SLOW Movement

WSJ: How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything

OCTOBER 24, 2011

How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything

What harm can a handful of nasty or incompetent employees do? A lot more than you may think.

By ROBERT SUTTON

Superstars get a lot of attention from bosses. But bad apples deserve even more.

A growing body of research suggests that having just a few nasty, lazy or incompetent characters around can ruin the performance of a team or an entire organization—no matter how stellar the other employees.

Bad apples distract and drag down everyone, and their destructive behaviors, such as anger, laziness and incompetence, are remarkably contagious. Leaders who let a few bad apples in the door—perhaps in exchange for political favors—or look the other way when employees are rude or incompetent are setting the stage for even their most skilled people to fail.

It's crucial for leaders to screen out bad apples before they're hired—and if they do slip through the cracks, bosses must make every effort to reform or (if necessary) oust them.

Spreading the Vibes

It's easy to understand why bosses would rather focus on attracting and developing superstars. A mountain of research shows that stars and geniuses can deliver astounding results. And, obviously, it's more fun and inspiring to focus on top-performing, energetic employees.

Serge Bloch

But studies of everything from romantic relationships to workplace encounters show that negative interactions can pack a much bigger wallop than positive ones. The reason is simple: "Bad is stronger than good," as psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues put it. The negative thoughts, feelings and performance they trigger in others are far larger and longer lasting than the positive responses generated by more constructive colleagues.

Consider research on bad apples and team effectiveness by Will Felps, Terence R. Mitchell and Eliza Byington. They examined the impact of team members who were deadbeats ("withholders of effort"), downers (who "express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation") and jerks (who violate "interpersonal norms of respect"). An experiment by Mr. Felps found that having just one slacker or jerk in a group can bring down performance by 30% to 40%.

How can organizations squash those negative influences? The easiest way, obviously, is to avoid hiring bad apples in the first place—and that means taking a different approach to assessing candidates for jobs.

The usual means of screening are often weak when it comes to determining if a job candidate is a bad apple. Candidates may have gone to the best schools or may come across as charming and brilliant in interviews—thus disguising their laziness, incompetence or nastiness.

That's why one of the best ways to screen employees is to see how they actually do the job under realistic conditions. Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta favor that approach. When they're hiring new people for their Palo Alto, Calif., company, Pulse, which makes a news-reading app for mobile devices, they consider evaluations from peers and superiors and do multiple rounds of interviews. But they say the most effective thing is to bring candidates in for a day or two and give them a short job to accomplish. (The candidates are paid for their time.)

Not only do they learn a lot about the candidates' technical skills, Messrs. Kothari and Gupta say, but they also learn about their personality. How do they deal with setbacks? Do they know when to ask for help and to give others help? Is the candidate the kind of person they want to work with? The partners say there have been several candidates who looked great on paper and came highly recommended but weren't offered jobs—because technical and interpersonal weaknesses surfaced during the selection process.

Play Nice or Else

Beyond smarter screening, it's important to develop a culture that doesn't tolerate jerks. The best organizations make explicit their intolerance for bad apples; they spell out which behaviors are unacceptable in the workplace and act decisively to prevent and halt them.

Consider Robert W. Baird & Co., a financial-services firm that has won praise as a great place to work. The company is serious about creating a culture where disrespect and selfishness are unacceptable. They call this the "no jerk rule" (though they use a more colorful word than "jerk").

The company starts sending the message during the hiring process, says CEO Paul Purcell. "During the interview, I look them in the eye and tell them, 'If I discover that you are a jerk, I am going to fire you,' " he says. "Most candidates aren't fazed by this, but every now and then, one turns pale, and we never see them again—they find some reason to back out of the search."

When the company makes a hiring error and brings aboard an employee who persistently demeans colleagues or puts personal needs ahead of others, Baird acts quickly to deal with or expel the bad apple.

Mr. Purcell's crusty approach won't work in every company culture. For an idea of how to handle the task with a more subtle hand, look at renowned chef Alice Waters, who has headed the restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., for 40 years now.

Biographer Thomas McNamee describes how Ms. Waters's love of people and food has spread to those around her. Along the way, though, many bad apples have been shown the door—but Ms. Waters doesn't hold it open. The process usually starts when one of her colleagues conveys the message that Ms. Waters isn't "entirely pleased." If the hints don't work, then that colleague—or someone else close to Ms. Waters—does the firing.

A spokesman for Chez Panisse says Ms. Waters does personally fire employees on occasion and "she manages to have that person feel as though they are making the decision to leave and it is better for themselves to move on and explore new opportunities." He also notes that a large percentage of employees have been with the restaurant for decades.

Keeping Them Close

There are times, of course, when an organization can't—or won't—remove a destructive personality. Maybe the person is a star as well as a bad apple, for instance, or is otherwise crucial to the operation. In such cases, leaders might try to use coaching, warnings and incentives to curb the toxic employee's behavior. Another tactic is to physically isolate the bad apple.

In one organization, there was a deeply skilled and incredibly nasty engineer whom leaders could not bring themselves to fire. So, they rented a beautiful private office for him several blocks from the building where his colleagues worked. His co-workers were a lot happier—and so was he, since he preferred working alone.

But beware: Leaders who believe that destructive superstars are "too important" to fire often underestimate the damage they can do. Stanford researchers Charles O'Reilly and Jeffrey Pfeffer report a revealing episode at a clothing retailer. The company fired a top-producing salesman who was a bad apple. After he was gone, none of his former colleagues sold as much as he had. But the store's total sales shot up by nearly 30%. The lesson, according to the researchers: "That one individual brought the others down, and when he was gone, they could do their best."

Mr. Sutton, a professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University, is the author of "Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best…and Learn from the Worst." He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

NY Times: The Power of Taking the Big Chance

October 8, 2011

The Power of Taking the Big Chance

By STEVE LOHR

STEVE JOBS, technologist and tastemaker of modern digital culture, described himself as a captain of product design, inspiring his teams of workers, as he once said, to go “beyond what anyone thought possible” and to do “some great work, really great work that will go down in history.”

And he did, time and again. Mr. Jobs did not make the technology himself; he led the teams that did, prodding, cajoling and inspiring. His track record as a business team leader is unique — as Apple’s Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad testify. In two stints at Apple, he made computers into coveted consumer goods and transformed not only product categories, like music players and cellphones, but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today.

Part of Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be the lessons learned by those who worked closely with him over the years. Here are just a few:

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DELIGHT CUSTOMERS Six weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Mr. Jobs ordered a crucial design change. Until then, the planning for supplies, manufacturing and engineering had been based on the assumption that the smartphone’s face would be plastic, recalls Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009. Plastic is less fragile than glass, and easier to make.

But the plastic touch screen had a drawback. It was prone to developing scratches. Those scratches, Mr. Jobs insisted, would irritate users and be seen as a design flaw. “All the logical facts told us to go with plastic, and Steve’s instinct went the other way,” Mr. Fadell says. “It was Steve’s call — his gut.”

