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Lessons from the Three Cups of Tea Controversy

Adam Richardson — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:56:17 PDT

Sitting on my nightstand is a half-finished copy of Stones into Schools, the sequel to the best-selling Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson, which has recently become embroiled in controversy due to an exposé on 60 Minutes. (In case you have just returned from, say, a long trek in the Himalayas and haven't heard about it, 60 Minutes and well-known adventure sports author Jon Krakauer claim that, among other things, many of the schools that Mortenson has helped build in Pakistan and Afghanstan are sitting unused and empty, and that the finances of his charity are mismanaged.)

Mortenson's life's work, which he came to after being rescued from a mountaineering trip gone wrong by villagers in Pakistan, is to build schools for remote villages in the mountains of Pakistan and later Afghanistan. His goal is to foster change, opening up often-denied paths to young girls by providing them education.

I hope the allegations turn out to be false or exaggerated, as Mortenson has been one of those people that I held up as an authentic shining light in our time of overblown media personalities. But whatever happens with investigation, there are a couple of lessons we can all take away if we are trying to create behavior change in our own organizations.

1. Make sure the metrics reinforce the goals
One of the main criticisms has been that many of the 140+ schools that Mortenson's charity, the Central Asia Institute, helped build or support are not actually being used for educational purposes. The reason for focusing on this number is that the CAI and Mortenson both place great weight on this metric — total number of schools, and number of schools built in each region. These statistics are mentioned in every interview and article.

When you're trying to push for an intangible goal (e.g. education), it makes sense to help show progress by focusing on concrete metrics (e.g. number of schools built, or test scores). However, you have to be careful picking the metrics as they drive behaviors, often far more than the intangible goal that you're actually trying to achieve. It's easy to get caught up in satisfying the metrics and lose sight of the underlying goal.

Lest we scoff at Mortenson's naivete, we see the same critique here in the U.S. about "teaching to the test" since standardized testing has come to dominate how we evaluate education of our own children. Critics of this approach (myself included) argue that the emphasis on test scores devalues critical capabilities in creativity and being comfortable with ambiguous problems.

So when you're trying to create behavior change in your own organization, make sure you pick the metrics very carefully, constantly assess whether they are truly aligning to the desired outcome, and adjust, add or drop metrics as needed. And constantly reinforce what the underlying goal is so people don't lose sight of it.

2. Tools are necessary but not sufficient for behavior change
Simply providing tools (e.g. schools, books) is almost never sufficient to create behavior change, no matter how well-intentioned or logical it seems.

The schools are (mostly) being built, why are they often not being used? There are any number of possible reasons: perhaps other family or farming duties pull the children away, or there are not sufficient teachers or supplies. Maybe support for the schools is not as widespread within a village as it appeared, and a vocal school champion did not reflect the views of the wider population. In the West, schoolhouse equals education, but in other cultures perhaps education happens in a different format. From a distance, it's impossible to say what the reasons are, but it's probably a combination of factors that conspire to leave many of the schools empty, and foil the well-intentioned goal.

Any manager who has ever tried to shift organizational behaviors by rolling out a new piece of software knows this well. Tools by themselves rarely create sustained change that matches to the goals. They must be supported by incentives, different processes, training, and often changes in how adjacent activities are carried out (as tools rarely sit in isolation). To modify the Peter Drucker quote, "Culture eats tools for breakfast" — if you don't understand the culture you're operating in, creating change will be an uphill battle.

If a tool supports or improves current behaviors then it will be readily adopted. A smartphone app that assists tracking travel expenses by taking a picture of and uploading a receipt at the moment its received will probably be enthusiastically adopted, as it makes the expense filing process less painful. But if you try to roll out software that causes a major shift, such as going from a per diem to a detailed accounting of expenses for each day, then the software will only be used grudgingly.

Creating change is hard. It takes time, there's lots of things that have to come together, progress is not always as steady as we'd like. Let's have some humility about how we struggle to create changes in our own organization, changes that in many cases are much easier and faster to accomplish than the ones that Mortenson has been trying to achieve.

Adam Richardson, Assistant VP of Strategy and Marketing at global innovation firm frog design, is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company's Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage. He can be found on Twitter at @Richardsona.

How to Survive the Social Crash

Julien — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 08:18:13 PST

I have to leave the house right now so I’m going to publish this post early. It is not polished, but I think the ideas are strong. If that means it gets ignored, whatever.

I am not a real investor– just a writer who wants to survive from one bubble to the next.

But today, I am pretty confident a social crash is coming. Whether you agree or not, it’s important that you read this.

We think all of this social stuff is building value for us– building wealth for some and just well-being for others. This is somewhat true– but I suspect we are overvaluing what it can do for us– most of us anyway.

It is true that there is a massive population going social online, but this growth might just be building value for established companies like Facebook. A few of us are making money off of it, but many people are at the bottom of this pyramid and will be left without anything to show for it at the end.

