed.

Once on site, missionaries pay a $400 share of their room and board and are required to live as the locals do. "The wonderful thing is that you don't experience Korea from the 25th floor of the Hyatt," says Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, a Rhodes scholar and board member at India's Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), who did his mission in Korea from 1971 to 1973. "They don't have air conditioning, you don't have air conditioning; they don't have plumbing, you don't have plumbing."

Each elder or sister spends every moment of every day in tandem with another, sleeping and rising at the same time in a shared room. That companion isn't always American and doesn't necessarily speak English. For the next two years, these "companionships" proselytize for 10 hours a day, six days a week, knocking on doors and offering The Book of Mormon to strangers, often in languages the missionaries barely know how to speak. They must persuade people to listen and learn to persevere in the face of near-constant rejection. "I don't think there's any more demanding profession than being a Mormon missionary," says Christensen.

Over the course of a mission, each individual rotates through two or three companions, an experience that forces the development of interpersonal skills, according to Joseph Ogden, assistant dean at BYU's Marriott School. One person is always assigned a senior role, usually on the strength of time served. Sometimes seniority is assigned by church officials' assessment of leadership abilities. Ogden remembers being given senior status over a 26-year-old ex-Green Beret while on his mission to Australia. "I was this lanky teenager ... and you could tell he really wanted to be in charge," says Ogden. "That was a tough one."

Missionaries aren't allowed access to news and are only permitted two phone calls home each year, on Mother's Day and Christmas. Guidelines are laid out in a pocket-sized handbook that Provo MTC President Gordon D. Brown says helps them to focus, stay safe, and integrate faster. The book has instructions on a wide range of activities: Full-court basketball games, for example, are banned, while half-court is permissible. Returned missionaries say that simply abiding by all the rules is enough to impart a sense of accomplishment.

Serving abroad helps Mormons learn languages (around 70 percent of BYU students are bilingual). It also seems to provide them with insight into foreign cultures and economies, an asset many missionaries have used to start businesses and careers. Neeleman served in Brazil and, after founding JetBlue Airways, went on to start Azul Airlines, a domestic Brazilian carrier. L. Todd Budge, chairman of Tokyo Star Bank, used his mission experience in Japan to become the first non-Japanese CEO of a Japanese bank and says he may never have gone abroad at all if the church had not sent him. Allan O'Bryant, now Japan CEO at Reinsurance Group of America, served in Japan and later became the president of AFLAC International.

Mitt Romney served in France from 1966 to 1968, after his freshman year at Stanford University. Widespread anti-American sentiment at the time made proselytizing especially difficult; in a 2007 New York Times article, Romney described his mission as humbling, saying it was the only time in his life "when most of what I was trying to do was rejected."

As the son of George Romney, the ex-American Motors CEO who was then governor of Michigan, Mitt Romney enjoyed privileges unheard of for most elders and entered the mission field of Bordeaux and Paris having completed three years of French at Michigan's elite Cranbrook School. Once on site, Romney broke handbook rules to sneak out to the movies and eat coq au vin, and used his father's connections to arrange a meal at the American Embassy, according to the Times. Still, Romney has credited the experience with deepening his faith and ambition. Eager to move up through the missionary ranks, he experimented with innovative means of getting out the Mormon Word, like hosting "American night" at a local café and staging an exhibition baseball game. According to The Washington Post, he also pitched articles about Mormons to newspapers and even tried proselytizing at bars.

Romney's mission was marred by tragedy. On June 16, 1968, he was asked to chauffeur the couple presiding over the region's missionaries and was at the wheel during a head-on collision that killed the mission president's wife. Romney was left unconscious and so badly mangled that a police officer mistakenly pronounced him dead. He was rushed to the hospital and found to have a concussion, fractured ribs, and a broken arm.

When the mission president returned to the U.S. to bury his wife, Romney was asked to take charge of the region's missionaries, who numbered around 200. He thrived in the position, traveling across France to lead conferences. Under his leadership, France's missionaries exceeded 200 baptisms for the first time in a decade.

Dave Checketts is chairman of the sports, entertainment, and media enterprise SCP Worldwide, the owner of the St. Louis Blues, and a Mormon whose past titles have included CEO of Madison Square Garden. Checketts served his mission in East Los Angeles, mostly walking the streets of neighborhoods such as Compton, Whittier, and Boyle Heights. The hardest part, he says, was splitting from his comparatively comfortable teenage life. "You leave your family, your friends, your car, you don't date for two years, and you're 19 years old," he says. "I missed my freedom, I missed going out to eat—I was suddenly working hard, knocking on doors, trying to find people who would listen, dressing every day in a shirt and tie, whereas before I probably had on a T-shirt and jeans."

In witnessing extreme poverty and wealth, Checketts says he understood that he needed to take responsibility for his future. Upon returning to college, he shot to the top of his class and later became president of the National Basketball Assn.'s Utah Jazz at the age of 28. "What happens on a mission is that you grow up pretty fast," he says. "You're dealing with adult problems and adult issues, because when you're teaching somebody the gospel of Jesus Christ, you're typically meeting people who want to improve their lives ... and you kind of get a sense for how you'd like to live your life; you get serious about life, about school, about work."

Kevin Rollins, the former CEO of Dell Computers and currently a senior adviser to TPG Capital, says the rejections spiked with occasional successes that he experienced during his mission in Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada, prepared him for entrepreneurship. "When you get into the business world, most of what you try doesn't work either," he says. "And so the notion of having focus and determination, working hard, and leading others along with you, those principles are all things you would look for in a corporate executive, vs. someone who closes his tent after one little disappointment."
Mormons, who consider their faith to be a Christian denomination, take Biblical exhortations to work hard to the extreme. "Mormonism is kind of like the Puritan ethic on high," says Nathan Furr, assistant professor of entrepreneurship at BYU's Marriott School. "There's total emphasis on self-sufficiency, on working hard."

This aspect of the missionary experience is rooted in the religion's origins and permeates all aspects of Mormon life. Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert, a seventh-generation Mormon whose relatives were among the state's original settlers, admires the Mormons who found Utah after leaving behind New York, Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri. Settlers, in his words, "harnessed the snowpack and built reservoirs and canals and ditches, and ... literally made the desert blossom like a desert rose." Herbert's account could be straight fromThe Book of Mormon's version of how the land of Helam was made fruitful: "And they pitched their tents, and began to till the ground, and began to build buildings; yea, they were industrious, and did labor exceedingly."

Simply belonging to the highly managerial Mormon Church requires work. Mormons depend upon an unpaid "lay" clergy composed of ordinary congregants tapped to lead sermons each week. Congregants don't just go to church on Sunday, they run the church, filling all the positions from Sunday school teacher to bishop, serving an estimated five to 25 hours each week. At the same time, they are expected to pay a 10 percent tithe on their incomes while encouraged to raise large families. Only those who tithe are given "temple recommends," passes which are required to enter Mormon temples.

Church obligations start early. "Children at a very young age begin to learn things that leaders have to do—speak in public, interact with people, teach," says Kim Clark. Public speaking starts with two-minute presentations at the age of three, according to Kim Farah, a spokeswoman for the church. The goal is to "help them internalize their beliefs," she says, and any professional benefits are secondary. Mormons don't undergo grueling Battle-Hymn-of-the-Tiger-Mother upbringings, but teenagers are expected to get up early and attend seminary one hour before school, five days a week. Kids age 12 through 18 progress through hierarchical rings of youth groups, each of which has two or three appointed leaders who learn to hold meetings, take responsibility for their groups, and check on members who aren't attending church regularly. One former Latter-Day Saint, a facial plastic surgeon from Brazil named Marcello Jun de Oliveira, says church commitments are so intense that "when you finally start a job, it's just like churchit's so much work."

Kevin Rollins, whose Mormon roots go back to the religion's founders (and who says he worked 20 hours a week for the church while putting in another 100 hours at Dell), remembers conducting youth group meetings as a child. "You learn by experience that it's better to have an agenda, have a plan, have a structure, have people participating ... and if you have to discipline somebody, you learn to do that in private," he says. When Dell hired him from the consultancy Bain & Co. to head up the company's Americas division—accounting for 70 percent of the company's revenue at the time—Rollins had no prior experience as an executive. "I can still remember, I was at my first meeting at Dell ... and there were, oh, I don't know, 12 executives, and I think they were stunned at how I came in and ran the meeting, knowing how to run a meeting from all the times I had run one as a church member," he says. "I really owe most of that natural instinct there to the training I received as a young kid."

The church itself is a well-run global conglomerate. Ryan T. Cragun, an assistant professor at the University of Tampa and president of the Mormon Social Science Assn., says the church likely owns more acreage than there is in the state of Delaware. In Florida alone, he says, Mormons own 10 times as much land as Walt Disney (DIS), including a $1 billion for-profit cattle and citrus ranch. The LDS Church also owns commercial hunting grounds, radio stations, newspapers, real estate developers, shopping centers, and a land management company in Hawaii. Churches in the U.S. are not required to report their finances, and the Mormon Church does not, but the Financial Times in 2010 estimated the LDS Church's worth at $25 billion to $30 billion.

Mormons insist that self-improvement and self-reliance, not material wealth, are their religious aims, yet the Book of Mormon states, "And thus they did prosper and become far more wealthy than those who did not belong to their church" (Alma 1:31). The same passage goes on to explain why non-Mormons fall short: "For those who did not belong to their church did indulge themselves in sorceries, and in idolatry or idleness, and in babblings, and in envyings and strife; wearing costly apparel; being lifted up in the pride of their own eyes." Armand L. Mauss, professor emeritus of Sociology and Religious Studies at Washington State University, notes that "Mormons tend to assume that if they are doing their best in meeting their religious obligations, God will bless their worldly efforts."

In fact, Mormons fall in the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum, their numbers perhaps skewed lower by recent converts who tend to be less educated and less wealthy, according to Furr and others. Even so, Latter-Day Saints are less likely than the general public to be in the lowest income bracket, according to the Pew Research Center.
BYU's Marriott School, housed inside a bland box of tinted glass and gray pebble slabs, is a 10-minute drive from the Missionary Training Center and 2,000 miles from Wall Street. Most high-ranking business schools are located in major urban centers; BYU has Provo, a city of roughly 100,000, laid out on a grid of colossal six-lane streets built up into a maze of housing developments, hotels, and fast-food chains. Still, Dean Cornia says, "[Wall Street finds] it interesting enough to continue to hire. If we weren't producing, I don't think we'd end up there."

BYU's undergraduate business program ranked 11th last year, just behind Georgetown University, according to Bloomberg Businessweek's annual rankings. BYU ranks No. 1 for invention disclosures, new patent applications, and startup companies spun out per every $1 million of research expenditure, according to the Association of University Technology Managers.

Of 127 full-time faculty members, Kristen DeTienne, a professor of organized leadership and strategy, is the sole non-LDS professor and, although she says she doesn't "buy into the religion," she is floored by the Mormon work ethic. "They have this song that they sing all the time, it's called Put Your Shoulder to the Wheel." After a shy attempt at the hymn, DeTienne corrals the school's PR manager, Chad Little, to provide a more polished rendition. He obliges in a sweet tenor: "The world has need of willing men/Who wear the worker's seal/Come help the good work move along/Put your shoulder to the wheel."

Non-Mormons who make a point of hiring Latter-Day Saints go back at least as far as Howard Hughes, who surrounded himself with Mormons, trusting them over others because of their reputation as hard-working teetotalers. Ronald Reagan also employed several LDS staffers and once declared, the "Mormon contribution to American life is beyond measuring," according to historian Michael K. Winder. DeTienne says she knows several executives at top companies who express enthusiasm about hiring Mormon employees, in part because they are often faithfully married, which tends to make them "more mature and better at managing their time, establishing priorities, working hard."

Mormon women are partners in those faithful marriages, yet they're almost absent from the business landscape. The Marriott School's MBA class of 2011 is only 12 percent female, compared with HBS's 36 percent, and although LDS spokeswoman Jessica Moody says Mormon women do hold leadership roles at small companies, none have reached the corporate leadership heights of Mormon men. Women are urged by the church to pursue education, but the Mormon Proclamation on the Family, which, according to religion scholar Mauss, attained near- canonical status after its issuance in 1995, says men should provide for families while women should raise children. In his 2007 book The Mormon Way of Doing Business, Mormon journalist Jeff Benedict includes a chapter titled "The Secret to Success," dedicated entirely to the stay-at-home wives of famous Mormon CEOs. "The wives' deep commitment to the home" is the glue that keeps Mormon families together, says Benedict, and also "vital to the success of these CEOs' performance at work."

Kevin Rollins stresses that both man and wife must be devoted to the family, but that in "the Mormon model, a woman would take care of the kids and the husband would assist her and go out and work and make all the money they need to survive." Scholar of Mormonism Melissa Proctor also notes, "A Mormon woman who has post-graduate education is less likely to attend church," perhaps because "an advanced degree does not contribute to an LDS woman's status within the church," whereas the church tends to fill its top positions with professionally successful men.

To some, the Mormon emphasis on success can seem restrictive. John Schultz, a 33-year-old warehouse manager in Toronto, opted for a "voluntary excommunication" in 2003 when his bishop scolded him for failing to tithe and missing Sunday services for work. His resentment toward the church had been building for some time. "Growing up [in the Mormon Church], there was all this focus on the middle-class lifestyle, on going to college," he says, explaining why he felt like a misfit. "You had to look a certain way and act a certain way." Schultz theorizes that the church's insistence on a middle-class appearance is PR to win mainstream acceptance and recognition as a Christian faith. "In religious and theological communities, Mormons are always pushed to the side," says Schultz. "If they're even considered Christian by the Christian majority, they consider that a huge gain. I think that's exactly why there's the pressure to put on this face."

