Bosses: What Will You Do Differently Today?

I awoke this morning anticipating a National Boss Day like years' past: a happy acknowledgement of bosses everywhere — cards signed by staff, inspirational stories, and perhaps even parties of celebration here and there. Instead, after reading the findings of the first Bad Boss Study, I find myself saddened by the number of bad bosses in America who should be hanging their heads in shame.

Released by psychologist, Michelle McQuaid, the study is based on interviews of 1,000 U.S. workers across the country of all ages in a wide variety of professions — and its conclusions are nothing short of alarming:

• Almost a third (31%) of employees polled feel uninspired and unappreciated by their bosses — and close to 15% feel downright miserable, bored, and lonely.

• Only 38% describe their boss as "great," 42% say their bosses don't work very hard, and close to 20% say their bosses have little or no integrity.

• Close to 70% say they'd be happier at work if they got along better with their bosses. That breaks down equally among men and women, but rises to an astonishing 80% among workers in their 20s and 30s.

• Close to 60% say they'd do a better job if they got along better with their bosses.

• When stress levels rise at work, a disturbing 47% say their bosses do not stay calm and in control (although, to be fair, 70% of the boomers say their bosses keep their cool when the heat is on).

A recent Gallup poll I wrote about a few months ago on employee engagement came to a similar conclusion, finding that engaged employees are twice as likely to stay with an organization but that more than half (about 54%) of U.S. employees were not engaged in their organizations.

Overall conclusions: Many bosses lack integrity and work ethic and are leaving U.S. workers feeling unappreciated, uninspired, lonely, miserable, and bored at work. Ouch.

Still, McQuaid points out, there's hope: Almost 10% of those polled said they will use today as an opportunity to talk to their bosses and improve their relationships.

As bosses, we can do better. Let today be the day we recognize the responsibility we hold for the lives of the tremendous individuals who work in our companies and who serve our customers. As a boss, what will you do differently today?

Here are six simple suggestions to make your employees feel more valued and engaged before you lose them:

Communicate: Do your employees really know who you are? Do they know what you stand for? If not, tell them. Welcome new employees personally. Hold — and be involved in — regular staff meetings. Send out regular company e-mails with your personal insights and strategy. Make people feel like they are in the loop, and they'll feel more engaged and more positive about you as a boss.

Be Positive: Encourage everyone. Show empathy when employees mess up. Even when they're in the wrong, always try to weave something positive they've done into the conversation. Give them the confidence they need to repair any damage and succeed.

Be Honest: If you say you're going to do something, do it. Period. If circumstances require a change in plans, go back to step 1: Communicate.

Set Goals: Do your employees know what's expected of them? Are these goals written down and measured? Do your people have the resources to reach these goals? Don't make your employees guess about whether they're doing enough or fulfilling your expectations. When they have measureable goals you've both agreed to, they'll know if you're happy or if they need to step it up a notch.

Show Support: Support your employees' career development and growth by providing training programs. Send them to conferences to help them advance both the company and their careers. Keep them engaged in the industry, and they'll continue to be engaged with you and the company.

Reward: Are your employees rewarded for a job well done? Give them financial bonuses. Personally congratulate them and let them know how much they're appreciated. Keep them posted on what resulted from their work. Sometimes a simple pat on the back and "good job" is enough to change an entire relationship for the better.

You may not convince every employee that you're concerned about them personally, but if you follow at least a few of these suggestions, you can hold your head up high when next year's National Boss Day rolls around. 

Alan E. Hall
Investor and serial entrepreneur Alan E. Hall is the founder and chairman of sales-outsource firm MarketStar, and the founder of Grow America, an organization dedicated to helping entrepreneurs nationwide.
Source: blogs.hbr.org

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The Best Debater May Not Be the Best Leader

With tonight's U.S. presidential debate just hours away, there are many people who assume that the winner of the debate will be the superior leader. But having worked with hundreds of senior leaders over the years, I'm not convinced that debating skill is a good indicator of leadership potential. In fact, from my experience, the ability and willingness to debate is often a leadership liability.

