tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84091290175198018422024-03-12T20:11:06.668-03:00Management 101Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.comBlogger999125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-67225258880112617182016-08-23T10:32:00.002-03:002016-08-23T10:32:15.257-03:00The Mind Map of Blue Ocean Leadership<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_lyd_H0I656hEfMdNWtXKS46L0kLkuFxcU9izTQfsInYk3d0Z4kHHSpi0IEkbvbP688JlhyphenhyphenJl1HoHcsfE72HOISewv4oXNntumpDEPERFv-8Hb5cG3mCc2JOGoz_fBrzcysFEi0knLHs/s1600/mind_map.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_lyd_H0I656hEfMdNWtXKS46L0kLkuFxcU9izTQfsInYk3d0Z4kHHSpi0IEkbvbP688JlhyphenhyphenJl1HoHcsfE72HOISewv4oXNntumpDEPERFv-8Hb5cG3mCc2JOGoz_fBrzcysFEi0knLHs/s320/mind_map.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"> Releasing the ocean of untapped talent and energy of employees is something few companies can afford not to do. Visualising blue ocean leadership in comparison to conventional leadership practices will help you with implementation.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">As we describe in our <strong style="text-decoration: none;">recent series</strong> of articles on INSEAD Knowledge, blue ocean leadership can help organisations realise oceans of employee potential and stop leaders from wasting their time. The step-by-step process we’ve outlined gives organisations and leaders a clear roadmap to approach the implementation of blue ocean leadership.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">We’re glad to share this Mind Map, which will help you to visualise the whole process.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSTgvd_cTE9T-bW0N1NgpwG9OAA0HUEP1IL8H-QxPHoIeYWRnciwQdIlcDXMrfb_O_VHx7xQWE-y0xzmXiErtav06_iVpbbL6oRVrXIHgUDnO9aI8PdYSMlq2kVSXr3mxWKJ5tql-dqLs/s1600/bol_mind_map_final.001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSTgvd_cTE9T-bW0N1NgpwG9OAA0HUEP1IL8H-QxPHoIeYWRnciwQdIlcDXMrfb_O_VHx7xQWE-y0xzmXiErtav06_iVpbbL6oRVrXIHgUDnO9aI8PdYSMlq2kVSXr3mxWKJ5tql-dqLs/s640/bol_mind_map_final.001.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 15.6px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">To explain the map, it is important to start at the top, realising that there is a wide gulf in organisations between the potential and realised talent within. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report, the majority of employees in the countries surveyed around the world are disengaged, merely doing what it takes to get by, or actively disengaged and acting out their discontent in unproductive ways. These disengaged employees are effectively the noncustomers of leadership.</span></span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Key differences</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">While leaders don’t intentionally leave untapped talent and employee potential on the table, their understanding of this issue is key to turning the situation around. To do that, it’s important that leaders and HR directors start by understanding the principles underlying blue ocean leadership. These are: that leadership should be connected to market realities; be focused on acts and activities that have a direct and measurable impact on performance; be distributed across the organisation; and, to be achievable, should focus as much on what leaders should eliminate and reduce in what they do as on what acts and activities they should raise and create to achieve a step change in leadership strength. Without eliminating and reducing to create room on leaders’ plates, few have the time to up their game even if they wanted to (the left of the diagram). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">As we illustrate, this is different from conventional leadership approaches (red oceans). We have observed that leadership approaches used in firms are often focused on personal qualities and behavioral styles that are hard to change and are detached from what firms stand for in the eyes of customers and from the market results employees are expected to achieve. Using blue ocean leadership to connect to the market, the people who face market realities every day are asked for their direct input on the acts and activities of their leaders, and what they need from their leaders to effectively serve customers.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Starting the process</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Blue ocean leadership is based on a <strong style="text-decoration: none;">four-step process</strong><strong style="text-decoration: none;">. </strong>Before making changes in leadership, it is important for the organisation to understand where leadership stands today and where it is falling short. This is done by creating the “As-Is Leadership Canvas”, which creates a company-wide conversation on what actions actually absorb leaders’ time at each level. From there, organisations should:</span></div>
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<li style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><strong>Apply the blue ocean leadership grid </strong>to determine which activities should be eliminated, reduced, raised or created.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Develop alternative “To-Be Leadership Profiles”</span></strong></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></strong></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Present To-Be Leadership Canvases at a “Leadership Fair”</span></strong></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></strong></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Select “To-Be Leadership Profiles”</span></strong></li>
<li style="text-align: justify;"><strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></strong></li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The bottom of the diagram provides a high level understanding of how the four-step process is executed, who drives the process, and how it achieves high performance fast and at low cost while gaining employees’ commitment for change.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Making the change</span></strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The development of To-Be Leadership Profiles will have given organisations the ability to see the changes needed. Once the leadership reality is realised, a case for change can be made (right side of the diagram).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Operating on the blue ocean leadership foundation, the leadership actions of frontline and middle managers will be reset, giving senior leaders the ability to delegate more and spend more time charting the company’s future rather than focusing on day-to-day operations.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">It will also liberate, coach and empower middle management, making them less controlling and nervous of acting alone. The frontline managers will spend less time trying to please the boss and more time serving customers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">While leadership is by no means an exact science, rethinking the acts and activities of senior managers can free them from forms, reporting and dealing with day-to-day operational issues to focus on strategy and communication. With more empowerment, frontline managers can make decisions and spend less time reporting upwards on all aspects of the day-to-day. Together, this can unlock high performance at the top and unleash an ocean of unrealised talent and energy on the front lines.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>INSEAD Knowledge</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-64322977553011358562016-08-23T10:28:00.000-03:002016-08-23T10:28:02.064-03:00Three Questions Humble Leaders Ask<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOC1Ea2tqhNU6jTSLbW967b0cJbI3GfzwJictq1w-GnOfaniLqLF0TOqiogxzkayq4bOoL0uUA7quSC2rktUc8qPmNIlHVZIHwanY6wd6zEQhLhOhtpas8ax6_umwbQU7sqnvSiqvH00/s1600/annet_aris_three_questions_humble_leaders_ask.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWOC1Ea2tqhNU6jTSLbW967b0cJbI3GfzwJictq1w-GnOfaniLqLF0TOqiogxzkayq4bOoL0uUA7quSC2rktUc8qPmNIlHVZIHwanY6wd6zEQhLhOhtpas8ax6_umwbQU7sqnvSiqvH00/s320/annet_aris_three_questions_humble_leaders_ask.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<b><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To avoid falling victim
to narcissistic tendencies, leaders need to look outside in more ways than one.<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">My office window looks out on the only grassed square in my
neighbourhood. The view is wonderful: toddlers stumbling along playing tag,
love-struck teenagers flirting shyly, fathers patiently playing ball with their
offspring, hopeful they have an Olympics contender in the making.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As a<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><strong>supervisory board member of several companies</strong>,
I often have to make difficult telephone calls over the course of the day; it
may be to address conflicts in the boardroom or discuss tricky takeovers or
remuneration issues. In each case, a quick glance out of the window during
these conversations provides perspective and significantly improves my mood,
which clearly benefits the outcome of the discussions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is a shame then that so many directors' offices are without such a
view and are often far away from the ordinary world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Narcissistic leaders</span></strong><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Research conducted by my INSEAD colleague, Professor Manfred Kets de
Vries, among others, suggests<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><strong><span lang="EN-US" style="text-decoration: none;">narcissism is a frequent occurrence
among management’s upper echelons</span></strong><span lang="EN-US">.
In fact the number of narcissists in top management is clearly above average,
although it is impossible to say exactly how many because narcissism is not
black and white: it is a sliding scale. A degree of narcissism is required to
be an inspirational and visionary leader, someone with the courage to take
unconventional steps in disruptive environments. Too much narcissism, however,
leads to megalomania, manipulative behaviour and a focus on one’s own power and
status instead of the interests of the company, employees and clients.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="cursor: pointer;"><span class="tweetable-text"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240);">Narcissism doesn't just happen</span></span></span><span lang="EN-US">; the foundation is laid by a combination of innate personality traits
and childhood experiences. It only truly reveals itself as an individual
attains increasing power and success, and is most obvious in organisations with
large hierarchical distances where great importance is attached to status.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to academic literature, external indicators for narcissism
include the frequency with which a manager uses 'I' instead of 'we', how
prominently they feature in the news, and the distance between their
remuneration and that of the rest of the organisation. To this list I have
personally and subjectively added, an attractive, young, second (or third)
wife, a luxury company car and prestigious additional functions.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Three questions to staying grounded</span></strong><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 11.7pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">So, what role does my office window play in preventing excessive
narcissism?<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span style="cursor: pointer;"><span class="tweetable-text"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240);">As a manager, it is important to keep your feet firmly
on the ground.</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span lang="EN-US" style="background: rgb(240, 240, 240);"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN-US">To
do this, leaders need to look at three aspects of their lives and regularly ask
themselves: am I surrounded by enough critical voices? Is there enough
adversity? And, have I kept contact with the world outside the office?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Critical voices can come from many sides. On a personal level, from
censorious teenagers and one’s (first) spouse who knows you inside out. At a
professional level you can regularly ask for feedback from employees. Evaluations
from young employees in particular can be ruthless but very enlightening. And
of course you can surround yourself with colleagues, and supervisory board
members, who won’t accept things at face value.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 11.7pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When it comes to adversity, setbacks cannot be planned but I can’t help
but be sceptical if a manager has always prospered. Adversity teaches us that
we cannot have control over everything. It makes us less likely to judge
others. How an individual deals with adversity and what he/she learns from it is
one of the most meaningful indicators of sustained success.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong><span lang="EN-US">Finding another perspective</span></strong><span lang="EN-US"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 11.7pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally, how do we stay in contact with the real world? It’s not easy
for today’s managers to remain open to customers, staff and the people on the
street, when they spend the majority of their time in transit or shuttered in
meeting rooms, usually in the company of other directors. However, taking time
to spend a day in your organisation’s call-centre speaking to dissatisfied
customers, or visiting customers’ homes with the technical team, can be well
worthwhile. Tony Ball, a non-executive board director at British Telecom, tells
the story of the day he went ‘on the job’ and discovered how inventive
engineers managed to avoid unnecessary bureaucratic rules to genuinely assist
customers. The CEO of one of the companies where I am a board member holds
regular 'fireplace meetings' with young staff members in all the countries
where they are active.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 11.7pt; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By taking a more humble, grounded approach and seeking advice from a
different perspective, managers can contain inherent egocentricity and
avoid the trappings of narcissism.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of course it helps to be able to
view the real world through your window, and be reminded that power and
happiness are two separate things. </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 9pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">INSEAD Knowledge</span></b></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-33941264269469145892016-08-23T10:25:00.000-03:002016-08-23T10:25:05.548-03:00Stop Second-Guessing Your Decisions at Work<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiaZPPdt83yUyChkU6-lyzIL_CZ0qj4s44YwOAmu7C-If2dy15MzgFM_cauMYseZZWz6ecPjXKmc6oUD57oes70YNUVSgsCVJGnb2BsVx3TNkLw09e_xGRmPlmsC8T0p9klBW7e2aVicc/s1600/nov15-06-82255195-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiaZPPdt83yUyChkU6-lyzIL_CZ0qj4s44YwOAmu7C-If2dy15MzgFM_cauMYseZZWz6ecPjXKmc6oUD57oes70YNUVSgsCVJGnb2BsVx3TNkLw09e_xGRmPlmsC8T0p9klBW7e2aVicc/s320/nov15-06-82255195-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You’ve finally made a decision. Time to cross it off your list and move on. Or not? Do you find yourself revisiting every decision you make, agonizing over whether it really was the right one?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">What the Experts Say</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">Everyone has moments of doubt. But “constant second-guessing can really affect your leadership — and the perception of your leadership among other people,” says Sydney Finkelstein, faculty director of Dartmouth’s Tuck Center for Leadership and the author of the forthcoming book, </span><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Superbosses</span></em><span style="line-height: 1.9;">. It can also do unintended harm. “If you are excessively second-guessing a hire you’ve made, for instance, you are actually reducing the likelihood of that hire being successful,” says Finkelstein. “There is a risk of a self-fulfilling prophecy.” And that’s not all. “Second-guessing also has a real productivity impact,” says Amy Jen Su, co-founder of executive leadership development firm Paravis Partners and coauthor of </span><em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">Own the Room</span></em><span style="line-height: 1.9;">. “When you’re spinning on a decision, you’re not moving forward. You’re just sitting in this purgatory of second-guessing.” Here’s how to stop looking back with regret.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Get some perspective</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">Ask yourself: How big a decision was this really? What are the stakes now? “There are a lot of decisions where the costs of being wrong are actually not that big,” says Finkelstein. If you’re juggling other more important decisions and issues, “why spend another minute wondering about the ‘what ifs’?” he says. “Remind yourself that worrying is taking time away from the bigger things you have to deal with.” That exercise alone can help soothe your anxiety.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Check your gut</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">If you initially aren’t feeling confident about a chosen path, don’t discount where your intuition has led you. “Trusting your gut can be absolutely useful, valuable, and appropriate,” says Finkelstein. “It can cut down on a ton of time.” Both Finkelstein and Su suggest maintaining a kind of “acknowledgment practice,” which might involve keeping a journal of recent decisions. Hopefully, you’ll find that your intuition has led you in the right direction over time and that even when you made mistakes, they were easily corrected. Reviewing decisions in this way should help you become more self-assured, reducing the likelihood that you’ll second-guess needlessly.</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Poll a group of “advisers”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">If checking your gut still doesn’t </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">give you the confidence</span><span style="line-height: 1.9;"> that you’ve made the right decision, ask around for advice. “Have a group of people who are your sounding boards” and seek their input, says Su. “Say, ‘Here’s what I was thinking. What am I not taking into consideration here?’ That will help you better understand what it is that’s causing you to worry.” It can be particularly helpful to stock this informal panel with people who have experience dealing with similar issues or who can bring new perspectives to the table. Their wisdom can help you feel more comfortable with your chosen path.</span></div>
</span><br />
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Get comfortable with adjustments</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">Few decisions are irreversible. But, in our quest to make the best ones, we tend to forget that. “There’s a real tyranny to trying to be perfect,” says Finkelstein. “It’s important to remember that you can’t possibly be right about everything.” And in nearly every scenario, chances are “you can fix and adjust it,” he says. Su agrees. “When we pretend that decisions are final, we paralyze ourselves. It’s OK to make mistakes. Moving forward is what’s important.”</span></div>
</span><br />
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Make a date to check in</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">One of the best ways to stop questioning a decision in the moment is to make a plan to formally review it at a later date. It could be in a few weeks, or a few months — whatever feels appropriate. Add a reminder to your calendar. “The point is that you can set into place a very simple monitoring mechanism,” says Finkelstein. “That greatly reduces the risk of the consequences of your decision going off-track, and you don’t have to be so crazed in the meantime by second-guessing.”</span></div>
</span><br />
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Balance your decision biases going forward</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">To protect yourself from second-guessing future decisions, work to step out of your comfort zone when making them. People tend to approach choices from either a subjective, emotion-driven perspective or an objective, logic-based one, says Su. But, to feel confident about a course of action, you need to make sure you consider it from all angles. “If you are more logical and fact-based, stretch yourself to consider the subjective factors. If you’re all about subjectivity, make sure you consider the logic side and marry the two.”</span></div>
</span><br />
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Principles to Remember:</span></span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Do:</span></span></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.8; list-style-position: outside; margin: 0px 0px 2rem 1.1rem; padding: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Trust your intuition.</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Reach out to a group of advisers for advice to put your mind at ease.</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Set a date to review the decision in the future so you can stop worrying about it in the present.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="box-sizing: inherit; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don’t:</span></span></div>
<div class="promo--right" style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; float: right; line-height: 22.4px; margin: 0px -332.594px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; width: 18.75rem;">
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<div data-google-query-id="CL7XgJDR184CFVeFkQodjCoERQ" id="DFP_IC_pos3" style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">
<div id="google_ads_iframe_/34363400/HBR_300x600_1__container__" style="border: 0pt none; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><iframe frameborder="0" height="600" id="google_ads_iframe_/34363400/HBR_300x600_1" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" name="google_ads_iframe_/34363400/HBR_300x600_1" scrolling="no" style="border-style: initial; border-width: 0px; box-sizing: inherit; vertical-align: bottom;" title="3rd party ad content" width="300"></iframe></span></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.8; list-style-position: outside; margin: 0px 0px 2rem 1.1rem; padding: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sweat the small stuff. Recognize when decisions have low stakes.</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Assume the decision is permanent; you can almost always change course later on.</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Default to what makes you comfortable when making your next decision</span></li>
</ul>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Case study #1: Finding confidence in outside advice</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">In 2007, when William Schroeder launched a boutique counseling center, Just Mind, in Austin, Texas, he knew that he’d have to make a deluge of daily decisions. But he found himself second-guessing many of them — big ones, like how many people he’d hired and clients he’d agreed to accept, but also small ones, like how much he was spending on Google Adwords campaigns. The worrying ate up his time and attention, leaving him drained. “It became the bane of my existence very quickly,” he says.</span></div>
</span><br />
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Over time, he learned how to better insulate himself from needless doubt later on. In some cases, he creates a decision-making matrix in order to weigh his objectives and the factors in play. This helps him visualize his options, as well as reassures him that he’s done enough research. “I am a visual person and being able to see my options helps me to feel more comfortable about a decision,” he says. “It also allows me to have something to go back to and refer to later when I come up with a similar issue.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The other helpful tool he has developed is an informal group of advisors that he regularly polls when he needs reassurance and advice. He reaches out to another group counseling practice owner for hiring advice; to relatives like his psychologist father-in-law and his lawyer father; and to other entrepreneurs in the area for help running a small business.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“At the end of the day, you do the best you can and sometimes it doesn’t turn out correctly,” he says. “But if it doesn’t go well, you try and fix it as quickly as possible and learn from it.”</span></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: 700; line-height: inherit;">Case study #2: When indecisive is worse than wrong</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.9;">Matt Bremerkamp, VP of public relations for virtual assistant startup Pressed, was worried that he and his colleagues had made the wrong decision to expand the company’s brand ambassador program. They’d gone back and forth over whether to cast a wide net with the program, which works with outsiders who evangelize the company’s product, or shrink it, developing a smaller, targeted group of ambassadors. “We were debating the decision ad nauseum,” he says.</span></div>
</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To break through the inertia, Matt fell back on a strategy he had honed as an infantry team leader in the Army National Guard: Move left. “Basically, if after a moment of hesitation, a best course of action wasn’t apparent, I would always have my team of men move left,” he says. “Then I’d reevaluate the decision, and if a better course of action still wasn’t apparent we’d move left again, and so on.” If left proved to be a poor choice, they’d change course. But “the point was to constantly keep moving forward and to never stagnate.”</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In this case, moving left meant implementing the decision to cast a wide net for brand ambassadors. “The decision actually ended up working out very well,” Matt says. “Some of the issues that we thought we’d have, like relying on spokespeople that we hadn’t handpicked or developed, really haven’t come into play.”</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Matt says he now relies on the “move left” mantra all the time in his professional life. “A decision may not always be perfect,” he says. “But by moving forward you can always ‘adjust fire’ and redirect your efforts if need be.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-79947733830478781742016-08-23T10:22:00.000-03:002016-08-23T10:22:23.261-03:00To Reduce Complexity in Your Company, Start with Pen and Paper<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEighGNPiPBuZ5gSDLn_zuTY6574c27xyYGDpel8YpCMFOjof8hP9kWirijh056yvtKgzhkR1JjETq0_nj54IGv6siMv9v6F8qCnJogxYSqlGf5MSeX0ifE3ZTIaoLnF8qJcACfD7RFjiFc/s1600/aug16-22-170550809-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEighGNPiPBuZ5gSDLn_zuTY6574c27xyYGDpel8YpCMFOjof8hP9kWirijh056yvtKgzhkR1JjETq0_nj54IGv6siMv9v6F8qCnJogxYSqlGf5MSeX0ifE3ZTIaoLnF8qJcACfD7RFjiFc/s320/aug16-22-170550809-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Companies that grow face
a predictable problem: over time, the business becomes way too
complex for its own good. I see this a lot in companies that have moved heavily
into what I call the<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;">“exploitation” phase of a competitive advantage</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">,
or the phase that comes after the initial launch and successful ramp-up. Chris
Zook and James Allen have also recently tackled this issue their
recent HBR article “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit; text-decoration: none;">Reigniting Growth</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">.”</span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With
the warm glow of steady and more-or-less predictable profits to depend on, more
and more policies are introduced, more new ways of extracting profits are
developed, the company<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">loses touch with its customers</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">,
fewer activities are directly related to what<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">Geoffrey Moore</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">famously
called the “core” and instead have to do with context, and the company seems to
lose its agility. The internal world comes to matter more than what is going on
outside the boundaries of the company and it just sort of loses its edge. The
difficulty here is that this doesn’t happen overnight. Convinced that they have
a sustainable competitive advantage (always<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">a risky way to think</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">about your
business), executives allow bureaucracy to take over and decision-making to
become sclerotic.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To
give an example of just how hard it can be to prevent this from happening,
let’s consider the case of Nokia. For years, the company was a poster-child of
success, earning admiration from business executives and academics alike. The
voluminous case studies and articles about the firm would fill entire file
cabinets in the typical business school storage area. I myself wrote admiringly
about the firm’s practices with respect to venturing in<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">an article</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">that was
published in 2006. Nokia’s CEO was featured on<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">the cover of Forbes magazine</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">in 2007,
with the headline “Nokia: A billion customer and counting. Can anyone catch the
cell phone king?” You could forgive executives in the company for believing
that they had it nailed.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
yet…2007 was the year that the iPhone was introduced and Android
commercialized. Despite Nokia’s global footprint, it was nowhere in the US and
carriers disliked the company’s arrogance, built up during its day as the dominant
handset maker. I’m told that at one point the
management-through-presentation culture of the company was so extensive
that they were actually investigated by 3M for potentially re-selling the huge
volumes of acetates used in those days to make slides for overhead projectors!</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I
started to get communications from the company that felt like really bad news. In
one, a star researcher said that he was leaving as there was no space for
creativity anymore, as the company squeezed budgets and eliminated roles without
a clear ROI. The venturing process that I so admired was essentially
dismantled, to be replaced by a numbers-driven group that went hunting for
near-term success. And I wasn’t the only one concerned about the company’s
direction – in 2008 my colleagues Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">wrote about the “rollercoaster”<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">that was
strategy at Nokia for many years, just before the Apple phenomenon decimated
the company’s handset business.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
is a story without suspense – eventually, we know, Kallasvuo was fired and
Stephen Elop was brought in as CEO, penning a call to arms for the company, his</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">famous “burning platform” memo</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">.