De Oliveira, the Brazilian surgeon, considers himself a secular Mormon. He left the church because of its role in dismantling gay marriage in California and because of what he described as class-ism in his chapel. De Oliveira, who notes that the vast majority of new converts are poor, witnessed the church's influence in making some low-income families upwardly mobile, while several others spoke with him about feeling excluded by wealthier congregants who held all the top leadership positions. "Here in Brazil, I attended a ward [parish] for half a decade where the chapel would literally, and physically, split itself down the aisle," he says.
At the Salt Lake City airport, three teenage elders in white shirts and black suits are headed to Brazil on 24-month missions. Only one of them has been outside the U.S. They say they're fully prepared for their undertaking and have never felt as much love as during their training period at the Provo MTC ("with 3,000 young men dedicated to serving"). Elder Hildebrandt, 19, says he can't wait to be changed by his mission. "It's only two years," he says. "People come back, and they're just totally different ... they don't need mom anymore."

As for the prospect of having two Mormon Presidential candidates in 2012, the elders say they're not generally interested in politics. None have heard of Jon Huntsman, and they don't have much to say about Romney. Upon reflection, though, Elder Hildebrandt says, "One good thing about having a Mormon President—we'll be able to hold him to a higher standard."

Winter is a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_25/b4233058977933.htm

Why we trust people we do not know

2011-06-07T10:33:00.001-07:00

BASED ON THE RESEARCH OF LI HUANG AND J. KEITH MURNIGHAN

Trust is essential to successful business interactions, but it also involves risk. A supervisor who trusts a subordinate to complete a task could lose out on a raise or promotion if the subordinate botches an important assignment. Given the stakes, it makes sense that trust develops gradually, allowing people time to assess the trustworthiness of others. But some decisions to trust are made swiftly, as in the case of investors who trusted Bernard Madoff, head of the largest Ponzi scheme in history. What causes us to trust someone we do not really know?

To find out, J. Keith Murnighan, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, and Li Huang, a doctoral student also at the Kellogg School, conducted a series of experiments using the Trust Game. They used subliminal cues, such as the name of a good friend, to prime feelings of trust. Their findings help explain the good vibes we sometimes immediately pick up from strangers, and also help explain why even sophisticated investors fall victim to financial scams, such as the one perpetrated by Madoff. “We found we could stimulate feelings of trust for a stranger without people even realizing,” Murnighan says, an outcome he finds “both exciting and scary.”

In the Trust Game, offerers decide how much money to send to anonymous receivers, knowing that receivers will get triple the amount sent and will then have the option of returning as much of the windfall to the sender as they wish. Sending a large amount of money indicates a high degree of trust because the receiver is not required to return anything.

“We found we could stimulate feelings of trust for a stranger without people even realizing.”

Before volunteers participated in the Trust Game, Murnighan and Huang asked them to provide the names of people they trusted and people they did not trust. Then researchers quickly flashed these names to subliminally prime the study participants. After that, the subjects were asked if they wanted to send money to an anonymous stranger, with the understanding they might get some money back. Participants who had seen the names of people they trusted sent larger sums and were more likely to believe money would be returned to them. Because the priming was so brief—mere milliseconds—no one was able to recognize the names that had been flashed before the Trust Game.

The researchers varied the experiment, asking subjects to provide the names of objects they liked and objects they did not. Another iteration asked subjects to provide the names of people they liked and those they did not like. The researchers found that object names did not stimulate trusting feelings, but the names of liked people did. The two experiments indicate that feelings of trust are rooted in human relationships. “It’s more than a positive state of mind,” Murnighan says.

Eliciting Trust
The study builds on previous research by Murnighan and others into the reasons why we sometimes trust strangers. Those studies have shown that trust is more likely if individuals expect to see one another in the future. The expectation of reciprocity also is a powerful motivator, Murnighan has found. Trust may also arise from positive organizational associations, such as schools or churches. This factor is at work in the marketing of affinity credit cards.

“We develop trust schemas—cognitive structures—that create expectations about how things are going to go,” Murnighan notes. Such cognitive structures may help explain why members of movie crews, who have little experience working together, trust each other to fulfill their roles. These internal trust schemes are built over time and help us decide “who we should trust and who we should not trust—whether this person is acting in a way that will hopefully benefit us rather than just benefiting themselves,” Murnighan remarks.

This latest set of studies suggests that the potentially risky decision to trust can begin below an individual’s conscious awareness—before there is time to evaluate or verify other information, like an individual’s reputation. This process can enhance the efficiency of social interactions, but it also increases our vulnerability to subliminal cues. “Imagine a fanatic fan of Elvis Presley,” Murnighan says. “If I know someone is a huge fan of Elvis, I might casually drop Elvis’s name to activate more trust in me. There is clearly a risk of manipulation.”

Madoff intentionally or inadvertently may have used this process, Huang says. For example, a prospective investor may have spotted friends’ names on Madoff’s client list, enhancing Madoff’s trustworthiness in the investor’s mind. Now, those who share the family name Madoff may suffer from this process—this might explain why Bernie Madoff’s daughter-in-law, Stephanie Madoff, sought a name change for herself and her children, Huang points out.

“Con men drop names to stimulate trust, and though we know to be cautious about that, we can still be affected,” Murnighan says. Used in the right setting, however, subliminal cues can be valuable management tools for building teamwork and cooperation. “Stimulating trust, if an organization has good intentions, can get over the kind of suspicion we have as a default,” he adds. Managers might stimulate trust by posting pictures of trusted role models and leaders.

Murnighan is planning a follow-up study to see if automatic cues can create a more trusting environment in sales negotiations, such as haggling over a used car. “If we actually trust, we can share our preferences—I may be more interested in price than a guarantee, you might be more interested in dependability than price—and reach a better agreement,” he says.

http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/index.php/Kellogg/article/a_trusted_name

Related reading on Kellogg Insight

Name-Letter Branding: How your name can influence your choices

Measuring Trust: Introducing the Financial Trust Index

Trusting the Stock Market: Impressions influence investors decisions

The Upside Learning Daily

2011-06-04T07:08:00.000-07:00

The Upside Learning Daily

Top 9 Company Names

2011-06-04T06:53:00.001-07:00

3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co.): Short and Sweet

When it came to finding a simple company name, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company had its hands full. Founded in 1902 by five entrepreneurs in Two Harbors, Minnesota, the company wanted to be innovative, but the name sounded robotic and dull. The founders eventually discovered the company's nickname 3M was the solution. The simple name now matches its innovative products like Post-It notes and Scotch tape. Abbreviations and acronyms are the perfect remedy for long and challenging names.

Apple: Challenging Perceptions

When Steve Jobs wanted to create a new line of personal computers in the 70s, computers were considered foreign and inaccessible. So when it came to the company name, Jobs searched for a friendly, inviting name to attract everyday people. Co-founder Steve Wozniak supposes the name Apple was inspired by Jobs's stay at an Oregon commune, which was completely surrounded by apple trees. But however the inspiration came to him, Jobs made Apple into a leader in consumer electronics innovations, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad devices attracting computer and noncomputer types alike.

BAPE: Thoughtfulness Counts

Company names with substance can help to define the brand's identity. BAPE, a cult clothing company founded in 1993 by music producer/DJ Tomoaki "Nigo" Nagao, stands for "A Bathing Ape." The name is derived from an old Japanese saying, "A bathing ape in lukewarm water," which refers to overindulgence. It was the perfect concept for the company, which targets the egotistical and overconfident youth. In other words, when you think of names consider who your products will be serving.

Kodak: The Power of "K"

George Eastman, the founder of Kodak—both the camera and the company—loved the letter "K." Before arriving at the name "Kodak" in 1892, Eastman tested several combinations of words starting and ending with "K." Eastman believed the right name would be memorable, would not resemble anything else, and could not be mispronounced. However, above all else, it must have the letter "K" because he believed in the letter's punch and effectiveness. Kodak has endured over 100 years, having thoroughly ingrained itself in the world of photography and popular culture.

Nike: Just Outsource It

In 1971, Bill Bowerman and Philip Knight, the founders of Blue Ribbon Sports, were set to launch a new line of soccer shoes branded with a design by Carolyn Davidson, called the swoosh. The new shoe line would embrace the spirit of victory, so the marketing minds behind BRS consulted Greek mythology to find their muse: Nike, the Winged Goddess of Victory. The name was so good that in 1978, Blue Ribbon Sports officially changed its name to Nike, Inc.

Samsonite: Never Too Late to Change

The Shwayder Trunk Manufacturing Company, founded in 1910 by Jesse Shwayder, made suitcases and briefcases that emphasized durability and strength. Shwayder named one of his first cases after the biblical figure Samson, a man given supernatural strength by God to defeat his enemies, wrestle lions, slay entire armies. Shwayder started using the trademarked name "Samsonite" in 1941, and changed his company's name in 1966. Significant, relevant names dominate the minds of the public, much more so than common family names.

Virgin: Calling It Like It Is

Before earning his billions, 20-year-old entrepreneur Richard Branson was preparing to launch a mail order record retailer. According to Branson's biography, one of his workers suggested, "What about Virgin? We're complete virgins at business." Branson loved the idea. It embraced who they were, rather than trying to conceal it. In 1970, Branson's mail order business took off. Two short years later came the record shop and then the recording studio.

Häagen-Dazs: Expand the Dictionary

How can you ensure your company's name will never be replicated? Make it up! That's what ice cream makers Reuben and Rose Mattus did in 1961, when they founded their ice cream store Häagen-Dazs in New York. Though the name sounds exotic, the owners will tell you the name doesn't actually mean anything. The Bronx-natives realized the appeal of foreign-sounding names.

Google: Mistakes Aren't Mistakes

Google was originally a misspelling of a word that already exists in the dictionary: "Googol." A googol is defined as a very large number, specifically 10 to the 100th power. Googol was supposed to be a name that would be indicative of the titanic amount of information on the Internet that the company sought to organize. The misspelled domain name "google.com" was still available, so the company settled on "google." Now, both words are in the dictionary, but most consumers only ever use one.

5 Ways "X-Men First Class" Is Like A Startup Business

2011-06-04T06:44:00.001-07:00

How do you reboot the concept of a reboot? With a director who values originality, leadership, a strong team, and the power of rabid fans to say whatever the hell they want (as long as they're saying something). Sound like any successful entrepreneurs you know?

By the time a film series gets to its fifth installment, the last throes of a franchise usually fall somewhere in between disappointment (Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones), or blatantly shameful money grabs (National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure). But now there’s the curious case of X-Men: First Class.

The X-Men franchise, though still profitable, hasn’t creatively evolved since the second film,X2, which was released almost a decade ago. Critics have largely panned subsequent strains of the mutant flicks, including Brett Ratner’s X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). First Class is a film whose title sounds like it's sponsored by American Airlines. Instead, it may just be the best installment to date. Only the filmmakers and Fox can say for sure how this happened, but we’d argue the flick’s early buzz and optimistic box office estimates come from treating First Class less like a rusty franchise in need of a reboot and more like a startup that generated a new set of rules for sequel-loving Tinseltown. Here’s five of them we spotted.

1. Welcome New Leadership

No, Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr (aka Magneto) are very much still in charge during the course of the film. It’s director Matthew Vaughn who was the relative unknown that was tapped to get behind the camera. The X-Men films are a character driven study--the struggle for outcasts to be accepted within society. Bryan Singer, who directed the first two films, used his experiences as an openly gay man to form the basis for the mutant point of view--it gave the first two films gravitas. After Singer left, directors Brett Ratner and Gavin Hood traded gravitas for non-stop action. What Vaughn brings to the proceedings is a sense of intrigue and danger. Vaughn, known for his cult hits Layer Cake and Kick-Ass, treats this new X-Men film as a '60s spy thriller in the vein of Bond classics like Dr. No. In other words, Vaughn traded all out action for intrigue.

2.) Reinvent Instead of Reboot

Star Trek played this nifty trick back in 2009; going back to the origins of the Starship Enterprise and in the process, creating a whole new timeline. Now, First Class, technically, is still part of the same story as the original films. Thematically, it’s not a true reboot. Financially and creatively, it’s a reboot. Setting the film in 1962 allowed Vaughn to not only take a fresh look at a group of characters that had become stale, but it also allowed him to up the ante, so to speak, by inserting the X-Men into a historically significant event--namely the Cuban Missile Crises. Basically by going back in time, Vaughn avoids the cluttered mess that Ratner left him in the present--the result is clean and fresh.

3. ) Pare Down Over Amp Up

There are one million different mutants depicted on-screen in X-Men: The Last Stand andX-Men Origins: Wolverine. OK, that’s an exaggeration, but there were over 30 in The Last Stand, alone. Which meant that there was really no time to dawdle on the relationship between Charles and Erik that made the first two films so good because, hey, we must be introduced to a guy who can gain weight on command (apparently that’s a real power). First Class is Charles and Erik’s story. Sure, other characters surround them--but only five other mutant X-Men. Put it this way: Last Stand ended with an all out battle with so much action on screen that it caused sensory overload. First Class’ signature scene is an important lesson for everyone that "less is more."

4. ) Hire a Team, Not a Marquee

You know what also happens when you marginalize (or kill off) the best two characters from the first two movies? You also marginalize the two best actors in the original X-Menseries: Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. Obviously, since First Class is a prequel, McKellen and Stewart aren’t going to be able to reprise their roles. Vaughn was wise to seek out Michael Fassbender and James McAvoy to play the roles of Erik and Charles--two actors who have so much charisma on screen that a lot of the supporting characters become an afterthought … and well they should be. Again, this is the story of Erik and Charles. Fassbender and McAvoy are so good together that it (almost) makes you forget how good McKellen and Stewart were together.

5. ) Trust Word of Mouth

Obviously a lot of the topics already hit on are a good way to produce word of mouth box office--i.e. being a good movie. And it does: As of this writing, First Class checks in at 87% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes–-so it has the critical word of mouth. Thankfully, because certainly the initial ad campaign from Fox for First Class didn’t help. Even Vaughn has been critical of some of the initial images released, going as far to tell/Film at one point, "When I found out, I said, what the fuck is this shit, and Fox is running around trying to figure out what happened as well. I agree. It’s like a bad Photoshop…" So, yeah, this is a movie that better have good word of mouth. Though, thankfully, Fox finally stopped releasing Photoshop-esque images and, instead, just started writing big fancy "X"s in the sky--which has paid off with a viral marketing campaign that no floating head of January Jones would ever produce.

http://www.fastcompany.com/1757346/5-ways-x-men-first-class-is-like-a-startup-business

Designing Outside the Box

2011-06-04T06:25:00.001-07:00

By Michael Allen

Designers who address the three learning phases will find e-learning success.