Because most people are not financially invested in this space, the bubble will not leave people broke. But it will leave people thinking they’ve wasted a few years of their lives.

If you’re like most people, you did not start here early, which means you’re closer to the bottom of the pyramid than the top. So it’s possible you’re being had.

But I want you to avoid this, and I will endeavour here to show you how.

But first, why.

“Friends” are valueless. Well, maybe. I’ve written before that audience is an asset, but is it really? Most of your “friends” on Facebook, if you’re a typical social media douche, will never do anything for you except social proof your popularity, an effect which is blunted over time anyway as more people realize the reality of the situation.

I view the hyperinflation of friends the same way I see the valuation and false growth of companies based on inflated/purchased ComScore traffic stats. They convince those with money to spend, or those not savvy enough to tell the difference. But eventually valuations become so unreasonably high that they are unbelievable to even the uneducated.

This collective “A-ha!” moment is when the bubble bursts. It’s when we all call bullshit on online friends, comments, and connections as a reason to know someone– online, that is.

Most startups have no business model. I worked for a startup in the late 90′s with a great idea but no business model or revenue (it was an early Google Maps type thing). It was very interesting but the decline was evident. The model was clearly to get bought.

I had a discussion with an angel/VC type the other day who is very smart. I asked him why people do this instead of, say, real estate. One of his answers was “ego.”

I think another may be that people now feel that anyone can do it. This collective sentiment is based on watching regular guys be able to develop massive followings, but it’s common to all bubbles to find an “anyone can do it” mentality. Think housing, dot-com, and many others.

Everyone is looking for the “next” Facebook or Twitter. This is probably the question I get the most often from conference attendees, as many of you probably know. Possibly many of you are looking for it or are trying to build it. God bless you and I hope you do well.

But it’s likely that the “next” anything will not be social at all.

What’s really interesting is that Facebook, Twitter, etc actually benefit from this inflation. Their valuations are not public and therefore don’t impact the public at large, but those of us inside here will definitely feel it, especially if we work in the space.

Now to the next question. How do you avoid a crash?

You must exit. This means convert to cash.

Your assets must be diversified. You cannot sit there with your Twitter expertise– you, and your company, must do more.

Your assets must be real. They must be outside this space– or if they’re in it, they must provide actual profit.

If you do not have the ability to do any of these things, your personal stock may plunge– soon.

There are those who know how to really turn networks into an income stream, by the way. They are called SALESPEOPLE.

Do you consider yourself a salesperson? This is not most of us. Most people are anxious about turning weak ties into money, but for some, it may be necessary.

So your options are to step out, or to learn to create value from what you have built by stretching your social contract to include selling to them.

Final note. During the dot-com bubble, some very interesting people emerged. I think of Frank Schilling, who is quoted as saying that, after the dot-com crash, everyone just went back to using the internet every single day. And this is where Frank picked up over 300,000 dropped, and valuable, domain names– while everyone thought they were valueless.

Now, he lives in the Cayman Islands earning… well, let’s just say a lot.

There will always be people who survive crashes, or who grab undervalued assets and use them effectively to make a killing, one way or another.

But there are many more people who think “everything will be fine” and who walk along with people all the way off the cliff.

The choice as to which kind you will be, of course, is yours.

The Future of Location-Based Applications

ceb — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 01:30:00 PST

My thinking on the future of location-based applications is that we’re not yet far enough along. We have two solid applications (GPS and announcement), and one reasonably developed one (geotagging), but we are lacking a few more things that I need. I shot a quick video, and then you can read my thoughts below. If you can’t see the video, click here. If you want to write a post and track back to this one, use the url http://chrisbrogan.com/futureoflocation.

Location Based Apps Need an Identity Register

It’s not enough to tell me what’s local. I want you to tell me what’s local that I actually care about. If I prefer seafood restaurants to sushi restaurants, I want Yelp to serve me those when I ask what’s around. If I prefer shopping to museums, then I want that. I want a “register” that adds functions to when I check in, so that it knows how I want to represent myself.

Location Based Apps Need Temporary Groups

I want to identify and be “seen” by local and temporary groups, but not announce my presence to everywhere else. Thus, when I’m at a conference, I want all conference goers to have a steady state knowledge of where to find me, without me re-checking over and over, but not flood or notify the rest of the world that’s not at an event. I want this by proximity, or maybe by hashtag. There are more ways to do this than I could imagine.

Location Based Apps Need Commerce

It’s great that you get coupons. Make actual currency transfer real, and then I can do things peer to peer and not just vendor to customer. This would enable a whole new level of commerce. The mobile payment tools are there. PayPal already allows for phone to phone transactions. I just want there to be a location-based tie-in, and/or I want the ability to “float” $10 in space somewhere for someone else to pick up, or pick up after a task is complete.