In what was clearly a “Hail Mary” pass, Elop engineered a tie-up with Microsoft
that never really worked out, eventually setting the stage for the sale of the
company’s entire handset business. And this despite</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">having working prototypes of
devices</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;"><span lang="EN-US"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">that
could have come to market as the iPhone or iPad – years before Apple invented
them. The problem,<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">according to people like Qualcomm
CEO Paul Jacobs</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">, was sclerotic decision making that
caused the company to miss opportunity after opportunity. Sounds like what Zook
and Allen are<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">talking about</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit;">.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
is exactly what I look at when a company has gone far too heavily in the
direction of exploiting. You can think of it as the “tangle” of growth. Without
the pressure to move quickly and make decisions fast with imperfect
information, it is all too easy for the balance between pressing forward into
the future and exploiting the current situation to get out of whack. The focus
becomes internal, politics take over decision-making, senior leaders are not
told the bad news they need to hear, technical experts’ voices are not heard
and, for reasons nobody can quite put a finger on, everything seems to be
moving at a leaden pace.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
is the remedy that Zook and Allen propose? Clean house by eliminating
under-performing units, while reducing complexity and eliminating excess cost. Focus
on what they call the “front line”– that part of the company that actually
touches the customer. Get senior teams out of the office to encounter
one-on-one what is really going on in their markets and with their customers. Eliminate
bureaucracy. Rediscover the mission.</span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Pragmatically,
you can begin to do this without a whole lot of drama. I start by making a
model of the business. I like to look at variables in 4 columns:</span></div>
<ul style="box-sizing: inherit; list-style-position: outside; margin: 2rem 1.1rem;" type="disc">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; box-sizing: inherit; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Outcomes (what you
are trying to achieve, as in sales)<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; box-sizing: inherit; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Drivers (what you
believe causes the outcome to occur, or not)<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; box-sizing: inherit; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leading indicators
(how do you know how you are doing on the drivers?)<o:p></o:p></span></span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; box-sizing: inherit; text-align: justify;"><span lang="EN-US"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Work streams (what
are you doing to influence the leading indicators)</span></span></li>
</ul>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">In
a recent retreat with the executive team of a retailer that is facing a
genuine tangle and trying to get back on track, we kept it simple. I used a
hand-drawn picture of what the model for their business would look like. The
handwritten, unsophisticated part is important – remember that a lot of the
tangle is characterized by over-engineered PowerPoint presentations and way too
many reports. What you want is to get clarity about what really matters to your
business and what is just noise. So what we drew as outcomes for this retailer
were results such as in-store sales, revenues from secondary products, revenues
from on-line sales, and then the various contributors to cost. Next, we looked
at what we believe caused those things to happen, for good or for ill (things
like traffic from which customer segments, average spending, median spending,
nature of what was bought, share of wallet, etc.). Then we looked at what
indicators might predict whether our drivers were improving or not (customer
complaints, net promoter scores, sign-ups for a loyalty program, and so on).</span><div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">With
this picture firmly in front of the whole team, we next dove into the
implications for what the organization should be focusing on – and more
importantly what it could safely stop doing. If an activity didn’t have an
impact on a leading indicator, we resolved to eliminate it. If a unit couldn’t
clearly show the linkages between what they do every day and the outcomes we
were trying to drive, it was a candidate for being shut down. If one member of
the leadership team owned a key driver, the goal was to let them manage it
rather than everybody being in micro-management mode.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Eventually,
the changes that were implemented led to a redefinition of the company’s core
strategy and a renewal of its relationships with its customers, without a
wrenching restructuring or devastation to morale. Perhaps even more impressive
than these strategic outcomes were the effects of this “detangling” on the
organization. The senior team was able to more effectively prioritize the use
of their time. Before the detangling exercise, they had fallen into the classic
trap of continuing to “do stuff” when really their very senior roles were to
ensure that the right things were being executed down the organization. They
were now more able to clearly separate out responsibilities so that less
communication and fewer meetings were required as they realized that the
responsible person should tackle the action plans. Decisions were made more
quickly. A big thrust, ongoing at the moment, is to re-energize their workforce
which had been drifting in the direction taken by Circuit City and Home Depot,
namely replacing experienced and deeply knowledgeable staff with part-time and
less knowledgeable people which eventually damaged the reputation of both firms
(and in the case of Circuit City ultimately led to its demise).</span></div>
<div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: justify;">Getting
tangled up is easy. Getting untangled is hard. Absent the pressure from either
a major corporate crisis (such as a burning platform) or a CEO and senior team
that insist these things be part of the ongoing work of the organization, the
tangle will dominate. The reason this strikes me as a critically important
issue today is that in a world of<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit; text-align: justify;">transient competitive advantage</span><span lang="EN-US" style="background-color: white; background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit; text-align: justify;">,
even very good companies, like Nokia, can fall victim to this syndrome. </span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: inherit; text-align: justify;">Far better to tame it before it
sinks you.</span></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
<div style="background: white; box-sizing: inherit; margin: 2rem; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-position: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;"><br /></span></span></div>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-42915286867593161332016-08-01T12:33:00.001-03:002016-08-01T12:33:54.182-03:00Disrupting the Disruptors: Startup Accelerators Feel Pressure to Evolve<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihx4R1Bei4IwS_9lYBLbqKplP7VUaOFJ5U5o4P8d8B28v3FAORL4ztdMIkzg8OTX9cEJc4ycCPt-gywQimOhB6baa4J-_LW1foq67fZNjd__l7tMSS1y-82ueg6RYigsb_xc42c5IK-_E/s1600/startup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="137" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihx4R1Bei4IwS_9lYBLbqKplP7VUaOFJ5U5o4P8d8B28v3FAORL4ztdMIkzg8OTX9cEJc4ycCPt-gywQimOhB6baa4J-_LW1foq67fZNjd__l7tMSS1y-82ueg6RYigsb_xc42c5IK-_E/s320/startup.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div align="LEFT" class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">A
decade ago, eager entrepreneurs with little business acuity and in
need of funding turned to startup accelerators for help. From the
outside, these programs had an air of exclusivity with the source
code to build successful businesses.</span></span></div>
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<br />
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Now
that image seems passé.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;">“</span><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">New
models are emerging on how to create ventures and scale them,”
says</span></span><a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/ihrig/"><span style="color: #aa3d3d;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Martin
Ihrig</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">,
an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Wharton and practice
professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
global explosion of interest in entrepreneurship has spurred the
growth of tailor-made accelerator programs to service a startup
culture no longer tethered just to Silicon Valley. The evolution of
accelerators — business immersion boot camps that usually take a
percentage of equity to help launch companies — can be found in
scores of new programs offering budding entrepreneurs all sorts of
incentives to join.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
original startup accelerators — Y Combinator and Techstars — have
spawned a cottage industry with estimates ranging from 300 to more
than 2,000 worldwide, according to business professors Susan Cohen of
the University of Richmond and Yael Hochberg of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
reduction of entry-level costs has played a primary role in the
growth of the startup ecosystem, says Wharton management
professor </span></span><a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/emollick/"><span style="color: #aa3d3d;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Ethan
Mollick</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">.
He adds that the cost of launching a web-based startup has fallen by
three orders of magnitude since the late 1990s by some estimates.
“What used to cost $3 million to do now costs $300.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
easy access not only has led more people to launch businesses, it
also has affected the way to fund entrepreneurs, leading to questions
about the value of early stage seed-fund programs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
used to be that VC investors were very important,” says Mollick,
whose research includes early-stage entrepreneurship and
crowdfunding. “When you needed $2 million to launch your website
there weren’t many people to give you $2 million. You had to go to
a venture capitalist.”</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Mollick
says the new equation has led to competition among venture
capitalists. It started with the rise of super angel investors in the
mid-2000s who spent $100,000 to $200,000 on Silicon Valley pet
projects before venture capitalists got involved. “They were
starting to take more value of the startup because they got a big
chunk of the startup early.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Then
the landscape changed again in 2005 when computer scientist and
essayist Paul Graham co-founded Y Combinator, which has since
graduated such companies as Dropbox, Airbnb and Disqus. Investors
realized accelerator programs could get them in on the ground floor
with promising companies while they could shape their progress from
the start.</span></span></div>
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<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Incubators
Grow Up</span></span></strong></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Accelerators
were born out of the incubator concept that began in the late 1950s.
Although many entrepreneurs use the words interchangeably, incubators
generally are collectives where infant businesses share working space
and resources, and get occasional mentorship. Accelerators are
fixed-term programs generally lasting from three months to six months
that target projects showing promise.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Accelerators
help entrepreneurs develop operations and strategies with guidance
from advisors and mentors, as well as providing rent-free office
space and other infrastructure benefits. The programs usually
culminate with graduates pitching their ideas to potential investors.
About half raise capital, which are good odds considering about one
in 100 startups overall get funded, according to George Deeb,
managing partner of Red Rocket of Chicago and author of </span></span><em><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">101
Startup Lessons — An Entrepreneur’s Handbook.</span></span></span></span></em></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">However,
entree into accelerators can cost a startup from 2% to 10% equity.
Dave McClure, the founder of Silicon Valley accelerator 500 Startups,
cautions entrepreneurs to choose wisely when considering a program.
“The best programs have a substantial impact,” he says. “The
worst programs can probably cause damage.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Techstars
of Boulder, Colorado, followed Y Combinator in 2007. Over nine years,
Techstars has become one of the world’s leading accelerators, with
programs in Berlin, London, New York, Cape Town in South Africa, and
Tel Aviv, among other locations. “Ten years ago, you would
have been forced to relocate to Silicon Valley before they would have
cut that check,” says Deeb.</span></span></div>
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</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">According
to Techstars, a $100,000 convertible note is automatically offered to
all startups upon acceptance. The note converts at a pre-money
valuation [the valuation before outside funds or the latest rounds of
funding are accounted for] of $3 million to $5 million, the company
says.</span></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Those
who enter the program give up 6% of common stock for the loan. They
also receive lifetime access to Techstars’ resources, hands-on
mentorship in a three-month program with office space, $20,000 in
living expenses and connections to more than 5,000 experts.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Deeb,
a founding Techstars mentor, is a staunch proponent of the model that
vets startups before investors hear about them. Techstars Chicago
picks 10 companies out of 1,000 applicants, says Deeb. This way
investors hear pitches from only the most promising startups as
determined by the accelerator.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">But
of course, well-known accelerator programs are not the lone path to
funding and support. Another tentacle in the ecosystem can be found
in Techstars’ collaboration with major corporations. Since 2015,
Techstars had partnered with such heavyweights as Barclays, Disney
and Sprint to create accelerator programs for each company.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Disney
did not renew its contract with Techstars in early 2016 but continues
to operate a startup accelerator. Kevin Mayer, Disney’s executive
vice president of corporate development, has said the company isn’t
investing in startups in order to make a quick profit like a typical
venture capitalist. The entertainment company is more interested in
creating cutting-edge products it can use, as well as revitalizing
its leadership by staying at the forefront of innovation.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Corporate
leaders figure they can train and support aspiring entrepreneurs to
be part of innovative projects in-house instead of having to pay
millions later on to acquire them. “Opening an accelerator is a
strategic decision that allows big corporates to stay relevant and
competitive in a rapidly changing economy,” Microsoft’s general
manager of accelerators Zack Weisfeld wrote this year in an opinion
piece for </span></span><em><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">Forbes</span></span></span></span></em><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">.</span></span></div>
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</div>
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<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Many
Tracks</span></span></strong></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Charles
Bonello, a New York entrepreneur, investor and startup tinkerer, is
playing the classic role of disrupter as co-founder and managing
director of Grand Central Tech.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">His
New York City startup hub offers companies a yearlong program without
charging rent or taking equity. The catch is companies that complete
the program agree to rent office space for four years in the
accelerator’s extensive 1.1-million square foot building
overlooking Grand Central Station. The building is owned by the
accelerator’s billionaire backers, New York real estate investors
Milstein Properties.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Bonello
has made a career out of partnering with companies and entrepreneurs
to support their growth. With Grand Central Tech, he and his team
want to promote startups across a broad spectrum in one communal
setting. “Our goal is to create a single point of density of the
best technology companies in New York,” he says.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Many
of the startups entering Grand Central Tech aren’t looking for seed
money. They are attracted to the program’s impressive list of
corporate partners that include Google, IBM, L’Oreal USA,
Microsoft, Pepsico North America and JPMorgan Chase.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Bonello
and partner Matt Harrigan have a long-term goal of finding emerging
companies trying to solve problems. One of their first startups was
Nagare Membranes, a developer of water filtration technology. By
keeping like-minded entrepreneurs in the same office the men hope for
cross-pollination in problem solving.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Researchers,
however, caution against blindly accepting civic leaders’
cheerleading that locally grown startup clusters can transform
economies.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Looking
at emerging markets, many see entrepreneurship as solving
unemployment issues,” says Wharton’s Ihrig. “Then the question
is, looking at statistics, do those tech startups and incubators
really produce jobs? Many don’t. And many jobs are outsourced to
other countries like India for IT.” Wharton’s Mollick says while
community and political leaders have many motivations for
accelerating business in their region, “it’s not clear it is
working.”</span></span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
questions about value have yet to mute enthusiasm, though. Even the
Obama Administration’s Startup America Initiative uses many of the
fundamental accelerator ideas to promote small businesses nationally.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
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<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">New
Directions</span></span></strong></div>
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<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">England’s
Entrepreneur First has a similar idea with its new-model accelerator.
Instead of looking for companies, it recruits what officials say are
Europe’s top technologists. Entrepreneur First then partners
with the talent to build a company from scratch. This is a way to
attract a variety of experts to work on a specific issue.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
first accelerators recruited all types of companies instead of
focusing on specific industries. But as these programs proliferated
they became more nuanced in targeting companies to accelerate.</span></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Benjamin
Böhle-Roitelet found a niche in southwest France with his
accelerator Blue Builder. It caters to ocean and other outdoor sports
in the picturesque fishing village of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, located in
the heart of the surf alley in the Basque country. It also lies
beneath the Pyrenees Mountains, providing a testing ground for all
kinds of adventure sports products.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
French accelerator offers a campus with prototype studios, workshops
and a safe environment to experiment with materials such as polymers
and resins used for building surfboards and snowboards.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are places to build companies and places to finance or do business
development for startups,” says Böhle-Roitelet. “Places like
Saint-Jean-de-Luz are great because they are close to the market and
audience without the solicitations and noise of major ecosystems like
Silicon Valley.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">For
an industry such as adventure sports, it is more important to be
connected to the core audience than prospective funders.
Böhle-Roitelet also sees an upside in these entrepreneurs staying
true to their lifestyle while improving the products they use
themselves.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Blue
Builder doesn’t have a regular program with “demo days” such as
many other accelerators. Instead, it works with entrepreneurs on
specific projects to get them launched when they are ready to be
presented to investors. It surrounds these creative trailblazers with
brand designers, user experience designers, business developers and
finance and legal experts to increase the likelihood of success
during a yearlong assignment to build a product, such as one
involving a sensor that measures surfboard movements in real time.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Böhle-Roitelet’s
group determines how much equity it gets based on the valuation of
each company instead of taking a uniform percentage at the entry
point.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Government
Role</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Halfway
across the world, Muhammed Mekki, a founding partner of AstroLabs,
has extended a corporate connection to Dubai in the United Arab
Emirates.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
bridge to the corporate world makes sense to the Iraqi-American who
helped create tech startups in Silicon Valley while still earning his
MBA. AstroLabs has partnered with Google to build a startup hub and
training academy to promote online and mobile business throughout the
Arab world. The relationship is not surprising because Google for
Entrepreneurs is designed to promote startups worldwide. It also
makes sense that AstroLabs has strong government backing for its
project. Local and regional governments have a stake in the success
of these programs to create 21st-century jobs.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
becomes part of the culture, and when it becomes part of the culture,
it becomes part” of the government “to integrate this idea of
startup mentality,” says Bambi Francisco, whose company Vator is
one of the largest social network platforms dedicated to
entrepreneurs.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">In
2011, the Chilean government decided the best way to promote
homegrown entrepreneurship was to create its own accelerator. The
country’s economic development agency hatched the idea with
Stanford University experts to create Start-Up Chile.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Government
officials offered entrepreneurs from around the world $40,000 of
equity-free capital, infrastructure and work visas for one year to
develop their companies over six months. The program also gave
selected startups access to Chile’s financial network.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
idea is the recruited entrepreneurs would serve as role models for
Chile’s budding startup culture. “I know a bunch of guys who went
to Start-Up Chile, but I don’t know any who stayed in Chile,”
says Mollick.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Diego
Saez Gil of Argentina was one of the first entrepreneurs to join
Start-Up Chile. He got seed money for his former company, WeHostels,
a social hotel booking application for mobile platforms that was sold
after its launch. Saez Gil was attracted to Chile’s program because
he wanted to help grow the Latin American ecosystem.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">But
his latest venture is located in Silicon Valley, underscoring
Mollick’s point of view. Yet, Mollick says homegrown accelerators
worldwide could provide a valuable financial service because of
Silicon Valley’s lack of diversity. “The problem with
conventional funding sources — and quite honestly it doesn’t look
that different at Y Combinator or Techstars — they overwhelmingly
tend to fund men, they overwhelmingly tend to fund white men, they
overwhelmingly tend to fund white men from top schools,” says
Mollick. “Either those are the only people who are interested in
going into startups or the system has built-in biases.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">He
adds that the mean distance between a venture capitalist and a
company they invest in is only 80 miles. “So, if you’re not in
San Francisco or New York or a few other places, you’re unlikely to
get access to funding.” He is skeptical of some accelerators that
advertise a new approach with more access. They might have a savvy
marketing angle, but still target “the exact same pile of mostly
white, mostly male, mostly coastal, already connected people who make
up the most classes at Y Combinator and other programs,” says
Mollick. “There are reasons to have accelerators in cities
Europe-wide because these people are cut off from the funding system
and support system that exists for the lucky few in the U.S. But you
can’t just copy Y Combinator and expect it to work.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Hybrid
Approaches</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
University of Pennsylvania is pioneering a new approach to
entrepreneurship by combining academic applications with practical
experience. </span></span><a href="http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/faculty/ulrich/"><span style="color: #aa3d3d;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Karl
Ulrich</span></span></span></a><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">,
the vice dean of entrepreneurship and innovation at Wharton, has
argued that college is the best time to launch a business because of
the proximity to so many people to test the product and gather
feedback.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We
encourage our students to work on their own projects while in
school,” says Ihrig, who directs the Strategic and Entrepreneurial
Management of Knowledge (SEM-K) research initiative at Wharton’s
Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center. “They can experiment
with their venture ideas and consult their professors if they have
problems.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Penn’s
Graduate School of Education (GSE) has created the country’s first
executive master’s degree program in education entrepreneurship.
The school also helped create an Education Design Studio, a hybrid
incubator and seed fund for education startups.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Entrepreneurs
who chose the incubator route have access to GSE’s professors to
get the latest research on what is working in their areas of
interest. But they do not earn degrees.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
model of offering two routes to launching businesses with academic
support — in school while pursuing a master’s degree
part-time or through an incubator program — is not limited to
education startups. “We can bring research to practice by including
the university in the entrepreneurial ecosystem,” says Ihrig, who
is the founding academic director of GSE’s master’s program.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Saez
Gil doesn’t think a degree is necessary for those already itching
to launch a business. “Probably if you know you want to be an
entrepreneur you should just go and do it,” adds the co-founder and
chief executive of Bluesmart, a travel products startup that is a Y
Combinator alumnus.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">According
to Francisco, it is easier than ever to create a startup. Her company
Vator — short for innovator — is another example that underscores
the changing environment in seed funding.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Started
in 2007, Vator holds entrepreneur conferences in Los Angeles, London
and Oakland, California, that can lead to investment deals. One of
Vator’s backers is Silicon Valley darling Peter Thiel, best known
for co-founding PayPal in 1998, being the first outside investor in
Facebook and co-founding data analysis giant Palantir Technologies.
Francisco said accelerators provided just what the emerging ecosystem
needed a decade ago. “At one point their value proposition made a
lot of sense,” she says. “They could introduce you to so many
investors. Now there is a lot of backlash.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">In
2015, Techstars initiated an equity back guarantee program to address
the shifting paradigm. With the preponderance of competing
accelerators and other avenues to reach investors, Techstars
officials now offer their startups a chance to lower or eliminate how
much equity they give up. Startups have three business days after the
program ends to reject the standard plan if they aren’t satisfied
with what Techstars offers.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Continual
Evolution</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Yet,
Francisco sees a more basic issue for early stage businesses. “The
value proposition for accelerators has gone down,” she says. “There
is a lot more information out there and a lot more investors. There’s
not a funnel any longer to get to a few investors because capital is
pretty abundant.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Vator,
for example, has promoted about 175 companies through its startup
competitions in the past five years. The winners get to pitch to
investors at the end of their Splash events just like they would at
an accelerator “demo-day.” Francisco said Vator startups have
raised $700 million in capital without releasing any equity to the
facilitator.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
glut of accelerators also could lead to a downturn for all but the
biggest players and those, such as France’s Blue Builder, that
cater to specialized markets. An example of this trend occurred in
June 2015 when Techstars acquired accelerator UP Global.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">There
are just too many incubators and accelerators and some of them will
merge or disappear,” says Ihrig. “Only the best will survive.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Veterans
of entrepreneurship are not the only ones questioning old models.
Startup newcomer Erica McLain of Palo Alto, California, wonders
whether any immersion program is worth it.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Accelerators
are a very expensive source of capital,” she says. “If you’ve
never launched your own startup before it’s great validation, and
maybe you need that leg up. If you need a stronger network and you
definitely need advisers – those are the key things accelerators
provide you that is worth that 7%.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">McLain,
the founder of PATHworks, says joining an accelerator indicates the
company is immature. “If you’re a vetted entrepreneur or you’ve
been at Google as an engineer and you’ve been at a fast-moving
pace, an accelerator might even be a negative signal for a venture
capitalist knowing that you’ve already committed 7%,” she adds.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Yet,
the 2008 Olympic triple jumper sees a big upside for anyone who goes
through the application process. McLain gained valuable insight by
applying to education tech accelerator Imagine K12. She advanced to
the interview stage at the Silicon Valley accelerator but ultimately
didn’t get selected. “The questions that they ask you are
something the entrepreneur needs to think through regardless,” says
McLain.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">At
the time McLain answered the Imagine K12 application questions she
had already invested 10 months in her for-profit summer and
after-school program to promote STEM and language arts education
through structured sports participation.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
I hadn’t framed my answers in the way they asked the questions,”
says the Facebook operations manager. “It is a really great
exercise to spend six to six and a half hours.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"> <span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Those
are the same questions you are going to be asked if you get into a
room with an angel investor. If you haven’t thought about that
stuff, going to a VC might not be the best route for you.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Wharton’s
Mollick also sees a need for more introspection from the
accelerators. He says they haven’t taken the time to analyze their
real value and contributions to accelerating businesses.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Is
the mere act of being selected by the accelerator most of the
benefits?” he asks. “Is it the mentoring that you get? Is it the
money you get, is it the pitch day? I don’t think accelerators are
trying to learn as much [as they can.] They have philosophies but I
don’t know if they are gathering data on what is working and what
isn’t.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<strong><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Future
of the Valley</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Looking
ahead, does Silicon Valley’s stranglehold as the center for
innovation show signs of erosion as technology hubs surface
worldwide? Some industry experts think so. Today, thriving startup
communities can be found in Bangalore, Beijing, London and Los
Angeles. All possess the same entrepreneurial spirit as Silicon
Valley.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;">“<span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">People
say nobody’s going to duplicate Silicon Valley, nobody’s going to
beat Silicon Valley,” says McClure. “Both answers are wrong. It
wouldn’t surprise me that in 10 years Beijing is more active than
Silicon Valley.”</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">It
should come as no surprise that an area priding itself on
“disrupting” industries through invention would experience a
disruption of its own. In many ways, it is part of the natural
evolution that turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a global
economic powerhouse with Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter among
the current stars.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Mollick
warns against summarily dismissing Silicon Valley’s influence,
however. “It has gotten easier in other places, but there is no
doubt by every stat that it is the hub of entrepreneurial activity,
especially in the web software services space. You could be anywhere,
but there is a difference between saying you can do startups anywhere
and to say the Valley’s not important anymore.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
big brands keep the Bay Area at the heart of American innovation. But
the environment has changed, says Red Rocket’s Deeb. “Silicon
Valley is still an epicenter, but it is slowly going to lose market
share over time,” says the author of </span></span><em><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">101
Startup Lessons — An Entrepreneur’s Handbook</span></span></span></span></em><span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">With
investors more dispersed these days, entrepreneurs can create
companies closer to their homes, which, in turn, can lead to
organically grown startup communities that include accelerator
programs and localized funding. McClure says it requires the “minimum
critical mass” of startups and investment in entrepreneurs to
develop a thriving hub. As many as 100 metropolitan areas worldwide
have the potential to reach that threshold.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">The
type of industry plays a big role in where a community develops,
according to Vator’s Francisco, who adds that Silicon Valley won’t
lose its standing quickly because entrepreneurs still want to attract
heavyweight venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital and Kleiner
Perkins Caufield & Byers.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Judging
by the job growth and building frenzy in the Valley and San
Francisco, the northern California technology corridor is
experiencing boom times. But not every startup has to move there to
find success.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<br />
</div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;">Notes
Mollick: “I don’t see a huge slipping of the advantage of
California — I just see that other places you can make a good go of
it, too.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
<span style="color: #191a1a;"><span style="font-family: Merriweather, Georgia, Times, serif;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Knowledge@Wharton</span></b></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-44540449700013945452016-08-01T12:21:00.005-03:002016-08-01T12:21:50.492-03:00Brazil’s X Factor<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLh0If1sbzfiS3DaHVMnBFcZVu90Qsn-V8J8GbB58fKTcX5Cg6LnKwrNq_sgZfWGJTFaulmuVM_zk7J-AkpIW_KGwhhR7f_aSln4CMYLF8w7bFVK_a7ZB3s7lPrLijZdc4TAcuuXGh2aI/s1600/felipe_monteiro_brazils_x_factor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLh0If1sbzfiS3DaHVMnBFcZVu90Qsn-V8J8GbB58fKTcX5Cg6LnKwrNq_sgZfWGJTFaulmuVM_zk7J-AkpIW_KGwhhR7f_aSln4CMYLF8w7bFVK_a7ZB3s7lPrLijZdc4TAcuuXGh2aI/s320/felipe_monteiro_brazils_x_factor.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Eike
Batista, Brazil’s former “rock-star” entrepreneur, was the
seventh wealthiest man in the world and a “strategic asset” for
his country, according to his president. Starting with gold, moving
onto iron ore, developing a super port and ending his amazing
adventure with oil, Batista earned a fortune incredibly quickly and
lost it just as dramatically. His was a story of big dreams and
incredible growth. But it’s also a story of hubris and the hazards
of growing too quickly, of believing that this growth can create a
company that is too big to fail.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
son of a Brazilian father and German mother, Batista began without
family wealth but with family connections and education. His father
was president of the largest Brazilian mining company.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Batista
studied metallurgy in Germany and at the age of 23 began working as a
gold intermediary. Within 18 months he had US$6 million in capital
and, in 1983, created the first alluvial mechanised gold mine in the
Amazon. Batista had logistical issues in the wild west of the jungle
– and was even shot – but he persisted and his mine made money.