The glass choice was a challenge that seemed “nearly impossible” at the time, he says — a last-minute scramble to get supplies of specialized glass and tweak the design of the phone’s casing to reduce the chances the glass would crack when an iPhone was dropped. But with extra investment and a frenetic work regimen, the switch proved doable, despite the tight deadline.

The episode, Mr. Fadell says, points to a principle he took away from his years working with Mr. Jobs. “You do not cut corners and you make sure the customer gets an experience that is an absolute delight,” observes Mr. Fadell, who heads a Silicon Valley start-up company whose product has not yet been disclosed and will not compete with Apple.

GOOD IDEAS TAKE TIME After he was ousted from Apple, Mr. Jobs founded NeXT in 1985. It produced a powerful desktop computer, a stylish black cube, and its initial market was going to be in education. The idea was that the machine would be more than hardware and software; it would also offer content, “a universe of wisdom,” recalls Michael Hawley, a computer scientist who worked closely with Mr. Jobs at NeXT and lived part time in Mr. Jobs’s house, as Mr. Hawley shuttled between California and his post at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

NeXT computers, in Mr. Jobs’s vision, would marry technology and the liberal arts by including digital books, music and art. Mr. Jobs began pursuing the rights to works that could be converted to digital form. He persuaded a few publishers that because they would save the expense of paper, printing and distribution, NeXT should pay a royalty that was a fraction of the cost of a printed book. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Hawley recalled, struck a deal with the Oxford University Press for the complete works of Shakespeare for a royalty of $1 a digital copy.

NeXT’s foray into education fizzled; its machines were too expensive for that market. But Mr. Jobs’s concept and business model for digital media were “the instinct that was translated to Apple with the iTunes store, 99-cents-a-song pricing and all the media offerings that have followed,” Mr. Hawley says.

“When Steve believed in an idea, he was both passionate and patient, scratching away over the years until he got it right,” says Mr. Hawley, a scientist, concert pianist and host of the EG Conference, an annual gathering for technologists, educators and people in media and entertainment.

DON’T DWELL ON MISTAKES Steve Capps, a computer scientist, describes creating the Macintosh, which shipped in 1984, as a constant process of making decisions — part experiment and part product development, with steps ahead mixed with many setbacks. “Steve kind of knew what he wanted, but he didn’t precisely,” says Mr. Capps, who designed software for Macintosh.

Mr. Jobs, Mr. Capps remembers, was the arbiter on countless hardware, software and design choices. “His combination of incisiveness and decisiveness, I think, really explained his success,” Mr. Capps says.

Mr. Jobs was also decisive in recognizing mistakes, even when they were his own. For example, he favored one model of a disk drive — for reading computer programs stored on small, removable so-called floppy disks — while other members of the team championed another design. They kept their disk project going surreptitiously. When they showed him the result, he embraced it. “He turned on a dime,” Mr. Capps says. “Don’t dwell on your mistakes. It’s a great lesson.”

PASSION COUNTS FOR A LOT The relentless intensity and total commitment that Mr. Jobs brought to his work, former colleagues and friends agree, had a simple explanation: he genuinely enjoyed what he did and found it worthwhile.

Andy Hertzfeld, a member of original Macintosh team who is now an engineer at Google, says: “The most important thing that I learned from Steve is to always follow your heart. He believed that the only way to do truly great work is to adore what you are doing.”

Mr. Jobs made a lot of money over the years, for himself and for Apple shareholders. But money never seemed to be his principal motivation. One day in the late 1990s, Mr. Jobs and I were walking near his home in Palo Alto. Internet stocks were getting bubbly at the time, and Mr. Jobs spoke of the proliferation of start-ups, with so many young entrepreneurs focused on an “exit strategy,” selling their companies for a quick and hefty profit.

“It’s such a small ambition and sad really,” Mr. Jobs said. “They should want to build something, something that lasts.”

FT: Forget dong the 'math' and stick to proper English

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/be8ae0b0-eabc-11e0-ac18-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1aGV775ud

October 3, 2011 2:52 am

Forget doing the ‘math’ and stick to proper English

By Lucy Kellaway

Last week, I was sent an email from a “work-life balance expert” offering tips on staying cheerful in times of financial strife.

What struck me most about this message – apart from its trite fatuousness – was the assumption that we need cheering up when the economy is down.

I have never seen any evidence that happiness moves in tandem with economic activity. I’m no less happy now than I was in the boom of the mid-2000s. And if I am upset, it’s not because of the economy but because the ceiling has just fallen down in my hall and so there is grit in my bed and in the fridge.

In fact, it’s possible that happiness may even rise in recessions. There was a study a couple of years ago that showed that people in work are marginally more content during hard times because they are grateful to have a job.

However, according to last week’s press release, the path to good cheer in recession lies through “living exponentially”. Just looking at this phrase causes my happiness levels to suffer a dip. The word “exponential” has taken a lot of abuse from managers who use it to describe any growth that is more than sluggish. Whereas in maths an exponential graph goes swiftly from almost flat to almost vertical, this pattern is seldom traced by any market I’ve ever come across.

But now the term seems to have slipped free of its mathematical moorings altogether: living “exponentially” involves having “quality time with yourself” and “living in your own truth”.

Speaking from the vantage point of my own truth, I find some things are truer than others. Truest of all are mathematical truths, and it is therefore upsetting to see them being pilfered shamelessly by innumerate managers eager to lend an aura of fact to what is usually a glob of guff.

Exponential is the least of it. Now every happening in business is called a “data point”, and change is increasingly known as “delta”, as in “what’s the delta on that?”

“Inflection point” is similarly debased. In maths, this is when the curvature goes from positive to negative but to managers it is a grandiose way of saying maximum or minimum. Last month, I saw it had been degraded further in a gung-ho article on the Huffington Post by a social entrepreneur entitled “The Inflection Point, The ‘Aha’ Moment” – in which it meant nothing at all.

Managers have a long history in playing fast and loose with percentages to make themselves look good. When it comes to effort, an impossible 110 per cent used to be regarded as a bare minimum.

Now hyperinflation has taken hold. A few weeks ago in Australia, the highest ever illegitimate percentage scoring was recorded when ex-cricketer Tim Nielsen said he was “100,000 per cent behind Australia being the best team in the world”.

All sorts of other things are just plain wrong when they are translated from maths to business talk. “To decimate” means to reduce by one-tenth; it does not mean to slash. “Infinite” means immeasurably large; it isn’t a general term to mean a lot. And “quantum” is something very, very small, not something very, very big.

More distressing than any of the above, however, is the phrase “Do the math”. This would be fine if it were a genuine invitation to whip out one’s slide rule. Instead it is a slightly threatening way of asserting: I’m right and I have logic on my side.

Last month, Barack Obama claimed that his tax package “isn’t class warfare. It’s math.” But it wasn’t math, really. It was politics. Yet at least President Obama is American, and so the phrase sounds better on his lips. On BBC Radio Four last week, I heard a Brit taking about the far right in UK politics, urging listeners to “do the maths” – which sounded even worse.