And You?

You’re smarter at location than me. What’s your take?

Steve Jobs’ Amazing Ability to “Discover” (Not Invent) Products

Leslie Brokaw — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 23:14:35 PST

In the new winter issue of MIT SMR, editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins’ “Steve Jobs, the Way John Sculley Tells It” highlights a recent interview with the one-time Apple CEO about the current chief executive, who announced Monday that he’s taking a medical leave of absence.

John Sculley’s conversation with Leander Kahney, publisher of cultofmac.com and author of Inside Steve’s Brain, was published in October.

Hopkins says that the interview is provocative partly because of “Sculley’s abject frankness and vulnerability — his psychic near-nakedness,” and partly because of “Sculley’s efforts to describe what he calls Jobs’s sacrosanct “methodology”— design-centric, customer-experience-focused and committed to the belief that it’s what you decide not to do that matters.”

One great story from the interview is about the time Sculley and Jobs visited Edwin Land, inventor of Polaroid instant photography. Said Sculley:

“Dr Land had been kicked out of Polaroid. He had his own lab on the Charles River in Cambridge. It was a fascinating afternoon because we were sitting in this big conference room with an empty table. Dr Land and Steve were both looking at the center of the table the whole time they were talking. Dr Land was saying: ‘I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.’

“And Steve said: ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.’ He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?

“Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed – it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery.”

Five Industries Hit the Reset Button

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 22:00:00 PST

As a prerequisite for growth in the post-crisis environment, leading companies in the consumer products, telecommunications, industrial goods, automotive, and financial-services industries are shifting their business models and operating practices.

Was Social Media A Big Factor In Holiday Purchases? Reach Your Own Conclusion!

Augie Ray — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 10:59:37 PST

It's sometimes amazing (and disappointing) what you find when you scratch beneath the surface of headlines. Take this one from Mashable: "Social Media Not a Big Factor in Holiday Purchases." It's a big, eye-catching, alarm-raising headline, but as I dug into the story beneath the headline, I found my impression changed considerably.

The article reports on a ForeSee study that, according to Mashable, demonstrates that "social media may be an underwhelming driver" of retail sales. Based on the Mashable article, I downloaded the report from the ForeSee site, expecting a thorough exploration of social media's role in holiday shopping purchases. I was surprised to find that the portion pertaining to social media was a mere two sentences in the 22-page report. (In fact, ForeSee notes that its report could not contain all of the findings of the study, so additional information relating to topics like social and mobile will be made available in future weeks by request.)

In the very brief section dedicated to social media and holiday retail, ForeSee reveals that just 5% of online holiday shoppers report being primarily influenced to visit top retailer sites by social media channels, compared with 19% primarily influenced by promotional email and 8% as a result of search engine results. Based on these findings, ForeSee laments that "retailers continue to put vast resources into this type of marketing" and states, "tried-and-true online marketing tactics should not be abandoned or ignored in favor of newer media." Mashable declares, "The power of social media to influence purchase decisions may be overstated."

Are Leaders Born or Made? Why the Question Itself is Dangerous

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 04:39:14 PST

Executives who believe that leaders are born, give less attention to leader development, both their own personal development as well the development of those they lead. They are focused on selecting leaders with the "right stuff," and expecting that those leaders' natural abilities will mean organizational success. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The first rule of doing work that matters

Seth Godin — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 02:24:00 PST

Go to work on a regular basis.

Art is hard. Selling is hard. Writing is hard. Making a difference is hard.

When you're doing hard work, getting rejected, failing, working it out--this is a dumb time to make a situational decision about whether it's time for a nap or a day off or a coffee break.

Zig taught me this twenty years ago. Make your schedule before you start. Don't allow setbacks or blocks or anxiety to push you to say, "hey, maybe I should check my email for a while, or you know, I could use a nap." If you do that, the lizard brain is quickly trained to use that escape hatch again and again.

Isaac Asimov wrote and published 400 (!) books using this technique.

The first five years of my solo business, when the struggle seemed neverending, I never missed a day, never took a nap. (I also committed to ending the day at a certain time and not working on the weekends. It cuts both ways.)

In short: show up.

The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday

(author unknown) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 08:50:00 PST

McKinsey’s new survey research finds that companies using the Web intensively gain greater market share and higher margins.
Read more on the McKinsey Quarterly >

Topics:

	High Tech
	Business Technology
	Interactive
	Organization

Update your Quarterly feed preferences

Do You Have Too Much Data?

Martha E. Mangelsdorf — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 14:30:03 PST

Does your organization have more data than it really knows what to do with?

If so, you’re not alone. Sixty percent of respondents in a 2010 survey conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value agreed or strongly agreed that their organization “has more data than it knows how to use effectively.”