He expanded in 1986 to an even more remote mine in Chilean Atacama
Desert. That too was viable. From 1986 to 2001, he expanded
operations into Brazil and was chairman of TVX, a Toronto-based gold
firm.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Then
things really started to take off.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Building
an X empire</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After
selling TVX in 2001, Batista was back in Brazil. At this time the
country was starting to recover from the economic problems which
plagued the nation in the 1990s. But there were still many logistical
problems – a lack of infrastructure and challenges with labour and
finding talent. In 2004, he established MMX to mine ore – assisted
by a big loan from a Brazilian bank – and took the company public
in 2006, raising US$509 million. Batista continued, via M&As with
other mining companies, to move from project to project.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He
recognised the need for a large port to get his minerals to customers
in China, so when the Brazilian government, which had unsuccessfully
approached a number of big companies about developing a site 300km
from Rio de Janeiro, came to him with the idea, he leapt at
the suggestion. Excited at the prospect of transporting ore he
foresaw an even bigger project, creating a huge pipeline and Açu
super port. For this he created another company, LLX.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally,
oil</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">By
2007, Batista was also investing in Brazil’s burgeoning oil
industry, creating OGX. Within six months, OGX was ready to make its
IPO. It was the biggest public offering up to that time in Brazil,
raising US$4.1 billion. Based on exploratory wells drilled between
March 2008 and November 2009, the estimated oil and gas reserves
mounted from 4.8 billion barrels to 10.8 billion barrels.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
the costs of running an oil company – leasing an oil rig cost more
than US$500,000 per day – and enormous investments spread across
other diverse business interests were starting to take their toll.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
2010, Batista offered part of OGX’s exploratory fields for sale.
No-one was prepared to make an offer and between January and February
2011, OGX stock dropped 20 percent. In June 2012, OGX finally told
the Brazilian National Petroleum Agency that they only had a quarter
of what was promised and a run on all X companies began.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally
admitting their oil fields were not economically viable in July 2013,
the X business group collapsed. Companies filed for bankruptcy or
were put under the management of their creditors.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">How
do you know when to stop?</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
our case studies, <strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></strong><strong><span style="text-decoration: none;">EBX:
Eike Batista and the X Factor</span></strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></strong> and <strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">“</span></strong><strong><span style="text-decoration: none;">EBX
Group: Autopsy of a Failure</span></strong><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">”</span></strong>,
we look at what happened to Batista and his business group,
considering what could have been done differently. While some would
like to blame his downfall on global markets and others claim illegal
activity, we look at Batista’s fall to earth as an example and
wonder for future entrepreneurs: how do you know where to stop?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We
see Batista as an incredible entrepreneur; it’s amazing how much
international support he was able to get. He was working with
partnerships and investment from all over the world. He could have
limited himself in Brazil, but he had big ambitions.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Emerging
market multinationals</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Business
groups, like EBX, make a very important contribution to emerging
markets. They have the power to do things on a large scale and can
create infrastructure where none previously existed. Executives are
able to take what they learn from one company to benefit other
companies in the group. The Indian multinational <strong><span style="text-decoration: none;"><b><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Tata</span></b></span></strong><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"> is
a great example of how knowledge can be transferred across an
organisation</span>:
where good managers identified in one company are assigned to lead
the next company created or acquired by the group.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
problem EBX had was that the business group was built so quickly the
new companies didn’t have time to enjoy the benefits of experience.
It was almost as if all their companies were starting simultaneously
while just one of them, the mining company MMX had revenues. There
was no large central company to support the others. By constantly
expanding, the entrepreneurial DNA inherent in Batista meant that not
enough time was spent executing strategy. While the scale of
investment from outside Brazil was impressive, the timing and rapid
growth, created a huge business without direction or focus or the
ability to move nimbly and efficiently.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Personality
or culture</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Batista’s
story holds lessons in hubris and company culture.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
Brazil, he was seen as an icon of entrepreneurship. He was portrayed
in the most important Brazilian magazines as the face of modern
Brazilian capitalism.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
uniqueness gave him a phenomenal amount of financial support. He had
access to investors all over the world for major projects. The
opportunities seemed endless. Unfortunately his eagerness to grasp
them all at once meant he was unable to make the transition from
entrepreneur to general manager.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To
run a large business group (including a new oil company) process and
diligence are vital. The entrepreneurial culture at EBX meant
the focus remained on expansion. For the group to succeed, it needed
to transition to an execution-focused culture. This isn’t a minor,
incremental change, it’s a sea change and particularly important in
emerging markets where the environment is often volatile and shocks
can be abrupt.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
they were. Just as Batista’s business group grew at an incredible
speed so did it collapse. Left with his overconfidence and his
business group’s inability to evolve away from entrepreneurial
culture, Batista lost his X empire.</span></span>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b style="background-color: white;">INSEAD Knowledge</b></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-79196188980255478642016-08-01T12:16:00.001-03:002016-08-01T12:16:53.561-03:00If You’re Not Outside Your Comfort Zone, You Won’t Learn Anything<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicpz2y8u8eJ7k_nm3gT-9DdkOhOhsPVBiP4ISHDJNGH2t7xd6h5mvkuYx1zOWTpUJ1mtcAQgTxHhFRWezXrpGrxwuGQucqqiMWlj06QYVVQ_5fDYMIEWqQmaK-d2ibuFKlXm8xu8d8dZc/s1600/jul16-29-500344266-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicpz2y8u8eJ7k_nm3gT-9DdkOhOhsPVBiP4ISHDJNGH2t7xd6h5mvkuYx1zOWTpUJ1mtcAQgTxHhFRWezXrpGrxwuGQucqqiMWlj06QYVVQ_5fDYMIEWqQmaK-d2ibuFKlXm8xu8d8dZc/s320/jul16-29-500344266-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You need to
speak in public, but your knees buckle even before you reach the
podium. You want to expand your network, but you’d rather swallow
nails than make small talk with strangers. Speaking up in meetings
would further your reputation at work, but you’re afraid of saying
the wrong thing. Situations like these — ones that are important
professionally, but personally terrifying — are, unfortunately,
ubiquitous. An easy response to these situations is avoidance. Who
wants to feel anxious when you don’t have to?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the
problem, of course, is that these tasks aren’t just unpleasant;
they’re also necessary. As we grow and learn in our jobs and in our
careers, we’re constantly faced with situations where we need to
adapt our behavior. It’s simply a reality of the world we work in
today. And without the skill and courage to take the leap, we can
miss out on important opportunities for advancement. How can we as
professionals stop building our lives around avoiding these
unpleasant, but professionally beneficial, tasks?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>First,
be honest with yourself.</strong> When
you turned down that opportunity to speak at a big industry
conference, was it really because you didn’t have the time, or were
you scared to step on a stage and present? And when you didn’t
confront that coworker who had been undermining you, was it really
because you felt he would eventually stop, or was it because you were
terrified of conflict? Take an inventory of the excuses you tend to
make about avoiding situations outside your comfort zone and ask
yourself if they are truly legitimate. If someone else offered you
those same excuses about their behavior, would you see these as
excuses or legitimate reasons to decline? The answer isn’t always
clear, but you’ll never be able to overcome inaction without being
honest about your motives in the first place.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Then,
make the behavior your own. </strong>Very
few people struggle in every single version of a formidable work
situation. You might have a hard time making small talk generally,
but find it easier if the topic is something you know a lot about. Or
you may have a hard time networking, except when it’s in a really
small setting.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Recognize
these opportunities and take advantage — don’t chalk this
variability up to randomness. For many years, I’ve worked with
people struggling to step outside their comfort zones at work and in
everyday life, and what I’ve found is that we often have much more
leeway than we believe to make these tasks feel less loathsome. We
can often find a way to tweak what we have to do to make it palatable
enough to perform by sculpting situations in a way that minimizes
discomfort. For example, if you’re like me and get queasy talking
with big groups during large, noisy settings, find a quiet corner of
that setting to talk, or step outside into the hallway or just
outside the building. If you hate public speaking and networking
events, but feel slightly more comfortable in small groups, look for
opportunities to speak with smaller groups or set up intimate coffee
meetings with those you want to network with.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Finally,
take the plunge.</strong> In
order to step outside your comfort zone, you have to do it, even if
it’s uncomfortable. Put mechanisms in place that will force you to
dive in, and you might discover that what you initially feared isn’t
as bad as you thought.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For example,
I have a history of being uncomfortable with public speaking. In
graduate school I took a public speaking class and the professor had
us deliver speeches — using notes — every class. Then, after the
third or fourth class, we were told to hand over our notes and to
speak extemporaneously. I was terrified, as was everyone else in the
course, but you know what? It actually worked. I did just fine, and
so did everyone else. In fact, speaking without notes ended up being
much more effective, making my speaking more natural and authentic.
But without this mechanism of forcing me into action, I might never
have taken the plunge.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Start with
small steps. Instead of jumping right into speaking at an industry
event, sign up for a public speaking class. Instead of speaking up in
the boardroom, in front of your most senior colleagues, start by
speaking up in smaller meetings with peers to see how it feels. And
while you’re at it, see if you can recruit a close friend or
colleague to offer advice and encouragement in advance of a
challenging situation.</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">You may
stumble, but that’s OK. In fact, it’s the only way you’ll
learn, especially if you can appreciate that missteps are an
inevitable — and in fact essential — part of the learning
process. In the end, even though we might feel powerless in
situations outside our comfort zone, we have more power than we
think. So, give it a go. Be honest with yourself, make the behavior
your own, and take the plunge. My guess is you’ll be pleased at
having given yourself the opportunity to grow, learn, and expand your
professional repertoire.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
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<br />
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-54707333993871358772016-08-01T12:09:00.003-03:002016-08-01T12:09:40.697-03:00Until You Have Productivity Skills, Productivity Tools Are Useless<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcp9JhmL6FLI8ZVumacfe5BCT3d7XG6c3RA1I-gn3cHKnSoamz1hHQYd-H0do7eFXZqC9e1BABefrCZVV9w_DYkusfHjtOquSrvtA2ff2EMxOgzVPh53kjptp-gAAqJqrC7RTHM8vGPfk/s1600/aug16-01-122240221-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcp9JhmL6FLI8ZVumacfe5BCT3d7XG6c3RA1I-gn3cHKnSoamz1hHQYd-H0do7eFXZqC9e1BABefrCZVV9w_DYkusfHjtOquSrvtA2ff2EMxOgzVPh53kjptp-gAAqJqrC7RTHM8vGPfk/s320/aug16-01-122240221-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 2.5rem 0px 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Back in the days of paper based planners, I depended on mine to help me stay on top of my to-do list and commitments. Making the switch to electronic tools was difficult and disruptive, and initially I didn’t want to do it. But once I had, I realized how much the software and gadgets helped me to kick my productivity into high gear.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But the truth is, it wasn’t the tools alone, it was also the <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">workflow management process</span>—or methodology—I applied to the tools. This is an important point that is often overlooked when people try new productivity tools, and when organizations introduce new tools to employees.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A workflow management process keeps the focus on the big picture while offering a structure in which to organize and manage the details.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So when people ask me for advice about choosing software to improve productivity for themselves or their organizations, I ask them this question: “How will the software fit into the existing workflow management process?” And often, we quickly uncover the real problem: there is no workflow management process.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To illustrate the problem, let’s use sports as an example. Have you ever heard of “Racquet lessons?” “Club lessons?” How about “Stick lessons?” Probably not. But I’m sure you’ve heard of tennis, golf, and hockey lessons. In all cases, learning to use the tool is a by-product. The real goal is to learn to play the game. I don’t play golf, but I understand how to swing a club: I know that I am supposed to hold the grip end and swing the flat end. But this doesn’t mean I’m a great golfer. Continuing the analogy, if Jason Day or Dustin Johnson were forced to play his next tournament with a random used club he bought at a thrift store, he wouldn’t play up to the standards of a PGA pro. What’s necessary is both the skill, <em style="box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">and</em> the right set of tools.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Productivity, similarly, is also a combination of skill and tools, for both organizations and individuals. Regardless of the software, apps, and gadgets that a company invests in for its employees, those tools aren’t going to make the employees more productive unless they are also <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: inherit;">taught</span> a solid methodology with which to use those tools.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet most companies roll out software with only technical training, intending for that software to improve efficiency and ultimately, productivity. There’s instruction on the various menus, and where to click to achieve certain tasks. This training only serves to make employees proficient in the software, but not necessarily more productive. Thus the new software often isn’t used, or if it is, it doesn’t solve the problem.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The same is true for individuals who go in search of the latest and greatest app or the fancy new software, hoping it will be the magic bullet to solve their time management challenges. My clients tell me they install the program, test it out for a day or two, but then never open it again. I know this isn’t because the tool is bad, it’s simply because they didn’t have the framework of a workflow methodology. They bought the clubs, but it didn’t make them golfers.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A better approach is to focus first on the methodology before the tool itself. When you have the methodology, the requirements for the tool become apparent.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If individuals and organizations as a whole have good workflow methodologies, often new software isn’t needed. But either way, a process for getting the desired results will solve the problem using existing tools, or illuminate the requirements for new software, or both. If you are considering purchasing new software or switching from one to another in an effort to improve productivity—either for yourself, or for your organization, first ask the following questions:</span></div>
<ul style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.8; list-style-position: outside; margin: 0px 0px 2rem 1.1rem; padding: 0px;">
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What specifically are the problems the software is expected to solve?</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What is currently being done? For example, in the case of personal productivity, ask “How is the workload being managed now?” If you think you might need a project management tool, ask “How do individuals currently track tasks related to projects, and how do project leaders set timelines and track projects currently?”</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If there is no discernable workflow management process, the software will not provide one, and that is the first problem to be solved. If there is one, ask “How will this new tool support the existing process?”</span></li>
<li style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If you’re a leader and you have employees who excel in the area where you perceive a problem, examine their process, and ask what they need in a tool.</span></li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There is no question that technology can improve knowledge worker productivity. But when investing your own or your company resources into technology tools, remember that fancy clubs alone won’t turn users into PGA pros.</span></div>
<div style="background-color: white; box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.9; margin-bottom: 2rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify; text-rendering: optimizeSpeed;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-70387539432567592522016-05-30T14:05:00.002-03:002016-05-30T14:05:33.125-03:00The sales secrets of high-growth companies<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="clear: right; color: black; float: right; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: justify;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLIJneYiHH2JI_NywzP_ZZIEC-_vpi4ifOAOLUIJnkACdGnXo9ZPR4jg8QhKIWm7CK0LgYlmRT1c7Rb3jWaue9-OdnY2RrLOEnr0MC68snbLmUsvKNLYyrMjmOn9M-Osxti1WoYgYjuc4/s320/sales-secrets-1536x1536.jpg" width="320" /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">What
distinguishes</span></strong> sales
organizations at fast-growing companies from their lagging peers? In
a wide-ranging survey of more than 1,000 companies, we unearthed five
meaningful differences:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">1.
Commitment to the future</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That
the world is changing ever more quickly may be a cliché, but that
makes it no less true: all sales leaders know that they need to
anticipate changes that could turn into opportunities or threats. Yet
the best leaders move beyond acknowledgement to commitment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They
make trend analysis a formal part of the sales process through
systematic investments of time, money, and people. Building and
sustaining the capability to take a forward-looking view of the
market is not easy. In discussions with more than 200 sales leaders
while researching our new book, <em><span style="font-style: normal;">Sales
Growth</span></em>,
two common characteristics emerged: the mind-set of sales leadership
and resource commitment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sales
leaders must consistently monitor the macro-environment in search of
sales opportunities, no easy task given the relentless pressure to
hit near-term targets. Forward planning must be part of someone’s
job description—not just part of top management’s lengthy to-do
list—with sufficient resources to take advantage of the best
opportunities. Companies have to be willing to take risks now to
create sales capacity long before the revenue will materialize. More
than half of the fast-growing companies
we analyzed look at least one year out, and 10 percent look
more than three years out.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After
planning, sales leaders aren’t afraid to put their money where they
think the growth will be: 45 percent of fast-growing companies invest
more than 6 percent of their sales budget on activities supporting
goals that are at least a year out—a significant commitment in an
environment where sales leaders fight for each dollar of investment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnZyfy0oOgg2kfaglndEcG5kuexfznfrNoRd2HZ0-w8fih3eDt-oidGQXtv-tXdonfwPG-_cMZl5-JlNkBulOPevWt390vcFvyVFPz3wOboXE77-rOve79fKlXMfiqb03uSBBibWqz1Q4/s1600/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit1-png.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="459" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnZyfy0oOgg2kfaglndEcG5kuexfznfrNoRd2HZ0-w8fih3eDt-oidGQXtv-tXdonfwPG-_cMZl5-JlNkBulOPevWt390vcFvyVFPz3wOboXE77-rOve79fKlXMfiqb03uSBBibWqz1Q4/s640/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit1-png.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2.
Focus on key aspects of digital</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Successful
brands don’t just “do digital”; they use their full arsenal of
capabilities to massively increase the effectiveness of their sales
force and to transform the customer buying experience to be “digital
first.” It pays off: digital channels provided at least a fifth of
2015 revenues for 41 percent of the fast-growing companies we
surveyed—both business-to- business and
business-to-consumer—compared with just 31 percent at slow-growing
companies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
trend is only becoming more important, as almost two-thirds of all US
retail sales by 2017 will involve some form of online research,
consideration, or purchase.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
it comes to customer experience, leading organizations are building
out digital routes to market or augmenting traditional direct or
indirect sales with digital. For traditional software companies, the
focus on SaaS-based products is driving a change toward a digital
sales experience where they discover, demo, and trial, all within a
few clicks online. Many industrial companies are seeing their
products also sold in external marketplaces, which is prompting them
to build out their own e-commerce platforms to directly shape the
customer experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sales
leaders are especially strong at harnessing digital tools and
capacities to support the sales organization. Fast-growing companies
are more effective than slower-growing ones at using digital tools
and capabilities to support the sales organization (43 percent versus
30 percent). They tend to focus on three fronts:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First,
they arm sales teams with digital tools that can quickly deliver
relevant and usable insights. Second, they treat partners as an
extension of the sales force and invest in collaboration tools to
improve the flow of data between organizations. Third, they recognize
the potential for big micromarket or macrotrend analyses to improve
planning and capture opportunities most effectively. As the
technology emerges, they are making targeted investments in tools,
technologies, and talent to make the most of these opportunities.
Success in digital comes from fanatical optimization—not as a
one-off project, but as a continuous process. It comes from
harnessing mobile technologies to drive growth, understanding how
customers use and switch between the mobile channel and other
channels. And it comes from integrating digital into a great
omnichannel experience that spans marketing to post-purchase.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMIheXUXOojTgVLyd0qXRV0zJeMH4iTnMNzizU2ozTCOn_H5braQ2ENENo4HS6owBxa_qvKgUZ53MN3AedpBhAN5Mw_lJgkDqkJwrP1axNls3MYFYkg_Dq9pmaKz0XgdhYBJRIF4wo-Pg/s1600/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit2-png.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMIheXUXOojTgVLyd0qXRV0zJeMH4iTnMNzizU2ozTCOn_H5braQ2ENENo4HS6owBxa_qvKgUZ53MN3AedpBhAN5Mw_lJgkDqkJwrP1axNls3MYFYkg_Dq9pmaKz0XgdhYBJRIF4wo-Pg/s640/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit2-png.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3.
Harnessing of the full range of sales analytics</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Only
now is the promise of advanced analytics catching up to the hype.
Take customer analytics. Companies that use it extensively see profit
improvements 126 percent higher than competitors who don’t. And
when it comes to sales improvements through the extensive use of
advanced analytics, the difference is even larger: 131 percent.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
value of advanced analytics is wide ranging, but where sales leaders
excel against their peers is in making better decisions, managing
accounts, uncovering insights into sales and deal opportunities, and
sales strategy. In particular, they are shifting from analysis of
historical data to being more predictive. They use sophisticated
analytics to decide not only what the best opportunities are but also
which ones will help minimize risk. In fact, in these areas three
quarters of fast-growing companies believe themselves to be above
average, while between 53 and 61 percent of slow-growing companies
hold the same view.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
even among fast-growing companies, only just over half—53
percent—claim to be moderately or extremely effective in using
analytics to make decisions. For slow-growing companies, it drops to
a little over a third. This indicates that there remains significant
untapped potential in sales analytics.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr72AnxwYbIZNZ8kCjPHSPFuWA3kpMgr73eCwAnzIhEtFT-rHgH8kjgCgZTlEqP5gp11GX5WOKr-sF2F1jWDVTA0m8GmnPv-aExbBRwwsMh5Pvz9HEb1UkuzhmUVidaOMBm36WnEzMvQc/s1600/ddd.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr72AnxwYbIZNZ8kCjPHSPFuWA3kpMgr73eCwAnzIhEtFT-rHgH8kjgCgZTlEqP5gp11GX5WOKr-sF2F1jWDVTA0m8GmnPv-aExbBRwwsMh5Pvz9HEb1UkuzhmUVidaOMBm36WnEzMvQc/s640/ddd.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">4.