This is not to say that debating is unimportant. Being a good debater requires a mastery of facts and issues, and the ability to put them together in a coherent and convincing manner. It also calls for rapid adaptation of arguments and being fast on your feet, which is a great skill for managers who need to make quick but informed decisions.

At the same time, it's important to recognize that some amount of successful debating is based on theatrics as opposed to content. Good debaters work on timing, rhetorical flourishes, one-liners, and body language — all of which can overcome weaknesses in messaging. As historian Thomas V. DiBacco pointed out in a recent article presidential debates are often "won" by the best actors or those with the best voices, which is why, for example, Ronald Reagan was so effective.

The bigger question is whether debating itself is a useful leadership skill. There are times when it's important for a leader to marshal logical arguments and put forth a convincing case for a particular policy or strategy. Most of the time however, getting other people to move in a certain direction is less about "convincing" and more about "engaging." Effective leaders spend much more time listening, probing, exploring, and facilitating discussion than they do debating. In fact, debating the issues, trying to score points, and focusing on "winning" arguments is usually a recipe for shutting down dialogue. Each side ends up becoming more attached to their position and it becomes harder to find middle ground.

A number of years ago I worked with a senior executive who had been trained as a trial attorney, and therefore was a fantastic debater. As such she could bring together facts and figures to support her positions, and do it in a way that made opposing arguments seem unsupportable. The problem was that she always had to be "right," which meant winning the argument. While this style worked well in the courtroom, it was a disaster in the boardroom. Team members stopped pushing back or hesitated to raise issues altogether, which was easier than arguing and being humiliated. Eventually this led to poor decisions which colleagues didn't often buy into.

Obviously this is an extreme case. But in organizations, debating skills — such as presenting logical arguments, responding to questions, and challenging opposing views — should instead be leveraged in the service of exploration and engagement. This means that the objective should not be to win, but to bring out the nuances of the issue. This way, you'll reach a better conclusion that people will be confident in, because they've heard the various sides. One way to do this, for example, is to intentionally "stage" debates on an issue by assigning people to opposing positions, giving them time to prepare, and then letting them have at it with you and other colleagues in the audience. The key is to use this process as an intentional way to enrich the dialogue, rather than shut it down.

Presidential debates do indeed help us understand each candidate's position on the issues; and they make great theater to boot. But let's be careful about assuming that the best debater will be the better leader. In most organizations, it's just not the case.

RON ASHKENAS
Ron Ashkenas is a managing partner of Schaffer Consulting and a co-author of The GE Work-Out and The Boundaryless Organization. His latest book is Simply Effective.

Source: http://blogs.hbr.org

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The No. 1 Enemy of Creativity: Fear of Failure

Never once in my life until my mid 30s did anyone ever (to the best of my recollection) call me "creative." But now, I hear it all the time.

So what happened?

Well, after a traditional education, business school, and five years working in strategy consulting and venture capital, I went to a cocktail reception at Stanford's d.school, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, where I met George Kembel, cofounder and executive director of the school. While I cannot remember one thing that we discussed, I do remember laughing for about 40 minutes straight as we riffed on odds and ends. (I've since learned that anyone who has a sense of humor is creative.)

Over the next five years, what Kembel and his colleagues at the d.school taught me changed the way I thought about everything, leaving me to wonder why the hell I had never learned the basic methods for thinking like a designer (especially in a world where the leading company, Apple, has a culture built around design methods).

For me, the most important insight from design thinking was that you have to make sure you've defined the right problem before you try to solve it. So, you act like an anthropologist to understand human needs and problems before jumping to solutions. Most of us in business, if we need to discover how to do something new, use PowerPoint or Excel spreadsheets to rationalize our approach. This is what I call "the illusion of rationality." Whether motivated by a lack of insight arrogance, or stupidity, the illusion of rationality is a waste of time and resources — yet one that keeps a lot of people employed in management consulting, as I learned first hand.