In many ways, designing successful e-learning is a nearly impossible task. The complexity can be overwhelming, with challenges coming from voluminous content that somehow manages to be incomplete, unsympathetic technology, anxious and inattentive learners, inadequate budgets, subject matter experts who are asked to be designers, and restrictive deadlines.

Many current e-learning solutions are so compromised in the design and development process that, in retrospect, e-learning probably wasn’t the best delivery medium. Simpler media present fewer design and development challenges, expose fewer design weaknesses, and cost less to develop. Unfortunately, they typically have limited potential. They also can become the most expensive solutions because they waste the learner’s time, fail to develop their skills, and do not improve performance. Any ineffective solution is expensive, but poorly designed e-learning ups the ante in wastefulness.

When organizational leaders sit down to analyze what a prospective performance improvement solution is worth, the resulting numbers often exceed, by dramatic amounts, budgets normally expected for the design, development, and delivery of e-learning solutions. However, the expected return-on-investment can be much more than the necessary cost for a highly successful e-learning solution.

In contrast, when managers develop budgets based on traditional training costs or reasonable investments, funds customarily fall far below what’s actually required to fulfill demands. So what can workplace learning professionals do differently? Let’s review a few unsuccessful traditions in e-learning design, and propose a plan for e-learning’s future success.

Unsuccessful traditions

We often think too narrowly of our role as instructional designers, confining our work to defining objectives, organizing content, selecting media, determining learning events, and developing performance measures (tests). These tasks become the boxes used to define and structure the components of a learning solution. But our role as instructional designers isn’t simply to apply design principles and hope for the best; it’s to enable people to perform at higher levels of competency.

If learners fail in performance, we have failed them, even if they scored flawlessly on our posttest. We tell ourselves that learners would perform better if only they would complete all of our e-learning modules, if only they did their homework, if only they’d practice more, if only they’d take a chance and apply the new things we’ve taught them. But these are just excuses. The bottom line is we’ve failed to reach the goal. Designing inside the boxes of an e-learning application, an instructor-led course, or even a blended learning solution is a traditional but narrow view of the design responsibility.

Inside these boxes, designers regularly give little attention to the practicality of learners actually performing on the job what they learned, as well as the level of practice that is necessary to sustain proficiency when performance opportunities might not occur for some time. In addition, designers often fail to address the fact that co-workers might misunderstand or even disapprove of the new practices being taught.

Instead, designers create a string of learning modules; each dependent on the preceding one, each presenting more difficult concepts and tasks to perform, each designed to raise performance to a higher level. There’s an assumption that the learner is totally inside each box with the designer, committed to and focused on each module and approaching it with energy and enthusiasm. E-learning designers need to get out more—out of these boxes, that is.

There are many variables not typically seen as within the purview of instructional design that can sabotage instructional efforts or enrich them. Success requires designers to think expansively about the real lives and influences on learners, including what they care about, what they are trying to do, and how they might perceive the learning solution. Then they can design both inside and outside the confines of the typical learning product.

Successful design

Before revamping the list of design responsibilities, we must first define what we mean by successful design. I do not think e-learning or any other educational program is successful if it results only in high posttest scores. I do not think success is reached if the targeted audience comes only to know things it didn’t before. No one succeeds just by knowing things. Success comes from doing the right thing at the right time.

Success, therefore, is realized only if learners develop and apply appropriate behaviors. Success means learners can recognize real world situations for which they have applicable knowledge or skills and respond effectively. Successful designs not only impart knowledge, but also the propensity to act. They build the confidence necessary to perform well as well as the skill to perform at an effective pace. But what must practitioners do for e-learning to succeed?

Three learning phases Inside traditional boxes, instructional design has generally ignored not only what is happening in the lives of learners while they are trying to learn (conflicting role expectations, sick loved ones, fear of standing out or looking foolish, and so on), but also critical conditions and events that occur both prior to learning and subsequently. Designers need to look at the entire process before people can learn.

Pre-instruction phase. Learners are not a blank slate. They may not know much about the content and skills they are trying to learn, but learners approach learning with various levels of confidence, expectations, readiness, habits, and preferences. They have a general disposition in each of these factors, as well as more specific dispositions with respect to the content (or whatever they know of it) and what they may know of e-learning and other instructional techniques involved.

The period preceding instruction is an important time for setting expectations, energizing learners, and preparing them to learn. Helping learners see that the prospective learning is about behavioral change is a good place to start. Don’t assume that learners understand this. Help them look at learning in a different and more useful way. It isn’t about getting a good grade and then going back to business as usual. It’s about changing what they do and when they do it.

Learning has a purpose for both them and their organization. It can change things for the better for everyone. Change is a simple word. It sounds like progress and improvement to organizational leaders who think, “If we’re not improving (which means changing), we’re falling backward.”

But change strikes fear in the hearts and minds of many employees who have found a familiar if not effective routine of dealing with performance expectations and don’t want to be rooted out of their comfort zone. Neurologists have actually discovered that the brain is wired to avoid change. It senses a sort of pain even when change is being contemplated. To get learners in the mode of thinking about change use exercises such as asking them to think about how things could be better and then describe how such improvements could occur. This is a first step. Then present specific problems and ask learners to evaluate possible solutions to help them move forward to understand the need for changes.

Eventually, pre-instruction phase activities should require that learners commit to changes they will make. Only then will learners be ready for skill-building exercises. When learners are psychologically unprepared for change, they’re also unprepared for the types of e-learning usually offered. With unprepared learners, e-learning fails. Designers need to change before they can expect learners to change, and this means dealing seriously with pre-learning preparation.

Instruction phase. Instructional designers need to make changes as well. In this phase, we need to focus on having learners actually perform work-related tasks, not just acquire knowledge and recognize correct answers. While there is general consensus that learning by doing is better than passive learning, it makes a great difference on what learners are doing during the learning experience.

For example, learners often are taught performance skills, but not the ability to recognize situations that determine which performance skills should be used. Learners need to think about the consequences of alternative behaviors. They need to analyze situations to determine what they should do, then practice both the analysis skills and the performance until these skills become solid and learners develop needed confidence and eagerness to perform.

Informal learning is always at work among workers. Employees are continually gathering information and forming perspectives that may be helpful or detrimental to their performance— whether it is talking with peers about the behavior of others, experimenting on their own to see what actions yelled the greatest accolades or require the least effort, or searching the Internet for alternative ways of working.

To take advantage of informal learning activities and help connect learning to work, programs should challenge learners to use varied avenues of exploration to solve hypothetical problems and develop useful skills and habits for solving problems.

Performance phase. Designers often act like parental turtles, walking off the job when their eggs hatch and leaving their young to fend for themselves. But embryonic skills face a high fatality rate when support terminates at the end of formalized instruction. Just as only one in 100 hatchling turtles survive to maturity, designers leave much to chance if they view what happens to learners after instruction as something that is completely outside their realm of influence.

During the performance phase, designers need to keep in mind that training programs should provide learning experiences for at least two audiences: one set for the target learners and another for their managers. Untrained supervisors, even if they are generally supportive of change, often unwittingly hamper changes because they have not developed mentoring skills, are unfamiliar with new processes being introduced through training, or do not recognize the challenges of change.

In addition, fledgling behaviors can be strengthened when learners have others at the same point in behavior development to compare notes. Facilitating ways learners can talk with each other as they transition learning to actual performance can help. E-learning applications can help learners find each other online and team up with each other in the pre-instruction phase. These teams can continue to bolster performance improvement through learning and long afterward.

Finally, e-learning programs can provide continual opportunities to practice and review new skills. Through increasing intervals, learners can use refresher exercises to keep their skills honed in a way that is rarely possible when traditional learning applications conclude.

Again, because e-learning works in the e-environment, alerting learners to the need for practice and providing various reminders and performance aids at optimally spaced intervals is easy, effective, and inexpensive.

Michael W. Allen is chair and CEO of Allen Interactions, and author of Designing Successful E-Learning;mallen@alleninteractions.com.

http://www.astd.org/LC/2008/0308_allen.html

How to Create Magnetic Copy to Maximize Your Content Appeal

2011-06-04T06:23:00.001-07:00

Getting people to take actions from your content requires a deep connection with your audience.

We all know the need to implement the right tactics to capture the emotion that leads to those desirable actions. Provide valuable content, use ethical SEO (search engine optimization) tactics, give away free eBooks, free webinars, whitepapers, special reports, you name it.

But if you really want to elevate your conversion rate, you need to understand the art and science of content marketing.

You need to figure out what motivates your audience to click here and sign up there.

Why people give their emails away to complete strangers, follow every call-to-action and come back for more.

Let’s look at the 3 keys of creating powerful content to help you increase your product appeal.

Grab and Keep Attention

How do you read newspaper? How about magazines? Do you every sentence of every word from start to finish cover to cover?

If you do, that’s great, but for rest of us we scan.

In today’s drive-by attention grabbing culture, people do judge a book by its cover.

That’s why magnetic copy must have magnetic headlines that get people curious. It should always be organize around benefits, the “what’s in it for me” must jump out at your prospective customers.

This is why content marketing mimics the format of news with powerful headlines, sub-headlines and bullets. Simply put, human beings are wired to tune out advertising because that’s the natural of our brain to detect deceptions.

People have less resistance with news style formatted content than advertising that looks like, well, advertising!

So start getting into the mindset that you need to write effective copy in order to grab and keep attention.

Focus your coy on the results that your customer will get instead of what your product does or the fancy technology behind it. Research your customer’s behaviors, attitudes anddemographics.

People only really care about themselves so keep your copy simple to the point and write in a way as if it’s you and one other person that are in conversation.

Your content can break through the noise if it’s interesting and exciting.

Demonstrate Social Proof

Ever since we’re little we associate ourselves with certain type of identifiers. Whether it’s the cloths we wear, the car we drive, the food we eat, the music we listen to, we’re obsessed with being part of a group.

This is human nature and the foundation of our society.

When people first land on your website or visits your social media profile they are looking for validation. The idea of social proof is all about perceived value of your influence and authority.

Who you are, what you do and why should people trust you?

You simply can NOT ignore the fact that people will form opinions in their own mind that reflects the perceived status of your stuff. You literally have less than 10 seconds to make an impression and that’s your instant reputation.

If you want your visitors to stay you must show them you’ve got the goods.

You can do this by leveraging testimonials and user-generated content (UGC) such as reviews or questions and answers (Q&A). Then follow up with some high value stuff that resonates with them right away.

Another method is to show the number of subscribers, comments, retweets or followers you have. The bottom line is that social proof is all about positioning.

Get Them To Take Action

So now you’ve demonstrated your expertise across multiple communities. The next step is to get your audience to take action.

Getting people to take action on the internet is all direct response marketing strategy with effective copywriting techniques. This means integrating measurable call-to-action that gets your visitors to do what it is that you want them to do.

It can be as direct as asking people to buy your product, contact you, input their personal information, share your content or leave a comment.

The trick here is that you must provide enough real value to earn the trust of your prospective customer so you can start building a relationship with them.

People are more likely to do what you ask if you’re open, honest and transparent.

Speak like a friend and stay relevant is the key to motivate people to take action.

The take away: Magnetic copy is about appeal and getting attention not about you or what you know. It’s about becoming your customer and getting people genuinely interested so they will want to know more, see more and take actions that you anticipated by design.

Your customers don’t want your product, service or sign up for anything. What they want is the solution to their problems.

Sure you can create content that appears to do that but ultimately magnetic content helps connecting the dots in all your information to drive out miscommunication.

Real effective content actually does help people and get them the result they want.

How about you? Are you creating content that sticks? Share your top tip for creating effective content in the comments.

http://www.designdamage.com/how-to-create-magnetic-copy-to-maximize-your-content-appeal/

Get out of your box!

2011-06-01T09:45:00.001-07:00

I will give you a little puzzle at the onset. The famous 9 dot puzzle! Can you link all the nine dots using four straight lines or less, without lifting the pen or pencil?

A helpful hint – THINK OUT OF THE BOX! Before we get to the solution, let us talk a bit about this.

A few of my business colleagues would be quite familiar with this story from Colgate. It is one of my favourites when I speak to sales and marketing teams about the importance of lateral thinking. Once upon a time, Colgate being the proverbial corporate, was looking at ways to improve its revenue. The research showed that their market share was increasing day by day and yet their sales were not increasing. It was driving the heads mad. (Sounds only too familiar, doesn’t it?) The solution came from the driver of the CEO who usually overheard all the conversations and made an interesting observation to his employer. He swore by the Colgate brand and used it everyday. But he did not buy it quite so much because of one reason. And the reason was that it lasted very long. You see the tube had a small opening and thus lasted for absolute ages. This was easily fixed. Colgate increased the size of the toothpaste tube’s opening and voila! The sales started growing.

Let us look at another example. I shall take you back to India this time again. Ever happened to go around rural India and witnessed “jugaad”. If there was ever a best bet on innovation, this would be one. It is a diesel engine fitted on a cart to make it into a low cost and workable motor vehicle. In essence, it’s a tribute to native genius and lateral thinking.
And here is the solution to the puzzle:

We all have boxes – visible, invisible, cultural, religious, social, intellectual, regional, etc. and it takes great time and effort to think out of these boxes. Liberate your thought, think beyond the boundaries and a lot of impossible will become possible.Get out of your box, you deserve it!

Google Studies Management And Uncovers…. The Fundamentals

2011-05-21T03:45:00.001-07:00

An article in the New York Times today describes Google’s Project Oxygen, a statistics driven research project to study what makes good managers. Google’s People Analytics team apparently studied the attributes of high-performing teams and published the “Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.” Apparently Google believes that its management style is very unique, so their goal in this effort was to uncover the “secrets” to excellent management at Google.