Investment in people</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
rigorous focus on sales-force training is a clear differentiator
between the fast- and slow-growing companies we surveyed. Just under
half the fast growers spend significant time and money on sales-force
training, compared to 29 percent of slow growers. There’s room for
improvement, though. Among fast growers, just over half believe their
organization has the sales capabilities it will need in the future,
while a third of the slow growers feel similarly equipped. As few as
18 percent of fast growers think they excel at pipeline management,
and even in the most successful area—understanding specific
customer needs—only 29 percent claimed to be outstanding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What
is notable from our research, however, is that fast growers are
committed to improving sales talent and performance. The head of
sales at a North American consumer-services company, for example,
tried a new approach to improving sales performance after years of
fruitless initiatives. Instead of focusing solely on what the sales
force had to do, the program also devoted significant attention to
building the talents and capabilities to enable them to do it, making
a substantial investment in teaching skills and enforcing their use
with specific goals. The result? A 25 percent improvement in rep
productivity across all regions within 18 months. More impressive
still, the gains stuck, and two years later performance was still
improving.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3a-mhfie1ghQHxtQSUi4WLmwnPuCFWrQ3S_RvOvYUk7M2GzT_rUuKZLnVP_c7c2qgB_oRjxUFH649EIGdbYxqr4iVjS3L1AyV9eWn5orAvKiW51EPNfhUSClslL5_xTpbkU_dl-E8VLw/s1600/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit4-png.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="522" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3a-mhfie1ghQHxtQSUi4WLmwnPuCFWrQ3S_RvOvYUk7M2GzT_rUuKZLnVP_c7c2qgB_oRjxUFH649EIGdbYxqr4iVjS3L1AyV9eWn5orAvKiW51EPNfhUSClslL5_xTpbkU_dl-E8VLw/s640/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit4-png.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">5.
Marriage of clear vision with leadership action</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Two-thirds
of fast-growing companies undertook a major performance improvement
over the previous three years, and 84 percent considered it
successful or very successful.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sales
leaders at these organizations said the two most important factors
that contributed to that success were management articulation of a
clear and consistent vision and strategy, followed by leadership
commitment.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Articulating
the vision should be simple. The chief executive officer of an
emerging-markets telecommunications firm, for example, announced a “3
× 3 × 3” growth aspiration: three years to expand beyond its home
country, three years to expand beyond its region, and three years to
become a leading global brand. Besides being simple, the aspiration
was bold, specific, and easily measurable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No
sales transformation will work without steadfast support from the
very top. Only a committed leader can override internal politics, see
the big picture, and focus on the best solution regardless of past
practices. Sometimes, the commitment can be very personal. For
example, the head of sales at another telecom firm recognized how
fundamental customer experience was for success. At the same time
that he controversially clamped down on aggressive sales techniques
that had a negative effect on customer experience, he proposed to his
CEO that customer satisfaction ratings should determine 25 percent of
his variable pay.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sales
leaders face a dizzying array of issues and opportunities to manage,
often at speeds that seemed unimaginable even a few years ago. But by
focusing on what really matters, sales leaders can break away from
their competitors.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9nBaZUlfKE7IH-Bnng3oUD6BTYCW2L8QadLQqRis155xsSU_1rt9j66-9LbHpdK8vXmCuBQ_ktO0f3LB3QgR2QU9lv_gMm0pdZMKdhQTxrjR9lVw9I_Qc15GrK5hpg_loskOiS8vVb4Q/s1600/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit5-png.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><img border="0" height="622" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9nBaZUlfKE7IH-Bnng3oUD6BTYCW2L8QadLQqRis155xsSU_1rt9j66-9LbHpdK8vXmCuBQ_ktO0f3LB3QgR2QU9lv_gMm0pdZMKdhQTxrjR9lVw9I_Qc15GrK5hpg_loskOiS8vVb4Q/s640/SalesGrowthSurvey6-exhibit5-png.png" width="640" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>McKinsey&Company</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-66158919452916581272016-05-30T13:00:00.000-03:002016-05-30T13:00:10.803-03:00To Win the Civil War, Lincoln Had to Change His Leadership<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0zIzv5mQGW7JmqBC1VqsUqXiE5vAJtcnS3ewfaJrqXu0A-1Ib9i3mtqY4prCI8jYsC2iGQOs3-JVBxhOu9BD7f0Bx1WnRNXo_lH5gxtXZWxZ7igdFSkkVvW8xIUBLYbqrx7-z9AjBpvg/s1600/may16-30-nypl-civil-war-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0zIzv5mQGW7JmqBC1VqsUqXiE5vAJtcnS3ewfaJrqXu0A-1Ib9i3mtqY4prCI8jYsC2iGQOs3-JVBxhOu9BD7f0Bx1WnRNXo_lH5gxtXZWxZ7igdFSkkVvW8xIUBLYbqrx7-z9AjBpvg/s320/may16-30-nypl-civil-war-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
our work with leaders, we see that great ones grow themselves and
their organizations by deliberately working <span style="text-decoration: none;">on
three areas:</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<ol>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They
wisely manage the<em><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></em><em>present,</em> anchoring
in purpose and values.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They
selectively forget the<em><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></em><em>past, </em>letting
go of old values, beliefs, and behaviors that no longer serve them
or their organizations.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">They
purposefully create the<em><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></span></em><em>future </em>by
adopting new aspirations, values, beliefs, and behaviors that enable
a step-change in their leadership.</span></div>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most leaders
are good at the first and third areas. What many leaders
may not recognize is that we often need to give something up — a
belief, attitude or behavior — in order to achieve a new level of
performance. How is this done effectively?</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We can look
to one of the most celebrated leaders of U.S. history for an
example. He was a leader who rallied people around vision, a vision
so strong it united a war-torn country. But it took more than
determination. It also took sacrifice and decisive action by cutting
out what was no longer working.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<h3 class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Finding himself
at a turning point</span></h3>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In early
June 1863 President Abraham Lincoln faced a dire situation. He had
been president for two and a half years and was reviled by most. A
civil war had divided the country between North and South and the
Union Army had just lost two major battles. People from his own party
were attacking him for his compromising, indecisive attitude.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Just
three months later, public opinion shifted. <span style="text-decoration: none;">The
New York Times</span> expressed
gratitude that the nation was being led by “a ruler who is so
peculiarly adapted to the needs of the time as clear-headed,
dispassionate, discreet, steadfast, [and] honest [as] Abraham
Lincoln.” His fortunes also shifted on the battlefield. His
army celebrated two key victories at Vicksburg and Gettysburg,
marking a turning point in the war.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What shifted
in the summer of 1863? By examining how Lincoln handled this pivotal
time in the Civil War, we can learn how the three points mentioned
above can help create the future we aspire to.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<h3 class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Taking a new
tone with his generals</span></h3>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Lincoln
realized in early summer 1863 that he had two big challenges:
reestablishing control over the Army and recapturing public opinion.
With this realization, Lincoln made some bold choices. First, he got
rid of some old beliefs that no longer worked. And second, he
started leading in a completely new way. In retrospect we can see how
his bold choices in the summer of 1863 helped him become one of the
greatest leaders the U.S. has ever known.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
first set of beliefs Lincoln got rid of was about how he
related to his generals. Up until then, Lincoln believed that as a
civil leader he should leave the running of the army to his generals;
that’s how the game had always been played. Instead of giving his
generals firm orders, Lincoln gave them only timid suggestions, which
they, in turn, mostly ignored. Lincoln’s secretary, John Nicolay,
despondently noted that the president habitually gave in to one
general’s “<span style="text-decoration: none;">whims</span> and
complaints and shortcomings as a mother would indulge her baby.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">After many
frustrating exchanges with a string of ineffective generals, Lincoln
gave up his submissive style in favor of a more assertive tone. In
the summer of 1863, he issued a series of direct instructions to his
generals. Rather than nudging them, he left no doubt any longer as to
who was in charge. To General Joseph Hooker, who had repeatedly
defied his suggestions, he wrote, “To remove all misunderstanding,
I now place you in the strict military relation to Gen. Halleck, of a
commander of one of the armies, to the General-in-Chief of all the
armies. I have not intended differently; but as it seems to be
differently understood, I shall direct him to give you orders, and
you to obey them.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Soon after
Lincoln’s change in leadership style, the Union army booked a
series of victories, notably at Vicksburg and Gettysburg. Instead of
waiting for the perfect time, the Union army was now moving
proactively, following Lincoln’s orders.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<h3 class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Winning over the
public</span></h3>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From the
start of his presidency, right up to his death, Lincoln’s
unwavering vision was clear: preserving the Union. But despite
this clarity of purpose and his recent battlefield victories, he
still faced another challenge: a public exasperated and
impatient with the war and the administration. His second shift came
in how he related to the people.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div dir="LTR" id="google_ads_iframe_/34363400/HBR_300x600_1__container__">
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
</div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Once
elected, presidents of his time had little direct contact with the
public. Their job was to run the government and share their wishes
with Congress. They’d rarely leave the capitol, except for
vacations. In the summer of 1863 Lincoln broke with tradition and
stepped out of the social prison of the White House. Learning from
the success of his recent letter-writing campaign to enlist the
support of the British public for the Union, Lincoln implemented a
successful public letter-writing campaign in his own country.
Five-hundred thousand copies of one of his letters alone were in
circulation and were reportedly read by at least 10,000,000 people.
Lincoln’s public outreach was effective and helped him keep
significant public support during the remainder of his presidency
from 1863 until his assassination in 1865.
</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
President had decisively left behind the conventions of the past and
created a new relationship with both the military and the general
public.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To succeed
in creating the future, we must also excel in letting go of the past:
selectively forgetting practices and attitudes that stand in the way
of the new future. How do we know what to cut? It’s important
to distinguish between our roots and the beliefs we can get rid of.
If we cut a tree’s roots, the tree dies.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Roots, like
dedication to core purpose and vision, have timeless value and
leaders need to preserve and nourish them. But every person and
organization also has outdated beliefs. If we do not break loose from
these beliefs, we will become entangled in them and are unlikely to
get to the future we so desire.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<br />
</div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Harvard Business Review</span></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-47219070264131534992016-05-30T12:54:00.002-03:002016-05-30T12:54:50.293-03:00The Considerations for Launching an Innovation<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg_ivU3gpE_rsilPHJ5djT1Vo6xYCTgXm9HoETbxuiwMGWZGQ47Q4W6zYPj5HXXPH3LJd71Y2kgTcJvf5g0iAUHAh-9I2udDcDvVt0S2FnpN5DxQ5POnKPChh2UuyqvNOQnGCqVzSs-1g/s1600/launching_an_innovation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjg_ivU3gpE_rsilPHJ5djT1Vo6xYCTgXm9HoETbxuiwMGWZGQ47Q4W6zYPj5HXXPH3LJd71Y2kgTcJvf5g0iAUHAh-9I2udDcDvVt0S2FnpN5DxQ5POnKPChh2UuyqvNOQnGCqVzSs-1g/s320/launching_an_innovation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Innovation
matters to the long-term success of firms, and marketing plays a key
role in developing and launching innovations. While I have no doubt
that managers and executives think carefully about the circumstances
in which they propose to launch an innovation, recent marketing
research brings to light an extended list of critical factors to
consider in formulating long-term strategies, as well as specific
tools to reduce the uncertainty inherent in such decisions.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Marketing
practitioners may be especially interested in several studies
(covered at greater length in my comprehensive article “</span><strong><span style="text-decoration: none;">Strategic
Marketing for the C-Suite</span></strong><span style="color: black;">”)
offering new concepts and metrics for concretising the nuanced
relationship between success in innovation and consumer demand.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom, which typically focuses on one
“winning” strategy, the research suggests that a company’s
ability to innovate successfully depends on its specific consumer
mandate. Moreover, </span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">when
it comes to marketing buzz, volume does not always equal value.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
“innovator’s license”</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Companies
without a history of innovation may be in a hurry to reinvent
themselves in order to keep pace with agile start-ups. A 2013 study
in </span><em><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Journal
of Marketing</b></span></span></em><span style="color: black;"> implies
they should proceed with caution, as consumers appear to consider
brand positioning before accepting a new product as a genuine
innovation. Brands such as Apple that enjoy a high degree of
innovation credibility with consumers are, in effect, granted
exemption from the prevailing norms of their product category — a
phenomenon the authors name “the innovator’s license”. Brands
that have not yet earned innovation cred are penalised by consumers
when they stray from said norms.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
authors found that only brands viewed as innovative were rewarded by
consumers for pushing marketing boundaries; non-innovative brands
alienated consumers when they did so. Interestingly, the authors
observed that the “license to innovate” applied not only to
marketing strategies but to pricing strategies as well. The authors
conclude that consumer permission is a prerequisite for transitioning
from a non-innovative company to one that reaps the full benefits of
innovation. Consumers may relax their expectations of firms that have
a solid reputation as an innovator.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
trajectory of “buzz”</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Researchers
have also shown that <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">significant
pre-release buzz doesn’t necessarily guarantee successful product
adoption.</span></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">According
to a 2014 paper in </span><em><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Marketing
Science</b></span></span></em><span style="color: black;">,
marketing managers should track not only the total amount of
pre-release buzz but also how buzz fluctuates in the run-up to
product launch. Using buzz data for 681 new video games, the authors
concluded that buzz that starts high relative to competing products
but dwindles as the release date approaches is likely to presage
disappointing sales. They assert that even an incomplete dataset on
pre-release buzz trajectory provides more accurate sales forecasts
than pre-release advertising budgets, product characteristics, or the
total volume of accumulated buzz. Moreover, they cite evidence that
pre-release buzz is quickly taken on board by financial analysts and
investors, and thus affects stock prices prior to launch.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Targeting
“revenue leaders” instead of influencers</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Innovators
are often told that the best way to spur widespread adoption of a new
product is to get influencers buzzing about it. Marketers commonly
target opinion leaders early in a product’s life cycle, soliciting
their feedback and gifting free samples in what industry
professionals call “seeding programmes”. But a 2013 article
in </span><em><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Journal
of Marketing</b></span></span></em><span style="color: black;"> suggests
that these campaigns are often misdirected because they focus too
much on maximizing the quantity of customers affected as opposed to
their value. In other words, marketers would often be better off
trying to reach the higher-spending consumers rather than the most
influential. The reasoning? People’s social networks tend to
consist of others like themselves, so setting selected “revenue
leaders” abuzz should stimulate interest among their peers with
similar purchasing patterns.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
authors found that across all seed sizes larger than one percent of
the total target market, revenue leaders were more valuable than
opinion leaders. That’s because as the target group becomes larger,
there will be more overlap between influencers’ social networks and
therefore less value to be derived per consumer. Also, expensive
efforts to target influencers risk redundancy, since opinion leaders
are more likely to become early adopters anyway, due to their high
degree of social connectivity which keeps them in the know about new
products and technologies. So it may be prudent, especially when the
seed size is larger, to target revenue leaders instead.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Whose
sales are you stealing?</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Supposedly,
disruptive innovation enables companies to introduce new products
without siphoning demand from existing product lines. However, a 2010
article in </span><em><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>Marketing
Science</b></span></span></em><span style="color: black;"> contends
that innovation actually increases potential avenues for
cannibalisation, as products with innovative attributes often attract
demand from multiple categories. For example, Procter & Gamble’s
Febreze eliminates odor and works directly on fabric, so it
theoretically could compete with both P&G’s air fresheners and
its laundry detergents.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
authors developed a model designed to quantify the different
categories of demand for newly launched products — from within and
between-category cannibalisation, to brand-switching (i.e., demand
swiped from other companies) and newly created demand. Their test
case was the introduction of the Lexus RX300—the first crossover
sport utility vehicle—which had the potential to poach sales from
“both the luxury SUV and luxury sedan categories”. Using six
years of sales and marketing mix figures for Lexus and competing
brands, the authors found that RX300 sales due to cannibalization
were far outweighed by those resulting from brand-switching and newly
generated demand. Therefore, Lexus United States CEO Jim Press’s
early assessment of the RX300 as a “huge hit” appears to be
accurate.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
cannibalisation-calculating model could also be used to help
competitors formulate a responsive strategy to new innovations,
complete with exact amounts for both price reductions and increases
in advertising spend.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Conclusion</span></span></strong></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;">Happily
for marketing professionals, research literature bears out the
supposition that the success of a radical innovation—both in the
market and the stock market—depends at least in part on the level
of marketing support it is given. But support needs to be coupled
with an understanding of likely competitor response and of the firm’s
competitive advantages and disadvantages. Over time, proven
innovators may be granted a “license” to push the boundaries of
the categories in which they operate. Brand positioning, brand equity
and firm reputation are thus key elements of a firm’s innovation
success.</span>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b style="background-color: white;">INSEAD Knowledge</b></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-84594006897356438102016-05-20T15:40:00.001-03:002016-05-20T15:40:41.595-03:00Managing big projects: The lessons of experience<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir_4jTBOlJCs0GGDRCF3MDsPWlk9Z-3kldCW6aRGToVdlYjyhC-S2utsugLZO-Zb0HIDfVcWWlU_HR21WieEq_9mse_RhmNMKecxvAj-8ZSpN7A0bZyhwaqIO5RSOXkhZ6RFSJ7yVgi10/s1600/Insights-MoInfra-Managing-big-projects-1536x1536_300_Standard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEir_4jTBOlJCs0GGDRCF3MDsPWlk9Z-3kldCW6aRGToVdlYjyhC-S2utsugLZO-Zb0HIDfVcWWlU_HR21WieEq_9mse_RhmNMKecxvAj-8ZSpN7A0bZyhwaqIO5RSOXkhZ6RFSJ7yVgi10/s320/Insights-MoInfra-Managing-big-projects-1536x1536_300_Standard.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><span style="font-style: normal;">In</span></em><strong><span style="font-weight: normal;">frastructure
has a problem.</span></strong><em><span style="font-style: normal;"> Even
for projects that are similar and that many companies have experience
building—think of roads, for example—delays and cost overruns are
common. Poor planning and execution, unbalanced contract terms and
conditions, inadequate controls, and lack of proper risk management
are rife.</span></em></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According
to data from IHS Global Insight,
construction
productivity in many areas has worsened over the past decade; the IHS
Herold Global Projects Database
estimates
that large infrastructure, mining, and oil and gas projects, on
average, cost 80 percent more than budgeted and run 20 months late.
Major events like the Olympics and World Cup have to start on time,
but in recent decades, have always cost more than the original
projections.
Finally,
some projects meet these goals, but don’t work as intended.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Does
it have to be this way? Not necessarily. Some projects, after all,
are delivered as planned, such as the Alameda Corridor freight rail
program in Southern California and Singapore’s North East rail
line. Based on my experience and research, here are five ways to
improve the odds of success.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; padding: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 20.8px;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 20.8px;"><br /></span></div>
</span><br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Manage
more than just time and budget.</em> For
infrastructure projects, the emphasis is usually on completing the
project on time and on budget. These matters are important, but they
are not everything. A project that is completed punctually but that
doesn’t work well cannot be considered a success. Think of a new
airport or highway that handles less than the planned capacity
because of design changes or cut-backs during construction but was
completed on time and on budget. These functional elements need to be
tracked just as rigorously as the traditional parameters of cost and
schedule.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All
these factors must be defined, tested, proven, and managed from early
planning through commissioning. To do so, the project owner should
appoint someone to monitor how well the project meets all
requirements. The designer, construction manager, or contractor are
usually unable to provide a dispassionate overview. The monitor
should have the authority to prevent changes to the configuration of
the project during design and construction that could have an impact
on the planned operational performance. When a European airport did
this, the outside hire helped to significantly reduce capital
spending by examining the plans for risk and by working with the
airport authorities to increase flexibility for future expansion.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Apply
the appropriate delivery method for each project.</em> Particularly
in the public sector, there is a tendency to opt for the same
delivery method—such as design-bid-build, construction manager at
risk, or design-build—for all capital projects. This is
understandable. Doing the usual is safer than trying something new.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
conditions can differ. It makes much more sense to evaluate each
project and then decide which method is most appropriate. This means
evaluating a wide array of factors, such as permitting and regulatory
status, land-site control, owner priorities, geotechnical and
subsurface analysis, organizational and supply-chain capacity, degree
of risk, and potential for changes. This evaluation can clarify which
delivery method fits the risk profile. One North American
infrastructure agency uses a “value for money” assessment when it
is considering using a nonstandard delivery model. It compares total
project costs for each option, thereby verifying that the chosen
delivery model was best suited for that particular project. This may
sound like an obvious approach; in my experience, though, few
agencies do it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Balance
risks.</em> Organizations
that work with designers and contractors must accept that this is a
business relationship fraught with risks—and be willing to share
them. Counterintuitively, this may actually lower the risks for
everyone and make the project run more smoothly.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Profit
margins for infrastructure companies are typically low. Taking a hit
on a single big project can jeopardize their financial well-being.
Therefore, if the owner tries to shift all or most risks and
liabilities over to these companies, the latter will naturally seek
ways to cover or hedge them through higher bid costs, additional
contingencies, costly insurance policies, or adversarial contract
management. This approach may lead to disputes, delays, and failure.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">During
the construction of Heathrow’s Terminal 5, the parties managed risk
more collaboratively. (Terminal 5 opened in March 2008 on schedule
and within budget; for more, see “Remember the people: The
foundation for success in 21st-century infrastructure,” in<em><span style="text-decoration: none;">Voices
on Infrastructure</span></em>,
Spring 2016.) The client, Heathrow Airport, held a comprehensive
insurance policy to cover all risk. Instead of a traditional
client-contractor relationship, Heathrow treated the different
partners like team members. It invited them to work together to solve
complex issues during delivery and to help Heathrow find the
technical solutions that worked best for the project as a whole. This
allowed all the parties to focus on finding ways to keep the project
on schedule and within budget. That, in turn, helped the different
companies meet their own obligations. This is similar to the
successful alliance-contracting approach that has been used
extensively in Australia on large projects, in which the project
owner, designer, and contractor work under one contractual agreement
to jointly deliver the project.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em>Involve
operations and maintenance experts from the start.</em> Projects
that have progressed smoothly through the design and construction
phases still have a chance of hitting a rough patch. This can happen
when the people who will ultimately operate and maintain the asset,
whether it is a rail system, port, terminal, or highway, are shut out
of the decision-making process during design and construction.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.87cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Decisions
affecting the total cost of ownership—including access and
logistics, spare-parts management, and trade-offs of initial versus
operating costs—are critical. The costs associated with operating
and maintaining infrastructure assets over a 20- to 30-year span run
many times higher than the costs for design and construction.
Therefore, the costs must be considered in the planning and design.