However, using data well can give a company a competitive edge. For example, the survey also found that respondents who strongly agreed that the use of business information and analytics differentiated their organization within its industry were twice as likely to describe their organization as substantially outperforming industry peers than to say it was substantially underperforming them.

For more information about how smart companies are using analytics in their businesses, read Analytics: The New Path to Value. a special report produced by MIT Sloan Management Review, in collaboration with IBM.

You can also view a recording of a webcast panel discussion, held in November 2010, on the topic of insights from the data deluge. The four expert panelists were:

Michael Hopkins, MIT Sloan Management Review’s editor-in-chief;

Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business and the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management;

Steve LaValle, global strategy leader for IBM’s Business Analytics and Optimization service line; and

Stephen Baker, author of The Numerati.

Facebook Now Biggest Driver of Video Traffic Behind Google

Austin Carr — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 12:11:02 PST

When it comes to watching videos online, there is one dominant player: Google. The search giant drives more traffic to video sites than Facebook, Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. But another player is fast catching up: Facebook.

According to a report by Brightcove and Tubemogul, released Thursday, Facebook has overtaken Yahoo to become the second largest source of video traffic. The world's most popular social network just about doubled its referral traffic in the past quarter, and now accounts for 9.6% of the market. Google, Yahoo, and Bing all fell in the third quarter. Only Facebook made significant gains.

Google's control of the market is far from being shaken. Though it dropped several percentage points, it still represents more than 50% of all video traffic referrals. What's more, Brightcove chose to exclude YouTube in its consumer data analysis, according to a statement. That undoubtedly means a significant chunk of Google's referrals have been cut out of this report.

YouTube boasts more than 700 billion views in the last year--that's about 2 billion views per day--and has become a powerful player in search, never mind videos. According to a ComScore report, if you stack YouTube's internal search engine against other search engines, it would have a larger market share than Yahoo.

But that doesn't change how impressive Facebook's gains are, especially for a social network. All the sites save one Facebook was compared with--Google, Yahoo, Bing--are search engines. Facebook's growth in referral traffic is yet another indicator that social search is where the future is heading.

[Image by P Flannagan]

Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick

by Ashley Harshak, DeAnne Aguirre, and Anna Brown — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 22:00:00 PST

Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for a transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in implementing and embedding change.

The Power of the Post-Recession Consumer

by John Gerzema and Michael D'Antonio — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:00:00 PST

An analysis of attitudes and spending reveals a return to traditional values, driven by consumers searching for quality, affordability, and connection.

Why Being Wrong Feels So Right (And What You Can Do About It)

Sarah Green — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 12:10:51 PDT

What if you made a major mistake — and you didn't even notice? Even if it was right in front of your nose?

Chances are, it happens on a regular basis. That's what I took away from the recently concluded PopTech conference, whose theme this year was "Brilliant Accidents, Necessary Failures, and Improbable Breakthroughs."

Kevin Dunbar, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, illustrated our reflexive reaction to being wrong with brain scans that should make any would-be innovator turn cold. When the subject — in this case, a lab researcher — viewed an unexpected result, the scan showed a dime-sized area of activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. As this Wired profile of Dunbar explains, that's like the brain's "delete" key. Now, as any editor can tell you, a delete key is a wonderful gift: by cutting out the chaff (of prose, of data, of life) we can see the wheat that much more clearly. The brain's process of filtering is what helps us pay attention. But for a scientist — or anyone in the business of discovery — if you habitually mentally delete anomalous data, how can you learn from it?

(Ladies, the news is slightly better for you: Dunbar noticed a gender split in his research. Women were more likely than men to investigate unexpected findings, while men were more likely to assume they knew the reason for the unexpected result, and proceed without more analysis.)

And that's just the cases where the brain noticed something off. What if you didn't even see the anomaly in the first place — even if it was as glaring as a chest-thumping gorilla? On day three of the conference, we heard from Chris Chabris, one of the psychologists behind the now-famous "gorilla experiment." (If you'd like to try the experiment, stop reading now, and follow the link.) Subjects are told to watch a video of two teams — one wearing white shirts, the other black — passing basketballs, and to count the number of times the white team passes the ball. Towards the end of the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks through the middle of the teams, turns to face the camera, thumps their chest, and then walks off. In Chabris's experiments, about fifty percent of people don't see the gorilla at all. As Chabris and co-author Daniel Simons explain in their fascinating new book, The Invisible Gorilla, people are not generally pleased to find themselves duped, and easily switch from surprise to denial. "A man who was tested later by the producers of Dateline NBC for their report on this research said, 'I know that gorilla didn't come through there the first time.' Other subjects accused us of switching the tape while they weren't looking."