Well, as you read the article and the eight habits, you are going to be amazingly surprised that the eight habits which Google identified are the same very principles which make up good management at every organization on earth. In fact I had to smile as I read the article, because this story again confirms how younger, fast-growing companies have to rediscover the principles of leadership which enduring organizations already learned years ago.

This is not to say Google didn’t do a wonderful thing – but it does show how companies like Google tend to believe that their organization is different from everyone else, so they need to learn the principles of management for themselves. One of the revelations which Google discovered was that “the biggest controllable factor in high performing teams was the quality of the manager, and how they sort of made things happen.” As with many technical organizations (and sales organizations as well), there is a natural tendency to believe that the best engineers (read sales people, recruiters, etc.) should be promoted to management. As leadership development experts know, leadership and management is a profession in itself – and it takes time and skills to learn to lead well.

What are the eight findings?

1. Be a good coach. (We couldn’t agree more – in fact the best way to characterize a great manager is to think of them as a coach – someone who brings out the best in people and helps them succeed. Google’s definition of a coach is a bit more limited.)

2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage. (One of the biggest findings in our High-Impact Learning Culture research and now one of the biggest new “competencies” in leadership development. Google mentions “stretch assignments” in this category, as a way of helping the team improve its performance. )

3. Express interest in the team’s success and personal well-being. (A pretty important factor in any manager’s success, and something new managers in fast-moving companies often have to remind themselves of regularly.)

4. Dont’ be a sissy: be productive and results-oriented. (This is a way of stating “manage by objectives” and “focus on results” – which is often a challenge with new, technical managers.)

5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team. (Again a very important leadership value, and Google specifically recommends that you hold all-hands meetings. As we all know, listening is a vital leadership skill and I have found that the best leaders are really the best listeners, and they have a unique ability to hear “reality” and then communicate a vision which fits “reality.” Much harder said than done.)

6. Help your employees with career development. (Our Talent Management Factbook research found that companies with mature development planning processes far outperform those that don’t – and in fact this is one of the most highly correlated talent management dimensions with business success. The problem is that doing this is far harder than it sounds – and the entire organization must be enabled for career development.)

7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team. (Clearly an important leadership competency.)

8. Have key technical skills so you can help your team. (A very important characteristic of strong leadership in a technical company. In services-related businesses we find this to be far less true – and there is somewhat of a truth to the point that “good managers can manage anything.” Technical skills are key to leadership, but in many roles less important than you may think.)

Why this kind of effort means so much to all organizations.

While the findings of Project Oxygen may not be that new or innovative, this whole story teaches us two very important lessons.

First, management, like golf or any other sport, is built upon the fundamentals. If people don’t know or learn the fundamentals, they cannot achieve greatness. What Google has discovered is that many of the company’s managers need to learn the basics – and all organizations have new managers who fall into this category.

Second, what this story shows is that organizations must go through their own self-discovery about the value of strong leadership. We talk with hundreds of companies each year, and we find executives in all industries who believe that their success is due solely to their innovative product, sales expertise, unique strategy, or strong engineering prowess. While these are critical elements to success, over time strong management always wins over strong product and market position. And every enduring organization we study discovers its own need for management skills in its own special way.

Google is a data-driven culture. What Google apparently found was that by studying leadership and using data to promote the value of strong management, people took it seriously. Amen to that!

The “Knowledge Hiding” Epidemic in Corporate America

2011-05-18T10:57:00.000-07:00

Companies spent about $73 billion on knowledge management software in 2008, according to AMR Research.

Wow. And, possibly, what a waste.

A new study, authored by David Zweig of the Rotman School of Management, Catherine Connelly of McMaster University, Jane Webster of Queen’s University, and the University of Toronto’s John Trougakos, pokes at the phenomenon that has become the elephant in the room for those who specialize in knowledge management: What if employees-those folks with the knowledge-don’t want to share? All the IT in the world isn’t going to help you there.

“A lot of companies have jumped on the bandwagon of knowledge-sharing,” such as spending money on developing knowledge-sharing software, says Professor Zweig. “It was a case of, ‘If you build it they will come.’ But they didn’t come.”

How they Hide

In particular, Zweig and his colleagues found that employees have three particular techniques for bucking knowledge management initiatives, all of which the researchers classify as “knowledge hiding”:

Being evasive, or just repeatedly ignoring requests for information
Rationalized hiding, such as claiming a report is confidential when it really isn’t
Playing dumb, or pretending they don’t have the information that is being requested
There are two big reasons employees refuse to share, say the researchers. They both boil down to the same thing: Knowledge is power, and in this age of downsizing, rightsizing, and high unemployment, who in their right mind would give it up? Employees won’t share because:

They don’t trust the other party. They don’t believe the information will be used in a way that will help the organization as a whole, or they fear that the information will be used against them-to poach a client, for example.
The culture of the organization doesn’t encourage it. If people who share information aren’t rewarded or at least recognized, why would they bother?
The paper suggests two ways companies can encourage more sharing of critical knowledge-and the first one takes a direct shot at that $73 billion spend mentioned above.

Cut down on email. Instead, encourage trust through more person-to-person contact
Make positive examples of people who share and who use information well, thereby highlighting examples of trustworthiness
Make sure not to reward people who use information that’s been shared with them in a duplicitous manner.

Would you be willing to share hard-won, mission-critical information with a close colleague? With someone in another department? Why or why not?

http://www.bnet.com/blog/business-research/the-8220knowledge-hiding-8221-epidemic-in-corporate-america/1543?tag=content;drawer-container

50 Things I Know About Business Process Management | Forrester Blogs

2011-05-17T11:53:00.001-07:00

50 Things I Know About Business Process Management | Forrester Blogs

The Fallacy Of Architecting Behavioral Change With Social Technologies | Forrester Blogs

2011-05-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

The Fallacy Of Architecting Behavioral Change With Social Technologies | Forrester Blogs

"Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch" | Forrester Blogs

2011-05-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

"Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch" | Forrester Blogs

Why surveys aren't the best tool for designing experiences | Forrester Blogs

2011-05-17T11:38:00.000-07:00

Why surveys aren't the best tool for designing experiences | Forrester Blogs

Would You Pay $172,200 For This MBA? | BNET

2011-05-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

Would You Pay $172,200 For This MBA? | BNET

ANISH KAPOOR

2011-05-16T11:14:00.000-07:00

ANISH KAPOOR

Directory of E-Learning Tools: Course Authoring Tools

2011-05-05T08:36:00.000-07:00

Directory of E-Learning Tools: Course Authoring Tools: "free"

8 Things You Should Never Say to Employees | BNET

2011-04-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

8 Things You Should Never Say to Employees | BNET

The Right to Management Competence

2011-04-27T08:04:00.001-07:00

Imagine that you're conducting a performance appraisal with one of your people. You're discussing a major project that didn't turn out as hoped and you've just asked him why.

"Why did it fail?" he says. "Lots of reasons, but mostly because we didn't get what we needed from you. We were depending on other groups, but they couldn't have cared less. In fact, they didn't even know what we were doing and how it would help them. Plus, we never had a real strategy or plan and so we pretty much winged it every day, and every day you seemed to change your mind about what was important. In fact, Jack (your boss) never understood the project. So when people asked him, he couldn't support us."

What would your reaction be? We suspect a part of you would be thinking: "He can't say this. This is insubordination. I'm evaluating him. This isn't how it works."

And you'd be right. This isn't how it usually works. In virtually all organizations we know, the right to have formal expectations of others flows only downward, just like formal authority.

Notice we said "the right to have expectations." People certainly have expectations of those above them in the hierarchy, but there's little if any recognition of those expectations. Certainly there's no recognition of the right to have them.

We suggest that point of view should be questioned. We certainly don't think every expectation people have of a boss is appropriate. Many are naive, self-serving, and dysfunctional for the group. But there is one right we believe needs recognition by bosses, organizations, and all the people in them:

People have a right to competent management.

This is not a new idea. Even in Roman times it was said thatevery soldier had a right to competent command. In the same way, your people can and should expect you to be an able boss. They should expect this in the same way and for the same reason they can expect to receive the minimal tools and resources needed to do the work assigned to them. And they should be allowed to discuss these expectations with you, their boss, just as you and they discuss your expectations of them.

"That's fine, in theory," you're probably thinking. "But who knows what 'competent' management is? Look at the millions of words written about the subject."

Certainly there's room for ongoing negotiation, especially around how the requirements of good management apply in a given situation. But that's little different from your own expectations of your people. You know the general elements of what's required of each; how those elements apply to specifics is open to ongoing discussion.

What good management comprises — what bosses do to make their people productive — isn't really a mystery. We can argue about the exact wording, but the basic elements aren't in doubt. We've summarized them in what we call the "3 Imperatives": Manage yourself, manage your network, manage your team. In writing about these elements, we've described them in terms of what good managers do and what all managers should strive to do. But it's not hard to rephrase them from a direct report's point of view — in effect, a "Direct Reports' Bill of Rights" — as follows.

Every direct report should be able to expect that the boss will:

Be Trustworthy. Trust is based on competence and character, and so people can expect the boss (a) will know what to do and how to do it, and (b) will possess fundamental values, standards, interpersonal skills, emotional maturity, and levels of caring that support the work and those doing it.
Exercise influence beyond his or her group. Every group works in a web of interdependence within a broader organization and beyond. Success — through, for example, securing needed resources, attention, and cooperation — depends on the boss's ability to exercise influence in that broader context through a network of ongoing, mutually supportive relationships.
Create a team of his or her group. A group is a collection of people who work together. A team is a group whose members are mutually committed to pursuit of a clear purpose and the achievement of goals based on that purpose. In a team there is a "we" separate from the individuals involved and the people in that "we" believe they will all succeed or fail together. Why is this important? Because members of a team are more engaged and committed and as a group are more innovative and productive. A competent manager knows how to transform a group into a team — by fostering a compelling purpose, worthwhile goals and clear plans, productive work processes, and a culture of "we."
Recognize individuals and support their development. People want to belong and be recognized for themselves. Thus, an effective manager knows individual team members, works with them, supports their development, and recognizes their contributions — all within the context of the team.

How would you fare in the eyes of your people if they applied these standards? What if your organization told everyone that this is what all employees should expect of their managers? What if, in your performance reviews with your people, you discussed with them your own performance in terms of the expectations above?

http://blogs.hbr.org/hill-lineback/2011/04/the-right-to-management-compet.html

Funding 101 | 30 Second MBA

2011-04-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

Funding 101 | 30 Second MBA

Amit Bhatia's Aspire: Matching Rural Workers With Jobs | Fast Company

2011-04-26T09:11:00.000-07:00

Amit Bhatia's Aspire: Matching Rural Workers With Jobs | Fast Company

Who’s busiest: working hours and household chores across OECD

2011-04-23T10:09:00.000-07:00

Who’s busiest: working hours and household chores across OECD

Society at a Glance 2011 - OECD Social Indicators

2011-04-23T10:02:00.001-07:00

Society at a Glance 2011 - OECD Social Indicators

Time use: A day in the life | The Economist

2011-04-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

Time use: A day in the life | The Economist

Fun: The Key to Better Team Collaboration

2011-04-21T10:01:00.001-07:00

Remember when collaborating was fun?

The news that Google’s staff bonuses now depend on the success of its new +1 social rank tool — and Mathew’s observation that “you can’t threaten people into being social” — brings to the fore an important but often unacknowledged issue surrounding collaborative business: While businesses focus on choosing tools, prescribing acceptable network policies and measuring ROI, the easiest way to get staff to collaborate is, well, to make it fun.

One organization I worked with last year used an internal social network that was literally devoid of any humor or personality whatsoever. Try as I might, I couldn’t bring myself to use it, and I wasn’t the only one. Who wants to “engage” when there’s nothing but a constructed corporate persona to engage with?

If you want staff to collaborate productively with one another, your suppliers, peers or customers, the simplest way is to make it fun.

You may think that’s unrealistic; a non-essential element in the cut-and-thrust of today’s heady business competition. But the fact remains that it’s the easiest way to get staff to work together.

What makes collaboration fun?

Human Contact

Collaboration is fun because we do it with others. Online collaboration helps us very efficiently avoid the tyranny of distance, which is equally great for making disparate teams feel closer, and for allowing us to learn from people we’ll never get a chance to meet.

We all know the kick that comes from engaging with someone we admire — albeit at a distance — over Twitter or Facebook. That thrill is echoed every day in good collaborative exchanges within teams.

Personalities

Personalities can make or break the collaborative effort. Evolving team member disagreements and friendships all have their impacts on the collaborative fun factor.

Establish your collaborative space as a supportive, open platform on which individuals’ unique aspects are welcome, and your staff will likely have more fun there.

A Shared Goal or Direction

Being part of something bigger than the individual is a key motivator for many collaborators. Most of us want to belong, and belonging involves sharing. Shared experience—especially the overcoming of collective challenges, and the achievement of common goals—strengthens team bonds and supports future collaborative efforts.

Think of the people you love collaborating with on work projects. They’re probably people who share your passion for the work, and who can communicate that enthusiasm equally well through in-person or online exchanges.

Learning, Contribution and Recognition

For most professionals, a key personal motivation for collaboration is the opportunities it provides to learn from peers, contribute to the collaborative effort, and be recognized for the good work we do by people we admire.

That cycle of mutual respect, admiration and knowledge exchange is self-perpetuating. Valuable, rich collaborative relationships usually continue even when team members change employers, and no longer have access to in-house collaborative systems.

The Payoff

If you’re thinking, “that’s fine and all, but it sure sounds like a lot of fun,” you’re right. But remember: more fun means stronger staff engagement, more effective collaboration, and greater productivity.

If your organization is one of those that’s still worried about the potential for staff to “spend all their time on social networks,” it’s way past time to join the age of social business. Engaging with staff about the networks they enjoy, and considering the ways they could be used to enrich workplace collaboration might be a good first step towards making your organization more collaborative and effective.