The strangest thing about all this misuse of mathematics is that when there is an actual need to discuss figures, managers go all coy, and proper numerical terms are nowhere to be seen.

Indeed, in business, numbers are not called numbers any more – they are called “metrics”. Which is a bit bizarre, when you think that metrics are about the study of metre in poetry. And in the mouths of modern managers, numbers no longer do anything as basic as go up and down: they go north and south as if they were points on a map.

Last week in a meeting I heard a finance manager say the following words: “We’re looking to see our metrics coming in north of the 3 mill mark.”

If he had done the maths before opening his mouth, he might have put it rather better and said: the number will be bigger than three million or X>3m.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011

FT: How to avoid choosing the wrong partner

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b867b068-eed2-11e0-959a-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1aGUT7uK4

 

October 4, 2011 11:36 pm

How to avoid choosing the wrong partner

By Luke Johnson

I have read and written about the desirable attributes to look for in a business partner: but I have never seen a list setting out the characteristics to avoid. So I thought I would itemise the most dangerous flaws I have observed among top executives.

● Endless excuses: certain bosses are incapable of admitting any failings – their entire management style is about finding others to blame for setbacks. Since they never own up to guilt, they never improve – and no one wants to work with them. If things go well, they steal the credit.

● Conflict avoiders: running a business is not a relaxing affair. Frequently it involves differences – with suppliers, employees, customers, landlords, regulators and others. Wimps who retreat from any form of disagreement, who are incapable of being assertive, are no use.

● Too many divorces: everyone can make such an error once, but to repeat it several times shows poor judgment and lack of willpower. I know more entrepreneurs brought emotionally and financially low by repeated divorce than through their companies going bust.

● Serial litigants: never work with individuals who sue all the time, be it staff, vendors or partners. You are bound to suffer a legal claim from them sooner or later: better not to start such an arrangement in the first place.

● Chronic overoptimists: quite a few entrepreneurs fall into this category. There is a delicate balance to be struck between positive thinking and overcaution – which can inhibit action. But steer clear of the fantasists whose ambitions wildly exceed their abilities and resources.

● No sense of humour: things go wrong in life and at work. If you cannot laugh at the bungles, the journey is simply too painful.

● Alcoholics and drug addicts: partnering with unreformed substance abusers is a nightmare. They will lie and perhaps steal – their first loyalty will always be to booze and drugs.

● Wrong priorities: you want a financial partner to be highly focused on success. If their hobbies, home, family and friends are overwhelmingly more important to them, walk away. You need someone who will make real sacrifices to achieve your joint commercial goals

● No hinterland: the opposite extreme – workaholic bosses who possess no life whatsoever outside the office. Such monochrome types are dull and lack balance.

● Philanderers: owners who sexually exploit their staff are toxic – and surprisingly common. Their private lives are chaotic, and their extracurricular activities often generate discrimination claims.

● Verbal diarrhoea: great managers should listen and thereby learn, not simply deliver monologues. Communication must be an exchange of information, or it is ineffective.

● Persistent critics: their endless carping demotivates all their subordinates, which means they never build a solid team. Such moaners do not understand that the carrot is a much more effective tool than the stick.

● Non-delegators: detail maniacs who cannot surrender control of anything. As a consequence they are incapable of building a substantial enterprise, because they trust no one and doubt everyone’s competence – save their own, of course.

● Financial illiteracy: do not appoint an innumerate CEO. If they do not understand financial statements, they cannot be in charge of a business. They do not need to be a qualified accountant, but they must be able to interpret the accounts.

● Bullies: most who rise to the top are forceful personalities, but megalomaniac dictators who torment their staff tend to destroy morale and undermine productivity. They are anathema in the modern workplace.

● Neurotic worriers: overanxiety makes people indecisive and erodes confidence. Skilful leaders cannot afford such weaknesses: they are the ones who are meant to know the direction of travel, and who promote the cause.

● Profligacy: extravagance is not an asset in these straitened times. You want a cost-conscious, abstemious colleague who leads by example.

Of course, no one is perfect, and many of us suffer from some of these faults. But big scores on more than a few categories should set alarm bells ringing.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

 

WSJ: Steve Jobs - The Secular Prophet

THE SATURDAY ESSAY
OCTOBER 8, 2011

Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet

Steve Jobs turned Eve's apple, the symbol of fallen humankind, into a religious icon for true believers in technology. But can salvation be downloaded?

By ANDY CROUCH

For every magical thing Steve Jobs revealed in his Apple keynote addresses, there were many other things he concealed. Like the devices he created, his life was more and more opaque even while becoming more and more celebrated. So his death this week came as a shock for nearly all of us, even though we knew that only grave illness could be keeping him from the company he co-founded and loved. He told us almost nothing about his prognosis—right through his last public appearance he was as turtleneck-clad and upbeat as ever. But suddenly, this week, he was gone.

Portrait by Tim O'Brien

Portrait of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was extraordinary in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (demanding and occasionally ruthless) leader. But his most singular quality was his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple's early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and turned it into a sign of promise and progress.

That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs's many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—"cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life." All technology implicitly promises to reverse the curse, easing the burden of creaturely existence. And technology is most celebrated when it is most invisible—when the machinery is completely hidden, combining godlike effortlessness with blissful ignorance about the mechanisms that deliver our disburdened lives.

Brett Arends discusses on Lunch Break why he believes Steve Jobs was the best chief executive of his generation and wasn't just a technology genius but also a hype master.

No company combined simplicity and hiddenness better than Apple under Mr. Jobs's leadership. Apple made technology not for geeks but for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with great style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not in the way geeks wanted technology to improve, with ever longer lists of features (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Word) and technical specifications, but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are 5 or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. You cannot open it up to see its inner workings even if you want to. No geeks required—or allowed. The iPad offers its blessings to ordinary mortals.

WSJ Personal Technology Columnist Walt Mossberg joins this special edition of Digits to discuss Steve Jobs's post-PC vision for the future and what his path would have been had he lived longer, as well as what he believes motivated him throughout his legendary career.

And so it came to pass that in the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety and frustration, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology.

In October 2001, with the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month when unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Reuters

A tribute to Steve Jobs in front of a Tokyo Apple store Thursday. The 2000s were defined by disappointments—except technologically, as Mr. Jobs strode on stage always with another miracle in his pocket.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—but technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. He believed so sincerely in the "magical, revolutionary" promise of Apple precisely because he believed in no higher power. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It's worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn't, say:

Betaworks CEO John Borthwick and Dow Jones's Neal Lipschutz discuss Apple's future and the challenges any company faces after the loss of its innovator-in-chief.

 

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become."

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died on Wednesday at age 56. Wall Street Journal managing editor Alan Murray and editors discuss Jobs's legacy, early reactions to his death and how his showmanship changed the retail and tech landscape.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own "inner voice, heart and intuition."

Mr. Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University.

Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil—the kind of tragedy that cuts off lives not just at 56 years old but at 5 or 6, the kind of evil bent on eradicating whole tribes and nations from the earth—it is strangely inert.

Perhaps every human system of meaning fails or at least falls silent in the face of these harsh realities, but the gospel of self-fulfillment does require an extra helping of stability and privilege to be plausible. Death is "life's change agent"? For most human beings, that would sound like cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs was to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of "the Apple faithful" and the "cult of the Mac" is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

It is said that human beings can live for 40 days without food, four days without water and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.

It's probably true for nations as well.

Mr. Jobs's final leave of absence was announced this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And, as it happened, Mr. Jobs died on the same day as one of Dr. King's companions, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, one of the last living co-founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Dr. King, too, had had a close encounter with his own mortality when he was stabbed by a mentally ill woman at a book signing in 1958. He told that story a decade later to a rally on the night of April 3, 1968, and then turned, with unsettling foresight, to the possibility of his own early death. His words, at the beginning, could easily have been a part of Steve Jobs's commencement address:

"Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now."

But here Dr. King, the civic and religious leader, turned a corner that Mr. Jobs never did. "I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything, I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"

Is it possible to live a good, full, human life without that kind of hope? Steve Jobs would have said yes in a heartbeat. A convert to Zen Buddhism, he was convinced as anyone could be that this life is all there is. He hoped to put a "ding in the universe" by his own genius and vision in this life alone—and who can deny that he did?

But the rest of us, as grateful as we are for his legacy, still have to decide whether technology's promise is enough to take us to the promised land. Is technology enough? Has the curse truly been repealed? Is the troublesome world simply awaiting another Steve Jobs, the evangelist of our power to unfold our own possibilities?

And, correspondingly, was the hope beyond themselves, and beyond this life, that animated Dr. King and his companions merely superfluous to the success of their cause, an accident of religious history rather than a civic necessity?

For people of a secular age, Steve Jobs's gospel may seem like all the good news we need. But people of another age would have considered it a set of beautifully polished empty promises, notwithstanding all its magical results. Indeed, they would have been suspicious of it precisely because of its magical results.

And that may be true of a future age as well. Our grandchildren may discover that technological progress, for all its gifts, is the exception rather than the rule. It works wonders within its own walled garden, but it falters when confronted with the worst of the world and the worst in ourselves. Indeed, it may be that rather than concealing difficulty and relieving burdens, the only way forward in the most tenacious human troubles is to embrace difficulty and take up burdens—in Dr. King's words, to embrace a "dangerous unselfishness."

Whatever the limits of Steve Jobs's secular gospel, or for that matter of Dr. King's Christian one, our keen sense of loss at his passing reminds us that the oxygen of human societies is hope. Steve Jobs kept hope alive. We will not soon see his like again. Let us hope that when we do, it is soon enough to help us deal with the troubles that this century, and every century, will bring.

—Mr. Crouch is the author of "Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling" and an editor-at-large at Christianity Today.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

WSJ: Better Ideas Through Failure

WORK & FAMILY
SEPTEMBER 27, 2011

Better Ideas Through Failure

Companies Reward Employee Mistakes to Spur Innovation, Get Back Their Edge

• By SUE SHELLENBARGER

To pitch a prospective client for her ad agency, Amanda Zolten knew she a had to take a risk. But the client's product—kitty litter—posed a unique challenge.

Lucy Belle, Ms. Zolten's cat, furnished the answer.

Before she and her team met with six of the company's executives, Ms. Zolten buried Lucy Belle's mess in a box of the company's litter and pushed it under the conference-room table. No one noticed until Ms. Zolten pointed it out—and the fact that no one had smelled it.

A growing number of companies are explicitly rewarding failure - giving cash prizes or trophies to people who foul up. Sue Shellenbarger has details on Lunch Break.

Shocked, several executives pushed back from the table. Two left the room. After a pause, those who remained started laughing, says Ms. Zolten, a senior vice president with Grey New York. "We achieved what we hoped, which was creating a memorable experience," she says.

She won't know for a few weeks whether Grey won the business. But her boss, Tor Myhren, has already named Ms. Zolten the winner of his first quarterly "Heroic Failure" award—for taking a big, edgy risk.

Amid worries that we are becoming less innovative, some companies are rewarding employees for their mistakes or questionable risks. The tactic is rooted in research showing that innovations are often accompanied by a high rate of failure.

"Failure, and how companies deal with failure, is a very big part of innovation," says Judy Estrin of Menlo Park, Calif., a founder of seven high-tech companies and author of a book on innovation. Failures caused by sloppiness or laziness are bad. But "if employees try something that was worth trying and fail, and if they are open about it, and if they learn from that failure, that is a good thing."

Amanda Zolten with the 'Heroic Failure' trophy from her employer, a New York advertising company.

Grey's Mr. Myhren recently started handing out the "Heroic Failure" award because he was worried that fast growth at the agency, a unit of WPP's Grey Group in New York, was making employees "a little more conservative, maybe a little slower," he says. Creator of E*Trade's talking-baby ads, Grey New York has more than doubled to 900 employees since 2008.

"I thought rewarding a little risk-taking was potentially an answer," Mr. Myhren says. The award is for ideas that are "edgier or riskier, or new and totally unproven," he says.

Mr. Myhren acknowledges that Ms. Zolten's prank could have gotten his eight-member team "kicked out of the room and told never to come back." He adds, "There was enough chaos in the room that we weren't sure whether it was a good or bad thing." Nevertheless, he calls the idea "absolutely brilliant" and deserving of the garish two-foot-tall "Heroic Failure" trophy. Regardless of how it turns out, he says, "we're proud that we had that idea."

Photo illustration by Stephen Webster

Many people succeed at producing innovations because they churn out a very large number of ideas, both good and bad, says Dean Keith Simonton, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis. "The most successful people tend to be those with the most failures," says Dr. Simonton, author of more than 500 studies and articles and 12 books on creativity and innovation.

Extracting lessons from foul-ups is the focal point of Michael Alter's "Best New Mistake" awards at SurePayroll, a payroll-services company in Glenview, Ill. Only people who are trying to do a good job, make a mistake and learn from it are eligible for the $400 annual cash award.

To test new functions of SurePayroll's systems in 2009, project manager Kate Vick created a fake company with imaginary employees. She flagged the data as a "test" before processing it, and the trial run went smoothly.

But Ms. Vick failed to foresee that the system would automatically report the fake employees to a state payroll-tax agency as if they were new hires at an actual company. A few days later, she was stunned by a phone call from an Illinois official asking her to confirm that her "company," named "Product Kate Test," had just hired someone named "Salaried Employee One" with a phone number of 555-555-5555. For a painful 15 minutes, "he went through my entire list of fake employees and wouldn't let me interrupt," she says. The official eventually hung up after she explained and apologized. But he made the issue seem so serious that "I felt like a very small human being," she says.