That requires making operations and maintenance experts part of the
team from the beginning. Many oil and gas companies use this approach
for big capital projects. They have found that doing so means that
projects are ready to run on completion and that operations and
maintenance personnel are prepared as well.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">McKinsey&Company</span></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-36425406210640065412016-05-20T15:32:00.001-03:002016-05-20T15:32:40.375-03:00How Your Leadership Has to Change as Your Startup Scales<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI-EBV1szC0Kgr36P7Nl5yxM4-JSLEuOvbBb3E_xzz4IQH1K9j3G0-mWWANuvccebAOVJ5qmOj6nlrboPjuPgrylJGEWTsrsj8bpZV2nIBRS9o0s_YoDfWpOWJ9FwI34JPrnAvUtGHItk/s1600/may16-20-hbr-laura-schneider-organizational-culture-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI-EBV1szC0Kgr36P7Nl5yxM4-JSLEuOvbBb3E_xzz4IQH1K9j3G0-mWWANuvccebAOVJ5qmOj6nlrboPjuPgrylJGEWTsrsj8bpZV2nIBRS9o0s_YoDfWpOWJ9FwI34JPrnAvUtGHItk/s320/may16-20-hbr-laura-schneider-organizational-culture-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
it comes to new tricks, sometimes new dogs are just as hard to teach
as old ones. At least, that was what went through my mind as I sat in
on a recent senior team meeting at a fast-growing, two-year-old
e-commerce company. I winced when Daniel, the 32-year-old CEO, said,
“Come on, guys, I need you all to focus more on execution. If we’re
going to scale successfully at the pace we’ve laid out, we’ve got
to execute faster and delegate more. I want you pushing hard on your
teams. Get them to step up and execute! That’s why we’ve brought
in Jeff here, to coach all of us on how to motivate the troops.” I
smiled sheepishly. <em>Really?</em> I
thought. <em>That’s
not what I had in mind.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Don’t get
me wrong — Daniel’s intentions are good. Many startup CEOs
adopt this “visionary entrepreneur” leadership style. They
set out a broad vision, provide lofty goals, and model an ambitious
work ethic (for recent college grads, it’s not a big leap from “all
nighters” to “all weekenders”). And at this stage in a
company’s growth, it generally works. Just being close to the
founders — working alongside them, being in meetings where there is
a personal connection — tends to motivate and inspire young staff.
Early employees feel that they belong to a special “club.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet keeping
enthusiasm up as the company grows is difficult, especially as the
direct link between founders and employees becomes less tangible or
less possible (when opening remote offices, for example). As a
result, many startups that experience zero turnover during the first
year or two suddenly find themselves dealing with as much as 40%
turnover in year three.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To address
the engagement problem, leaders like Daniel need to recognize that
the methods for leading and motivating staff that they used in the
startup phase may no longer work. According to Self-Determination
Theory, intrinsic drivers such as autonomy (the ability to have a
sense of “self-authoring” one’s work), competency (the sense of
continued growth in skills and abilities), and relatedness (the sense
of connection, inclusion, and belonging) are crucial factors in
building an engaged, committed workforce.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To scale the
business successfully, Daniel needs his employees onboard. To get
there, he needs to focus on these motivational drivers and shift his
mindset from “startup” to “scale up.” The latter requires
balancing the “push” mode of leadership (tell, direct, delegate)
with a “pull” approach (empower, collaborate, coach), which has
been shown to generate greater commitment and creativity in staff
members no matter their age or the size of the company.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Here are
four things leaders and their organizations can do to move from
startup mode to scale-up mode:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Listen
more.</strong> First,
you need to shift from directing to coaching, which is all about
listening rather than telling. Ask thoughtful, open-ended questions,
pay attention (no texting or distractions), maintain eye contact and
receptive body language, and let silence be OK (so an employee can
gather their thoughts). Many harried leaders may balk, insisting
they have no time for this. Keep in mind that it’s not the
quantity of time you set aside that matters — it’s the
quality of time.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Align
employee and business goals.</strong> Shift
from purely directive goal setting to a reciprocal process that
links the growth of the business with the growth of the individual.
When people feel that business goals are tied directly to their
development, they are much more likely to go the extra mile. Ask
employees to reflect on their personal goals and find ways to
incorporate them into business initiatives. For example, a digital
marketing director at Daniel’s company wanted to gain greater
visibility and impact beyond her area of focus. So she and her boss
agreed to have her lead the development of a pop-up store, which
required collaboration with finance, sales, and product teams.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because
the temporary retail outlet was a first for the company, it was
highly visible and allowed the marketing director to stretch
beyond her digital responsibilities. She was excited about the
opportunity, it helped her grow, and the project was a success for
the organization.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Create
feedback loops.</strong> Include
time for two-way feedback (“How are you doing, and how am I
doing?”) in weekly or biweekly one-on-one meetings with staff
members. That way, feedback will become embedded in the culture
instead of happening ad hoc in out-of-the-blue “gotcha” sessions
or too infrequently, at annual review time.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Build
peer-to-peer networks.</strong> Even
in small companies, big-company programs such as cross-functional
quality assurance groups or employee resource groups (ERGs) can help
deepen the sense of inclusion and relatedness that’s lost when the
company grows beyond the startup phase. (ERGs are groups formed
around staff affinities, such as volunteering or support for women,
or communities of LGBTQ people or people of color.) These
groups bring together staff from different functional areas to share
lessons learned from completed projects and to brainstorm potential
quality improvements or innovations. They help break down silos,
broaden awareness and sensitivity to other groups’ goals and
needs, and avoid building a finger-pointing culture. Research into
the benefits of ERGs at large companies such as American Express,
Accenture, and Merck has shown them to improve retention and
engagement. In some cases, acting like a big company may help you
become one.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">For Daniel,
it was a challenge to become a good listener, to set aside time
for brainstorming sessions with employees who were two or even three
levels below him. However, he’s now a big fan of what he calls his
monthly “listening tour” — regular breakfast meetings with
employees from across the company. Staff members appreciate the
opportunity to connect, and Daniel tells me that he regularly
comes away with ideas that might never have bubbled up otherwise.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Daniel and
his cofounders also began to sponsor and provide time for a
cross-functional, volunteer “QVC” group (quality, values,
culture), where staffers meet and brainstorm how to make the
company’s values statement real. Yet just as Daniel can see
tangible benefits from listening more, he and the other executive see
upside from the ideas and enthusiasm generated by this peer group
interaction. The head of HR is working to institute a simple online
checklist for leaders to track their two-way feedback interactions
with staff. She is optimistic that these conversations will become
embedded in the fabric of the organization, as she plans to provide
training on feedback best practices and monitor use of the checklist.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Initiatives
like these, which balance CEO or founder directives with
cross-functional interactions and two-way dialogue, can go a long way
toward addressing employees’ needs for relatedness, autonomy, and
personal growth. If Daniel and other leaders hope to grow their
companies past the startup phase, they need to scale with a
balanced leadership approach, one that pulls the best from good
people instead of unintentionally pushing them out the door.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-20764807262133902302016-05-20T15:26:00.001-03:002016-05-20T15:26:19.774-03:00You’re Never Done Finding Purpose at Work<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFxQADqnX2GUrOuIywLjAWeVlEOk-QQpUpgN7lwhvEO6B6XvTTWRh2UREYaGtfhrVcE8jF3lgMQFra1UGUxIkQfjv8O7tN4FPVYNe2BQ4yAY7DcVxjEpUY-3Yf6H6zo8J2EIS2ciKnV_A/s1600/may16-20-128945440-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFxQADqnX2GUrOuIywLjAWeVlEOk-QQpUpgN7lwhvEO6B6XvTTWRh2UREYaGtfhrVcE8jF3lgMQFra1UGUxIkQfjv8O7tN4FPVYNe2BQ4yAY7DcVxjEpUY-3Yf6H6zo8J2EIS2ciKnV_A/s320/may16-20-128945440-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Do you dread
going into the office Monday morning? Maybe a new boss has entered
the equation, creating a rift between how you once felt and how you
now feel. Perhaps your company has recently been acquired, changing
the culture. Maybe you simply have outgrown your role and are bored
to tears in your cubicle.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I have found
that whether we enjoy our work often boils down to how our job fits
with our sense of purpose. Where we work, the role we hold, our
broader sense of purpose — all three are subject to change.
Thus if we want to stay in the “sweet spot” among these
three, we must not fear career transitions or even change itself;
indeed, we must seek them out.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Having
a sense of purpose in our life is critical to well-being. In fact, in
a <span style="text-decoration: none;">longitudinal
study</span> researchers found
that people who demonstrate a sense of purpose in their lives have a
15% lower risk of death. Having a sense of purpose in our roles at
work is equally important. And yet it’s not enough to find that
sense of purpose once — you have to continually refind it as
circumstances (and you) change.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“<span style="font-size: small;">I
am cautious and alert and mindful that the battle is not won yet”
is how Céline Schillinger, an executive at Sanofi Pasteur, describes
staying on this learning journey. “I will not fall into
complacency. No matter what, I will continue to hone myself.” In
2001 Schillinger landed a position in France at the vaccine maker. To
date, she has occupied positions in human resources, product
development, and stakeholder engagement. She moved to Boston in 2015
to focus on quality innovation. “I would define myself as a person
under construction,” she said to me. “I’m always trying to
enrich my experience by adding bits and pieces wherever I go. I
experiment in my roles, and push for uncomfortableness to eventually
gain new knowledge out of each situation.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Schillinger’s
story shows that you don’t have to quit your company to stay
engaged. However, sometimes a more radical change is needed. Consider
the story of Mana Ionescu. She worked hard to climb the ladder at the
U.S.-based company she worked for, and she was in line for the
director role. But Ionescu was frustrated by the transactional nature
of her work. Creativity was minimal. Inspiration was nominal. “There
must be more to my working life than just sitting here making money
and not actually making an impact,” she thought.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She
decided to leave her organization and founded Lightspan Digital, a
digital marketing company based in Chicago that specializes in social
media, email, and content marketing. Ionescu recognized she had to
take charge of both her life and her working life — and ever
since, she has been living <em>and</em> working
with a sense of purpose.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s up to
each of us to know when to make that leap.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Try this
exercise. At the end of the workday, jot down approximately how much
time you spent in each of the three following mindsets:</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<ul>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Job
mindset</strong>.
When someone has a job mindset, they resort to a “paycheck
mentality,” performing their duties in return for compensation and
not much else.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Career
mindset.</strong> This
mindset occurs when an individual is focused on increasing or
advancing their salary, title, power, team size, or sphere of
control.</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><strong>Purpose
mindset.</strong> Feeling
passionate, innovative, and committed are hallmarks of this mindset,
as is having an outward-looking focus on serving the broader
organization or key stakeholders. Your professional purpose feels
aligned with your personal purpose.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm;">
</div>
</li>
</ul>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Keep a log
for a couple of weeks and see whether you fall into one of these
mindsets more than the others. If the job and career mindsets total
more than 50% of your time, that may be a warning sign that you
should to restate or redefine your personal purpose.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No one lives
in the purpose mindset all the time, but spending too much time in
the career or job mindsets is destructive: You are certain to be
dissatisfied with your job, and the mindsets can end up harming
your reputation, chances of promotion, and long-term
prospects. While everyone should be trying to develop and grow,
focusing too much on your career or your paycheck can lead to bad
behaviors such as bullying and selfishness, or simply trying to
exert too much control over others. Before that happens, seek a new
role, and perhaps a new organization, that rebalances your equation.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If
you have never <span style="text-decoration: none;">created
a personal declaration of purpose</span>,
now is the time. The declaration is a simple statement about how
you decide to live each and every day. Make it succinct,
specific, jargon-free, and expressive. Your statement ought to be
personal, and it should integrate your strengths, interests, and core
ambitions. For example, here’s mine: “We’re not here
to see through each other; we’re here to see each other through.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Take into
account all three types of purpose — personal, job, and
organization. But don’t shortchange your personal purpose, which
is a common error, according to A. R. Elangovan, professor at
the University of Victoria. As he told me, ”Especially in
contrast to organizational and role purpose, where multiple
stakeholders shape the outcomes, my advice is to invest as much
effort, if not more, in figuring out our personal purpose.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Life is
short. You deserve to work in a role, and for an organization, where
your personal purpose shines. But you cannot leave it up to the
organization, your boss, or your team. It really does come down
to you defining and enacting your purpose.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span>
</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-21388356797649043542016-05-20T15:21:00.001-03:002016-05-20T15:21:51.364-03:00Paying Skilled Workers More Would Create More Skilled Workers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW_lMetKLjgSiI1k4Solaq0ZT1u22Vi8q28GbOoWMbfhTrbUkAYcsA_cuyBq3mK8tYtgE2AobyEqe387rzOZFrh4VK-Lwlrr7oEo232W138LkKJBtH47EhxREgQoKKRlH_smYhm2wlalw/s1600/may16-19-83516758-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjW_lMetKLjgSiI1k4Solaq0ZT1u22Vi8q28GbOoWMbfhTrbUkAYcsA_cuyBq3mK8tYtgE2AobyEqe387rzOZFrh4VK-Lwlrr7oEo232W138LkKJBtH47EhxREgQoKKRlH_smYhm2wlalw/s320/may16-19-83516758-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
computers made their way into workplaces, in the 1980s, typists had a
problem. As computers replaced traditional typewriters, the skills of
typists who did not know how to work with a word processor grew
obsolete. Nevertheless, few would argue that information technology
permanently increased unemployment. Although the unemployment
rate did spike in the 1980s, it eventually went back down again, so
the average unemployment rate in the 1990s was <span style="text-decoration: none;">similar</span> to
the rate in the 1970s. The labor force adjusted to a new technology
replacing an older one.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, there was
a <span style="text-decoration: none;">lively</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">debate</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">among</span> <span style="text-decoration: none;">policy
makers</span>and <span style="text-decoration: none;">academics</span> about
whether a similar gap “<span style="text-decoration: none;">between
the skills workers have and the skills businesses say they need</span>”
contributed to the increase in unemployment. Research has since shown
that the skills gap has a <span style="text-decoration: none;">cyclical</span> effect
on unemployment, explaining as much as <span style="text-decoration: none;">one-third
of the increase in unemployment</span> following
the Great Recession.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
is usually taken for granted that the skills gap is a problem of
skills supply, and public concerns often focus on a <span style="text-decoration: none;">lack
of STEM skills</span> and <span style="text-decoration: none;">soft
skills</span>.
So proposed solutions tend to involve reforming education and
worker <span style="text-decoration: none;">training
programs</span>.
The most popular approach has been to <span style="text-decoration: none;">reduce
tuition fees</span> for
selective fields of study, usually STEM majors.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
I argue that this view is not correct. <span style="text-decoration: none;">Research</span> that
I and my colleagues have conducted <span style="text-decoration: none;">suggests</span> that
the skills gap persists mainly because employers are unwilling or
unable to pay market price for the skills they require.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
are three possible reasons for why a skills gap exists. First,
workers do not adjust to changes in the demand by acquiring new
skills. Second, employers do not take the supply of skills into
account when they make hiring decisions. Third, employers do not take
into account the relative shortage or abundance of particular skills
when they set wages. Using U.S. data on <span style="text-decoration: none;">job
finding and filling rates, wages</span>,
and<span style="text-decoration: none;">profits</span> across
states and industries since 1979, we measured the contribution of
each of these three reasons on mismatch unemployment. We found
that <span style="text-decoration: none;">wage
setting is the main reason</span> why
workers don’t have the skills employers are looking for.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
workforce can adjust to changes in the demand for skills by acquiring
new skills, through training, or by replacing older workers with
younger ones who have up-to-date skills. For example, an
unemployed typist looking for work in the 1980s could learn how to
use a computer or fill a vacant position left by another typist who
moved on to another job or retired.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Firms can
also respond to changes in the supply of skills. In the 1980s, for
instance, organizations could train their typists in word processing
or keep some typist positions open. While hiring less-skilled workers
hurts a firm’s productivity, the data shows that companies still
did this in order to take advantage of the fact that hiring these
workers is so much cheaper.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our
data shows that these kinds of adjustments do indeed happen, and that
they happen fast enough to prevent unemployment from going up. There
aren’t many occupations that are both <span style="text-decoration: none;">easy
to find and high-paying</span>,
which is what we would expect if the workforce were not adjusting and
companies were struggling to find talent. Similarly, there are few
jobs that are <span style="text-decoration: none;">easy
to fill and that generate high profits</span>for
the company.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet
the skills gap remains, because the adjustments that workers and
firms make will only eliminate the gap if wages reflect the
relative supply and demand for various skills across occupations. But
our data shows that this is not happening: Many jobs in
industries that generate high profits (retail trade, educational
services, mining, and forestry) tend to pay low wages and are
therefore unattractive to workers, whereas jobs in industries that
pay higher wages (finance, computer and electronics manufacturing,
paper and printing) are <span style="text-decoration: none;">not
very profitable</span>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Imagine
that a particular set of skills — say, STEM skills — enables
workers to be particularly productive but their pay does not go up to
reflect this higher productivity. It is not surprising that workers
do not acquire more of these skills, since they do not reap any of
the benefits of their increased productivity. In the UK, for
instance, <span style="text-decoration: none;">less
than half</span> of
STEM graduates work in scientific occupations, and there is no wage
premium for having a STEM degree in other occupations.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On
the other hand, firms are more interested in hiring workers with
these STEM skills, as they are very productive and cheap. Thus
companies open lots of vacancies for STEM positions but <span style="text-decoration: none;">find
it very difficult to fill them</span>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Companies
often advocate for better education to fix the skills gap, but our
results indicate that this is unlikely to work for a simple reason:
Students have a choice about what skills they acquire in school and
how they use these skills in the labor market. Encouraging
universities to educate more physicists and engineers will not make a
difference if these additional STEM graduates then choose to work for
investment banks that offer higher salaries.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unfortunately,
our research does not provide an explanation for <em>why</em> wages
do not reflect relative labor market conditions across occupations or
skills.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">However,
the data clearly indicates that wages for workers with scarce skills
are too low compared to wages for workers with a more abundant skill
set. It would seem that this provides a profitable opportunity for
companies that are able to be flexible in their compensation policy.
By paying more for certain skills, an employer would have no trouble
attracting workers with those skills in sufficient quantity and
quality, giving the company an undeniable edge over its
competitors.</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-78780348275107989812016-05-16T11:24:00.002-03:002016-05-16T11:24:20.767-03:00Why Buyers and Sellers Inherently Disagree on What Things Are Worth<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-26cmgFUrpscZme2vRM2mXkKmnvlmwKpZVb5F2HqTEF-GDTvlenHDZ4ISCsIlOVG3KiLBMNwJnV3fOkjmwgEF_X1m0mE6AFhQfIm4ZZ7oQd2n5Jj6LrDnxN6TvmSx5gJGSZ35HpSq59U/s1600/may16-13-540829383-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-26cmgFUrpscZme2vRM2mXkKmnvlmwKpZVb5F2HqTEF-GDTvlenHDZ4ISCsIlOVG3KiLBMNwJnV3fOkjmwgEF_X1m0mE6AFhQfIm4ZZ7oQd2n5Jj6LrDnxN6TvmSx5gJGSZ35HpSq59U/s320/may16-13-540829383-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Negotiations
involve gaps in perceived value. When we are sellers, we feel that
buyers offer too little. When we are buyers, we feel that sellers
demand too much. This is true whether we’re actually <span style="text-decoration: none;">exchanging
goods or services for money, or whether we’re simply trying to make
a fair trade</span>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This
gap in the perception of value is called the <span style="text-decoration: none;">endowment
effect</span>.
If we own a good, we value it more than if we did not. The endowment
effect influences us all, whether we are <span style="text-decoration: none;">young
children</span> deciding
whether to keep or trade a toy, or adults deciding the value of
intangible things like our <span style="text-decoration: none;">ideas</span> and <span style="text-decoration: none;">rights</span>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even <span style="text-decoration: none;">chimpanzees</span> show
an endowment effect for food they are given! It influences the way we
value everything from <span style="text-decoration: none;">concert
tickets to the environment</span>.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
endowment effect creates <span style="text-decoration: none;">frictions
in negotiations</span>.
At least one party may feel shortchanged. Worse, both may walk away
from the table. It creates all sorts of<span style="text-decoration: none;">adverse
effects in markets</span>.
We value government and employment benefits like health and safety
regulations more if they are ours to lose than if we are asked to pay
taxes or give up income to acquire them. We think public goods like
drinking water, clean air, and public space are more valuable when
they are owned by the government and sold or leased to firms in the
form of a water bill, carbon tax, or development rights than when
they are purchased by the government from private owners.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<h3 class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Explaining
the endowment effect</span></strong></h3>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Researchers
trying to understand the origins of the endowment effect in the
laboratory typically examine how it influences the value of simple
consumer goods using three different methods. In an <span style="text-decoration: none;">exchange
paradigm</span>,
people who are randomly given one good are reluctant to trade it for
another good of comparable value. In <span style="text-decoration: none;">one
illustrative study</span>,
only 11% of people given a coffee mug traded it for a large bar of
Swiss chocolate, whereas only 10% of people given the chocolate bar
traded it for the coffee mug. In a <span style="text-decoration: none;">valuation
paradigm</span>,
the minimum amount of money that people who are randomly given a good
(“sellers”) demand to relinquish it is usually about two times as
much as people who are not given the good (“buyers”) are willing
to pay to acquire it. This gap is even <span style="text-decoration: none;">higher
for more unique and abstract goods</span> (see
the chart below). In a <span style="text-decoration: none;">mere-ownership
paradigm</span>,
people randomly given a good believe it is objectively better than do
people to whom it was not given.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Traditionally,
the endowment effect has been explained as a byproduct of <span style="text-decoration: none;">loss
aversion</span>.
When we are buyers, not owing the good is the status quo so acquiring
the good is a gain. When we are sellers, owning the good is the
status quo so giving it up is a loss. Because we are <em><span style="text-decoration: none;">loss
averse</span></em><em> </em>—
losses impact us more than equivalent gains — this difference in
perspective leads us to value goods more when we are sellers than
when we are buyers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More
recent work has challenged this view. <span style="text-decoration: none;">My
collaborators, Lisa Shu of London Business School, Daniel Gilbert of
Harvard University, Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia, and
I showed that losing a good is not required to find the endowment
effect. Simply owning a good is sufficient</span>.
We found that research participants who were given a coffee mug were
willing to pay as much to buy an identical second mug as they
demanded to sell the first mug they were given. Both of these
“endowed-buyers” and “endowed-sellers” valued these mugs more
than buyers who were not first given a mug, whether these “unendowed
buyers” were asked how much they would pay to buy one mug or two
mugs.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
a <span style="text-decoration: none;">second
experiment</span>,
we endowed half of our research participants with a mug and did not
endow the other half of the participants with a mug. We then had them
act as “brokers” for the next participant. Brokers decided how
much money that “client” would pay to buy or accept to sell an
identical mug. We found that the amount of money brokers were willing
to pay or would accept to sell depended on whether they’d been
endowed with a mug or not, not whether they were buying or selling a
mug of behalf of their client:</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZKuEWe3uQvxFwI8r6SXtp3QlUTKCRwA7aVwidaNBeV5uOSztXxvxL1Q_GVCFyEti7iKG7cjb-3DeXPW398sxq5P-ZcOEwFW64pjqdDAelymwXRJx3zAcawzop5Tvlu-GC1U1_PdSZGI4/s1600/W160504_MOREWEDGE_PEOPLEWHO-850x353.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZKuEWe3uQvxFwI8r6SXtp3QlUTKCRwA7aVwidaNBeV5uOSztXxvxL1Q_GVCFyEti7iKG7cjb-3DeXPW398sxq5P-ZcOEwFW64pjqdDAelymwXRJx3zAcawzop5Tvlu-GC1U1_PdSZGI4/s640/W160504_MOREWEDGE_PEOPLEWHO-850x353.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>These
and other recent findings have prompted several alternative
psychological process explanations to loss aversion.</i></span></div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><em><span style="text-decoration: none;">Biased
information processing</span></em> theories
suggest that buying and selling evoke different cognitive frames.