Instead, if you don't have the data, you have to create the data. That does not mean plugging random numbers into your spreadsheet. It means generating real insight, from nothing. Designers and bootstrapped entrepreneurs I've worked with use rapid low cost experiments to create data. I refer to these "affordable losses" in the interest of learning, creativity, and discovery as "little bets."

This seems like common sense; so why is it so hard? Three words: fear of failure.

If you're an MBA-trained manager or executive, the odds are you were never, at any point in your educational or professional career given permission to fail, even on a "little bet." Your parents wanted you to achieve, achieve, achieve — in sports, the classroom, and scouting or work. Your teachers penalized you for having the "wrong" answers, or knocked your grades down if you were imperfect, according to however your adult figures defined perfection. Similarly, modern industrial management is still predicated largely on mitigating risks and preventing errors, not innovating or inventing.

But entrepreneurs and designers think of failure the way most people think of learning. As Darden Professor Saras Sarasvathy has shown through her research about how expert entrepreneurs make decisions, they must make lots of mistakes to discover new approaches, opportunities, or business models. She frequently references Howard Schultz who, when he started Il Giornale in Seattle, the company that Schultz used to later buy the original Starbucks brand and assets, the store had nonstop opera music playing, menus written in Italian, and no chairs. As Schultz has often said, "We had to make a lot of mistakes" before discovering a model that worked.

So, I ask you: how do you personally define a "failure"?

If it's going bankrupt with a company you started, getting fired for doing something inconsistent with your values, or needing to break off a wedding engagement or a divorce that could have been avoided if you listened to your heart originally, then, yes, that is a failure, and I can empathize.

However, if your internalized view of failure is anything that is not perfect, then you are disempowering yourself from exercising your inherent creativity.

You're certainly not the only one shackled by these norms, and I don't blame you with the way our educational system is focused so rigidly on "correct answers" and standardized testing. This must change. And modern management systems must become far more adaptive.

For instance, at GE, led by Jeff Immelt and Beth Comstock, we are learning in real time with GE's Innovation Accelerator how an organization long focused on Six Sigma, the antibody of innovation and entrepreneurial discovery, can help its leaders develop a discovery mindset for those situations where there are many unknowns and uncertainties.

Fortunately, the US Army provides a lot of insight about how a highly bureaucratic, command and control organization (the Army of the Cold War) can become more adaptive and creative (which it must when facing rapidly adaptive enemies, and when soldiers and officers can rarely predict what problems they will encounter). It starts with every individual, and unlearning many old bad habits. As Col. Casey Haskins, who heads up military instruction for West Point, has said, "You have to make it cool to fail." Slow as culture change may come to a behemoth like GE or the military, Comstock, Immelt, and Haskins understand the same insight.

At GE, instead of focusing on completing solutions, Comstock focuses on providing tools and resources to drive a discovery mindset, to identify problems first before jumping in with solutions. And, to do so, they've got to change a bunch of internal review approaches so that it becomes cool to be imperfect and half-baked at the early stages of new projects — so long as you're learning quickly.

One little bet after the other, GE, Cisco, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Clorox and many other companies are on the path to becoming more adaptive. Amazon and Pixar are leaders already. Bill Hewlett, cofounder of Hewlett Packard, an ardent proponent of what he called "small bet" innovation, found that HP needed to make 100 small bets to find 6 breakthroughs.

Ultimately, while basic design and creative methods can be learned much like muscles, and developed and strengthened through practice, this shift in mindset requires a different kind of leadership. In my opinion, Beth Comstock and Col. Casey Haskins are part of a new breed of leader who have developed and can use both sides of their brain — linear analysis for planning and executing when the decision-making information is known, and a discovery mindset when they must use small bets to create the data.

As the technologist Alan Kay says, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."