Teams that don’t collaborate well should assess their operation on the basis of the elements mentioned here. Certain tools may help you overcome specific collaborative issues, but the astute team leader will consider each possible solution in light of its potential to enhance the collaborative fun factor—knowing that more fun will likely lead to a greater ROI.

Anil Ananthaswamy: What it takes to do extreme astrophysics | Video on TED.com

2011-04-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Anil Ananthaswamy: What it takes to do extreme astrophysics | Video on TED.com

Joel Stein: the TIME 100 Most Influential Things in the World - The 2011 TIME 100 - TIME

2011-04-21T08:12:00.000-07:00

Joel Stein: the TIME 100 Most Influential Things in the World - The 2011 TIME 100 - TIME

Idea Hub :: American Express OPEN Forum

2011-04-20T07:44:00.000-07:00

Idea Hub :: American Express OPEN Forum

4 Keys To Delighting Your Customers

2011-04-19T09:06:00.001-07:00

The Vanishingly Rare Art of Customer Delight

Was ready for a flight destined to Houston, en route to my home. I had a tight connection. But I’m an optimist by default. So I was in strong spirits. And set to fly.

The initial delay was 30 minutes. Something about the plane having to be towed from another area to the gate (not sure why someone didn’t tow it over earlier but no worries; there are worse things happening in the world). 30 minutes stretched to an hour. Nearly zero communication nor explanation. The gate agents just typed frenetically on the keyboards as in one of the final scenes of the pretty-much-hilarious “Meet The Parents” movie.

Finally, we boarded. The captain then came on the PA and advised us of a “minor mechanical problem that should be fixed in 15 minutes.” Four hours later we were still on the runway.

When we eventually took off, I’d missed my connection and resigned myself to the adventure of an unexpected evening in Houston (great city). Through it all, no one from the airline said “Sorry”, the gate agents promised at the arrival gate were invisible and no plans were made for hotel accomodations or ground transport. No one seemed to care (when a business treats its people poorly, its people treat their customers poorly – except for the one in one hundred soul who rises above it all because of their personal belief system and Leads Without a Title).

Look, I’m not complaining. Not at all. Delays and disruption are the price of admission for a professional traveler. I had books to read, water to drink and my iPod with hundreds of audiobooks just begging to be consumed. I’m not so special (and certainly no different from you) but I was able to maintain a sense of perspective about the whole thing. But the experience did fine tune and bring into clearer focus the gorgeous opportunity every business has to breed customer loyalty and all -new levels of trust when things don’t go as planned.

Here are some of my thoughts on what a truly world-class airline that really cared about their customers would have done:

1. Talk To Your Customers: A problem is nothing more than an opportunity to engage and wow the people who keep you in business. The gate agents and personnel could have quickly and regularly explained the situation and assured us all possible progress was being made.

2. Say You’re Sorry: I’m a fanatic about leadership language. Words have such power. The captain talked a lot about “some more bad news”. Better to just give us the facts – and hold off on the emotion. But even more importantly, say “sorry” when you need to say sorry. Many of us missed our connections and were caused inconvenience because of this mechanical issue. Yet no one took responsibility.

3. Show Your Customers a Little Humanity: While we waited, the agents could have handed out bottles of water. Or had some protocol that would make a challenging situation easier (or even fun). Maybe the Plan B could have been a boxed sandwich. Or some special chocolates. Or just walking around checking in with as many passengers as possible to make human connections (I saw one passenger buy Chinese food and share it with people around him…shared decency amidst adversity).

4. Go Beyond Expectations: Most businesses don’t even deliver on what they promise in their advertising and sloganeering. Imagine, when we arrived in Houston (it was nearly midnight), if we were provided with transport to a hotel, a healthy meal, and a letter on check in wishing us a great night, while thanking us for giving the airline our business.

Business brilliance is pretty simple. Maybe not easy. But pretty simple. And it begins with caring about the people who keep you going.

http://www.robinsharma.com/blog/03/customer-delight/

The 50 New Rules of Work

2011-04-18T12:56:00.001-07:00

The global economy is in a state of acute disruption. Competition has never been more fierce. Consumers have never been so well-informed and loudly demanding. And what worked yesterday just might be obsolete today.

But this time is also a great time, for the astonishing few who are ready to show leadership. Leaders are at their absolute best during messy cycles versus during the easy ones. And messy cycles bring with them gorgeous opportunities.

As I sit quietly on this airplane at 40,000 feet, away from the rallying cries of a wired world filled with endless interruptions, I’ve distilled what I’ve been sharing in my presentations to clients across the planet over the past months, from Kuwait and Dubai to Paris, London and Dusseldorf.

Here are 50 powerful rules to amp up your game so this business cycle is one of your best business cycles yet.

You are not just paid to work. You are paid to be uncomfortable – and to pursue projects that scare you.
Take care of your relationships and the money will take care of itself.
Lead you first. You can’t help others reach for their highest potential until you’re in the process of reaching for yours.
To double your income, triple your rate of learning.
While victims condemn change, leaders grow inspired by change.
Small daily improvements over time create stunning results.
Surround yourself with people courageous enough to speak truthfully about what’s best for your organization and the customers you serve.
Don’t fall in love with your press releases.
Every moment in front of a customer is a moment of truth (to either show you live by the values you profess – or you don’t).
Copying what your competition is doing just leads to being second best.
Become obsessed with the user experience such that every touchpoint of doing business with you leaves people speechless. No, breathless.
If you’re in business, you’re in show business. The moment you get to work, you’re on stage. Give us the performance of your life.
Be a Master of Your Craft. And practice + practice + practice.
Get fit like Madonna.
Read magazines you don’t usually read. Talk to people who you don’t usually speak to. Go to places you don’t commonly visit. Disrupt your thinking so it stays fresh + hungry + brilliant.
Remember that what makes a great business – in part – are the seemingly insignificant details. Obsess over them.
Good enough just isn’t good enough.
Brilliant things happen when you go the extra mile for every single customer.
An addiction to distraction is the death of creative production. Enough said.
If you’re not failing regularly, you’re definitely not making much progress.
Lift your teammates up versus tear your teammates down. Anyone can be a critic. What takes guts is to see the best in people.
Remember that a critic is a dreamer gone scared.
Leadership’s no longer about position. Now, it’s about passion. And having an impact through the genius-level work that you do.
The bigger the dream, the more important the team.
If you’re not thinking for yourself, you’re following – not leading.
Work hard. But build an exceptional family life. What’s the point of reaching the mountaintop but getting there alone.
The job of the leader is to develop more leaders.
The antidote to deep change is daily learning. Investing in your professional and personal development is the smartest investment you can make. Period.
Smile. It makes a difference.
Say “please” and “thank you”. It makes a difference.
Shift from doing mindless toil to doing valuable work.
Remember that a job is only just a job if all you see it as is a job.
Don’t do your best work for the applause it generates but for the personal pride it delivers.
The only standard worth reaching for is BIW (Best in World).
In the new world of business, everyone works in Human Resources.
In the new world of business, everyone’s part of the leadership team.
Words can inspire. And words can destroy. Choose yours well.
You become your excuses.
You’ll get your game-changing ideas away from the office versus in the middle of work. Make time for solitude. Creativity needs the space to present itself.
The people who gossip about others when they are not around are the people who will gossip about you when you’re not around.
It could take you 30 years to build a great reputation and 30 seconds of bad judgment to lose it.
The client is always watching.
The way you do one thing defines the way you’ll do everything. Every act matters.
To be radically optimistic isn’t soft. It’s hard. Crankiness is easy.
People want to be inspired to pursue a vision. It’s your job to give it to them.
Every visionary was initially called crazy.
The purpose of work is to help people. The other rewards are inevitable by-products of this singular focus.
Remember that the things that get scheduled are the things that get done.
Keep promises and be impeccable with your word. People buy more than just your products and services. They invest in your credibility.
Lead Without a Title.

Swifty Lazar and the Awesome Value of Chutzpah

2011-04-18T12:49:00.001-07:00

New story I’ve been sharing with business audiences at my Lead Without a Title presentations. Legendary Hollywood agent Swifty Lazar was having dinner with a hot young starlet when he was just getting started. He wanted to wow her. And make her his client.

On a break from the meal, Swifty found himself in the men’s room with none other than Frank Sinatra. Swifty introduced himself with enormous passion and exceptional confidence. But Frank wasn’t interested. Swifty persisted and asked Sinatra to “please come and say hello to us at our table.” Sinatra said no.

But 90% of success is persevering longer than anyone thinks you have a right to persist. The best performers and the truest leaders have “Chutzpah”. Guts. Courage. Fearlessness amid their largest fears. And so our friend, the young Swifty, asked again. “Please come by and say a fast hello. It’ll only take a few seconds.” And so Sinatra said yes.

Swifty returned to the starlet. And Frank Sinatra, in full view of the entire room, walked over to Swifty’s table. “Hi Swifty,” said Sinatra, extending his hand. “Not now Frank,” replied Swifty. The starlet, duly impressed, signed on the dotted line the next day.

http://www.robinsharma.com/blog/04/swifty-lazar-and-the-awesome-value-of-chutzpah/

Column: Cultivate a Culture of Confidence - Harvard Business Review

2011-04-17T11:53:00.000-07:00

Column: Cultivate a Culture of Confidence - Harvard Business Review

10 Tips to Be a Better Business Writer | BNET

2011-04-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

10 Tips to Be a Better Business Writer | BNET

Adapt » Blog Archive » Mental disorder posters

2011-04-16T07:32:00.000-07:00

Adapt » Blog Archive » Mental disorder posters

Fail often, fail well

2011-04-16T04:13:00.001-07:00

Companies have a great deal to learn from failure—provided they manage it successfully

Apr 14th 2011

BUSINESS writers have always worshipped at the altar of success. Tom Peters turned himself into a superstar with “In Search of Excellence”. Stephen Covey has sold more than 15m copies of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Malcolm Gladwell cleverly subtitled his third book, “Outliers”, “The Story of Success”. This success-fetish makes the latest management fashion all the more remarkable. The April issue of the Harvard Business Review is devoted to failure, featuring among other contributors A.G. Lafley, a successful ex-boss of Procter & Gamble (P&G), proclaiming that “we learn much more from failure than we do from success.” The current British edition of Wired magazine has “Fail! Fast. Then succeed. What European business needs to learn from Silicon Valley” on its cover. IDEO, a consultancy, has coined the slogan “Fail often in order to succeed sooner”.

There are good reasons for the failure fashion. Success and failure are not polar opposites: you often need to endure the second to enjoy the first. Failure can indeed be a better teacher than success. It can also be a sign of creativity. The best way to avoid short-term failure is to keep churning out the same old products, though in the long term this may spell your doom. Businesses cannot invent the future—their own future—without taking risks.

Entrepreneurs have always understood this. Thomas Edison performed 9,000 experiments before coming up with a successful version of the light bulb. Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of “failing forward” as a common tech-industry phrase puts it: in Germany bankruptcy can end your business career whereas in Silicon Valley it is almost a badge of honour.

Related topics

A more tolerant attitude to failure can also help companies to avoid destruction. When Alan Mulally became boss of an ailing Ford Motor Company in 2006 one of the first things he did was demand that his executives own up to their failures. He asked managers to colour-code their progress reports—ranging from green for good to red for trouble. At one early meeting he expressed astonishment at being confronted by a sea of green, even though the company had lost several billion dollars in the previous year. Ford’s recovery began only when he got his managers to admit that things weren’t entirely green.

Failure is also becoming more common. John Hagel, of Deloitte’s Centre for the Edge (which advises bosses on technology), calculates that the average time a company spends in the S&P 500 index has declined from 75 years in 1937 to about 15 years today. Up to 90% of new businesses fail shortly after being founded. Venture-capital firms are lucky if 20% of their investments pay off. Pharmaceutical companies research hundreds of molecular groups before coming up with a marketable drug. Less than 2% of films account for 80% of box-office returns.

But simply “embracing” failure would be as silly as ignoring it. Companies need to learn how to manage it. Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School argues that the first thing they must do is distinguish between productive and unproductive failures. There is nothing to be gained from tolerating defects on the production line or mistakes in the operating theatre.

This might sound like an obvious distinction. But it is one that some of the best minds in business have failed to make. James McNerney, a former boss of 3M, a manufacturer, damaged the company’s innovation engine by trying to apply six-sigma principles (which are intended to reduce errors on production lines) to the entire company, including the research laboratories. It is only a matter of time before a boss, hypnotised by all the current talk of “rampant experimentation”, makes the opposite mistake.

Companies must also recognise the virtues of failing small and failing fast. Peter Sims likens this to placing “Little Bets”, in a new book of that title. Chris Rock, one of the world’s most successful comedians, tries out his ideas in small venues, often bombing and always junking more material than he saves. Jeff Bezos, the boss of Amazon, compares his company’s strategy to planting seeds, or “going down blind alleys”. One of those blind alleys, letting small shops sell books on the company’s website, now accounts for a third of its sales.

Damage limitation

Placing small bets is one of several ways that companies can limit the downside of failure. Mr Sims emphasises the importance of testing ideas on consumers using rough-and-ready prototypes: they will be more willing to give honest opinions on something that is clearly an early-stage mock-up than on something that looks like the finished product. Chris Zook, of Bain & Company, a consultancy, urges companies to keep potential failures close to their core business—perhaps by introducing existing products into new markets or new products into familiar markets. Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School suggests that companies should guard against “confirmation bias” by giving one team member the job of looking for flaws.

But there is no point in failing fast if you fail to learn from your mistakes. Companies are trying hard to get better at this. India’s Tata group awards an annual prize for the best failed idea. Intuit, in software, and Eli Lilly, in pharmaceuticals, have both taken to holding “failure parties”. P&G encourages employees to talk about their failures as well as their successes during performance reviews. But the higher up in the company, the bigger the egos and the greater the reluctance to admit to really big failings rather than minor ones. Bosses should remember how often failure paves the way for success: Henry Ford got nowhere with his first two attempts to start a car company, but that did not stop him.