But before you judge them — especially if you saw the gorilla — think back to the last time you were wrong. How did being wrong feel? Was your reaction to deny it? Did you feel "idiotic and embarassed," or did "your heart sink and your dander rise" as "wrongologist" Kathryn Schulz describes in the delightful Being Wrong? As Schulz pointed out in her PopTech talk, deflation and embarrassment are the emotions of realizing you are wrong. Because in truth, being wrong feels exactly the same as being right. This is how, while camping, I once had an impassioned argument with a friend over whose pillow was whose. We were both utterly convinced, by the light of our Coleman lantern, that a certain pillow was ours. Of course, in the clear light of day, only one of us was right. But in the moment, even though it was completely trivial, we both thought the other person was insane. And, Schulz points out, we're terrible at admitting our own wrongness — even when it's something trivial. Like the subjects of Dunbar's research and Chabris's experiments, we delete the information, deny it, pass the blame to someone else, justify ourselves, or get defensive.

And here's the kicker: though we think of being wrong as aberrant or unusual, in truth we're wrong astonishingly often.

To illustrate this, Schulz pointed to Ulric Neisser's work on flashbulb memories - our memories of events like the Challenger disaster, the Kennedy assassination, D-Day, or 9/11. We tend to start our stories of these events with the words, "I remember exactly where I was when I heard..." But do we? The day after the Challenger explosion, Neisser asked a group of students to write down their memory of events. Three years later, he asked them to do so again. Fifty percent of these subsequent reports were more than two-thirds wrong. Twenty-five percent of the reports were completely, 100% wrong. And only seven percent were completely accurate. And, Schulz pointed out, while we'd all like to be in that seven percent, the odds are stacked heavily against us.

As a result of this influx of information, I've made two post-PopTech resolutions:

Actively look for anomalies. We can't look inward for feelings of wrongness; as Schulz so convincingly illustrated, the "feeling" of being right is misleading. We've got to look outward. We need an external aid — the light of the sun, in my camping example above — to know when we're wrong. Dunbar assured us that the brain is not hardwired to disregard anomalous data — we can retrain our brains to notice the unexpected. We just need to look for it. After all, the key to Chabris's experiments is not that his subjects aren't paying attention — on the contrary, it's that they are so focused on the task at hand that they experience a kind of tunnel vision that allows them to screen out "irrelevant" data.
Be gentle to each other — and to yourself. My second strategy, however, is an internal one. And that's to remember that we all have blind spots. The next time I'm convinced a politician is lying, or a friend is being willfully obtuse, or a colleague is half-daft — or that I myself must be an idiot — I'm going to pause, and remember: sometimes, we all miss the gorilla.

Sarah Green is an associate editor at HBR.

Six Ways Leaders Can Fuel Excellence At Anything

Tony Schwartz — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 11:47:47 PST

In August, I posted a blog titled "Six Keys to Being Excellent at Anything." Over the subsequent three months it has become one of HBR's most widely read blogs ever.

The notion that we can be excellent at anything prompted passionate debate. On the one hand, it's empowering and inspiring to believe that excellence is within our reach in any area to which we devote ourselves with sufficient diligence — something the researcher Anders Ericsson calls "deliberate practice."

Just think of how many movies — often based on true stories — tell the story of inspiring teachers, coaches and mentors helping undervalued kids become extraordinary performers: The Blind Side, Stand and Deliver, Lean On Me, Mr. Holland's Opus, The Bad News Bears, and Dangerous Minds, among many others

At the same time, it's daunting to consider that when we ourselves fall short of excellence, it's not that we lack talent but rather we haven't put in the right kind of effort.

There is precious little scientific evidence to suggest that genes are our destiny — and more and more evidence of neuroplasticity — the capacity to influence the way our genes express themselves. So what, then, can leaders do to most effectively inspire and nurture excellence in those they lead? Here are six keys:

1. Ban words like "talented," "gifted," and "special" from your vocabulary. Well meaning as these words may be, they tend to give people credit for something they did nothing to earn, while also suggesting that others don't have equal potential. Consider replacing these words with ones like "effective," "determined," "accomplished," "skilled," "persevering," and "masterful," all of which give due credit to effort.

2. Regularly, genuinely, and specifically acknowledge and appreciate people's successes. Believe deeply in their potential, enthusiastically encourage their passions, and don't be overly fazed by their failures. There may be nothing more motivating to the people you lead than to notice what they're doing well, and to express your appreciation with detail and specificity. Likewise, there may be no single more powerful act than to handwrite and mail someone a personal note of appreciation.

3. Provide constant feedback. Annual or semi-annual reviews are vastly insufficient and often worthless. Most people don't improve their skills over time, in large part because they don't get consistent, specific feedback. That's different than judgment or criticism. As often as possible, resist pointing out people's deficits, and focus instead on where you can help them improve or take it to the next level in any given area.

4. Create and protect periods of uninterrupted focus. Don't demand instant responses from your people all day long. Interruptions fracture their attention, and absorbed focus is a prerequisite to high quality work, especially on the most challenging tasks. Stop measuring your people by how many hours they work, and assess them instead based on the value they produce.