Buyers focus on reasons to keep their money and</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">reasons
not to buy. Sellers focus on reasons to keep the item and reasons not
to take the money. When<span style="text-decoration: none;">buying
a ticket to a sold-out basketball game</span>,
we might think about the hassle of getting there and what else we
could do with the money. By contrast, when selling we might think
about how much we paid for the ticket and the quality of the game.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
these theories don’t explain <span style="text-decoration: none;">mere
ownership effects</span>,
when we simply value a good more because we own it. <em>Psychological
ownership</em> theories
suggest that the endowment effect is due to the association that
owning a good creates between it and our self. <em><span style="text-decoration: none;">Associative
ownership</span></em> theories
suggest that because we usually think positively of ourselves, a good
gains an additional positive association when we acquire it—its
link to us (e.g., “This is MY mug”). As evidence, people with
higher self-esteem show a stronger endowment effect for the goods
they own than people with lower self-esteem. <em><span style="text-decoration: none;">Attachment
ownership</span></em> theories
suggest that when we acquire a good, it becomes incorporated into our
self-concept (e.g., “I’m a BMW owner”) and giving up the good
is painful because it feels like losing part of our self.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
a recent paper in <span style="text-decoration: none;">Trends
in Cognitive Sciences</span>,
Colleen Giblin of Carnegie Mellon University and I suggested a
cognitive framing account of psychological ownership effects. We
suggest that owning a thing changes the way we think about it. Most
of us exhibit a memory bias for things related to ourselves. We tend
to pay more attention to and better remember information that is
associated with us than other people, places, or facts.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Because we
relate what we own to ourselves, owning may act as a cognitive frame,
amplifying our attention to and memory for our possessions. Most
“goods” have more good features than bad features. You probably
wouldn’t buy a home, car, or pair of shoes if you didn’t like it
more than you disliked it. If owners pay more attention to and better
remember the features of the goods they own, those goods should then
seem more valuable to owner than to non-owners.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our
theory can also explain why the endowment <span style="text-decoration: none;">effect
reverses for “bads”</span>—things
that are on the whole more negative than positive, like a traffic
fine, an unpleasant task at work, or a broken appliance. We suggest
that because ownership increases our attention to and memory for the
things we own, bads seem worse when they’re our problem than when
they are someone else’s problem.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Reducing
the endowment effect</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fortunately,
research has shown that it is possible to reduce the endowment
effect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One
effective tactic is to <span style="text-decoration: none;">direct
the attention</span> of
buyers and sellers to the information that they ignore. Asking buyers
to first <span style="text-decoration: none;">think
about</span> the
valuable attributes of the good they might acquire leads them to
value the good more. Asking sellers to first <span style="text-decoration: none;">think
about</span> what
else they might do with the money they would receive—the
opportunity cost of owning the good—seems to also reduce the price
they demand to give up what they own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Another
effective tactic is to change the <span style="text-decoration: none;">reference
price</span> that
people use to evaluate the good. When buying or acquiring a good, one
might remind sellers of cheaper alternatives, like used versions of
the same good or similar more economical goods. When selling or
trading a good, one might remind buyers of more expensive
alternatives to what one is offering.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
third tactic is to get buyers to <span style="text-decoration: none;">touch</span>, <span style="text-decoration: none;">hold</span>,
or <span style="text-decoration: none;">imagine
owning the good</span>.
Experiences like interacting with a product through a <span style="text-decoration: none;">touchscreen</span>,
receiving a <span style="text-decoration: none;">coupon</span> for
it, or temporarily being the <span style="text-decoration: none;">highest
bidder for it in an auction</span> all
have the potential to induce the endowment effect for the product if
they make us feel like we own it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">No matter
which side of the table we sit on, the endowment effect has the
potential to lead to disagreements in the value of what is being
negotiated. Being aware of its influence and how to defuse it can
help us understand differences of perceived value, reduce them, and
increase our likelihood of coming to a more satisfactory agreement
for everyone involved.</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="margin-bottom: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-73826907527652249892016-05-16T11:16:00.001-03:002016-05-16T11:16:18.277-03:00Three ways to get the best out of diverse teams<div style="padding: 0px;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu5qFffZRVZurFv-xxOSrfCxeA2_UdLbp0LJUtij-GZ0Fy4BU0oTELzpuA5swNeW4j3ZGFumdkuosDk9eSTLnpv8YNArjS4pgGxo0cxc4h1JCjgfjrgayEimG6RO3aIKRFT74FAaTc9kg/s1600/conflict_resolution.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu5qFffZRVZurFv-xxOSrfCxeA2_UdLbp0LJUtij-GZ0Fy4BU0oTELzpuA5swNeW4j3ZGFumdkuosDk9eSTLnpv8YNArjS4pgGxo0cxc4h1JCjgfjrgayEimG6RO3aIKRFT74FAaTc9kg/s320/conflict_resolution.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">Conventional wisdom is that diversity in a team promotes positive performance – combining different views, perspectives, knowledge, experience, interests, motives and personality types to get the job done. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">In fact, really diverse teams can produce extreme results – either being the most effective teams or the least effective – research suggests. So the key to getting the best, not the worst, out of diverse teams is knowing how to manage them. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 28.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Our research shows there are three areas to concentrate on, but first let’s think about why things go wrong.</span></div>
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The importance of trust</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="padding: 0px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">I’ve been working with real teams looking at diversity and people’s propensity to trust. One aspect of this is how open people are. Do they tend to walk into a room and start sharing their views and experiences because they feel trusting of the people there? Or do they tend to hold back until they can gauge how trustworthy the group is?</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 28.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Variations in individuals’ propensity to trust each other can create differences between them. So if the guy across the table is unloading all kinds of information and thoughts, you might think: “Why is he doing this? Is he just completely naïve or is he trying to manipulate me?”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Conversely, if someone is holding back until they can see whether people are trustworthy, others might be thinking: “What’s wrong with them? Why aren’t they being helpful with the team?”</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">This lack of initial trust can lead to conflict later on. With low trust levels, people start thinking: “I’m really different from them.” Then they start disliking each other, which leads to a further decline in trust and poor group performance.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">So even on something like personality most groups find it hard to manage diversity.</span></div>
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The danger of factionalism</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Similarly, one of the strengths of diversity – bringing different perspectives – can be a double-edged sword. When people are met with a different type of person they can resort to what’s called “social categorisation”. They label them as a certain kind of person, maybe belonging to a certain group or political party. So while this person’s perspective might be useful in developing a group decision, it can also create resentment, leading to misunderstandings, factions and coalitions. None of this is good for team work.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">So what’s the best way to minimise these kinds of problems and get the best out of a team?</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">1. Build trust and protect it</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It is easy to see the absolutely central role of trust. When there is trust, people can disagree about a task or process without it turning personal. Without trust people tend to interpret things in the worst possible light. So, trust is the gold dust of any team. It can be difficult to achieve, but if you’ve got it, value it and protect it, because it is going to make your ability to deal with group conflict much easier.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">2. Guard against coordination failure</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="padding: 0px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">People talk and operate at cross purposes, even within the same organisation. Someone from the marketing division will talk about a topic, and may even use some of the same words, in a completely different way to someone in operations. We may think we’re talking about the same thing, but it turns out we’re not. I’m talking feet and inches and you’re hearing centimetres and metres. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 28.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Teams with diverse information, perspectives and values are likely to experience these kinds of coordination failures early on. And research shows teams are very good at dividing up work and pulling apart, while being notoriously bad at putting those pieces back together again. </span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Once a coordination problem occurs, team members tend very quickly to start explaining it by looking for people who are different. So, why did this not work? Why are we having problems? It’s not simply that we come from different worlds, it’s because that person looks different, they have different values to me, and it’s obviously their fault that this is not working.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">So the challenge is to create coordination early on, watch out for problems and, if they do come up, avoid finding fault and focus more on how to work together and ensure this coordination failure doesn’t happen again.</span></div>
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">3. Have a clear decision-making process</span></h3>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="padding: 0px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">Clearly the best situation is a cohesive group that agrees with the decision. But in a situation where conflict is high and trust is low there are three options. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 28.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">The best one is qualified consensus: everybody can live with the decision, even if they may not think it is the best. </span></div>
</span><span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Second-best is that the matter is discussed and the team leaders decide. The advantage is that this doesn’t disenfranchise or disconnect any subgroup that perhaps doesn’t like the result. It maintains a relationship between the leader and the individuals so is a better, reasonable wayof going about things.</span></div>
</span><div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">What you should actively avoid is the third option: majority rule. Most people think this works because it is a well-known form of democracy. But it’s associated with really angry people, disenfranchised or disconnected subgroups, and really poor performance.</span></div>
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<h3 style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 2.1rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">4. Be preemptive and pluralistic</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="padding: 0px;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 1.8rem; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">With all these challenges you might well be thinking: “Why bother with teams at all?” And indeed one of the reasons I started studying teams and conflict was because I couldn’t understand how groups of really great people can come together and make silly decisions. But most of it revolves around how they manage conflict, or in many cases how they don’t manage conflict. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 28.8px;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">The more aware you can be of thinking about what kind of issues might come up, and how to work together to solve those problems, the better.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;"><b><span style="font-size: x-small;">London Business Review</span></b></span></div>
</span></span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-37385133708379362352016-05-16T11:13:00.001-03:002016-05-16T11:13:30.829-03:00Start-Ups: Growth Engines of the Middle East<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6cUhSu3lkNMKYI-6if3DkIhs_vrwiOM8klMSScFOHYCG7G4sHc-MQSu-4fT2tj7Pf_6hswwYBPMYqAR2ZHdDIeJCDeBx7u8otm5Hx9GVz4uY9nmvLpZY7xgra8sVyDl72olb5f6zkyI/s1600/sami_mahroum_start-ups_growth_engines_of_the_middle_east.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhp6cUhSu3lkNMKYI-6if3DkIhs_vrwiOM8klMSScFOHYCG7G4sHc-MQSu-4fT2tj7Pf_6hswwYBPMYqAR2ZHdDIeJCDeBx7u8otm5Hx9GVz4uY9nmvLpZY7xgra8sVyDl72olb5f6zkyI/s320/sami_mahroum_start-ups_growth_engines_of_the_middle_east.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The recent <strong>STEP</strong> conference in Dubai – the biggest start-up conference for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region – attracted a lot of buzz. It seemed to indicate that the region’s start-up scene was coming of age. Yet MENA entrepreneurs are still facing serious structural impediments to progress.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The successes of the region’s start-ups should not be underestimated. According to <strong>Wamda</strong>, a regional accelerator platform, more than a dozen start-ups – including Bayt, Careem, MarkaVIP, Namshi, News Group, Propertyfinder, and Wadi.com – now have estimated valuations above $100 million. Souq.com, a 3,000-employee company founded in 2005, is poised to be the region’s first “unicorn,” with a valuation above US$1 billion.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yet the regional environment remains far from conducive to entrepreneurship. Beyond the wars, terrorism, and political turbulence plaguing the Arab world – not to mention the usual challenges facing entrepreneurs outside Silicon Valley, such as lack of adequate risk capital, talent, or infrastructure – is a slew of deep-rooted structural problems.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Checked by a “tribal” business culture</span></strong></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of those problems relates to enterprise demographics. According to <strong>one study</strong>, in 2011, family businesses represented up to 70 percent of the MENA private-sector economy – a higher share than in any other region. This means that a large segment of the business community raises funds, shares equity, and manages operations within small, tight-knit social circles.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The conventional wisdom of drawing on friends, family, and fools for new business endeavors seems to translate in the MENA region as, “If you are not a friend or family, you must be a fool.” While this might help to contain risk, it also fosters a risk-averse business culture. And yet a willingness to take risks is pivotal to innovation and entrepreneurship. Moreover, keeping businesses in the family reduces their disruptive potential, even when they do manage to innovate.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This family-oriented, or “tribal,” business culture is the result of a long history of inefficient, commercial judicial systems, arbitrary nationalisation programmes, and a lack of effective corporate governance. While most countries have made improvements on these fronts, the tribal business tradition remains entrenched, and will take time to dislodge.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But steps can be taken now to help mitigate some of the problems associated with this business culture, such as a lack of availability of adequate risk capital for new entrepreneurs. In Lebanon, for example, the central bank has launched an unprecedented start-up support initiative, <strong>Circular 331</strong>, through which it guarantees up to 75 percent of risk capital, made available by local banks, amounting to up to 3 percent of their assets. Since its launch in 2013, the programme has generated more than US$400 million in risk capital.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A second major hindrance to innovative entrepreneurship in the MENA region lies in the way governments manage their critical role as clients. Through the procurement of goods and services – <strong>comprising</strong> about 10-15 percent of GDP in developed countries and up to 20 percent of GDP in developing countries – governments can serve as important drivers of growth and innovation. Silicon Valley’s genesis and growth, it should be recalled, were propelled by government contracts and procurement.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But in MENA countries, the conditions for doing business with the government – including tendering requirements, payment schedules, and bureaucratic demands – tend to be prohibitive for small firms (10 - 50 employees). With small businesses unable to access the market for public goods and services, they miss out on important opportunities to mature and expand, which limits their capacity to spur broader economic growth and development.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The struggle to find B2B connections</span></strong></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A third major impediment to innovative entrepreneurship in MENA countries relates to the industrial structure. Construction, banking, telecommunications, tourism, and traditional manufacturing represent a significant share of the region’s private-sector economy. Companies in these industries tend to be not only family-owned, but also large in size and heavy in capital investment, and they do not typically <strong>view start-ups</strong> as potential strategic business partners.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All of this implies high barriers to entry for new businesses, which face severely limited opportunities to disrupt, spin off, or even leverage, major industries. Even start-ups that make some initial headway struggle to scale up in the B2B sector. Unsurprisingly, in these major industries, disruptive entrepreneurship and innovation tend to arrive slowly and late. While telecommunications is something of an exception in this sense, even its development is hampered by government regulation.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">MENA start-ups have achieved the most success online, where the large established players did not show early interest, and barriers to entry, in terms of capital investment and market access, are relatively low. Indeed, most of the successful companies in this domain sell directly to consumers and conduct transactions via digital payment services that enable them to avoid transactional barriers such as government procurement regulations and high bank fees.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dynamic growth drivers</span></strong></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The progress that such start-ups have managed to achieve highlights their potential to spearhead innovation and generate economic growth. It should thus serve as a powerful incentive for MENA governments and businesses to change their approach. Specifically, governments should do more to leverage their spending to support new, innovative businesses, while established companies should open up their operations and cooperate with start-ups to scale up innovative activities that can inject dynamism into markets.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Start-ups are proven hubs of innovation and drivers of economic growth, employment, and development. It is time for the MENA countries to make the most of that potential.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>INSEAD Knowledge</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-85671697173747568292016-05-16T11:09:00.004-03:002016-05-16T11:09:35.060-03:00Are You Next for Digital Disruption?<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Have you ever been bitten by a snake? Fortunately this has not happened to me (yet) but it might be a similar experience to what happens you when your business is hit by digital disruption. One minute the reptile is calmly enjoying the sun, the next moment it lunges forward. Before you know it you have received the deadly bite and if you do not administer the antidote as quickly as possible you are finished.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One industry after the next has fallen victim to the digital trap in the last decade. The music industry had the honour of being the first to go, Followed by the travel industry, newspapers and magazines, the retail sector, telecommunications and advertising. With the advent of Uber and Airbnb, the transport and hotel world are now under pressure.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And, if we look at the developments currently in the pipeline, there is significant chance that soon the payment industry (bitcoins, iPay and M-Pesa), television world (Netflix) and even the automotive and logisitcs industries (self-driving cars, drones and warehousing) will be next in line.</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSy2_H17e7fRahEVGhnMAagRcELkmXxeKJy6808iXlJrMsMsYlK9no8qAbVHSBA-TWiqAr6Y7lJka2pw4WXWlpZQ5ZEukQyYzBf-x5a4OQ8ljW42JjhKn4tPzJgVpuen55mtIDHkzpGWs/s1600/next_for_digital_disruption.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSy2_H17e7fRahEVGhnMAagRcELkmXxeKJy6808iXlJrMsMsYlK9no8qAbVHSBA-TWiqAr6Y7lJka2pw4WXWlpZQ5ZEukQyYzBf-x5a4OQ8ljW42JjhKn4tPzJgVpuen55mtIDHkzpGWs/s320/next_for_digital_disruption.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The fact that the digital transformation is gaining ground is no surprise. Ambitious entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley not only dream about building the next global company and becoming millionaires, they are looking to stir up the existing order. They strive to improve the world (in their eyes) by replacing established, bureaucratic and often inefficient practices with services that offer what the client actually wants.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Will your industry be next?</span></strong></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The crucial question facing businesses today is: will my industry be next? If yes, when? At first glance this seems difficult to predict: who could have predicted the advent of Airbnb or Tinder? Whether you will be disrupted, however, does not depend solely on brilliant inventors. In fact the current characteristics of individual industries have a much greater predictive value than the latest developments in Silicon Valley. Three factors in particular increase the chance that disruption will occur. The first being the amount of waste in your industry. This could refer to unused capacity (empty rooms, car seats, freight trucks or containers), time-consuming processes or actual waste.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The second element that you should look at is how much money your industry makes by being opaque. In other words, do clients keep on using a suboptimal product because it is too complex or too difficult to find something better (this may be the case with many investment and insurance products or mobile subscriptions).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finally, you should ask whether your industry forces clients into artificial straight jackets because it better suits your production processes (such as fixed schedules for flying, driving or television watching) or sales processes (selling a standard deal instead of tailor-made offers).</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If the answer to one or more of these questions is yes, then beware – it is certain that disruptive digital innovation will arrive sooner or later with new companies offering your customers more convenient, complete transparency and tailor-made products.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Consumer exposure and complexity</span></strong></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Where you operate in the value chain will influence when it will happen: the closer you are to the end consumer, the more vulnerable you are. A consumer can quickly decide what is best for him, in a business-to-business world, vested interests, ingrained practices and organisational resistance might delay digital disruptions by three to five years.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Strongly regulated industries (such as the financial world) will also be protected longer. Finally: the more complex the product, the stronger the barriers. While these delaying factors won’t prevent the disruption, they will give businesses time to prepare.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One thing is certain: the analogue paradise is over and sooner or later everyone will have to bite the digital bullet.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Beware of snakes.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 15.6px; margin-bottom: 1em; text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">INSEAD Knowledge</span></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-88288826681231998952016-05-12T15:36:00.002-03:002016-05-12T15:36:26.994-03:00The Risks of Brainstorm Negotiating<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigg-Qmj7-bkkoUZnORFQPEF7CC_wfj_vxekhG-e9J1-BUzp7-BehpNUzh-1ydNwsKgiI-APXLrR_NlyyNfJHjZPUm8eSpKfOrE8TG4NXf0GhmNcOI1wPKlNu-7pKbHKv3WaM2S5bojtAI/s1600/horacia_falcao_the_art_of_brainstorm_negotiation.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigg-Qmj7-bkkoUZnORFQPEF7CC_wfj_vxekhG-e9J1-BUzp7-BehpNUzh-1ydNwsKgiI-APXLrR_NlyyNfJHjZPUm8eSpKfOrE8TG4NXf0GhmNcOI1wPKlNu-7pKbHKv3WaM2S5bojtAI/s320/horacia_falcao_the_art_of_brainstorm_negotiation.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many
of those who teach win-win negotiation theory advise negotiators to
brainstorm options to increase creativity and value creation.
Brainstorming can uncover many options for one or more interests by
generating a list contributed by its members without any trace of
judgment or commitment. While brainstorming is a great creativity
tool for groups who are working together, it can be risky if the
members of such a group also have a competitive tension between them,
as in most negotiations.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Brainstorming
can increase the number of options available, improve the spirit of
collaboration among the parties, enhance their potential to find new
value, expand the pie and thus get better outcomes. However,
brainstorming’s effectiveness for enlarging the pie for value
creation purposes is not without risks for the value claiming phase
of the negotiation.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
lack of filters and rapid fire approach of brainstorming could reveal
too much about the parties’ limits or possibilities. As a result,
they may end up giving the counterparty a potential information
advantage when it comes to value claiming (dividing up the pie). The
fact that an idea is brainstormed hints to the counterparty that the
originator of the idea can and probably has the resources to make the
idea happen.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
addition, the counterparty may play the brainstorming strategically
and opportunistically, pretending to collaborate, but playing it safe
and revealing just enough to keep the first party excited to continue
brainstorming and thus revealing more information. Directly or
indirectly, the counterparty may be collecting information that can
be later used to ask for more or to put pressure on the first party
during the value claiming phase.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Careful
what you brainstorm</span></span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
is best, therefore, to separate brainstorming from
evaluation/commitment. This should benefit value creation as it frees
the parties to discuss ideas without having to justify them at every
turn, thus avoiding interruptions in the creative process. This
advice can be broken down into three different negotiation moves that
can make brainstorming valuable to negotiations.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black; line-height: 0.4cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 0.4cm;">1)
Do brainstorm, but do it first, during your preparation –
Brainstorming in front of your counterparty is to completely lower
your defenses. A </span><strong style="line-height: 0.4cm;"><span style="text-decoration: none;">value
negotiator</span></strong><span style="line-height: 0.4cm;">,
positive, but not naïve, should also consider the risk that the
counterparty will not lower their defenses equally and instead will
see this as an opportunity to improve their value claiming position
instead of fully engaging in value creation.</span></span></div>
<ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
</div>
</ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Invite
a colleague or two if you can, and go as wild and as far as you can,
since you will be in a safe environment and thus can come up with any
idea, no matter how borderline or past the border it may sound. Once
that exercise is done, you can then go back to your list and prepare
for the brainstorming during the negotiation with pre-thought ideas
to further stimulate the process. During your preparation, you will
also realise which ideas reveal too much and are thus inappropriate
to the negotiation. It may be possible to tweak some of them so that
they expand the scope of options without revealing disadvantageous
information.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 0.4cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 0.4cm;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">2)
Brainstorm structural options, not numbers – Frame the
brainstorming exercise as an exchange of ideas or options just for
the sake of exploring possibilities, since you may not even be
able to commit to some of the options you share. Make sure that this
understanding and “rule” are clear to the counterparty. The
evaluation or commitment should be set aside for later. Keep
brainstorming to the structure or the framework of the agreement
(structural options), but avoid brainstorming numbers (specific
options) since these are the ones that reveal the extent of your
limits and resources.</span></span></div>
<ol start="2">
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: left;">
</div>
</ol>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">3)
Avoid early judgment or commitment of any kind – For a
brainstorming or any similar option generation process to work, it is
helpful to not have every idea being scrutinised and torn apart
before you move to the next one. The demotivation and internalisation
of the evaluation alone will kill the process. Besides, going from
creation to evaluation and then to creation again is a difficult
mental and emotional transition to make, especially if it is done
repeatedly.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As
a result, the parties will probably find the process too cumbersome
and revolve around a couple of options, avoiding the back-and-forth.