By PETER SIMS
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/the_no_1_enemy_of_creativity_f.html

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Being the Boss Isn't So Stressful After All

A new study just out from James Gross of Stanford University and six other researchers has shown that the higher people go as a leader, the less stress they experience. It turns out that being the CEO is less stressful than being a senior manager. It's an intriguing idea, as it flies in the face of the current thinking about leadership, which has supported the notion that top leaders are under enormous stress.

But new research in neuroscience tends to support Gross's findings. One of the big ideas that has emerged out of the connection between neuroscience and leadership is that leaders are largely motivated by what we've come to call theSCARF model. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness — the five social experiences that create strong threats or rewards in the brain.

From the SCARF perspective, while top leaders might have plenty of stress, they also have lots of rewards (literally activations of the reward center in the brain) that offset this stress. They obviously have very high status. Cameron Anderson from Berkely showed in a study that respect from others (which comes from having high status) mattered more than money for happiness in life. He defined the term "local status," (which is how you rank compared to people are around you), and found that it was more important in terms of personal happiness than socio economic status. Anderson believed that high local status is like the "gift that keeps on giving," one of the few rewards that will not diminish much in value over time. So while leaders might be stressed, this is offset by high status, which literally activates the reward centers in the brain.

What about the other SCARF domains? Senior leaders have higher certainty than most people, with long term contracts and big pay packages giving them the confidence and wherewithal to weather economic storms. Studies show that a sense of certainty is deeply rewarding, in and of itself, whereas the experience of uncertainty creates further stress in the brain.

As the Gross study explored, senior leaders also have a lot more autonomy (what this study calls a sense of control) than lower level leaders. A sense of autonomy also activates a strong reward response.

Finally, I suspect that senior leaders perceive the world as being quite fair (as most people would if paid $50 million a year,) giving them a reward in this domain too.

So while senior leaders might have plenty of stress, they experience rewards from at least four of the five domains that could be offsetting this stress. Without even considering the big pay packets, we can see that senior leaders in theory may be a whole lot happier than is widely believed.

However, like many studies, Gross' finding doesn't tell the whole story. The average large company might have one CEO, an executive team of 20, and then 1,000 other people in "leadership" roles, out of a staff of, say, 100,000. So, we've learned that 21 people out of 100,000 are less stressed than we thought. What about the rest of the leaders in that firm?

Let's look at followership from the SCARF perspective. Speaking to one's boss is likely to put employees into a threat (stress) state, because the employee has less status, less certainty, and less autonomy. When someone is feeling under threat, small threats can become much larger. Imagine how people feel about their boss when the employee experiences large threats, like a sudden drop in income and assets, and an increase in uncertainty because of global economic conditions.

In short, while top bosses are less stressed than we thought, the life of the average manager, the people who make up many of the middle class, is getting more stressful than ever. As one example, more people than ever are staying connected while on vacation, yet the trend is the other direction for senior executives.

There is another side to top leaders being generally "happy," which I think deserves teasing out. First, experiencing positive affect makes you more likely to perceive other people's situations as positive, even when they are not. Second, a number of studies show that high social status tends to make people less aware of social cues. Third, high cognitive load, which senior leaders indeed experience, makes it harder to fully grasp how others experience the world. Finally, high cognitive load also makes it harder to displace the well documented "false consensus effect," which is the tendency to automatically assume other people feel the way that you do.

So, senior leaders might be happier than we thought, though this mental state combined with their position could be the source of how deeply unaware they can be of the stress that others are experiencing.

By David Rock
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/being_the_boss_isnt_so_stressful.html

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Do Your Employees Make You a Better Manager?

Successful leaders and managers alike constantly stress the importance of developing their employees. But do they appropriately recognize the importance of how their employees might develop them? One of the world's top coaches thinks not.

While chatting about "coachability" with Sir Clive Woodward — who had coached England's world champion rugby team and served as Director of Elite Performance for the wildly overachieving British Olympic team — he casually observed that, in reality, the best athletes he had invariably improved his abilities as a coach.