5. Encourage and model intermittent renewal throughout the day. Great performers, the research shows, work intensely for periods no longer than 90 minutes and then stop to recover and refuel. Create a "renewal room" so people have a place to truly chill out. Nothing better fuels productivity in the afternoons than a 20-30 minute nap between 12 and 2 p.m, and encouraging people to exercise at midday runs a close second.

6. Tie the pursuit of excellence to a larger mission. Excellence requires enormous effort. You need to give your people a compelling reason to push beyond their comfort zones. What most of us hunger for is evidence that what we're doing truly matter and serves something beyond the bottom line. CEOs such as Alan Mullally at Ford, John Chambers at Cisco, and Steve Jobs at Apple have done a great job rallying their people around a higher mission. Start by defining what you truly stand for, share with others what gets you up in the morning as often as you can, and encourage people to go through the same exercise for themselves.

How well are you managing the needs of those you lead? Take The Energy Audit for Leaders and find out.

Innovators Go It Alone

Ndubuisi Ekekwe — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 08:08:42 PDT

For a long time, Ford, Chrysler, and GM followed the same strategy: they built big gas-guzzlers. Asian competitors attacked that model, took market share, and transformed the U.S. automobile industry.

Also for a long time, Yahoo and AOL offered email customers 4MB of storage. Google came out with Gmail and provided a free 1GB email account (250 times as much). Many switched.

In both cases, the new entrants attacked a reliable business model and disrupted a market in which the incumbents competed by cooperating, tacitly agreeing to procedures that ensured that the industry as a whole remained continuously healthy. Indeed, terms like "win-win" and "coopetition" are very common in our contemporary business lexicons. But in many cases, firms fail to separate the necessity of preserving their industries from developing individual survival strategies. They become docile and follow one another. From wireless carriers to broadcast TV, casinos to airlines, we often see an ordered communality within industries. They move in packs regarding features, services, and prices.

This carries a major risk: an entire complacent industry can be attacked from the outside. It's not easy, but when it happens, it often reshapes an industry, with major consequences to the old players. In his classic "The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy", Michael E. Porter showed how you don't see much innovation when "degree of rivalry" is very low in an industry. Why? Because the entrenched players are depending largely on a communal strategy. Industries where the players are not innovating are easily disrupted by new entrants.

Industries cannot drive consumers as easily as they used to. The customers have more information and exert much more influence in the market. Technology disrupts our needs a lot faster and makes it possible that trends arrive and fade quicker. This is in line with my earlier post that focusing on customer needs is a recipe for disaster; rather, firms must focus on meeting the perception of customers. As social media, technology, and globalization better inform consumers, firms must resist the urge to herd. When everyone does the same thing, new ideas will easily attack the entire industry, not just a particular firm. How did the foreign car brands take away market share from the U.S. Big Three? They built smaller cars and that alone was enough. It might have been harder if Ford, Chrysler, or GM followed different strategies. The foreign brands had only one strategy to beat.

In the airline industry, we have seen Ryanair and other budget carriers in Europe disrupt the industry with very low prices that took market share from the traditional carriers. Sometimes firms give customers more when they should give less, and vice versa. Mastering that balance helps a firm lead and differentiate in its industry. If you provide a competitive price and take away some services, customers will adjust accordingly to your clear differentiation. But if you align your strategies to what everyone else does, be assured that a single business bullet will take you all down.

Ndubuisi Ekekwe is a founder of the non-profit African Institution of Technology. He recently edited Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy.

Can't Change Your Leader? Change How You Follow

Li Xin Bai — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 13:10:11 PDT

Consider the following findings from the Hay Group:

Research conducted worldwide shows that leadership contributes to 70% of corporate atmosphere, while corporate atmosphere contributes to 30% of corporate performance. Therefore, leadership can exert direct influence on 21% of corporate performance.
In Chinese companies, 19.1% of the managers are found to be high-performance leaders, 9.8% inspiring leaders, 13.4% leaders who create no obvious value, and 57.7% leaders who actually discourage their employees. That is to say, 70% of the managers either don't help or discourage their people.

The first conclusion reinforces that leadership does have a significant impact on organizational performance. But the second conclusion tells us that leadership development in Chinese companies really has a long way to go.

As a follower, we may not be able to change our leader's style. But we can help solve the problem by adjusting our own work style. Based on my experience — meeting with two or three CEOs a week for the past five years — I have come to think of leaders as falling into one of three categories. Being able to categorize which type of leader I'm working with has helped me figure out how to work most effectively with them.

Sun-like leaders. The quintessential sun-like leader is an entrepreneur, one who takes the lead in everything, just as the sun illuminates everything. Their subordinates get close supervision. These hands-on leaders sometimes feel like if they're not involved, they've lost control — as their follower, you need to be aware of this sense of insecurity. When working with such a leader, be sympathetic. Include him in work where he can demonstrate his ability — he wants to be useful, so give him something to do! Invite him to get involved — he will do so anyway, and bringing him in increases the odds that he'll support your work. Make your own job easier by leveraging his experience and his insights with customers and others.