When Ms. Vick confessed to her boss, Steve Kania, he had a laugh at the official's "FBI-esque seriousness" about "completely ridiculous data," says Mr. Kania, a vice president, product management. They now train others to avoid using hypothetical new hires during tests.

Mr. Alter describes the fallout as "paying tuition. As opposed to saying, 'You screwed up,' or, 'You messed up,' we say, 'Let's talk about what we learned.' That drives a lot of innovation," he says.

Employers use a variety of tactics to foster innovation. Grey New York blocks off a "no meeting zone" every Thursday morning, to allow employees sustained time for work on creative projects. Procter & Gamble Co. has set up a division for innovation, called FutureWorks.

Some add game or nap rooms, expansive art-filled atriums, hiking trails or private meditation rooms with music and adjustable lighting.

Intuitive Surgical, a Sunnyvale, Calif., maker of surgical robots, limits work teams to five members "like jazz bands," says Gary Guthart, president and chief executive. Team members tend to share ideas easily, respond quickly to problems and hold each other accountable, he says.

However, all innovative companies tend to be alike in certain ways, Ms. Estrin says. They encourage coworkers to trust each other, comment on each other's work and take criticism in stride. Also, managers encourage intelligent risk-taking, tolerate failure and insist that employees share information openly.

At the 150-employee Consumer Electronics Association, an Arlington, Va., trade group, Gary Shapiro, president and chief executive, tries to make it safe to fail by talking openly about screw-ups. In his eight-page manifesto called "Gary's Guidelines," writes Mr. Shapiro, co-author of a book on innovation: "Mistakes are OK—hiding them is not."

—Email sue.shellenbarger@wsj.com

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

 

FT: Cheers to those with a half-empty glass

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/47001718-a40d-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1X5e8PV4s

July 3, 2011 8:12 pm

Cheers to those with a half-empty glass

By Lucy Kellaway

In business, optimism is good and pessimism bad. Optimists have a monopoly on success, on happiness and even on longevity. Pessimists, with their long faces and dark thoughts are pariahs, thought fit for nothing in the gung-ho corporate world except possibly careers in journalism (where bad news is good news). Otherwise, they have a choice between the couch, the closet or the comedy circuit.

But now pessimism may be coming back to the mainstream. The turn came last Monday, when management guru Tom Peters tweeted enthusiastically about a book that extols negative thinking. This is an extraordinary turnround for a man whose logo is a colourful exclamation mark and who for decades has been relentlessly, exhaustingly upbeat. The fact that the inventor of “Wow!” and “Brand Me” is now dabbling with negativity is the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a long time.

More

On this story

• Lucy Kellaway Six little words and one very big question
• Lucy Kellaway Staying on through worlidays
• Lucy Kellaway Unrequited love and corporate idiocy
• Lucy Kellaway A need to please can get you into trouble
• Lucy Kellaway Path to happiness runs through the office

Unlike Mr Peters, I was born pessimistic. I expect a sudden downpour to spoil every summer party; I am confident that every initiative will end in failure; at least half the dresses in my wardrobe are grey. Were it not for the fact that I never celebrate anything in advance just in case it doesn’t happen, I would be dancing a jig at the idea that people like me are going to be rehabilitated.

I’ve dashed to look up the book Mr Peters recommends, which turns out to be written by Julie Norem, a psychology professor at Wellesley College. She spent 18 years doing careful research only to reach the sensible – if taboo – conclusion that it’s a good idea to think about all the things that might go wrong before embarking on something. Unfortunately she has limited her scope to people who are anxious, but it seems to me she has stumbled on a truth that applies universally.

Even more unfortunately, the publishers have sugarcoated the slightly subversive message with a brainlessly upbeat title: The Positive Power of Negative Thinking: Use Defensive Pessimism to Harness Anxiety & Perform at Your Peak. Still, Rome wasn’t destroyed in a day, and perhaps Prof Norem has now softened up the market for negativity sufficiently to prepare it for the book I’d like to write myself (if Mr Peters doesn’t get there first). I might call it: Pear-shaped: Why Things Always Go Wrong at Work, and How to Cope When They Do.

The trouble with optimists is that they don’t do well in a pear-shaped world. In prisoner of war camps in Vietnam, the people who died first were the positive thinkers: they fully expected to be back home by Christmas and fell to pieces when they weren’t. Admittedly, the world of business isn’t exactly like a prisoner of war camp, in that you can nip out for a latte and you can sleep in your own comfy bed at night. But it can be grim and relentless and one bad thing can happen after another and being always prepared for the worst seems to me the only wise course of action. Woody Allen put it best: “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.”

Even though a rehabilitation of pessimists is to be welcomed, there is little point pushing the point in self-help books. Optimists and pessimists were born that way; there is no change that can come from picking up a tip or two in a book, the only change comes through time – which tends to soften all extremes. I fancy I’m marginally less pessimistic than I was 30 years ago, having discovered that, once in a while, things can actually pass off rather well. Optimists eventually discover the reverse – and perhaps a drastic version of this is all that is happening with Tom Peters (who has also taken to tweeting cheesy quotes from Mother Teresa, which is never a good sign).

In any case, it is stupid to argue about which view of the world is best, when both views are clearly needed all of the time. Every organisation and every partnership should be carefully balanced to include both optimists and pessimists. A marriage also needs both – my own experience has taught me that it’s good to have an optimist to come up with endless wild schemes for picnics and outings and a pessimist to swash the maddest ones and temper the rest with paracetamol and umbrellas.

Businesses need both even more to have just the right mix of daring and caution. Diversity of optimists and pessimists is the most important sort there is and should be actively sought at board level and every level below. Corporate pessimists should be de-stigmatised and beckoned out of the closet. Above all, they should stop having to pretend to see the glass half full just to suit the fashion. They should be proud to declare that for them, it has been half empty all along.

The Unreal Times: BCG hires McKinsey to advice it on how to become number 1

 

This is hilarious! :D

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The Unreal Times

India's favourite satire, spoof, parody and human portal

Source: http://www.theunrealtimes.com/2011/08/12/bcg-hires-mckinsey-to-advise-it-on-how-to-become-number-1/

BCG hires McKinsey to advice it on how to become number 1

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McK will use the BCG matrix to slot BCG consultants as dogs and cows

Strategy consulting major Boston Consulting Group (BCG) announced today that it has hired the services of the world’s number 1 strategy consulting firm McKinsey to advice BCG on how to replace McKinsey as the number 1 strategy consulting firm.

“We are sick of being second best. After a rigorous year long internal analysis session that involved 35 BCG consultants (editor – this translates to roughly over 2.9 lakh manhours assuming each consultant put in 18 hours a day,7 days a week), 45 proprietary BCG frameworks, and over 900 Powerpoint slides, we came to the firm conclusion that the best strategy would be to hire McKinsey to advice us on becoming #1,” said Vijayendra ‘Baba’ Haryal, Global Head, BCG.