Even if the judgment or evaluation is positive, it will lead the
counterparty to perceive that this is something the counterparty
accepts and thus be understood as a commitment. This is also quite
dangerous, because it pushes the parties to commit to options or
issues in isolation, forgetting that an option is only good if it
fits the other options in a package or system that ultimately makes
sense and brings value to you. </span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So
if someone puts an option on the table and to some extent demands a
response, it may be wise to say: “I will be glad to share my
opinion on it once I see the full picture and all the other possible
options side by side. Why don’t we continue with our process and
see what else we can come up with?” If they insist and you feel
like giving some positive indication, it would be best to commit
tentatively: “This seems like a good idea for now but I can only
tell you if it works or not when I see how it will interact with the
other options. Since we do not know what else is there, let’s park
this one for now and continue our conversation.”</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<br />
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background: #f0f0f0;">Brainstorming
in a negotiation is useful, but it must be done with care. </span><span style="color: black;">Instead
of brainstorming, it could be thought of as brain irrigation, letting
both sides get their feet wet in the value creation process without
being fully soaked by the time it comes to the value claiming stage.</span>
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 0.4cm; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>INSEAD Knowledge</b></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-36674946270564335712016-05-12T15:31:00.004-03:002016-05-12T15:31:46.286-03:00Better Pay or More Flexibility: It Doesn’t Have to Be a Trade-off<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkeSh7K4Y4E8CTFQkfxeSsE5n5RuWTQoVLVDD921By7RFsGsWnIHJ6-6Y9y79snC_YlxceRShCl_F250FQpknEsAbpE05DHCYfU36X9fHtF1Y-ZPWin0qGYmHBDsUEoay7HgZE_dDVVgw/s1600/clock-vise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkeSh7K4Y4E8CTFQkfxeSsE5n5RuWTQoVLVDD921By7RFsGsWnIHJ6-6Y9y79snC_YlxceRShCl_F250FQpknEsAbpE05DHCYfU36X9fHtF1Y-ZPWin0qGYmHBDsUEoay7HgZE_dDVVgw/s400/clock-vise.jpg" width="400" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s
been a couple of decades now that many workers have had the freedom
of greater flexibility: the ability to set hours, to work at home or
patch together a day’s work around the demands of child- or
elder-care. Many of the youngest American workers have never known it
any other way. More than half of employers today offer some variety
of flexible work arrangements.</span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“The
macro trend is toward a greater interest and legitimacy in creating
flexibility or freedom in the where, when and how of work,”
says <span style="text-decoration: none;">Stewart
Friedman</span>,
director of Wharton’s Work/Life Integration Project. “We are
seeing all kinds of innovations in the structure of work that are
[becoming] normative. It’s not unusual for people to have
alternative work arrangements — the extent of variations among
companies is infinite.” The digital revolution is certainly one
reason, he says. “But it’s also a function of an emergent set of
ideas and interests among young people in having a greater sense of
control and meaning through their work.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That
many workers and employers are sorting through the “where, when and
how” of work is a natural consequence of several trends. Technology
allows not just working at home, but also the ability for the boss to
monitor when actual work is happening. Flexibility has become a
logistical necessity; in nearly half of families with two parents
today, both parents work fulltime – a marked increase from 1970.
And many are choosing multi-track careers that mean earning a living
in one job, while finding greater satisfaction moonlighting in
another.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
some jobs sectors, like manufacturing, flexibility is obviously not
always an option. But Wharton management professor <span style="text-decoration: none;">Nancy
Rothbard</span> says
there is reason to believe that job flexibility will be an
increasingly relevant issue for many workers. “My sense is that it
is somewhat a byproduct of the level of education and the types of
jobs that we are creating in this country, and the ability of those
jobs to be amenable to flexibility.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As
flexibility becomes more highly prized, it is a concept moving beyond
the ways the hours of the workday are distributed. Paid parental
leave appears to be gaining support. Unlimited vacation time is
getting its moment in the sun (even if only 1%-2% of companies
actually offer the benefit, according to the Society for Human
Resource Management). Job-sharing, compressed workweeks and fulltime
telecommuting have become common.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
some sectors, like law, are dipping a toe into value-based billing
where time-based billing was long standard. As firms move toward
greater flexibility, they must figure out new ways to assess the
value of their workers’ contributions.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More
flexibility means “defining results in a way that everyone will
understand and accept,” says Friedman. “In some industries it’s
easier than others, and part of the challenge here is in freeing
people up from the demands of simply measuring value according to a
time clock being punched. That’s less and less the model. The most
dyed-in-the-wool idea of employment — a single earner with
two-point-five kids and a wife at home and who is 100% available for
work all the time – that is fading. It’s certainly out there. But
every force you can see is pushing against it.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Overwhelmed
and Out of Control</span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Firms
see good reason to grant workers greater control of their schedules.
Control often means happiness. In one study recently published in
the<em><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-style: normal;">American
Sociological Review</span></span></em>,
data was gathered from about 850 IT workers at a Fortune 500 company.
Half of the employees that were studied worked a traditionally
structured 40- to 50-hour week, while the other half were given
autonomy over where and when they could work. Managers were trained
to focus on results rather than the time clock, and to be more
supportive of employees’ personal lives.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
was no drop in the number of hours worked or the quality of work in
the autonomous group, according to the study, “Does a
Flexibility/Support Organizational Initiative Improve High-Tech
Employees’ Well-Being?” by Phyllis Moen of the University of
Minnesota and six co-authors from other schools. What did change for
those employees with more control over their schedule was this:
reduced burnout, less perceived stress and psychological distress,
and increased job satisfaction.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That
study echoes the findings of an earlier study by Moen that measured
the positive effects of a workplace initiative granting greater
scheduling control in easing work-family conflict.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
expectations of parenthood have changed, says Wharton management
professor <span style="text-decoration: none;">Matthew
Bidwell</span>.
In many situations, “both parents are working, and so that creates
issues where obviously kids get sick, there are endless school
outings, you go read at school – all of those sorts of things where
school is grabbing time during the day. I do think my father never
dreamed of showing up at school during the day to attend absolutely
anything. I don’t, either, but at least I feel guilty about it.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flexibility
has joined any number of other aspects of a company’s bag of
incentives, says Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for
Human Resources. “Anything that employees like helps tie them to an
organization,” he says. “Another way to put it is that if
you treat them better, you don’t have to pay them as much to get
them to work for you – this is the idea of compensating
differentials. It’s the entire package we care about.
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Flextime,
especially practices where employee groups work out schedules to
cover the business needs, are really effective. Not being
willing to use them is like missing out on any other practice that is
effective and saves money, like not using calculators to add up
sums. You can get by doing that, but to what end?”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Squaring
work and home demands generally hits women harder than men. About 40%
of working mothers said that being a parent made it harder for them
to advance in their careers, while only 20% of working fathers said
the same in a recent Pew Research Center report. And so, several
studies show, women over time tend to advance less quickly, make less
money, and are often confronted with a different set of constraints
and factors in plotting out career moves.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Such
was the case for Christine Grant, a professor of chemical and
biomolecular engineering and associate dean of faculty advancement in
engineering of NC State University, when she was asked to consider a
different associate dean post. It could have meant more money, more
prestige and perhaps a faster stepping-stone to becoming dean. But
flexibility meant a lot to her — a benefit she would value even
more later when her mother got sick and came to live with her and her
family. “I’d have to be in the office 9 to 5, would have all of
those meetings, I’d have to be accountable in a different way, and
I don’t think I could do that,” said Grant, an editor and
contributing author to Success Strategies from Women in STEM: A
Portable Mentor.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">She
agonized over the decision for a year, and was eventually able to
continue in her job structure as associate dean that kept the parts
of the job she valued – empowering faculty, mentoring students,
consulting and coaching minority students – while still retaining
her flexibility. “I have had some opportunities where people come
to me and ask about being a dean somewhere, a more structured
position. But that’s just not the way I’m wired in this season of
my career,” she concluded.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even
now, though, she says she struggles with balance. “There is
flexibility, but in that flexibility you have to have some
boundaries, and not all of us manage those boundaries well,
especially when we love what we’re doing. When you love what you’re
doing, you’re going to do it maybe all the time.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That,
of course, is the paradox of flexibility for nearly everyone — the
constant intermingling of work and family life makes many people feel
“overwhelmed and out of control,” as Freidman puts it. “So many
feel they don’t have a sense of control over the conditions of
their lives,” he says. “That is typical now — this sense that
one has to react rapidly to the ever-present demands on your
attention of so many different people who have access to you through
the media through which we are now communicating. That has created a
new kind of demand for a skill in managing boundaries between work
and the other parts of your life that matter – turning it off so
that other people benefit as you benefit yourself.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Bidwell
points out that senior executives have always been expected to be
“on.” What’s changed today is that it is expected of even those
farther down in the organization. “The nice thing about the cell
phone is that, before it, if [there was a] crunch, [employers] asked
you to stick around because they said, ‘We don’t want to be in a
situation where we really need something and can’t reach you.’”
Now you can leave, but you’re never really free, he notes.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In
one study co-authored by Rothbard, it was clear that employees who
wanted – and got – a bright line between work and home were more
satisfied and committed to the firm. In “Managing Multiple Roles:
Work-Family Policies and Individuals’ Desires for Segmentation,”
published in Organization Science in 2005, the authors sampled 460
employees at a large U.S. public university and found that the
presence of on-site child care compelled those workers to visit their
children during the workday. This blurred the line between work and
home for workers who wanted more separation, thereby making them less
committed and satisfied. Workers who had access to flextime and who
wanted more separation between work and home were more satisfied and
committed.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<strong><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which
is Worth More – Money or Flexibility?</span></strong></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Some,
like Grant, at some point face the choice between flexibility and
career advancement. But Rothbard says there is often no reason to
choose. “Does it have to be a trade-off? Sometimes the answer is
yes, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be yes,” she says. “We
often pose these questions and think of them in trade-off terms, and
that can be limiting to us. If you can do something where you’re
very successful, you’re often paid a lot of money, but because you
are successful you are often given a lot of leeway in how you do your
job, and that can be the case in many different professions. The more
successful you are in delivering results, the more benefit of a doubt
people will give you, which may enable you to have flexibility.”
Sometimes a job candidate can negotiate that flexibility as part of
the terms of employment, and sometimes it can be negotiated later as
an employee’s needs – either personal or professional – change.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
other times, a job offer comes along that simply requires sacrifice.
And some are in a position to make sacrifices, while others are not.
“Any time you have any constraints on your willingness to move, it
hurts your ability to progress versus those with no such
constraints,” says Cappelli. “The question is whether that
effect is trivial or not, and that depends how big the constraint is.
If you want to live close to your family, that is going to constrain
your career choices, possibly a lot if you live in a remote area; if
you only want to move to a company more prestigious than where you
are now, it will limit advancement a bit.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Where
flexibility is an option, a lot depends on trust, Rothbard says.
Often a company has a policy that emphasizes flexibility, but how
that policy really plays out is determined at the employee-supervisor
level. “What the research shows is that the quality of the
relationship with the supervisor matters quite a bit,” she notes.
“A lot of times with supervisors, they have certain employees who
just get things done, and when those employees ask for flexibility,
[supervisors] are much more willing to give it to them because they
have trust that that person will deliver.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
solution Grant came up with – negotiating in the parts of the job
that speak to her within a sympathetic structure – is taking on
shape and language in the job-crafting movement. The job-crafting
exercise grants workers the ability to focus on passions, values and
strengths (which collectively define happiness) to actively adjust
their job tasks and the way they interact with others to find greater
meaning in the work. Says Rothbard: “The question is, what’s
really meaningful for me? What am I getting out of my job? And then
trying to figure out a way to reconfigure your job so you get more of
that.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Finding
meaning in, and bringing order to, work takes a spirit of
experimentation and creativity explicitly negotiated between the
worker and employer, says Friedman. “It starts with having an
appreciation for what matters to you that goes beyond what most
people normally think about. What are your values? What is your
vision of the world that you are trying to create? What matters to
you? It takes some effort to develop that. Most people are simply
reacting to an opportunity. You need to have some kind of compass.</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
second piece is actively refining and reassessing what the various
constituents who matter most to you want. What do they expect from
you? They often expect less from you than what you think they expect
from you. What you realize is that there really is less pressure on
you than you’re putting on yourself. This is true with most
ambitious people.”</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">From
this exercise, Friedman says, flow boundaries – “things like
saying no, or saying to the boss that after 2 p.m. on Tuesdays I will
go off-line. I believe at the end of a month of doing that you are
going to see results that are positive.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Grant
says that configuring her job is something that promises to change.
Friedman agrees. “What I would suggest is that there is no
prediction of how life will unfold,” he says. “For some people in
their mid-30s, they want to go full-bore into work, and others want
to check out. It’s different for everybody. My expectation for how
we are evolving is in variegated ways. It’s about collaborating in
such a way that enables people to have the freedom to control the
where, when and how they get things done, and doing so in a way
that’s good for them and good for the collective.”</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Knowledge@Wharton</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-70504441965030400072016-05-12T15:26:00.001-03:002016-05-12T15:26:43.942-03:00Most Employees Feel Authentic at Work, but It Can Take a While<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivS0QOkQma-JBTDETlI0KoSxpMT23QpWDD7t2B6L6SDNC3r8urEoRP1PALYEuQaLrjzkrziN6oWH8fbZ35JTwcvE9stqISKBlxPGbUHf6U_1tclhCgiSJLPQe1WzojOFxNkdieZTgBNaE/s1600/may16-11-470202278-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivS0QOkQma-JBTDETlI0KoSxpMT23QpWDD7t2B6L6SDNC3r8urEoRP1PALYEuQaLrjzkrziN6oWH8fbZ35JTwcvE9stqISKBlxPGbUHf6U_1tclhCgiSJLPQe1WzojOFxNkdieZTgBNaE/s320/may16-11-470202278-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most
of us engage in self-presentation in the workplace at least
occasionally. We actively manage our behavior, emotions, or the way
we are perceived by coworkers and bosses. We do it for a variety of
reasons: Some people feel they cannot freely express emotion at
work<em>,</em> others
believe they cannot share their sense of humor, and still others feel
they must “have it all together” or risk hurting their reputation
or credibility.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Recently,
researchers have begun to explore the implications for authenticity
in the workplace. One <span style="text-decoration: none;">study</span> found
that the greater employees’ feelings of authenticity are, the
greater their job satisfaction, engagement, and self-reported
performance. We suggest, then, that the crucial point is finding a
balance so that we can be true to ourselves while flourishing and
finding success within the company.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To
expand on this work, <span style="text-decoration: none;">Plasticity
Labs</span> partnered
with Dr. Anne Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier
University. We used a combination of quantitative and qualitative
methods to explore the benefits of authenticity, how the workplace
environment and norms contribute to authenticity, and the underlying
mechanisms linking authenticity and workplace well-being. Two hundred
and thirteen employees completed an online survey on authenticity at
work, workplace characteristics (e.g., dress code), and workplace
sentiment (job satisfaction, engagement, sense of community, etc.).
The survey asked participants to respond to statements such as “My
workplace environment encourages all employees to express who they
really are,” “When I’m at work, I don’t show the ‘the real
me,'” and “I would like my coworkers to show more of their true
selves at work.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Overall,
72% of people said they are authentic at work, taking an average
of two to three months to show their true selves. Of this group, 60%
were authentic by the three-month mark, and 22% by nine months. For
9% of respondents it took between 10–12 months for them to
feel comfortable being authentic. Another 9% reported that it
took more than one year to share their true selves at work. Of
course, employees varied in the <em>extent </em>to
which they showed their true selves — those who said it took longer
to reveal who they really are continued to report sharing less of
their true selves even after more time had passed.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Next, we
investigated whether workplace norms, such as dress code, matter for
authenticity. We compared employees who were required to follow a
dress code at work to employees who were not. We found that employees
who were unconstrained by dress code rules felt more authentic, felt
freer to express their true selves, and believed more strongly that
authenticity was important at work.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We also
explored the hypothesis that employees who reported being authentic
would have a more positive workplace experience. Overall, findings
indicated that authentic employees fared better than inauthentic
employees, reporting significantly higher job satisfaction and
engagement, greater happiness at work, stronger sense of community,
more inspiration, and lower job stress. Sharing one’s true self at
work, then, is related to employees’ experience at work: The more
of themselves that people shared with others, the better their
workplace experience.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although
results show a clear link between authenticity and well-being, it
doesn’t tell us what employees really think about the value of
authenticity. To answer this question, we asked employees
what <em>they</em> thought
about how authenticity affects workplace culture. Of the employees
who reported being authentic, the vast majority (80%) believed that
it improves the workplace. The comments we collected from them
centered on a few key themes: Being authentic improves productivity,
increases performance and success, and allows employees to exert less
energy and time censoring or hiding themselves. Indeed, employees
often linked these themes: Spending less time and energy on
self-monitoring freed up more time and energy for focusing on the
task at hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Employees
also believed that being genuine creates stronger and better
relationships with clients and coworkers because of a greater
understanding of one another and higher levels of trust. Finally,
they said that authenticity facilitates a more positive working
environment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Although
most people believed that authenticity boosts productivity and
creates a positive work environment, a small subset of employees
(10%) believed that some effects of showing their true selves were
detrimental. The individuals reported that this was primarily due to
personality clashes or to characteristics (such as sarcasm or
assertiveness) that were not appreciated or were misinterpreted by
others.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Among
employees who said they weren’t being authentic at work, many seem
to have calculated the costs and benefits of authenticity in their
workplace. Although 30% felt that authenticity would make their
workplace better, almost two-thirds (64%) felt that being their true
selves would make the workplace environment worse. Individuals who
felt that it was better to hide their true selves pointed to work
environments where differences are not appreciated, conformity
is emphasized, and acknowledging stress or emotion is frowned
upon. To be sure, employees occasionally noted how authenticity could
go too far if it gave people license to express disrespectful or
socially inappropriate inclinations. However, the majority of
instances in which being authentic was not appreciated occurred when
employees felt that authenticity was <em>not
valued</em> at
work, highlighting the importance of creating a welcoming,
open-minded workplace environment.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The benefits
of authenticity are clear, highlighting the importance of creating
workplaces that welcome authenticity. And in addition to our findings
above, we also found that a full 75% of employees said they wanted
their coworkers to share more about their true selves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What steps
can employers take to create a space in which employees feel safe to
be authentic? One approach is to encourage authenticity among
leaders. Authentic leaders are genuine and honest, admit error, and
stay true to what they believe. When leaders are true to themselves
and admit their mistakes or failures, it gives others permission to
do the same, changing the norms of the workplace.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
it is equally important that leaders welcome authenticity from their
employees. Creating an open-minded, accepting environment in which
differences in perspective and opinions are encouraged will set the
foundation for an authentic workplace. Employees should be encouraged
to express themselves and not simply follow the crowd, because
differences in viewpoints often lead to innovative, novel solutions.
</span></div>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our research
has also found that being true to one’s self empowers individuals
in the workplace, facilitating feelings of control and mastery, which
then lead to greater job satisfaction and happiness. This is a
crucial point because a sense of empowerment is essential to job
satisfaction and engagement. If leaders promote authenticity in the
workplace, feelings of empowerment among employees at all levels can
be enhanced.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
<div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 190%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Companies
are often advised to look for the right “fit” when hiring new
employees, but people can find it very difficult to be authentic when
they feel that they do not “fit” with their coworkers because of
different personalities, beliefs, attitudes, or opinions. While
differences between people can stimulate progress and innovation,
large discrepancies could lead some employees to put on a work
persona. This is a point that will need to be disentangled through
additional research — how much difference among people is too
much?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of
course, encouraging authenticity does not imply rigid adherence to a
single “true self.” People are multidimensional: There can be
variations in the way people express themselves at home and at work,
yet both expressions may be consistent with their true selves. As
employees, we should be asking ourselves not whether we express our
true selves in the <em>exact
same ways</em> at
home and work but rather whether our self-expressions at <em>both </em>home
and work reflect who we really are.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Harvard Business Review</b></div>
</span>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-86819631740287625442016-05-12T15:20:00.002-03:002016-05-12T15:20:45.315-03:00Corporate Inequality Is the Defining Fact of Business Today<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPG7XUWVPlmcZOeoicG-VLdSya_7_gu5EpY0oGf-BfNLxIlJ-xxKKMgps2qju6JWaRmP4hAmLj0wQQfsQIe_jAZezvqESp2jKZ1oDIcdojq8u9FM-KkBZXfH-vtHHk-r-vLmj51f13Iag/s1600/may16-11-147949378-850x478.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPG7XUWVPlmcZOeoicG-VLdSya_7_gu5EpY0oGf-BfNLxIlJ-xxKKMgps2qju6JWaRmP4hAmLj0wQQfsQIe_jAZezvqESp2jKZ1oDIcdojq8u9FM-KkBZXfH-vtHHk-r-vLmj51f13Iag/s320/may16-11-147949378-850x478.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Perhaps the
most overlooked aspect of economic inequality has been the role that
firms play in it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
best-performing companies seem to be pulling away from the rest,
according to a growing body of research, and that fact explains a
large part of the growth in inequality between individuals. The
result, at least in developed nations, is a highly unequal corporate
landscape, where some firms are incredibly productive and the amount
of money a person makes is tied to the company they work for, not
just the job that they do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are
several competing explanations for why this is happening, and there’s
plenty we still don’t know. Nonetheless, it is not a stretch to say
that if you want to understand competition today, you have to think
about inequality. And if you care about addressing inequality, you
have to consider why companies rise and fall.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Profits
Are High, but Not for Everyone</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s
true that <span style="text-decoration: none;">corporate
profits are at or near all-time highs in the U.S.</span>,
a fact that hasn’t escaped scrutiny on the campaign trail. But
that’s a bit like saying the defining feature of American economic
life is high incomes. By ignoring the distribution, that statistic
masks a more important trend: As the McKinsey Global Institute
has <span style="text-decoration: none;">documented</span>,
variance in corporate earnings has increased substantially as well.
“Not only are profits rising,” write the authors of the McKinsey
report, “but in some industries, the leading firms are winning
bigger than ever before.”</span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYwNtlfZ97TWlC4jd5Qs3hDTj0jVjmBaJaUVj-WG8jG3lUXpjuR1qP1nclMmd1osMjxk2W1-QOxzIdo7GYmQ-pkMSCbs3lYoWoOSY7yZ_WFLpVS-QRNeZv-1JcOQkv4pq4_cwxycqCFE/s1600/R1510B_BIG_VOLATILITY.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCYwNtlfZ97TWlC4jd5Qs3hDTj0jVjmBaJaUVj-WG8jG3lUXpjuR1qP1nclMmd1osMjxk2W1-QOxzIdo7GYmQ-pkMSCbs3lYoWoOSY7yZ_WFLpVS-QRNeZv-1JcOQkv4pq4_cwxycqCFE/s640/R1510B_BIG_VOLATILITY.png" width="364" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Researchers
at the OECD <span style="text-decoration: none;">documented
something similar</span>,
looking at firms’ productivity in 23 of the organization’s member
countries. Since 2000 productivity growth at the most productive
“frontier” firms has sharply outpaced the average.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And this
growing productivity gap shows up within industries, not just between
them. “This is not happening just in retail, or in IT-producing
sectors,” said Chiara Criscuolo, an OECD economist and coauthor of
the report. “It’s happening a bit across the board.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“Some
firms clearly ‘get it’ and others don’t,” Criscuolo <span style="text-decoration: none;">wrote
on HBR.org</span> earlier
this year, “and the divide between the two groups is growing over
time.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Evidence
of this trend toward greater corporate inequality has been
trickling in for a while now. In 2008 Andrew McAfee and Erik
Brynjolfsson <span style="text-decoration: none;">wrote
about their research</span>on
U.S. public companies from the 1960s up to 2005 in HBR: “Since the
mid-1990s, a new competitive dynamic has emerged — greater gaps
between the leaders and laggards in an industry, more concentrated
and winner-take-all markets, and more churn among rivals in a
sector.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Similarly,
in 2007 Giulia Faggio and John Van Reenen of the London School of
Economics and Kjell G. Salvanes of the Norwegian School of Economics
and Business Administration reported that
the productivity gap between firms had risen in the UK between 1984
and 2001, and that this phenomenon was linked to income inequality.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Two things
happened in the intervening years. First, debate has proliferated
over the causes of this corporate inequality. Second, researchers
have documented at length why it matters and why everyone, not just
CEOs, should care.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Where
You Work Increasingly Predicts Your Pay</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Most people
are used to thinking about inequality as the pay gap between a CEO
and an administrative assistant, or a software developer and a
manufacturing worker. That gap definitely matters, but it actually
hasn’t changed all that much.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Over
the past few years several academic studies have documented that the
majority of the increase in income inequality in the U.S. and
elsewhere is <span style="text-decoration: none;">driven
by differences in how well different firms pay.</span> In
other words, the increase in inequality is about the gap in wages
between companies, not within them.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That pay gap
seems to be linked to rising inequality in corporate performance. But
there are two explanations of why it is happening.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It
could be that different companies are paying more generously or less
generously for the exact same sort of work. For an extreme example,
take Chobani. In April the yogurt company’s CEO decided to
reward full-time employees by giving them stock, based on tenure and
other factors, amounting to an <span style="text-decoration: none;">average
of $150,000</span> each.