Moon-like leaders. The moon reflects the light of the sun; a moon-like leader reflects the light of his employees. He is more open-minded and trusting of his people. Only when you lose your way — just like someone walking a dark road at night — would he step forward to shed light on what he thinks you should do. This kind of leadership gives employees room for development. However, trust between the follower and the leader does require timely maintenance; when the leader does step forward, be willing to answer questions and open your project up for inspection.

Star-like leaders. Leaders of this type will only indicate a direction, like the North Star. Their teams, however, still need a light source, so star-like leaders need followers who can step up and light the way for others. Only those leaders with great wisdom have the confidence to be star-like. Their empowerment shows high recognition for your capabilities. This kind of leadership only works when the leader has built a capable team that can function with minimal supervision. As a follower to this kind of leader, you've got a great platform, but you have to demonstrate that you deserve the trust you've been given.

In reality, each of us is both leader and follower. As a leader, review your behaviors and words from the perspective of a follower; as a follower, ask yourself how you can work more effectively with your leaders. Imposing high standards in both roles will improve performance for all.

Li Xin Bai is a Senior Strategy Consultant for IBM in China.

How to Identify Your Disruptive Skills

Whitney Johnson — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 10:22:43 PDT

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of re-evaluating your portfolio of skills and leading with those that are unique — your disruptive skills. These may be capacities that are so innate you may not even consciously recognize them, or skills you have honed over years of practice. These are the skills that can help you carve out a disruptive niche — consequently upping your value in the marketplace. But how do you identify these skills? Or as one reader queried over at ~~YCombinator~~ Hacker News, "How do you identify the skills that disrupt others' previously-established judgment of your worth to them?" This is a subject I've researched and thought deeply about; readers of my last post also left some great advice. Here are three questions to get started.

What do you do reflexively well? You can arrive at an answer by asking questions such as: "What do I think about when I don't have to think about anything?" Or, "what one or two things do I spend time doing that I would continue to do even if I weren't compensated?" Alternatively, as Alana Cates recommended in a comment on the prior post, ask yourself: "When are you exasperated? The frustration of genius is in believing that if it is easy for you, it must be easy for everyone else."

Marcus Buckingham, the author of Now — Discover Your Strengths, frames it well: "Our strengths...clamor for attention in the most basic way: Using them makes you feel strong. Take note of the times when you feel invigorated, inquisitive, successful...These moments are clues to what your strengths are."

What do others identify as being your best skills? Neil Reay, who also weighed in on the previous post, wrote that when he asked for recommendations on his LinkedIn profile, "several things that others said about my strengths were not the things I was using as "Core Skills" in my own profile, but were valuable to those around me." Sometimes what we learn about our core skills isn't what we want to hear, like the fourteen year-old who is told he's built to be a long distance runner rather than a football player, as he aspires to be. Sometimes, however, the assessments of our colleagues and friends will actually surprise and delight us. A well-respected author who is a family friend told me he couldn't wait to see what I was going to accomplish over the next decade. To him, it was probably just an offhand remark, but for me it was a real confidence booster that he saw me as someone with potential, a do-er.

We can gain perspective on our strengths more systematically via 360-degree feedback analysis, which we often receive in the workplace. Just such an analysis at a previous job — which indicated that my skill of networking outside the firm was exceptional, but I was perceived as not being as good at networking within the firm — helped me to identify a pattern in my life I later recognized in Professor Boris Groysberg's article, "How Star Women Build Portable Skills." (Groysberg found that women are generally more successful than men in moving from one job to another because we have, out of necessity, built external networks.)

If you'd like to try a little self-analysis, I recommend an HBR article titled "How to Play to Your Strengths" which provides step-by-step instruction to determine those strengths — and involves asking trusted colleagues and friends. One of the leads is asking trusted colleagues to fill in the blank, "One of the greatest ways you add value is ______."

Do you have a confluence of skills? As you begin to inventory and mine for your unique abilities, you may discover that your disruptive skill may not be one skill, but an unusual intersection of ordinary proficiencies. As Ed Weissman opined on ~~YCombinator~~ Hacker News: "It's tough to claim to be one of the world's best php programmers, unix gurus, or apparel e-commerce experts. But there may not be many excellent php programmers who are also unix gurus and apparel e-commerce domain experts. For the right customer, that combination is your disruptive skill."