"My top performers ended up pushing me harder than I pushed them," Woodward said, adding that you can't help but learn from watching top athletes perfecting their craft.

This mutuality of professional development was a theme of his. Back in the late-nineties, Woodward was arguably the first coach of a national squad to give a laptop to every single player, insisting they be as world-class as IT users as they were as athletes. "Simply using it as a tool wasn't good enough," he insisted. "We wanted to be the best using IT." That squad won a world championship.

Needless to say, Woodward learned a great deal observing how his players used their laptops to learn and make themselves more competitive. Those lessons, of course, made him an even better coach.

That truly great players make everyone around them play better is one of sports' better championship clichés. But arguments that great players actually educate their coaches are considerably rarer. They're just as rare in the managerial literature. Woodward and I were on a panel for Tech Mahindra's European customer event in the U.K. In the panel's aftermath, I messaged a few friends and colleagues. I asked them to name employees — not colleagues or bosses! — who had dramatically improved them as leaders and/or managers. The most common response was that they'd never been asked before. (One colleague who'd helped grow a start-up to a nine-figure sale responded with the name of a particularly gifted software development project leader who blew him away with his standards of excellence and expectations management.)

Clearly, there's a "turning bugs into features" quality to this question. Often, coaches and managers learn the most from their most difficult, recalcitrant, or challenging charges. Not to diminish the importance of managing "talented temperamentals," but that explicitly wasn't Woodward's focus. He thought it critical for his own professional development to learn from his players. Do most managers and executives similarly believe it critical to learn from their direct reports? The data suggest not.

Not a single member of my network — nor the organizations I've worked with — have a performance review question assessing whether — and how well — bosses improve their own performances by learning from their employees. That seems odd. Reverse mentoring by millennials (and talented college students) to help their 40+ elders acquire better Internet and social media expertise has become more common. Certainly, project managers and new product leaders observe best practices worth sharing.

But how well — and how often — do they monitor how their own management style and insight have been improved by their best people and performers? Our human capital and professional development conversations and evaluations should be more symmetrical. Yes, everybody can recall that boss that made a huge difference. But who celebrates the one or two employees that dramatically improved managerial verve and effectiveness?

Which employee had the biggest positive impact on who you are today?

By Michael Schrage
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org

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Four Steps to Measuring What Matters

When it comes to assessing performance, business executives can be a lot like old-time baseball scouts. They've been around so long that they've developed a gut feel for which statistics matter most. But as Michael Lewis describes in Moneyball, the Oakland Athletics discovered that the metric the team's scouts used to choose players had nothing to do with whether those players would score runs. They had been measuring the wrong thing, and executives may be making the same mistake.

The statistics that companies use most often to track and communicate performance include financial measures such as sales and earnings per share growth. Yet these have only a flimsy connection to the objective of creating shareholder value. Executives cling to these metrics because they are overconfident in their intuition, they misattribute the causes of events, and they do not escape the pull of the status quo.

Useful statistics have two qualities. They are persistent, showing that the outcome of an action at one time will be similar to the outcome of the same action at a later time; and they are predictive, demonstrating a causal relationship between the action and the outcome being measured.

Choosing the right statistics — metrics that will allow you to understand, track, and manage the cause-and-effect relationships that determine the value of your company — is a four-step process. I'll illustrate the process in a simplified way using a fictional retail bank based on an analysis of 115 banks by Venky Nagar of the University of Michigan and Madhav Rajan of Stanford. Leave aside, for the moment, which metrics you currently use or which ones Wall Street analysts or bankers say you should. Start with a blank slate and work through these four steps in sequence.


Step 1: Define your governing objective. A clear objective is essential to business success because it guides the allocation of capital. Creating economic value is a logical governing objective for a company that operates in a free market system. Companies may choose a different objective, such as maximizing the firm's longevity. We will assume that the retail bank seeks to create economic value.