Why Apps Need Some Sense and Sensibility: Tech News and Analysis «

2011-04-15T23:27:00.000-07:00

Why Apps Need Some Sense and Sensibility: Tech News and Analysis «

The CarTel System

2011-04-15T23:20:00.001-07:00

Hari Balakrishnan
Samuel Madden
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

the Cartel logo

CarTel is a mobile sensor and telematics system whose design is motivated by transportation and civil infrastructure applications. Road traffic is a well-known “grand challenge” problem that affects most of us on a daily basis. For example, the Texas Transportation Institute’s urban mobility report estimates that the per-person delay caused by debilitating congestion on the highways near major cities was 54 hours on average. In addition to the loss of time and productivity, the amount of gas consumed is worth billions of dollars, and the environmental impact is enormous.

Municipalities spend millions of dollars on their roadways. Despite this investment, people are often unhappy with the quality of the roads they drive on. Poor roads are the cause of expensive lawsuits and damage claims—illustrated for example, by the more than 500,000 pothole-related claims received by insurance companies each year.

Figure 1 The CarTel system architecture. Cars on roads collect traffic and sensor data, and relay it to the CarTelHQ server via cellular or WiFi (802.11) networks. Users can connect to the server and view aggregate traffic and road quality information as well data about their own driving habits.

Balakrishnan and Madden have used a number of electrical engineering and computer science technologies, including sensing, embedded computing, and wireless networking technologies, together with machine learning and optimization algorithms, to significantly improve the state of the art in traffic planning and management. Unlike classical static sensor deployments, their approach is to use opportunistic mobile sensing—sensors deployed on cars and mobile phones). Opportunistic mobile sensing is effective because it delivers data about the roads that matter (those that are used), while being cost-effective to deploy.

The CarTel system uses in-car nodes to collect a variety of information (time, location, speed, vibration, acceleration, on-board vehicle diagnostics, etc.). This data is sent to servers using novel opportunistic wireless protocols that allow, for the first time, WiFi networks to be used from moving cars, and cellular connections (Figure 1, above). Server software analyzes the data using novel algorithms to perform tasks such as delay optimized vehicle routing (in collaboration with EECS Professor Daniela Rus and her group), carbon and emissions tracking, road surface assessment to determine which roads require immediate attention (Figure 2, below), drive data visualization, remote vehicle diagnostics, etc. Each user has an account on a commute portal (Figure 3, below) that maintains his or her data privately and provides the services mentioned above.

Figure 2 Website for the Pothole Patrol, an application that shows the location and pictures of the largest potholes in and around Boston.

CarTel is currently deployed on about 50 Boston-area taxis and a handful of MIT user cars. The team is planning a larger deployment including new algorithms and methods to services that can reduce traffic delays, fuel consumption, and carbon emissions.

The CarTel project is funded by the National Science Foundation and in part by the T-Party Project, a joint research program between MIT and Quanta Computer Inc., Taiwan, and in part by Google.

Figure 3 The drive log for one of our users. Users can see and manage the data collected about them, and visualize their driving patterns using a variety of plotting and filtering tools. (images: Balakrishnan, Madden)

Previous article: EECS Research Reaches Out – Where it makes a Difference

Next article: Autonomous Urban Driving

One Response to “The CarTel System”

Waco Cars says:
September 15, 2010 at 4:52 pm
Very awesome! We need quantitative data and experiments like this in order to gain more knowledge on our traffic, fuel, and emissions situation. This will better our situation moving toward the future.

http://eecs-newsletter.mit.edu/articles/2008-fall/the-cartel-system/

24 Quick Actions You Can Do Today That Can Change Your Financial Life Forever

2011-04-15T11:29:00.000-07:00

24 Quick Actions You Can Do Today That Can Change Your Financial Life Forever

From Values to Action

2011-04-15T10:52:00.001-07:00

Former chairman and chief executive officer of Baxter International, Harry Kraemer, has written a genuine, back-to-basics book on value-based leadership: From Values to Action. He presentsfour interconnected principles that build on and contribute to each other:
Self-Reflection is the most important and is central to your leadership. “If you are not self-reflective, how can you truly know yourself?” writes Kraemer. “If you do not know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you cannot lead yourself, how can you possibly lead others?”
Self-reflection allows you to transform activity into productivity for all the right reasons. It means “you are surprised less frequently.” It is essential in setting priorities. You can’t do everything. So reflection makes it possible to answer key questions like What is most important? and What should we be doing? in a way that is in line with your strengths and values and organizational goals.

Engaging in self-reflection on a regular, ongoing basis (preferably daily) keeps you from becoming so caught up in the momentum of the situation that you get carried away and consider actions and decisions that are not aligned with who you are and what you want to do with your life.

Balance and Perspective is the ability to understand all sides of an issue. Pursuing balance means you will have to grasp the fact that leaders don’t have all the answers. Kraemer says, “My task was to recognize when a particular perspective offered by one of my team members was the best answer….Leadership is not a democracy. My job as the leader is to seek input, not consensus.”

Because he believes we are more effective if we balance all areas of our life, he prefers the term “life balance” over “work-life balance.” It’s not an either or proposition. “When you identify too closely with your work, you can easily lose perspective and become unable to look at all angles in a situation.” He recommends implementing a “life-grid” to keep track of where you are spending your time and to hold yourself accountable.

True Self-Confidence is know what you know and you don’t know; to be comfortable with who you are while acknowledging that you still need to develop in certain areas. (Comfortable not complacent.) Why TRUE self-confidence?

There are people who adopt a persona that might make others think that they have self-confidence, but they are not the real deal. Instead, they possess false self-confidence, which is really just an act without any substance. These individuals are full of bravado and are dominating. They believe they have all the answers and are quick to cut off any discussion that veers in a direction that runs contrary to their opinions. They dismiss debate as being a complete waste of time. They always need to be right—which means proving everyone else wrong.

Genuine Humility is born of self-knowledge. Never forget where you started. “Genuine humility helps you recognize that you are neither better nor worse than anyone else, that you ought to respect everyone equally and not treat anyone differently just because of a job title.”

After describing each of these principles, Kraemer explains how these four elements play in everyday situations such as talent management and leadership development (“The values based leader is looking for people who exhibit the values that are most important to her.”), setting a clear direction(You’ve been tasked with creating a quick strategy, the first step is to listen. “This is precisely the time that you need to draw upon the capabilities of the excellent team you’ve put together.”), communication (“Never assume you have communicated enough.”), motivation (“What you must do is relate to others by letting them know who you are and the values you stand for.”), and execution(“As you become a leader, you will shift from knowing the right answers to asking the right questions.”).

Kraemer describes a values-based leader well: “Self-reflection increases his self-awareness. Balance encourages him to seek out different perspectives from all team members and to change his mind when appropriate in order to make the best possible decisions. With true self-confidence, he does not have to be right, and he easily shares credit with his team. Genuine humility allows him to connect with everyone because no one is more important than anyone else.”

From Values to Action is an outstanding book and filled with important concepts that any would-be leader would benefit from.

How You Show Up As a Leader: An Action Plan

2011-04-15T10:15:00.001-07:00

In my most recent blog, I made the case that leaders must first establish a relationship with themselves as the basis for leading others. On the journey toward self-knowledge and self-acceptance, you quickly realize that you have your own unique way of being in the world. Sure, you may share some qualities with other people, but your overall package is different from the rest.

How do you become more familiar with your own unique way of being in the world? By focusing on your character.

Character is defined as a “psychological system of personal traits, an evaluation of a particular individual’s moral qualities and a disposition to express behavior in consistent patterns across a range of situations.” As leaders are guided in discovering the various aspects of their character, they begin to see how these parts fit together (or not), what they accept about themselves (or not), and what more they can tap within themselves to lead more fully and authentically.

My work with leaders to help them better understand their character focuses on four key areas: self-awareness, energy (or drive), people skills, and practical insight. I refer to these four areas as the skills of character; they constitute the foundation upon which your leadership is based.

Most of our preparation for leadership focuses on gaining knowledge and experience. But the greatest impact leaders have on their world comes through knowing and experiencing who they are and how they show up—it derives more of the being than the doing part of leading. The skills of character help people connect to this being dimension.

Let’s begin with the skill of self-awareness. Although we live within ourselves from moment to moment, many leaders find that there is a lot about themselves that they are not aware of. This was certainly the case with one of my clients, whom I’ll call Dave. Interestingly, the more he examined himself, the less Dave considered himself to be a leader. (He wasn’t alone in this belief; many leaders have a similar view of themselves. In his zeal for knowing and doing, Dave would take on whatever was necessary to get the job done.

One day, however, Dave realized that what he was doing was no longer working. He was a technical guru; his knowledge of the business, coupled with his ability to translate that knowledge in to new service offerings, had won Dave a promotion to a higher-level position. But now Dave was out of his comfort zone: he was being asked to apply his vast knowledge across three critical functions that he was not very familiar with: product development, marketing, and sales. Dave responded to this challenge by leading in the same way that he did when he was in his comfort zone: he shared his technical knowledge.

As we become aware of our own perception of ourselves, we are better able to see how we are showing up for others and how they are responding to us. Dave gradually came to see that his new role called for leading people whose knowledge and experience were very different from his. What they needed from him was not his knowledge but his understanding of the possibilities for applying that knowledge.

As his self-awareness deepened, Dave realized that the leadership challenge he now faced was no longer about what he knew and what he could do—it was about how he could engage others. So he started to ask questions instead of sharing more ideas. As he learned more about what his team members could do, he began to frame for the team possible ways of putting their capabilities to use.

The demands of leadership require more than depth of experience and a track record of doing important work. If your prior success has been a function of what you know—your technical expertise—then you’ll probably feel unprepared when you’re catapulted into the world of leading. You’ll find yourself asking, “What else do I need to know? What more do I need to do?”

You won’t find the answers to these questions in books or seminars—you’ll find them within you.

The Action Plan
• Begin to observe who you are in your leading—when things go well and when things go badly. What are the feelings and insights that you get about yourself as a leader? Do you even see yourself as a leader?
• Who are the leaders that capture your attention? What do those leaders stir up within you? What is it that you deeply admire (or dislike) about them, and why?

http://www.becomealeader.org/articles/how-you-show-leader-action-plan

Short story

2011-04-10T01:11:00.001-07:00

"This is the story of four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody, and Nobody. There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody's job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realized that Everybody wouldn't do it. Consequently, it wound up that Nobody told Anybody, so Everybody blamed Somebody. "

10 Leadership Lessons From Food Network Chefs

2011-04-09T11:48:00.001-07:00

Engaged in a fierce battle on last night’s Chopped All-Stars, chef Aarón Sanchez quipped, “When brilliance happens, you don’t ask where it came from, you just kind of go with it, ride the wave.”

It didn’t matter that he was referring to making whipped cream out of chickpeas; he might just as well have been talking about the next high-tech innovation or big business idea.

If you watch enough Food Network shows like Iron Chef or Worst Cooks in America, a picture of what greatness is all about begins to emerge. No, I’m not talking about great chefs making great food. I’m talking about great leaders.

What separates iconic chefs like Bobby Flay, Masimaru Morimoto,and Cat Cora from the millions of competitors around the world is their leadership ability. It’s evident in their behavior, their character, everything they do. Never mind that they’re on TV. They may as well be cooking in one of their restaurants or mentoring an up-and-coming sous chef.

Restaurants deliver product and service like any other business. But make no mistake. The cooking business is a fiercely competitive battleground that breeds great chefs who are also great leaders.

10 Leadership Lessons From Food Network Chefs

Compete to win but respect the enemy. Forget all the politically correct BS - business is about winning. And yes, it is a zero-sum game. It’s all about market share. But that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t respect your competitors.
Success is about managing and mentoring people. The way chefs move up is by hiring talented cooks and training them to be sous chefs so they can someday run one of their many restaurants. It’s the same as climbing the corporate ladder.
Results are all that matter. It’s what the customer thinks of the product and service that counts. That’s what creates repeat business and loyal customers. You may think you’ve come up with a brilliant dish, but if the folks don’t like it, you failed.
You’ve got to know the business. Steve Jobs isn’t just a brilliant marketer. Warren Buffet isn’t just a smart investor. Bill Gates wasn’t just a great software coder. Just like these iconic leaders, every great chef has a head for the business.
It’s not who you know but what you know. Don’t let anyone tell you success is about who you know. That’s just an excuse for whiners who can’t cut it. Great chefs know everything there is to know about making a restaurant business successful. Period.
Experience is overrated. Even young chefs like Sanchez and Bobby Flay - when he was first starting out - exude such instincts and passion for what they do that you know in a heartbeat they’re going to be successful. That’s why people follow them.
Learn from failure and move on. Failure is how we learn and grow. Failure teaches us how to do things differently. How to do things better. Great chefs don’t dwell on their mistakes. They suck it up and do better next time. After all, there’s always another meal.
Focus on core strengths. Great chefs grow their business around their core strengths. For Flay it’s southwestern. Paul Prudhomme is a Cajun master. You can probably guess Mario Batali’s specialty. There are lots of ways to diversify without going too far afield.
Smarts matter. Nobody has ever been successful in the restaurant or cooking business by just doing the same stuff as everyone else. Sure, execution is critical, but innovation and creativity are also requirements for success. Like it or not, smarts matter.
Work hard, play hard. Even while competing at an extraordinarily high level, these chefs never lose their sense of humor and, when it’s over, they party and congratulate each other on a job well done. That’s how it should be.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/ceo/10-leadership-lessons-from-food-network-chefs/7118?tag=fd-river3

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

2011-04-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

Generations Around the Globe

2011-04-02T11:44:00.001-07:00

http://www.tammyerickson.com/

http://www.tammyerickson.com/images/uploads/Generations_and_Geography_white_paper.pdf

Geography significantly influences the formation of generational beliefs and behavior. Each country's unique social, political, and economic events shape specific views and attitudes among today's adults. Western generational models cannot be applied broadly to a global workforce.
My latest research builds on an approach of understanding the generations by looking at the shared formative events that shaped their early years. We did In-depth research into the events occurring in each country during the time each generational cohort would have been in their teens and pre-teens. Understanding these events is critical because many of our most powerful and lasting beliefs are formed when we are teenagers. What we see and hear — and the conclusions we draw — influence for our lifetimes what we value, how we measure success, whom we trust, and the priorities we set for our own lives, including the role work will play within them.