If you’re, say, an HR manager who happened to take a job at Chobani
early on, your compensation suddenly looks considerably better than
many of your peers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It could
also be that more-productive, higher-paying companies are hiring
better workers. Engineers at Google might be getting paid more than
engineers elsewhere because they’re better engineers. If these
highly sought-after workers are increasingly clustered at top
companies, that could explain the rising pay gap between firms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It’s safe
to say that a significant part of the growing gap in how well
different firms pay can be attributed to the latter “talent
sorting” effect — but exactly how much continues to be
debated.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Using
data from Portugal, David Card of Berkeley and his coauthors estimate
that differences between employees <span style="text-decoration: none;">explains
40%</span> of
the between-firm wage gap. Card finds <span style="text-decoration: none;">evidence</span> of
worker sorting in Germany as well. Work by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford
finds an even larger role: His analysis suggests that this worker
sorting effect can explain the bulk of the increase of inequality in
the U.S., <span style="text-decoration: none;">with
the exception of the rise of the 1%.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“<span style="font-size: small;">Back
in the 1980s, college graduates and low-skilled people would be in
every firm,” said Bloom. Today, much like our neighborhoods,
companies seem to be more segregated by education and skill.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This
segregation isn’t only about hard skills like coding, argues
Bloom, <span style="text-decoration: none;">pointing
to a paper</span> by
Christina Håkanson of the Swedish National Bank and her colleagues.
Workers are sorting by soft skills, too, as the top-performing firms
vacuum up the most-desirable workers. As Bloom puts it, “Nice,
fun, polite people are sorting into some firms, and assholes are
sorting into others.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The human
capital measures in these studies have their limits — basically,
they infer a worker’s value from how much that worker gets paid
above or below what’s typical at the company they work for. This
approach has many advantages, but the studies that employ it can’t
say for sure that what they’re measuring is skill. At a minimum,
the workers who typically get paid more seem to be working together
more than in the past. The experts I spoke to believe skill is a big
part of that story.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bottom line:
Inequality among individuals is deeply intertwined with the fates of
companies, whether through hiring, generosity, or some mix of both.
So long as top-performing companies continue to surge ahead, we can
expect income inequality to get worse.</span></div>
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<strong style="line-height: 100%;">There’s
Too Much Competition</strong></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So why did
corporate performance become more unequal in the first place?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Experts have
more or less narrowed it down to two theories: Firms have been
exposed to increasingly intense winner-take-all competition, or
leading firms have cemented their market power and are earning fat
profits without much threat of competition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The
competition story revolves around digital technology. The McKinsey
Global Institute surveyed the firm’s clients about their
digital investments and adoption, concluding that <span style="text-decoration: none;">the
most digital companies are leaving the rest behind</span>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">As
McKinsey’s researchers <span style="text-decoration: none;">write
in their report</span>:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>The most
digitized sectors in the U.S. economy — especially
software-intensive sectors such as media, professional services, and
finance — tend to be highly profitable as well. Over the past 20
years, their average profit margins have grown two to three times as
much as those in less digitized sectors. Even within these sectors,
the margin spreads between the top-performing companies and the
lowest performers are two to four times as large as in non-digitized
sectors. In other words, the most digital sectors are developing a
winner-take-all dynamic.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Faggio and
his colleagues saw evidence for this in their UK data as well. They
found that IT investment could “essentially account for all of the
increase in productivity [inequality].”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">McAfee and
Brynjolfsson report something similar in their 2008 HBR article. To
explain it, they use the example of CVS rolling out a change to its
prescription fulfillment process using software:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>Before the
advent of enterprise IT, a successful innovation by a manager at one
store could lead to dominance in that manager’s local market. But
because no firm had a monopoly on good managers, other firms might
win the competitive battle in other local markets, reflecting the
relative talent at these other locations. Sharing and replication of
innovations (via analog technologies like corporate memos, procedures
manuals, and training sessions) would be relatively slow and
imperfect, and overall market share would change little from year to
year.</i></span></blockquote>
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</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i>With the
advent of enterprise IT, however, not just CVS, but its competitors
have the option to deploy technology to improve their processes. Some
may not exercise this option because they don’t believe in the
power of IT. Others will try and fail. Some will succeed, and
effective innovations will spread rapidly. The firm with the best
processes will win in most or all markets.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Globalized
competition may also be playing a role. Exporters tend to pay better
than other firms, when all else is equal. And sure enough, there is
research connecting trade to both the <span style="text-decoration: none;">productivity</span> and <span style="text-decoration: none;">wage
gaps</span> between
firms. “The chance of winning the extra prize of exporting induces
firms to bet on bigger innovation projects with more-spread-out
outcomes,” explains <span style="text-decoration: none;">Alessandra
Bonfiglioli</span> of
Universitat Pompeu Fabra and her colleagues in recent research.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Bloom thinks
outsourcing is a cause as well. “Companies are restructuring from
an industry focus to an occupational focus,” he told me. “Think
of General Electric.” The company outsources catering and some of
its IT, yet its headcount hasn’t been shrinking. Instead, Bloom
says, GE has specialized in engineering and coding.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Essentially,
Bloom believes companies have been “reassembling” over the past
couple of decades <span style="text-decoration: none;">based
around their core competencies</span>,
which is why workers have been increasingly segregated by skill.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There’s
Too Little Competition</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Unless
of course that’s not it at all. Last year Jason Furman, chair of
the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Peter Orszag of
Citi and Brookings <span style="text-decoration: none;">published
a discussion paper</span> that
painted the inequality between firms in darker terms.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Their focus
is on economic “rents,” wasteful profits above and beyond what
firms should make in a competitive market. If a single firm dominates
an industry, for example, it’s able to charge extra for its
products. Economists refer to those extra profits as rents, and
Furman and Orszag worry that those rents are becoming more common.
They suggest that industry consolidation could be a cause.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“<span style="font-size: small;">To
the extent industries look more like oligopolies than perfectly
competitive markets, they will generate economic rents,” Furman and
Orszag write. An “uptick in merger and acquisition activity”
could be creating such a dynamic. They also cite the possible role of
lobbying and regulations like occupational licensing that might limit
competition, thereby increasing profits for certain firms or
industries.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Another
piece of evidence for the “lack of competition” theory is
the <span style="text-decoration: none;">decline
of startups in the U.S.</span> as
well as <span style="text-decoration: none;">in
most developed countries</span>.
Recent <span style="text-decoration: none;">work</span> has
found that although the number of high-potential startups in the U.S.
has accelerated, these firms are still somehow less likely to grow or
reach a significant “exit.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Finally,
Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research
has <span style="text-decoration: none;">suggested</span> that
patents and copyright law are skewing corporate returns, a
possibility Criscuolo mentioned to me as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“One
problem with American capitalism has been overlooked: a corrosive
lack of competition,” <span style="text-decoration: none;">wrote
The Economist in March</span>,
summing up these concerns. “America is meant to be a temple of free
enterprise. It isn’t.”</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Mr.
Schumpeter Goes to Washington</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Of course,
competition and concentration can sometimes go hand in hand.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">“<span style="font-size: small;">One
might think winner-take-all goes with one winner staying there, but
it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Brynjolfsson. “You win,
and when you win, you win big. But someone else is waiting in the
wings.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">That’s
the <span style="text-decoration: none;">Schumpeterian</span> model
of competition, where firms compete for brief stints as monopolists,
and when they’re on top, they’re more productive and profitable
than their competitors. Brynjolfsson believes that digital technology
makes this model of competition more common, for the reasons outlined
in the CVS example.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But there’s
a pessimistic synthesis between the competition and concentration
stories. Perhaps the gap between firms starts out as the
inevitable result of competition. Firms concentrate on what they’re
good at, adopt new technology, and deliver products and services more
efficiently. Having reached those heights, they then cement their
status through lobbying or M&A. “Once those firms get
there, it may be that they can actually draw up the drawbridge,”
said Van Reenen. Maybe competition creates corporate inequality. But
maybe it’s lack of competition that preserves it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Harvard Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-77941365435125560192016-05-04T14:48:00.000-03:002016-05-04T14:48:04.304-03:004 ways to lead the new breed of talent<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSclls_hREnI_NyU_9p3oU57OvfheOkm8U74r2JmRpqf-BDOJsw9p_QlIkAIMCBKyCtBHq4RlQeHbwoBe3KSMmTy7MAEhSCzmz5Om194YDeQ1UXhsLiDlnZ9yFv2oO3DT-ub67aETZn-M/s1600/NewBreedOfTalent482x271.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSclls_hREnI_NyU_9p3oU57OvfheOkm8U74r2JmRpqf-BDOJsw9p_QlIkAIMCBKyCtBHq4RlQeHbwoBe3KSMmTy7MAEhSCzmz5Om194YDeQ1UXhsLiDlnZ9yFv2oO3DT-ub67aETZn-M/s320/NewBreedOfTalent482x271.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">What if the future were to be based on facts instead of imagination? There’s a mappable pattern emerging about “people who work”, says Tammy Erickson, Adjunct Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Notice her choice of phrase. Not employees, but people who work. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">This is how you must think about the people who work for you and your company, now and in the future. “We need to explore the idea of HR becoming an on-demand agency,” she says. Of course, ‘agency’ means more than one thing. First: the capacity for individuals to act independently and make their own free choice. Second: an organisation set up to serve others. “Used as a noun, I think it accurately describes what we're seeing in the workforce and what we’re asking of HR as a function,” says Erickson.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">There are four components that underpin a successful agency on-demand, she says. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">1. Master – Understand how the business works. Break work into tasks and recognise how the business creates value</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">2. Minister – Offer a wide variety of work arrangements and lead a portfolio of individuals</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">3. Market – Create and execute a powerful, consistent brand and maintain long-term relationships with the right people</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">4. Measure – Identify relevant metrics and make the most of technology. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">More on the four Ms after you’ve explored how work is changing and why as a leader, it matters to you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">From personnel, to human resources, to human capital</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">According to a <span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">PwC</span> report in 2014, while 93% of CEOs said they recognised they needed to change their talent strategy, 61% hadn’t taken the first step, because they weren’t sure how. In 2013, according to <span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">this report</span> by Aberdeen Group, only 11% of HR leaders said they had a strategic workforce planning process and just 23% had planned for a future workforce. Why is the planning part going wrong? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The nature of the work being done today isn’t the same as it was even 10 years ago. Work is becoming knowledge-based, says Erickson. “Workers will need to leverage both human and machine-based intelligence effectively – detecting patterns, providing insights or innovating new capabilities,” Erickson <span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">writes here</span>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As the nature of the work changes, so too does the worker. As a leader, you need to nurture relationships with your workers, as well as “those who buy” says Erickson. “Workforce characteristics are shifting from people eager to be a member of an institution, and a homogenous workforce wanting to sign up and stay for life, to a much shorter work week, a push for flexibility and those who are increasingly skilled.” Most leaders are comfortable with asking: ‘How do I create long term brand loyalty with my consumers?’ But are you prepared to ask the same of your staff? Erickson says you need to ask: ‘How do I help my organisation become the preferred option. How do I get people to <span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">choose working here</span>?’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Free agent nation</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the future, you’re more likely to lead individuals who are diverse, have diverse needs and want to be treated as such, says Erickson. That’s why creating a switched on agency is so important. How do you lead the new effort? With the four Ms. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">1. Master </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">“If I were to pick simply one thing that’ll have the biggest impact on improving organisational productivity going forward, it would be the ability to break work into tasks,” she says. After that, she adds, the most important tasks must be identified. By doing so, your most creative workers won’t fall into the trap of spending 70% of their time on data entry. And your highly skilled knowledge workers won’t spend their time on spreadsheet analysis. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“Optimise their time”, says Erickson.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“The more you can think about a task as opposed to a broad role, the better.” It’s certainly not about job title or hierarchy. “Think less about this person being the vice president of marketing and think of them instead as being responsible for launching a new product this year. Go one step further and break the launch of the product down into specific sub tasks and work out which are dependent on others, and how.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">Erickson takes Walt Disney World as an example from Based on Beyond HR by John W. Boudreau and Pete Ramstad. “Try and pinpoint what is most critical to the theme park’s success,” she provokes. "The answer is clearly Mickey Mouse.” But, she says, it’s also the people who design the rides, the engineers who make the rides work and the people who clean up the ice creams off the floor. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“Disney's positioning is about being the happiest place on the planet. So how do they maximise customer delight? They make sure that every moment is individually delightful and quickly minimise any defects. Who’s responsible for that? The designer, ride engineer, or Mickey Mouse?</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“In fact, it's none of them. It's really the street sweeper dressed as a Disney character that stops to talk to the guests and creates delightful encounters. The character that carries chalk in his/her pocket and draws pictures on the street for children and fixes problems before they occur.” </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">This agile way of working is only achievable when tasks are defined and shared, she says and when workers aren’t limited to their job titles. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">2. Minister</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">Now you’re a ‘task master’, you need to go about ministering to individuals in different work settings. “It won’t just be employ-based workers,” says Erickson. “But contractors, consultants and experts you can tap for short periods of time, and in a variety of settings: flexible, reduced, job-sharing, flexible and decelerating roles.” </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">From outsourced contractors to full-time workers, as a leader, it’s your job to tap what you need, when demand calls for it. You need to imagine a workforce made up of people working in ways to suit their goals as well as your organisation. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“Some might argue that it's becoming too complex for a ‘line manager’ to deal with. It takes too much skill. HR will become similar to a talent agency in the film industry. It will be responsible for a portfolio of individuals, matching people to tasks, orchestrating their development, and importantly, maintaining relationships with people in the long term, through periods of non-work,” she says. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">But if HR becomes a talent agency what happens to the managers? </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“Traditional managers don't go away; they're still a critical role. They need to set the direction, directing the process, coaching the team and integrate separately produced pieces of the puzzle.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">So the line manager plays a critical role but it's the role of integrating tasks not the role of managing a complex portfolio of people. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">3. Market</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">The third role of the new agency function is to market, says Erickson. This is about future-proofing your organisation with the right talent. You don’t have to have a relationship with everyone.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">The classic definition of customer-focused marketing lends itself here, she explains: “’Marketing consists of the strategies and tactics used to identify, create and maintain, satisfying relationships with customers that result in value for both parties.’ I think that’s spot on here. You only need to substitute the word ‘customers’ with ‘people who work’.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“If a strong brand is created by fulfilling a promise over and over again, that’s exactly what you’ve got to do.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">What commands Loyalty Beyond Reason™ she asks? A brand of course. People act on emotion. So it’s only when you lead your organisation to nurture an emotional connection and create experiences for both current workers and people you want to attract as workers, that you’ll develop your talent pool.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“I’ve found the companies that do well create stories rather than slogans. It's not about saying, ‘We’re collaborative’. It's about making people comfortable in their skin.”</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">It’s your job to reinforce the promise and values so there's no disconnect, she says. Does your organisation have authenticity running through it like a stick of rock? </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“An essential role of this agency function is to be architects of goose-bump experiences and guardians of the employee experience. It's about creating powerful, differentiating experiences, it's about customising and delivering them in ways that are equal, even better, than the customer experiences you offer.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">4. Measure </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 1.8rem;">This final component, measure, comes down to the enduring question: if you don’t measure what you do, how do you know you’re doing it right? </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“Data has allowed organisations to move away from simple attrition rates or cost to hire, to more sophisticated predictive analytics more relevant to the future of our workforce.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“If you go back to the challenge of mastering pivotal tasks, you could look to measure the homogeneity of task requirements – the extent to which individuals feel that work requires skills they have. By asking people how much time they spend on tasks that fulfil them and use their full skillset will empower you to measure and break down tasks into relevant sub-components,” she says.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">This, argues Erickson, is an opportunity to improve efficiency by task reallocation and as well as measuring efficiently. Remember the creative worker who was forced to spend their time on data entry? Now they can spend 80% of their time writing, designing or innovating. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“In the minister component, one of the most important metrics is something called ‘fit to task’: understanding who has the capabilities to take on which task”, she says. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">And in the market component, of course, you can measure employment brand by asking people to tell you what they think it would mean to work in your organisation before they start and see how close it comes to what you’re trying to market. </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">“So these are the key components,” she says. Now what? </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">To shift your organisation, and the way you lead it, Erickson suggests you make a start here: </span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 1.8rem;">• Identify discrete tasks. “Don’t try doing anything across the organisation, but choose a focused task-based idea.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">• Then, articulate the principles of your employment brand. “You need to make three to five elements of your brand distinctive, unique and powerful.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">• Build a portfolio of current and future talent to lead. “Think about creative ways to stay in touch with individuals, even when they're not technically working for you, to maintain your portfolio.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>London Business Review</b></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8409129017519801842.post-32338743137307532342016-05-04T14:45:00.001-03:002016-05-04T14:45:22.389-03:00Five reasons why leaders fail<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsGkAuT4LRJW36g2tFXKTV0lmQpjPjbHs0UCFUdJbCyXzCo_gJNGUsL7NZcRL-iwwAj3epzIOKnuZ5mIMDeIt_PCScTe25kylvJAAu8xPSX-1G0wAbQd0KMqDeL4CkArSYeArqeweGIw/s1600/flawed-leaders.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsGkAuT4LRJW36g2tFXKTV0lmQpjPjbHs0UCFUdJbCyXzCo_gJNGUsL7NZcRL-iwwAj3epzIOKnuZ5mIMDeIt_PCScTe25kylvJAAu8xPSX-1G0wAbQd0KMqDeL4CkArSYeArqeweGIw/s320/flawed-leaders.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Indeed,
one might be tempted to wonder if we can just skip the problem
altogether and go leaderless. We see this in families, sports clubs,
music groups, and even in business. Several companies such as the
makers of Gore-Tex have pioneered self-managing teams with fluid
sharing of responsibility, and the minimal or episodic involvement of
leaders. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
on the other hand, history also seems to tell us that bad leaders are
sometimes preferable to no leaders. Look at how the Arab Spring
removal of despots too often left a legacy of factional anarchy.
Might we have an irrational, biologically-based yearning for people
to look up to, almost regardless of their misdeeds and flaws? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These
are among the themes that were covered in a round table discussion
hosted by the Leadership Institute at London Business School. The
exchange, which I had the pleasure of leading, featured male and
female leaders from government, industry, sports, finance, services,
education and commerce. I was supported in leading the
conversation by my colleague Vyla Rollins, the Executive Director of
the Leadership Institute, who is also a Programme Director of Custom
Executive Educational Programmes and Executive Coach at LBS.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">A
starting point for the group was the need to avoid equating leaders
with leadership. Leadership evolved in social species as a way of
serving the needs of the group, helping it to adapt to the
environment by co-ordinating and directing human effort. Among
wolves, the alpha helps the pack to work coherently and function. It
is the same for us humans. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leadership
has to be adaptive. As the Nicholson Leadership Formula says,
effectiveness involves being the right person, at the right time and
place, doing the right thing. This means leadership can take myriad
forms for a multitude of situations, and leaders fail when their
model, insights or relationships are wrong.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
following five types of failure are commonplace:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">1. The
pathological leader </span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
is a disturbing tendency for us to elevate narcissists, bullies and
psychopaths to lead us. Perhaps they make us feel safe for a while,
but ultimately people like Robert Maxwell, Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap
and political despots through history leave us a tattered legacy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">2. The
inflexible leader</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
world does not stand still, and neither can leaders. Business history
is littered with the wreckage of firms whose leaders failed to adapt
their style and strategy to changing times, such as Kodak or Lehman
Brothers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">3. The
over-reaching leader</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">There
have been leaders who have tried to bend the world to their will –
stretching their vision to breaking point. There have been plenty of
these in political history, from Napoleon to Margaret Thatcher.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">4. The lopsided
leader</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
is OK for leaders to have an unbalanced portfolio of skills, but only
if they have re-balancing co-leaders and teams. Those who don’t
fail to meet critical challenges of the role, such as Fred Goodwin of
RBS, who was all operations and no strategy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">5. The unlucky
leader</span></h3>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Louis
Pasteur said: “Chance favours the prepared mind”, and leaders
have to be able to ride their luck. The financial crisis destroyed
many firms, but good leaders hedge against extreme circumstances. Yet
even good men and women can go to the wall if the sky falls in on
their business.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Discussion
turned to the issue of leadership, competence and motivation. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These
can be conceived as the following simple 2x2 formula:</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLGarjJzry92szzfa0NwXiI0oyLjLJjtxRxwltyAIM8BxMn3Vv9k5eZkQDsh8cckXAvK_EHngSTNnI4bctqwonfRbqAIA8gBG4iT2vmDowqBb_iI6fKagziC9JdCwDfNsehGAfYZnSy80/s1600/sds.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="204" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLGarjJzry92szzfa0NwXiI0oyLjLJjtxRxwltyAIM8BxMn3Vv9k5eZkQDsh8cckXAvK_EHngSTNnI4bctqwonfRbqAIA8gBG4iT2vmDowqBb_iI6fKagziC9JdCwDfNsehGAfYZnSy80/s640/sds.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It
would nice if the world were just populated by leaders and followers,
but we have the uncomfortable reality of people in box B who want to
be leaders for all the wrong reasons – status and power being
common drivers – and people in box C whom we could really use as
leaders, but they just won’t put their heads above the parapet. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Many
people in box C are women. The female leaders taking part in the
discussion agreed that women are too often demotivated by the games
they see being played by male macho aspirants in competitive
hierarchies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
discussion stimulated a spirited debate about what we need more and
less of in leadership, and what we can do about it. Some key
observations were:</span></div>
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<ul>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We
need more flexible leadership models, where the function is more
rationally shared among people</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Organisational
structure and culture reform is part of the key to attracting more
women into leadership</span></div>
</li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Leadership
has to have value propositions at its core. We all suffer when
leaders are self-serving rather than oriented to their communities </span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
role of boards and their chairmen is widely misunderstood and needs
to be reconstituted around the fitness of the firm</span></div>
</li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The
ability to learn is the only way to gain competitive advantage and
leaders are central to the process</span></div>
</li>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vision
is key – leaders with the ability to see what others can’t and
make a dream or idea tangible are needed</span></div>
</li>
<li><div class="western" style="border: none; line-height: 180%; margin-bottom: 0cm; orphans: 1; padding: 0cm; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We
are impeded by our primitive desire for perfect, god-like leaders.
We need to shape organisational life to expect and deal with
imperfections.</span></div>
</li>
</ul>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Of
course, the purpose of gatherings such as ours is to explore what
goes wrong in leadership, the root causes and what we can do about
it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Luckily,
as with the news, we tend to hear much more about failure than
success. But we should not forget that so much goes right in business
and society, because of good men and women stepping up and taking
responsibility for making sure that the world works and delivers not
just value, but values for our benefit.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">London Business Review</span></b></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07136062643501976158noreply@blogger.com0