Step 2: Develop a theory of cause and effect to assess presumed drivers of the objective. The three commonly cited financial drivers of value creation are sales, costs, and investments. More-specific financial drivers vary among companies and can include earnings growth, cash flow growth, and return on invested capital.

Naturally, financial metrics can't capture all value-creating activities. You also need to assess nonfinancial measures such as customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and product quality, and determine if they can be directly linked to the financial measures that ultimately deliver value. As we've discussed, the link between value creation and financial and nonfinancial measures like these is variable and must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

In our example, the bank starts with the theory that customer satisfaction drives the use of bank services and that usage is the main driver of value. This theory links a nonfinancial and a financial driver. The bank then measures the correlations statistically to see if the theory is correct and determines that satisfied customers indeed use more services, allowing the bank to generate cash earnings growth and attractive returns on assets, both indicators of value creation. Having determined that customer satisfaction is persistently and predictively linked to returns on assets, the bank must now figure out which employee activities drive satisfaction.

Step 3: Identify the specific activities that employees can do to help achieve the governing objective. The goal is to make the link between your objective and the measures that employees can control through the application of skill. The relationship between these activities and the objective must also be persistent and predictive.

In the previous step, the bank determined that customer satisfaction drives value (it is predictive). The bank now has to find reliable drivers of customer satisfaction. Statistical analysis shows that the rates consumers receive on their loans, the speed of loan processing, and low teller turnover all affect customer satisfaction. Because these are within the control of employees and management, they are persistent. The bank can use this information to, for example, make sure that its process for reviewing and approving loans is quick and efficient.

Step 4: Evaluate your statistics. Finally, you must regularly reevaluate the measures you are using to link employee activities with the governing objective. The drivers of value change over time, and so must your statistics. For example, the demographics of the retail bank's customer base are changing, so the bank needs to review the drivers of customer satisfaction. As the customer base becomes younger and more digitally savvy, teller turnover becomes less relevant and the bank's online interface and customer service become more so.

Companies have access to a growing torrent of statistics that could improve their performance, but executives still cling to old-fashioned and often flawed methods for choosing metrics. In the past, companies could get away with going on gut and ignoring the right statistics because that's what everyone else was doing. Today, using them is necessary to compete. More to the point, identifying and exploiting them before rivals do will be the key to seizing advantage.

Michael J. Mauboussin
Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/how_to_pick_the_right_metrics.html

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Meditate makes you more productive

This morning, like every morning, I sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, rested my hands on my knees, closed my eyes, and did nothing but breathe for 20 minutes.

People say the hardest part about meditating is finding the time to meditate. This makes sense: who these days has time to do nothing? It's hard to justify.

Meditation brings many benefits: It refreshes us, helps us settle into what's happening now, makes us wiser and gentler, helps us cope in a world that overloads us with information and communication, and more. But if you're still looking for a business case to justify spending time meditating, try this one: Meditation makes you more productive.


Source : http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2012/10/if-youre-too-busy-to-meditate.html

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Encouraging your people to take the long view

Employees and managers should be measured as much on their contribution to an organization’s long-term health as to its performance.

Measuring the performance of people, especially managers and senior executives, presents a perennial conundrum. Without quantifiable goals, it’s difficult to measure progress objectively. At the same time, companies that rely too much on financial or other “hard” performance targets risk putting short-term success ahead of long-term health—for example, by tolerating flawed “stars” who drive top performance but intimidate others, ignore staff development, or fail to collaborate with colleagues. The fact is that when people don’t have real targets and incentives to focus on the long term, they don’t; over time, performance declines because not enough people have the attention, or the capabilities, to sustain and renew it.


Source: www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Strategic_Organization/Encouraging_your_people_to_take_the_long_view_3014

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Increasing the ROI of Social Media Marketing

By following a seven-step process to identify and recruit potential brand ambassadors in online social networks, an ice cream retailer substantially improved the effectiveness of its social media marketing.