This research, confirmed through personal interviews, highlights the logic of each generation's response to work and life today, encouraging acceptance and appreciation of the different lenses through which individuals view events. We focused on the generations in eight countries, including the four BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), some of the most important markets for talent over the next decade, as well as one country from the Middle East. We also examined two European countries, the U.K. and Germany, representing the two opposing sides in World War II; the generations shaped by events after the war in these two countries have significantly different characteristics. In each country, we studied four age cohorts. To allow comparisons across the geographies, we held consistent age spans and generational names.

Highlights from this research

National circumstances heavily influenced the development of Traditionalists (born from 1928 to 1945) and Boomers (born from 1946 to 1960).

Traditionalists around much of the world shared the experience of becoming teens in the midst of major, in some cases cataclysmic, changes in their local environment. For many, the defining event was World War II, which had consequences that haunted this generation's formative years in the countries affected. The conditions of the post-war world encouraged the abandonment of colonial policies and the emergence of new states, among them India. China ended its long civil war, and transformed into the Communist People's Republic of China. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was in its infancy, having just been formed through the consolidation of the local tribes in the Arabian Peninsula. Brazil was ruled by a dictator.

Traditionalists in the U.S., the U.K., and other countries on the Allied side in World War II exhibit strong characteristics as "joiners." Most were eager to participate in the post-war boom that created a promising economic climate. This generation experienced the rapid evolution of a middle class that dominated and drove these economies. These members of this generation tended to enter the workforce and advance through affiliation with successful organizations. Most held a strong respect for authority, rooted in their early observations that those in positions of leadership were doing admirable things and warranted respect.
In contrast, many other parts of the world experienced significant economic hardship, either from the aftermath of the war (for example, in Russia and East Germany) or from the policies of the then-leaders (for example, in Brazil, China, and India). In many cases, leadership demanded compliance, promoting risk-aversion and compliance, rather than respect. Traditionalists reared in these areas retained strong ties to traditional customs and family practices.

Perhaps the factor shared most widely by members of the Boomer generation around the world is simply the sheer size of the cohort. In many parts of the world, birth rates increased during the 1940s and 1950s, producing a large "boom" in the number of adolescents of the 1960s and 1970s. The sheer volume of people their age produced a generation that is generally hard-working, driven, and competitive.

However, within this large cohort, the formative experiences of Boomers differed substantially around the globe.

In the Western world during their teen years, progressive social values, such as increasing political involvement, civil rights for individuals of different races, and the political and economic liberty of women, became popular. In the 1970s, these values extended to opposition to the Vietnam War and nuclear weapons, the advocacy of world peace, and hostility to the authority of government and big business. The environmentalist movement grew dramatically during this period. In these areas, Boomers tend to share a desire for change, idealism, and anti-authoritarian values.
Members of this generation growing up in other parts of the world, however, experienced very different conditions. The military coup in Brazil produced a generation with anti-authoritarian views, but limited ability to speak out regarding their desire for change. Similarly, conditions in East Germany and the Soviet Union did not allow for the development of strong generational solidarity against the existing authority. In Saudi Arabia, the rapidly expanding wealth from the oil economy produced a generation that was deeply grateful to those in authority.
Educational opportunities were a key differentiator for this generation globally. The Cultural Revolution in China shaped a generation that is perhaps more different than any other in this age cohort because of the nearly complete lack of educational opportunities available to members during their teen years. Educational opportunities were limited in India, although those who were able emigrated to other countries for advanced education and work opportunities. In the Soviet Union and East Germany, education became a key differentiator among members of this generation, as the best and the brightest were able to excel in the communist system. Education was an important goal for Boomers in Western countries during these years.

Both Generation X (born from 1961 to 1979) and Generation Y (born from 1980 to 1995) tend to have more shared characteristics in common than do older generations, but for different reasons. For Generation X, the state of the local economy during their formative years had major implications for their outlook on life today.

In many parts of the world, the economy struggled. In the U.S., the recession of 1981 prompted a major wave of layoffs. In Brazil, the arduous transition from a military dictatorship to civilian rule, along with growing exposure to foreign trade, weakened the local economy and intensified the country's financial crisis. In Germany, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of East Germany came at significant financial cost. In Saudi Arabia, steeply declining oil prices created government deficits for the first time. These different underlying factors all contributed to shaping individuals who value self-reliance. X'ers in these areas tend not to rely on institutions for long-term financial security.
Members of Generation X in China and India, however, had very different formative experiences. In both countries, sudden reforms brought the promise of new economic opportunity. In India, loosened business regulations and restrictions on foreign investment and imports, along with reductions in bureaucracy spurred a boom in economic activity, including a major expansion of the telecommunications industry and space program and the birth of the software and information technology sector. In China, post-Mao economic reforms de-collectivized the countryside, decentralized government, legalized private ownership, and created Special Economic Zones for capitalist investment. China was exposed to American pop culture, cinema, nightlife, and brands and to a cultural renaissance, the return of traditional Chinese culture, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Living standards, life expectancies, literacy rates rose, along with a growing urban middle class. X'ers in these countries were eager to join the growing economy and willing to compete for still-scarce educational slots.

Members of Generation Y around the world had the greatest number of shared experiences of any of the generations profiled. Technology, of course, is at the core: in most countries, they have had almost lifelong access to digital technology and, because of that technology, have developed a shared awareness of many events, such as terrorist attacks and school violence, and a unique always-on connection with one another.

One of the key differences among Y's around the world is the degree to which their immediacy translates into a strong desire for financial success; this financial value is clearly strongest in the BRIC countries and others in which the economy is expanding rapidly for the first time. In many Western countries, the sense of immediacy encompasses a broad set of considerations: whether the current work is challenging and important, as well as financially beneficial.
Of the countries profiled in this research, Saudi Arabia's Generation Y is probably the most different from others in this age cohort around the world. In Saudi Arabia, Y's tend to be more religiously conservative than previous generations and more mistrustful of those in authority, while in most other parts of the world, Y's are both progressive and trusting of authority. Throughout the Middle East, Y's struggle to find balance between tradition and modernity. As recent events show, this generation's large size gives them a strong voice in the future of this region.

Each country's unique social, political, and economic events shaped specific views and attitudes among today's adults. Understanding these country-to-country differences is critical to creating employment deals that attract and retain the best employees in each geographic area.

Understanding individuals' backgrounds and resultant perspectives or mental models both within generations and across geographies helps leaders grapple with the diversity, challenges, and potential of a global workforce. Better understanding leads to greater empathy for the "other guy's" point of view and, ultimately, provides the foundation for more effective and efficient talent management practices.

Over the next decade, engaging talent from multiple generations and geographies will be vitally important for business success. As businesses expand, the availability of talent to match this growth will be limited in many areas and skill sets. Almost every company will find it challenging to attract and retain top talent unless they are able to engage individuals of all ages and across multiple geographies.

A white paper based on this research is available on my website.

http://blogs.hbr.org/erickson/2011/04/generations_around_the_globe_1.html

3 Key Success Factors to Becoming a Change Master

2011-03-29T10:32:00.001-07:00

March 21, 2011 - by: Jennifer Garvey Berger

Maybe you’re a leader looking for one of your team members to change. Maybe she’s aloof, stand-offish, and offends people with her cryptic and occasionally scathing responses to their questions. Maybe he talks too much, a mush of ideas spouting forth with little action behind them. Maybe she confuses people, or his team lacks motivation or spark; you’d like this person to be more thoughtful, or perhaps more decisive, or maybe more inspirational.

Or, maybe the person you’d like to change is yourself.

The question I ask clients in this situation (borrowing language from Harvard University’s Ronald Heifetz) is whether it’s a technical change or an adaptive change that they want. The difference is huge and shapes how you might go about moving toward that change.

A technical change is a linear process that leads to someone knowing more stuff:

Lack information/ tools→input new information/ new tools→have new information/ tools.

This is the kind of change you want if you have a Luddite executive who won’t send email and can’t open an attachment. The fix is easy: send him to a course, upgrade his laptop, and all will be well.

An adaptive change is a different story altogether. This is if you want someone to behave differently: not simply to use a new tool or a new piece of information, but to show up to meetings in a different way, give feedback to his colleagues in a different way, or think about solving problems in more expansive or creative ways.

When my clients talk about wanting a colleague to be more strategic, inspirational, or reflective, the key words for me aren’t the obvious ones—strategic, inspirational, reflective. The key word is be.

If you’re wanting others to be different, that’s an adaptive challenge. Although we often treat it as a technical challenge—sending the colleagues away for a three-day workshop on strategic thinking or inspirational leadership—research and experience will tell you that doesn’t work. Instead, what works is to figure out how to change not just what the colleagues know, but who they are.

Changing who we are is not effortless work, but it is possible. The first step is knowing whether that’s what you want. If it is, you need an adaptive change plan. This is not a straightforward addition of a tool or piece of information, but rather a series of interconnected pieces. After all, your behavior emerges from your thoughts, and your thoughts emerge from your world view: the sense you make of the world.

Try to change just the behavior and you’ll fail (as do more than 90% of well-intentioned new year’s resolutions). In the heat of the moment, you won’t remember to be strategic or inspirational or reflective. You’ll just be, well, you.

Instead, you actually have to change your world view, and the thoughts that arise from seeing the world the way you do.

How do you get started? Spend the first few days just noticing. When do I do the thing I’d like to stop doing (or when do I not do the thing I wish I were doing)? What was happening around me? In the quiet of my office afterwards, what did I wish I had done/ said/ thought? When you’ve collected some data about what you’re doing now, you’ll be ready to think about what you can do differently tomorrow.

The Action Plan

• Figure out whether it’s a technical change you want or an adaptive one.

• Ask: do I want to change what I know (technical), or how I behave (adaptive)?

• If it’s an adaptive change, begin to notice when you aren’t behaving as you’d like to. What was going through your mind at that time? What seemed to block your ability to act differently in that moment?

http://www.becomealeader.org/articles/3-key-success-factors-mastering-change

Hype Cycles | Gartner Inc.

2011-03-22T12:43:00.000-07:00

Hype Cycles | Gartner Inc.

Videos

2011-03-19T22:51:00.001-07:00

Failure and Success - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tjYoKCBYag

Never say die - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YHaWaB_y-I

Nick Vujicic - http://www.lifewithoutlimbs.org/media-center

Helpdesk - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yq3IkQoX5_I

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

2011-03-19T21:56:00.001-07:00

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast | Project Management | Unstuck Company | Dallas Fort Worth

Culture-tree.png (791×543)

2011-03-19T21:56:00.000-07:00

Culture-tree.png (791×543)

Silverman Speech Consulting

2011-03-19T21:51:00.000-07:00

Silverman Speech Consulting

15 Ways To Do Your Best Work

2011-02-27T12:53:00.000-08:00

15 Ways For You To Do Your Best Work

Do your best work by challenging the way you did things yesterday.
Do your best work by allowing your passion to see the light of day.
Do your best work by becoming part of the solution versus growing the problem.
Do your best work by expecting nothing less than you playing at world-class.
Do your best work by giving away the credit (especially when you crave it)
Do your best work by practicing your skills so you become a virtuoso.
Do your best work by releasing excuses and doing important things.
Do your best work by getting up when you’ve been knocked down.
Do your best work by keeping your promises; to others and to yourself.
Do your best work by showing integrity.
Do your best work by delivering more value than anyone could ever expect from you.
Do your best work by making time to refill your well.
Do your best work by having a strong foundation at home.
Do your best work by becoming as fit as a pro athlete.
Do your best work by doing work that makes a difference and inspires others to do the same.
As Chuck Palahniuk once said: “The goal isn’t to live forever. The goal is to create something that will.”

http://www.robinsharma.com/blog/02/do-your-best-work/

Ten Essentials for Getting Value from Values

2011-01-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

Many organizations have statements of mission and values. Unfortunately, most of them sound alike. Who could quibble with the importance of "respect" or "customer focus"? Values statements can seem like passive decoration for walls and the Web, easily ignored. And the words don't really tell anyone what to do in any specific sense.

But that doesn't mean that values don't matter. In organizations that I call "supercorps" — companies that are innovative, profitable, and responsible — widespread dialogue about the interpretation and application of values enhances accountability, collaboration, and initiative.

Here are ten essential ingredients that make values work to produce organizational value.

Values are a priority for leaders, invoked often in their messages and on the agenda for management discussions.
The entire work force can enter the conversation; employees are invited to discuss or interpret values and principles in conjunction with their peers, who help ensure alignment.
Principles are codified, made explicit, transmitted in writing in many media, and reviewed regularly to make sure people understand and remember them.
Statements about values and principles invoke a higher purpose, a purpose beyond current tasks that indicates service to society. This purpose can become part of the company's brand and a source of competitive differentiation.
The words become a basis for on-going dialogue that guides debate when there is controversy or initial disagreement. Decisions are supported by reference to particular values or principles.
Principles guide choices, in terms of business opportunities to pursue or reject, or in terms of investments with a longer time horizon that might seem uneconomic today.
As they become internalized by employees, values and principles can substitute for more impersonal or coercive rules. They can serve as a control system against violations, excesses, or veering off course.
Actions reflecting values and principles — especially difficult choices — become the basis for iconic stories that are easy to remember and retell, reinforcing to employees and the world what the company stands for.
Values are aspirational, signaling long-term intentions that guide thinking about the future.
Principles, purpose, and values are discussed with suppliers, distributors, and other business partners, to promote consistent high standards everywhere.