McKinsey has readily agreed to serve its new client as professionally as possible. “In normal times, we’d have asked them go climb a tree. But with another looming recession, we can’t afford to be choosy. Hopefully we should be able to retain BCG as an anchor client for at least 5 years,” said Achal Nath, Senior Partner, McKinsey.

Achal pooh-poohed the idea of a potential conflict of interest. “As long as they are paying us, we are happy to advice them. One of the firm’s core values is to place the client’s interest above everything else, so there is no question of  a conflict of interest” said Achal. The Senior Partner however did concede that in theory BCG can replace McKinsey as the number 1 firm at the end of the engagement. “Yeah, in theory they should. But the cool thing about consulting is that we are not required to put our money where our mouths are, so I am not gonna lose sleep over it,” he shrugged.

The McKinsey team deployed for this prestigious assignment has been persuaded by BCG to use the famous BCG Growth-Share Matrix for some of the analysis. “Yeah, we have our own tools but these guys seem quite sentimental about this stuff and insisted that we use it. So in the first phase of the engagement, we are gonna slot BCG consultants into dogs, cows, question marks, and stars so that the dogs can be kicked out and the stars can be promoted. We will then see what to do with the question marks,” said team lead and rising McKinsey star, Raghib Ahmed.

Pundits think BCG’s move is a master-stroke. “If McK indeed helps them become #1, great! If not, BCG can then tell prospective clients that Mck’s advice does not always produce results,” said Li Chin, a Hong Kong based business journalist. “Hmm… that’s an interesting line of thought. To be honest, we just want to get hold of some nice Mck slides, but that will help too,” said ‘Baba’ Haryal, Global Head, BCG to The UnReal Times.

NY Times: First, Make Money. Also, Do Good.

 

August 13, 2011

First, Make Money. Also, Do Good.

By STEVE LOHR

CORPORATE social responsibility efforts have always struck me as the modern equivalent of John D. Rockefeller handing out dimes to the common folk. They may be well-intentioned, but they often seem like small gestures at the margins of what companies are really trying to do: make money.

As well they should, an argument most famously made by the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman decades ago. He called social responsibility programs “hypocritical window-dressing” in an article he wrote for The New York Times Magazine in 1970, titled “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”

But Michael E. Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, may have an answer to the Friedman principle. Mr. Porter is best-known for his original ideas about corporate strategy and the economic competition among nations and regions. Recently, however, he has been promoting a concept he calls “shared value.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Porter and Mark R. Kramer, a consultant and a senior fellow in the corporate social responsibility program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, laid out their case in a lengthy article in the Harvard Business Review, “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism — and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth.” Since then, Mr. Porter and Mr. Kramer have been championing the shared-value thesis in conferences, meetings with corporate leaders, and even a conversation with White House advisers.

Shared value is an elaboration of the notion of corporate self-interest — greed, if you will. The idea that companies can do well by doing good is certainly not new. It is an appealing proposition that over the years has been called “triple bottom line” (people, planet, profit), “impact investing” and “sustainability” — all describing corporate initiatives that address social concerns including environmental pollution, natural-resource depletion, public health and the needs of the poor.

The shared-value concept builds on those ideas, but it emphasizes profit-making not just as a possibility but as a priority. Shared value, Mr. Porter says, points toward “a more sophisticated form of capitalism,” in which “the ability to address societal issues is integral to profit maximization instead of treated as outside the profit model.”

Social problems are looming market opportunities, according to Mr. Porter and Mr. Kramer. They note that while government programs and philanthropy have a place — beyond dimes, Mr. Rockefeller created a path-breaking foundation — so, increasingly, does capitalism.

The shared-value concept is not a moral stance, they add, and companies will still behave in their self-interest in ways that draw criticism, like aggressive tax avoidance and lobbying for less regulation. “This is not about companies being good or bad,” Mr. Kramer says. “It’s about galvanizing companies to exploit the market in addressing social problems.”

The pair point to promising signs that more and more companies are pursuing market strategies that fit the shared-value model.

Several years ago, executives at General Electric began looking across its portfolio of industrial and consumer businesses, eyeing ways to apply new technology to reduce energy consumption. They were prompted by corporate customers voicing concerns about rising electrical and fuel costs, and by governments pushing for curbs on carbon emissions.

The result was G.E.’s “ecomagination” program, a business plan as well as a marketing campaign. In recent years, the company has invested heavily in technology to lower its products’ energy consumption, and the use of water and other resources in manufacturing.

To count in the program, a product must deliver a significant energy savings or environmental benefit over previous designs. G.E. hired an outside environmental consulting firm, GreenOrder, to help in measuring performance. To date, more than 100 G.E. products have qualified, from jet engines to water filtration equipment to light bulbs. In 2010, such products generated sales of $18 billion, up from $10 billion in 2005, when the program began.

“We did it from a business standpoint from Day 1,” says Jeffrey R. Immelt, G.E.’s chief executive. “It was never about corporate social responsibility.”

Technology has opened the door to markets that have shared-value characteristics. For decades, I.B.M. sold its computers, software and services to city governments around the world, though mainly for back-office chores like managing payrolls. But the Internet, the Web, electronic sensors and steady advances in computing have helped transform I.B.M.’s role, as it now helps cities track and analyze all kinds of data to improve services.

“We’ve moved from the back office to the core mission of cities — managing traffic, monitoring public health, optimizing water use and crime-fighting,” says Jon C. Iwata, a senior vice president.

I.B.M. is now working with about 2,000 cities worldwide as part of its “Smarter Cities” business, which began three years ago. One advanced project is in the sprawling city of Rio de Janeiro, where I.B.M. is designing a computerized command center. It is intended to pull data from dozens of city agencies, as well as weather stations and webcams. One assignment is to closely track heavy rainfall and to predict its impact — where flooding might occur, how traffic should be rerouted, and what neighborhoods may need to be evacuated. The goal is to predict and prepare for the kind of mudslides and floods that killed hundreds of people in April 2010 and left 15,000 homeless.

THE evolution of low-cost Internet and mobile phone technology has also let Intuit pursue opportunities with shared-value attributes. The company offers free online income-tax preparation software and filing services for lower-income households (now earning $31,000 or less). Since 1999, nearly 13 million people have taken advantage of the service.

The cost is relatively inexpensive for Intuit, as the service exploits the efficiency of online distribution; the charge for paying customers is $20 to $50. And the program blurs the line between charity and marketing, because millions of people who are sampling the company’s product, may well become paying customers as their incomes rise.

In India, Intuit has begun offering a free information service for farmers that can be accessed on any cellphone. Part-time workers check crop prices at local markets and send the information to Intuit. The company then relays the latest, local price quotations in text messages to subscribing farmers. As a result, the farmers can make smarter decisions about when and where to sell their produce.

The service in India began last year, and 300,000 farmers now use it. In follow-up surveys, farmers report that their earnings are up 25 percent, says Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit and chairman of the executive committee. The company, he adds, is testing ways to make money off the service, perhaps with text ads for simple tractors and fertilizers.