Now that so many people worldwide participate in online social networks — 955 million on Facebook alone1 — influencing consumer preferences and purchase decisions through these networks and word of mouth (WOM) is an increasingly important part of every marketer’s job. Many enterprises are investing in social channels to rapidly create or propagate their brand through viral content, social media contests and other consumer engagement efforts. Their traditional campaigns are changing, too. Companies such as Geico, Dell and eBay are adapting the traditional “one-way” advertising message and using it as a stepping-stone to begin a two-way dialogue with consumers via social media.


Source: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-fall/54115/increasing-the-roi-of-social-media-marketing

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The element of good LEADERSHIP

What does it take to be an effective leader in today’s unpredictable and uncertain business environments?

Earlier this month, I attended an MIT Sloan executive education course called “Transforming Your Leadership Strategy,” taught by MIT Sloan professor Deborah Ancona. While a good deal of the learning in the course took place through interactive exercises, Ancona conveyed many important points about effective leadership through her presentations. Here are a few of those points:


Source : http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2012/07/27/the-elements-of-good-leadership/

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Driving growth and employment through logistics

Ever since British economist Alfred Marshall wrote about the importance of industry clusters in his classic 1920 book Principles of Economics, academics and policymakers have been trying to understand and nurture the ingredients that are essential to industrial success. In the late 1990s, business strategist Michael Porter argued that clusters make businesses more competitive by increasing the pace of innovation and stimulating new business formation. National and regional governments quickly embraced the idea that once they seeded a cluster, good things would happen: Businesses would be drawn to the area and attract employees and more employers, and these activities would feed on themselves, leading to economic growth.


Source: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-fall/54111/driving-growth-and-employment-through-logistics

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Create a presentation your audience will care about

Generating ideas is the easiest part of creating a presentation. The hard part is deciding what to keep. Many of your ideas may be fascinating or clever, but you can't squeeze them all in — and no one wants to hear them all, anyway.

The people in the audience are the stars of your show. If they don't buy what you're saying, it won't go anywhere. To keep them engaged and make your case, you'll need to focus on what matters to them. If you don't, they'll have to work hard to figure out why they should care about your presentation and what it'll help them accomplish, and they'll resent you for the extra effort they've had to put in.


Source: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/create_presentations_an_audien.html

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How to build creative confidence

One bad childhood experience where our creativity was mocked can inhibit us as adults. It can plant the idea that we’re practical people, not creative people, and can grow into a full-fledged “truth” about ourselves later.

But creativity can be coaxed out of people, if approached the right way.

That’s according to David Kelley, who is certainly one to know. Kelly is founder and chair of the design firm IDEO and creator of the “d.school” at Stanford, formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, where students studying everything from business to medicine work on building their creativity to collaboratively solve complex problems.


Source : http://sloanreview.mit.edu/improvisations/2012/07/03/how-to-build-your-creative-confidence

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When Is an Outsider CEO a Good Choice?

In recent years, established corporations such as Siemens, Hershey, 3M and Wrigley recruited new CEOs from outside the company for the first time in more than a century. Both General Motors and Hewlett-Packard have had more than one CEO who was brought in from outside.

But when is an outsider CEO the right choice? Outsider CEOs such as William Perez of Nike and Jeff Nugent of Revlon were hired by boards to lead their companies through major transformations but were not retained by the same boards through a two-year post-succession period. This suggests the possible existence of a paradox in which boards choose outsider CEOs with a presumed mandate for change but soon become dissatisfied with those same outsider CEOs.


Source : http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-summer/53408/when-is-an-outsider-ceo-a-good-choice/

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Big Data Doesn't Work if You Ignore the Small Things that Matter (by Robert Plan)

Ever waited hours, in vain, for a repair service to arrive at your home? Of course you have. We all have. Chances are you've also shifted your allegiance away from a company that made you wait like that.

So why do companies spend millions on big data and big-data-based market research while continuing to ignore the simple things that make customers happy? Why do they buy huge proprietary databases yet fail to use plain old scheduling software to tell you precisely when a technician is going to arrive?