In short, it's not the words that make a difference; it's the conversation. Frequent discussion about organizational values can be engaging and empowering. The organization becomes a community united by shared purpose, which reinforces teamwork and collaboration. People can be more readily relied on to do the right thing, and to guide their colleagues to do the same, once they buy into and internalize core principles. People can become more aware of the drivers and impact of their behavior. And, as I have seen in leading companies, active consideration of core values and purpose can unlock creative potential.

http://blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2010/06/ten-essentials-for-getting-val.html

Search terms

2011-01-17T09:45:00.001-08:00

site:http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/pubhealth/isett/ filetype:pdf

site:http://managementcraft.typepad.com/ filetype:pdf

http://www.linkpdf.com/download/dl/hbr-s-10-must-reads-.pdf

site:http://www.pioneernetwork.net/Data/Documents/ filetype:pdf

site:http://www.booz.com/media/file/ filetype:pdf

site:http://oxygenfororganizations.com/wp-content/uploads/

Six Keys to Changing Almost Anything

2011-01-17T09:35:00.000-08:00

Change is hard. New Year's resolutions almost always fail. But at The Energy Project, we have developed a way of making changes that has proved remarkably powerful and enduring, both in my own life and for the corporate clients to whom we teach it.

Our method is grounded in the recognition that human being are creatures of habit. Fully 95 percent of our behaviors are habitual, or occur in response to a strong external stimulus.Only 5 percent of our choices are consciously self-selected.

In 1911, the mathematician Alfred North Whitehead intuitedwhat researchers would confirm nearly a century later. "It is a profoundly erroneous truism," he wrote, "that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them."

Most of us wildly overvalue our will and discipline. Ingenious research by Roy Baumeister and others has demonstrated that our self-control is a severely limited resource that gets progressively depleted by every act of conscious self-regulation.

In order to make change that lasts, we must rely less on our prefrontal cortex, and more on co-opting the primitive parts of our brain in which habits are formed.

Put simply, the more behaviors are ritualized and routinized — in the form of a deliberate practice — the less energy they require to launch, and the more they recur automatically

What follows are our six key steps to making change that lasts:

1. Be Highly Precise and Specific. Imagine a typical New Year's resolution to "exercise regularly." It's a prescription for failure. You have a vastly higher chance for success if you decide in advance the days and times, and precisely what you're going to do on each of them.

Say instead that you commit to do a cardiovascular work out Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m., for 30 minutes. If something beyond your control forces you to miss one of those days, you automatically default to doing that workout instead on Saturday at 9 a.m.

Researchers call those "implementation intentions" and they dramatically increase your odds of success.

2. Take on one new challenge at a time. Over the years, I've established a broad range of routines and practices, ranging from ones for weight training and running, to doing the most important thing first every morning without interruption for 90 minutes and then taking a break to spending 90 minutes talking with my wife about the previous week on Saturday mornings.

In each case, I gave the new practice I was launching my sole focus. Even then, in some cases, it's taken several tries before I was able to stay at the behavior long enough for it to become essentially automatic.

Computers can run several programs simultaneously. Human beings operate best when we take on one thing at a time, sequentially.

3. Not too much, not too little. The most obvious mistake we make when we try to change something in our lives is that we bite off more than it turns out we can chew. Imagine that after doing no exercise at all for the past year, for example, you get inspired and launch a regimen of jogging for 30 minutes, five days a week. Chances are high that you'll find exercising that much so painful you'll quit after a few sessions.

It's also easy to go to the other extreme, and take on too little. So you launch a 10-minute walk at lunchtime three days a week and stay at it. The problem is that you don't feel any better for it after several weeks, and your motivation fades.

The only way to truly grow is to challenge your current comfort zone. The trick is finding a middle ground — pushing yourself hard enough that you get some real gain, but not too much that you find yourself unwilling to stay at it.

4. What we resist persists.

Think about sitting in front of a plate of fragrant chocolate chip cookies over an extended period of time. Diets fail the vast majority of time because they're typically built around regularly resisting food we enjoy eating. Eventually, we run up against our limited reservoir of self control.

The same is true of trying to ignore the Pavlovian ping of incoming emails while you're working on an important project that deserves your full attention.

The only reasonable answer is to avoid the temptation. With email, the more effective practice is turn it off entirely at designated times, and then answer it in chunks at others. For dieters, it's to keep food you don't want to eat out of sight, and focus your diet instead on what you are going to eat, at which times, and in what portion sizes. The less you have to think about what to do, the more successful you're likely to be.

5. Competing Commitments.

We all derive a sense of comfort and safety from doing what we've always done, even if it isn't ultimately serving us well. Researchers Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey call this "immunity to change." Even the most passionate commitment to change, they've shown, is invariably counterbalanced by an equally powerful but often unseen "competing" commitment not to change.

Here's a very simple way to surface your competing commitment. Think about a change you really want to make. Now ask yourself what you're currently doing or not doing to undermine that primary commitment. If you are trying to get more focused on important priorities, for example, your competing commitment might be the desire to be highly responsive and available to those emailing you.

For any change effort you launch, it's key to surface your competing commitment and then ask yourself "How can I design this practice so I get the desired benefits but also minimize the costs I fear it will prompt?"

6. Keep the faith.

Change is hard. It is painful. And you will experience failure at times. The average person launches a change effort six separate times before it finally takes. But follow the steps above, and I can tell you from my own experience and that of thousands of clients that you will succeed, and probably without multiple failures.

http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2011/01/six-keys-to-changing-almost-an.html

Bridging the Gap: How to Improve Communication Between the Office and Remote Workers

2010-12-09T11:57:00.001-08:00

Some teams are made up of some members who work on-site and some who work remotely. While most research shows that little difference in performance between the two groups, this kind of team poses a challenge. A study by researcher Nathan Bos and his colleagues from the University of Michigan shows that these mixed groups have a tendency to create a divide between the on-site workers (collocated) and the remote workers (isolates). From the study:

“We found that the collocated people formed an in-group, excluding the isolates. But, surprisingly, the isolates also formed an in-group, mainly because the collocated people ignored them and they responded to each other.”

Note that the on-site workers’ tendency to ignore the remote workers wasn’t intentional. It was just an effect of their physical proximity to each other and the greater inconvenience of contacting the remote workers. As a result, the remote workers were more responsive to each other, even though they couldn’t tell which participants worked on-site or remotely.

An earlier study, looking at Lucent Technologies’ software development department, supports these findings. At the time of the study, Lucent had teams working in the UK, Germany and India. The researchers found that employees interacted with local team members significantly more often than they did with remote team members.

Given the tendency of on site workers to ignore remote workers , how does one encourage unity in a mixed group? One way is to make communication between on-site and remote workers as easy as possible. This will minimize any difficulty for on-site workers to reach remote workers, and vice versa. You can do this by selecting communication channels that are easily accessible to everyone on the team. Whether it’s email, instant messaging, or a collaborative app, make sure that members can send and receive messages without compromising clarity. This is especially true with channels that are dependent on speed and signal quality, such as audio or video chat.

But it’s not just the quality of the tools and the speed of the Internet connection that matters. The speed of the replies and collaborative support among team members is also important. According to the Lucent Technologies study, multi-site groups have a tendency toward “a significant slowdown of work that spans sites, as compared to work involving the same people that does not cross sites.” Your team needs to understand that important remote requests require prompt responses to avoid this slowdown.

There are no shortage of tools to facilitate this kind of efficient communication. There are now hundreds of available communication and collaboration tools for teams to choose from, both in the form of hardware and software. Despite the broad choice of tools, however, it’s still best to stick to using as few of them as possible. This ensures that all the data, discussions, and content will be centralized and accessible in one place. So even if your people are not found in the same site, all the necessary information is.

When it comes to real-time communication, it may also help to establish cues that show whether a person welcomes incoming communication or not. Bos’ paper suggests that the lack of these cues may hinder successful communication, “Without contextual information it is difficult to know when someone is available or interruptible. Furthermore, people worry about appearing rude, so [they] do not initiate contact.” One way to use these cues would be type of presence status notification (the “Available”, “Busy”, and “Away” symbols) featured in most instant messaging apps. Make these cues consistent and enforced throughout the entire team.

But if you want to take a more radical step, why not encourage your entire team to work remotely — even if many of them live in the same city? A few years ago, Om interviewed Jason Fried of 37signals, who said that a distributed workforce was good for his company. Fried said that he believed people are more productive when they’re working apart. Even though (at the time) five members of the team lived in Chicago, they still worked apart. Since that interview, entire teams working remotely has become even more commonplace

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/bridging-the-gap-how-to-improve-communication-between-the-office-and-remote-workers/

What’s Crowdsourcing Useful For?

2010-12-09T11:53:00.001-08:00

Defining “crowdsourcing” — like defining “social media” — can be a bit of a challenge. The term not only seems to have multiple meanings depending on who’s using it, but it’s also being used to define a whole new landscape of activities that didn’t exist in their current form a mere five years ago.

In its simplest form, crowdsourcing means turning to the many people outside of your own company, organization or self to do something.

Social technologies, including social networks, make it easier than ever for to bring people together, to communicate with them and to organize them, both as individuals and as a group. New sites now exist that are custom-built to help you manage crowd outreach and the processes of getting something done with many people outside of your organization.

So what is the “something” that you can do — or get done — by tapping into the crowd? Here are some categories and examples of crowdsourcing:

1. WORK

Utilizing the crowd for work sometimes entails “micro-labor:” small, discrete tasks broken out of a bigger project and handled by many distributed workers. Examples of crowdsourcing work sites in this vein include Samasource, CrowdFlower and Mechanical Turk. Or it could be reaching out to the crowd to collaborate on creating something such as a new company logo. Or you could reach out to a crowd to identify a single contractor to do specific work, perhaps through site like Elance.

Another example of a crowd doing “work” for you is by leveraging the knowledge of your more avid customers to provide peer-to-peer support for your new customers, with some guidance from you. A product like BearHug can help you to manage your customer service crowd. (We wrote about Bearhug in July.) Another example of getting a crowd to do work is Wikipedia where people write, edit and police the site without pay.

2. INPUT

Polls and surveys are commonly used ways to use the crowd for input. Formal tools for getting input from the crowd include question-and-answer tools like LinkedIn Answers andFacebook Questions. These tools are similar to Yahoo! Answers, but they reach out to your own community, instead of the web population at large.

You can also turn to crowds to beta-test a website or software application, or to troubleshoot a problem. Sites such as uTest and TopCoder offer two different models of tapping into crowds of programmers. The former provides a managed community of professional programmers to run test cycles on other companies’ software products and sites, while the latter works more like a bidding site for managing online programming competitions and competitive software development. In testing situations, input becomes work and in some cases, there is compensation for that work. In other cases, programmers or others provide their input or work at no charge, often to build their portfolios and reputations.

3. ORGANIZING

While gathering crowds for social action is a centuries-old activity, in today’s technological interconnected world, the tools we can use to gather and manage crowds are more powerful and efficient than older ways, such as letter-writing or phone calls. Examples of such tools include SeeClickFix, or on a more global scale, One Billion Minds.

Fundraising is also an activity that has benefited from advances in technology. An application such as Facebook Causes provides individuals with a compact set of tools for reaching out to one’s Facebook friends (and their friends) for organizing, action, and fundraising. Kickstarter provides a funding platform to help individuals raise money for creative projects from others from both within and outside of their communities.

The flipside of getting something done through crowdsourcing is to be part of the crowd and doing the work or providing the input. I’ll cover that in my next post.

I’m currently writing a book about crowdsourcing, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing” (Penguin, Spring 2011), so you can expect to see a few more posts on the subject here on WebWorkerDaily.

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/3-uses-for-crowdsourcing/

18 Tasks You Can Crowdsource

2010-12-09T11:50:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about what crowdsourcing is useful for, breaking it down into three main categories: Work, Input and Organizing. Crowdsourcing is a way of getting work done that can help you save time, money and free you up to get to other work at hand.

Here are some ideas for tasks that can be crowdsourced, and links to sites that can help you with those tasks. Note that some of the sites mentioned can be used for several different types of crowdsourcing, and not just the tasks mentioned here.

TECHNICAL TASKS

Translation. Need something translated, without having to rely on Google Translation to do the trick? Try MyGenGo.
Transcription. Have audio files that need transcribing, such as a podcast? TryCastingWords.
Photo tagging. Looking to get photographs tagged or classified and support a good cause? Try the nonprofit crowdsourced labor site Samasource.
Keyword optimization. Looking for SEO help? Try Trada.
Data verification. Have a long list of business information, like a contact list or URLs, and need that content verified? Try the CrowdFlower self-service site (CrowdFlower CEOLukas Biewald will be speaking about the future of work and crowdsourcing at ourNet:Work conference in San Francisco next month).
Website testing. Looking for usability testing for your site? Try Usertesting.com.
Beta testing software. Need some skilled beta testers to test your software or go through your code? Try TopCoder.
Article writing. Need some content for your website or blog? Try SquadHelp.

CREATIVE TASKS

Logo design. Looking for a logo for your company? Try Prova.com.
Business card design. Need a new business card layout? Try Guerra-Creativa.
Print and online ads. Want a print ad or an online banner ad? Try 99designs.
Website design. Need a new website interface design? Try crowdSPRING.
Product development. Want to see if your cool product concept can become a real product? Try Quirky.com.
Brand names and taglines. Looking for a new name for a company, product or service or a clever tagline? Try NamingForce.
Video. Need a video produced? Try Tongal.
Packaging. Need packaging for a new product? Try BootB.
Creative campaign. Running a campaign and need a winning idea? Try IdeaBounty.
Quick ideas. Need some fast, inexpensive input? Try IdeaOffer.

Whatever your need, crowdsourcing can help you get work done and tap into crowds of talented and skilled workers willing to perform work in new ways. Keep in mind that the work can vary in terms of quality. Most sites that charge for services have some kind of refund policy if you are not 100 percent satisfied, but read the fine print.

How Much Time Does Social Media Marketing Take?

2010-12-09T11:43:00.000-08:00

http://gigaom.com/collaboration/how-much-time-does-social-media-marketing-take/