Mr. Cook points to other new business forays that are part of the same strategy. One is an Intuit health debit card for American small businesses that want to pay for some of their employees’ medical care but cannot afford conventional health insurance.

“We look for places we can use our strengths as a company to help solve big problems,” he says. “You can call that shared value if you like. But I look at it as the business we’re in.”

FT: Six little words and one very big question

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e0e11924-bfa9-11e0-90d5-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1UvIqoZwZ

August 7, 2011 4:37 pm

Six little words and one very big question

By Lucy Kellaway

Every week when writing this column I set myself a theme and try to do it justice in about 800 words. This week I am going to do things a bit differently. My theme is something I’ve touched on before – why we do the jobs we do – but my word count has shrunk. I have only six words in which to nail it.

I am limiting myself like this in response to a competition sponsored by Mercer, the management consultancy, and Smith magazine, which invites people to submit six-word stories with the title “Why I Do What I Do”. I like the idea. It’s good sometimes to wonder what keeps you in your job; the tight word limit makes waffle and pretentiousness out of bounds.

So I sat down and spent a while chewing my pen. Why do I do what I do? After a small crisis that such profound thinking inevitably brings on and after much searching of soul and wallet, I have come up with the following entry: “Money, recognition, gossip, freedom, satisfaction, mirth.”

My six words are by no means perfect, but I’m not displeased with them as they are honest and pretty much cover the waterfront. Perhaps “mirth” is a bit of a stretch, but I couldn’t face writing “fun” as it sounded too trite. Yet for some inexplicable reason I seem not to have won. Instead, prizes have been given to: “Amateur chocolatier, making life little sweeter” and “Because brilliant ideas die without encouragement.”

The only thing these entries have over mine is a better narrative flow. The first is a cheesy slogan with a word missing, and the second a shocker. I take it all back about the impossibility of being pretentious in six words. And I am particularly disappointed to discover that the woman who wrote “Because brilliant ideas deserve encouragement” is a careers adviser at Oxford university. They weren’t like that in my day. Back then they did what they did for another six-word reason: introducing spoilt graduates to real world.

I’ve had a skim through some of the other entries and find the judges have missed some gems. I like “After 38 years, still not sure”, but my runaway favourite is “tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick”. This is simple, elegant, works on many levels and I wish I’d been sufficiently Zen to come up with it myself. It is a clock ticking, marking out a working day. It stands for the repetition that is a big part of all jobs; it also suggests that six boxes are being ticked, but leaves it up to the reader to decide what they are.

Otherwise the entries are astoundingly grim. “Desire: being part of the solution.” “Chances to reach others. Deeply. Spiritually.” “Work is Passion. Passion is work.” Are they joking? What brave new world is this? After spending half an hour trawling through this sort of bilge, a four-word story has formed in my head: Pass the sick bag.

Hoping for something better, I have set up a competition of my own, inviting colleagues to write their own short stories on the same subject. They have approached the task with zeal – though mostly reaching for the reassuring journalistic default position of cynicism. “Fear and greed, like everyone else,” said one colleague. “Haven’t been offered a better job,” said another, while a third said: “Got no Sky Sports at home.”

Another popular theme was work as escape. One mother of three writes from the heart: “To get away from the kids.” Another puts it more elaborately: “Daily vicissitudes conveniently occlude enduring questions.” I had to look up what occlude means, but wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment. I also agree with the still darker version: “Deadens the drumming of the demon.”

After much deliberation, I’ve chosen three winners which I think are variously true, surprising and profound. The first is “Tried banking. Didn’t like it.” I love this story. It has great plot structure. It is also dead right in that lots of us (me included) end up doing something because something else didn’t work out.

The second prize hints at something deeper. “To find better version of myself.” This is daringly at odds with the current mood. Post phone hacking, journalism is generally believed to be where you go to find a worse version of yourself.

But the one that I like most of all is “Because it is hard and easy.” These six little words are oddly deep. A job that is only hard is too exhausting, a job that is only easy is too dull. The right balance is what makes a good job so very special.

In case you haven’t had your fill of six-word stories, I want to add another of my own, inspired by my work this week. Why I do what I do? “Colleagues make me think and laugh.”

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Coca Cola "Heist" Superbowl Commercial

Apt illustration of team work. Enjoy!

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FT: The dull names of those who rose

The dull names of those who rose

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 1 2011 19:17 | Last updated: May 1 2011 19:17

Whenever I used to hear that someone had saddled a son with a name like Tarquin, Apollo or Silas, I always feared that the child would be teased at school. I now find I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. The real damage done by an outlandish name doesn’t happen in the playground but in the boardroom.

LinkedIn has just consulted its database of 100m professionals and found that chief executives overwhelmingly have boring first names. When it comes to the corner office, Ed will do nicely but Tarquin will not do at all: the most popular CEO names are Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on? - May-08

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

I wonder that I have never noticed this before. If I trawl my mind for the names of the most remarkable corporate titans, they all have unremarkable, monosyllabic first names – Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen), Jack (Welch), John (Chambers). If they were born with longer names, they make them shorter: Jeffrey becomes Jeff (Immelt); Robert becomes Bob (Nardelli, Horton); and Christopher becomes Chris (Gent).

Two syllables are only really acceptable when they are a cute version of a more formal name. There is Jamie (Dimon), Sandy (Weill), Larry (Bossidy). But three syllables are not acceptable at all. I can’t think of a single famous boss in the US or UK with a long first name. Even less can I think of one with a flamboyant or weird one. The only mad name that sticks in my mind is Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the disgraced former head of Elf. But he doesn’t really count as he is a) French and b) has spent rather a long time in prison.

The LinkedIn research suggests different sorts of corporate jobs attract people with different names. If you have a cheery-chappy name such as Budd or Troy or Chip, then you will do well in sales, while a longer, straighter name such as Andrew will make you a perfect engineer. If, however, your name has seven or more letters, corporate life isn’t right for you at all. You should open a restaurant instead.

This idea – that your name shapes your career – passes under the name of “nominative determinism”. One of its supporters is the journalist David Brooks, who has dredged up the peculiar fact that people called Dennis are more likely than most to end up as dentists, while people called Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers. We want, he says, to do things that sound like us. I’ve often marvelled at how this idea works negatively: financial villains tend to have dodgy names – think of Madoff or Fuld, for example.

When I was at school, I thought such things a tremendous joke. “Have you read Great Falls by Eileen Dover?” I’d ask, and then scream with laughter. But real life turns out to be funnier than childish jokes: there was an article written on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp173-176, 1977) by J.W.  Splatt and D. Weedon.

Though the statistical evidence for nominative determinism may be a bit flaky, it figures. If we accept that the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too.

However, in the case of CEOs, what the Bob-Bill-Jack ascendancy tells us about corporate life is rather depressing. It says that diversity is bunkum: B-B-J puts foreigners at a clear disadvantage. Indeed, if you are born Gróf András István, but fancy running a big semiconductor company in the US, then you would be well advised to change your name to Andy Grove instead.