For that matter, why do they send trucks with the wrong inventory on board? Why do they impose unfathomable password requirements? Create complex online registration processes? Shut down their customer service on weekends? Hound you with robocalls until you answer a survey?

Big data is today's panacea, the great new hope for unlocking the mysteries of marketing. To avoid being left behind, companies are rushing to cash in on the information they glean from customers, and vendors are stepping up to help. The venture capital community has taken note of this trend: Over the past year, investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into start-ups that promise to exploit caches like Facebook's reported 100 petabytes of data.

But in the meantime, most companies haven't done much to improve the customer experience. Negative interactions with companies are as common as ever. A reported 86% of consumers have switched companies after bad customer experiences.

Companies would do better at satisfying and retaining customers if they spent less time worrying about big data and more time making good use of "small data" — already-available information from simple technology solutions — to become more flexible, informative, and helpful.

Miami-Dade Transit allows customers to monitorits system so they can know when to arrive at a stop in time to catch a particular bus. That's not so complicated; why can't commercial firms invest in allowing customers to monitor the location of service or delivery techs? The UK grocery chain Tesco gives customers a choice of delivery times that come with different prices (deliveries are cheaper during off-peak hours). That's not complicated either; why do so many companies give you no choice at all about deliveries? Cemex, the concrete maker, uses scheduling software to give customers a 20-minute window for deliveries. Comcast promises a $20 credit or three months of a free premium channel if techs are late. After a recent credit-card mixup, Apple responded immediately to my email and solved my problem. Why do so many other companies mishandle customer service and leave you to fend for yourself? Many innovative customer-service solutions like these are simple and inexpensive, and they have high payback.

Big data, by contrast, is far from inexpensive, and the payback is often iffy. Last year the UK government pulled the plug on an expensive and unwieldy patient-record database that was to have been used for clinical research and improved business processes. The government shifted its focus to creating smaller projects on more well-defined deliverables such as on-time patient appointments.

CXOs with long memories may recall prior panaceas that underdelivered over the long run. Think of "expert systems," which promised to deliver expert levels of performance but were unable to provide explanations for why the recommended courses of action should be taken, a failing that limited their usefulness (expert systems are becoming fashionable again through IBM's Watson).

I'm not saying that all big-data projects are useless. Far from it. Manchester City Football Club, the English Premier League Champion, has opened up part of its "on-ball events" database in the hope that people in the open-data community will find patterns and trends that could give the club an edge. That's a simple way to make use of a big trove of data, and the upside could be substantial.

But don't expect an easy payoff. To avoid being caught spending vast sums on half-vast results, CXOs would be wise to link a big-data project to the development of a rigorous metrics program — something like the Balanced Scorecard, which is more likely than CapEx or financial ROI to capture the full results of big-data applications downstream and across multiple process groups. Let's say, for example, that you're seeing a pattern of strong store sales for a group of products that were previously perceived as unrelated. It might take a scorecard approach for you to figure out that the sales peak coincided with a particular phase in the staff-training schedule. A scorecard that links financials with learning initiatives and other operations would serve as a cross-check for managers.

And in the frenzy to capitalize on big data, don't forget what it's like to be a data point — an individual customer dealing with your company. If you're not making your data points happy, they'll gladly move into someone else's database, just as you did after the repair service failed to show up.

Source : http://blogs.hbr.org/

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When is it the right time to change jobs?

There are a lot of things to consider when deciding when and why to move on. To begin with, you need to assesswhere you are now, what you have achieved and where you want to be in a few years time.

What do you enjoy about your present job? What don't you enjoy? What do you feel is missing? What have you enjoyed about any previous roles you have done? How will you know when you have achieved it? As well your own personal motives for wanting to change jobs, there are plenty of other reasons out of your control that cause you to leave your current position, including:

• potential financial difficulties for your employer
• your company moving into a different area of business
• a colappse in communication with your manager or colleagues

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