One final tip from my personal experience: keep an eye out for those compliments you habitually dismiss. It's possible that you're discounting a strength that others value. For example, when people compliment me on my interpersonal skills, I tend to deflect the compliment — perhaps because previous employers have discounted my soft skills vis-à-vis hard skills. Or consider a former college athlete who finds himself brushing aside the achievement of playing on a national championship team out of concern that others may view his brawn as eclipsing his brain. The tendency to deflect is often understandable, perhaps even justifiable, but over the course of our career, it will leave us trading at a discount to what we are worth. 19th-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

Identifying and deploying your best skills can be a game-changer for your career. Not necessarily because employers will suddenly decide to pay you more, but because accurately valuing ourselves is foundational to disrupting others' perception of our worth. When you recognize your greatest assets — your disruptive skills — you are on your way to taking stock in you.

How to Create a Better Workplace

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 05:47:37 PDT

We spend nearly a third of our life at work. A wonderful workplace can enrich our lives, provide a sense of purpose, accomplishment, and a source for friendships and social connections. A terrible workplace can become a living hell. Here are strategies to turn a company culture around.

Stop Comparing Yourself with Steve Jobs

Dan Pallotta — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:14:58 PDT

Comparing yourself with Steve Jobs is not healthy. Never mind that it's probably the pastime of every alpha male and female businessperson on the planet these days.

Drawing inspiration from Steve Jobs — or from anyone else you admire — studying them, and learning from them, now those are different matters. But all too often we conflate admiration and comparison. They're two completely different things. One is smart, the other debilitating.

Comparison sounds like this: "Why aren't I that creative?" "How come I don't have the negotiating cojones he does?" "How come I can't manage my people to that level of excellence?" "Why can't I run two companies at once like he does?" "Why didn't I have the guts to drop out of college and do what I really wanted to do?" "How come I haven't had a comeback?" And it's no surprise what comes next: "What a loser I am. I'll never be like him. I'll never be able to do anything that big. If I were sitting across the office from him he'd make mincemeat of me. I just don't have what he has."

The loop is repeated every hour or every time you read something about your icon, whichever comes first.

And this is healthy how?

Such comparisons spiral you into depression. They demotivate you, demoralize you, and generally suck every last bit of enthusiasm and aliveness out of you, so that you go into your next meeting or activity unable to contribute an ounce of energy to the room. How could you? You just annihilated your spirit.

Don't touch hot stoves, don't forget to call your mother on Mother's Day, and don't compare yourself with others. Wire this into your brain. Ruthlessly comparing yourself with others has become confused with some kind of tough-love work ethic. It isn't the same thing. And it isn't the least bit productive. It leaves you with nothing but personal unhappiness, and you can't create very much of anything with that.

Because we confuse destructive comparisons with a strong work ethic, we make a habit of them, and mental habits get hardwired into our brains.

Break the cycle. Do an intervention on yourself. Begin the process of permanently rewiring your brain by consciously recognizing that this thing you thought was good, or responsible, is in fact the opposite.

There's a saying, "You can't afford the luxury of a negative thought." It's true. And comparing yourself with others is the equivalent of smothering yourself in negative thought. The feelings of self-loathing that follow are ultimately self-centered and self-indulgent in the most negative possible way. Yes, it's a form of self-pity.

And if all that isn't enough, consider this: The last way you will ever get to play in a game remotely like the one your icons play in is by comparing yourself with them.

When I was in my 20s I moved to Los Angeles to try and get a record deal as a singer and songwriter. I compared myself with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell constantly. Using that approach, I never produced a remotely memorable song. And then I started observing pop/rock songwriter John Cougar. He was derided by the critics for being derivative of, but never nearly as insightful or affecting as, the greats. In a brilliant stroke of authenticity, he dropped the name I assume record producers had forced on him and began using his real name — John Mellencamp. As he embraced his own inadequacies, he began to write about things that were actually real and personal to him, instead of trying to channel Bob Seger, and suddenly he was producing critically acclaimed music. He went on to found Farm Aid and in 2008 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Using Mellencamp as my model — which meant being true to me and not someone else — I began writing much better, much more authentic material, and even had a song recorded by Edgar Winter.

I heard an interview on NPR the other day with Justin Townes Earle, a great and now successful songwriter in his own right, and son of Mellencamp's contemporary, the great rural songwriter Steve Earle. Justin bears his dad's last name, and his middle name was given to him in honor of the legendary songwriter Townes Van Zandt. He was asked if this was a burden, to be compared with these guys. His response was brilliant:

"I know both of 'em. They ain't legends to me. They're just regular guys. I've seen them throw up on themselves... I knew early on that anyone that decided they were going to be in competition with Steve Earle and Townsend Van Zandt as a songwriter is gonna live a fool's life. You just gotta try and write for yourself and not worry about what other people think. I think that that's what screws a lotta people up. You're not Dylan...you're who you are and you gotta learn who you are in order to write decent songs."

And this credo has made him a success.

Steve Earle or Steve Jobs — if you're comparing yourself with them you're betraying yourself and your life and all of the possibility that lies within it.