Indeed, the standard management guff tells us that the people who get ahead are the ones that are “unique” and “authentic”. Yet B-B-J shows this to be nonsense – if you want to get on, you need to sound and seem as unremarkable as everyone else.

B-B-J is evidence of a pervasive corporate lie. We are led to think that CEOs are friendly, when in fact it is their job to make people do things they don’t want to do and then fire them if they are not up to scratch. The matey little names – that seem to say “let’s have a couple of beers” – hoodwink us into thinking otherwise.

Finally, B-B-J tells us that it’s different for girls. The women CEOs on LinkedIn aren’t called Sue and Jill and Beth. They are Cynthia, Deborah and Carolyn; like my own CEO, Marjorie Scardino, they choose to use all three glorious syllables. Their names aren’t saying “let’s have a beer” but something more honest, if a bit more desperate: “Take me seriously.”

People often say that there will only be equality at the top when there are as many incompetent women CEOs as there are incompetent men. I’ve got another measure. Equality will be with us only when our female leaders ask to be called Debs and Marge.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Architect of modern Singapore steps down

Architect of modern Singapore steps down

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: May 15 2011 12:34 | Last updated: May 15 2011 12:34

Lee Kuan Yew, former Singapore prime minister, has resigned his cabinet seat after 52 years

Singaporeans woke up on Sunday to the prospect of a government without the country’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew – a dominating political figure who unexpectedly resigned from the cabinet after more than half a century in service.

Mr Lee, 87, quit along with Goh Chok Tong, prime minister from 1990 to 2004, exactly a week after the ruling People’s Action party suffered its worst election result since independence in 1965.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters’ concerns.

Mr Lee, who has been prime minister or a senior cabinet minister since the beginning of colonial self government in 1959, told state media his resignation was “the right thing to do, to give PM (sic) and his team the room to break from the past.”

He added: “We want to make it clear that the PAP has never been averse to change.”

As a founder member of the PAP in 1954, Mr Lee is regarded as the architect of modern Singapore, setting it on a free market course designed to attract foreign investment that has given the tiny island state the second highest living standards in Asia, after Japan.

He successfully fought far left opponents in the 1960s, locking up many without trial for years, and became associated with a tough approach to dissent that many dismissed as authoritarian. However, the PAP was repeatedly re-elected in general elections, usually winning between two-thirds and three quarters of the popular vote.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters¨concerns.

The PAP won 81 of 87 elected parliamentary seats with 60.1 per cent of the popular vote in the last election on May 7, but was clearly shaken by an increase in the total opposition vote to 39.9 per cent from a third in 2006.

The retirement of the two former prime ministers has few implications for policy, since the government has already undertaken to address election issues such as high immigration, income disparity and the price of government-subsidised housing.

However, political analysts said it was not purely symbolic, and speculated that the prime minister, who is the son of Lee Kuan Yew, might take the opportunity to replace a number of other senior ministers with younger faces.

Eugene Tan, a politics specialist at Singapore Management University, said the changing of the guard suggested the PAP was serious about promises to reconnect with younger voters, many of whom dislike the governing party’s authoritarian style.

“Government policy is seen as bearing the imprint of [Lee Kuan Yew], and the fact is that the announcement comes a week after the general election and that voters did not take kindly to what some might say was negative campaigning by [the elder Mr Lee],” he said.

“We are transitioning towards a post-Lee Kuan Yew era, and many did not expect it to come so soon. But it is not a revolution. That is not the way government is conducted in Singapore.”

The elder Mr Lee will remain a powerful figure in Singapore, as a leading member of the governing party with the ear of the prime minister, untrammelled access to the state supervised media and significant moral authority, especially over older Singaporeans.

However, his standing has been tarnished in recent years by controversial statements such as a claim that the country’s Malay muslim minority had failed to integrate, and an appearance of being out of step with Singaporeans born after independence, who now make up a majority of voters.

Mr Lee caused controversy during the election by appearing to threaten that the government would discriminate against constituencies that elected opposition MPs. His comments were in sharp contrast to the emollient tone adopted by the prime minister, who offered an unprecedented apology for any mistake the PAP might have made.

He became the first prime minister of independent Singapore in 1965, after the union broke up amid acrimony over Malay political rights. He stepped down in 1990, and has since served as a cabinet minister without portfolio, latterly with the title Minister Mentor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Case study - Trung Nguyen coffee

Case study: Trung Nguyên coffee

By Morgen Witzel

Published: April 27 2011 23:08 | Last updated: April 27 2011 23:08

Mr Vu positioned his brand as part of a Vietnamese tradition

The story. Coffee cultivation in Vietnam began under French colonial rule in the 19th century and soon became a staple industry. By the mid-1990s, the country had become one of the three biggest coffee producers in the world.

Much of it, however, was low quality and sold at cut prices overseas. Vietnamese-American entrepreneur Dang Le Nguyen Vu believed high-quality Vietnamese gourmet coffees could be produced and sold profitably. So, in the mid-1990s, he launched Trung Nguyên, a coffee manufacturer and café chain.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Case study: How to avoid complacency - Apr-20

Case study: Porter Airlines - Apr-06

Case study: Anglo American - Mar-30

Case study: Walmart - Mar-23

Case study: Cirque du Soleil - Mar-16

Case study: Axa’s rebranding - Mar-09

The challenge. Vietnam is an emerging market. In 1995, per capita income was only $250 (the 2010 figure was $1,200). This was one reason why Mr Vu chose to develop a luxury brand that would appeal to both domestic and export markets.

To do so, he would have to persuade the home market that his expensive product offered value, and convince overseas customers that Vietnam could produce gourmet coffee.

The home market. As the owner of a coffee-processing business, Mr Vu could improve the quality but there was no efficient distribution network. The answer was to set up a chain of coffee shops, modelled in part on Starbucks, that would also sell coffee beans for home consumption.

The branding of Trung Nguyên was carefully planned. To counter competition from big multinationals, whether coffee shops or brands such as Nescafé, Mr Vu positioned it as part of a Vietnamese tradition. A Trung Nguyên museum tells the history of coffee-making in the country.

One of Trung Nguyên’s best-known products is kopi luwak or “weasel coffee”, made from coffee berries that have passed through the digestive tract of a civet cat. Marketing this expensive delicacy, which is harvested only in south-east Asia, helps identify Trung Nguyên with Vietnam’s coffee culture.

Combining heritage and modernity is at the heart of the brand, whether in the packaging or the styling of the coffee shops. Straplines such as “Bringing creativity into coffee” suggest innovation.

By pricing the coffee high, Mr Vu appealed to the aspirations of Vietnamese people. An emerging middle class took to the brand and the coffee shops became important social centres. The first Trung Nguyên coffee shop opened in Ho Chi Minh City in 1998, and by 2010 there were more than 1,000 across Vietnam.

Trung Nguyên has also diversified into decaffeinated and instant coffee and tea production.

The overseas market. Export was part of the strategy from the start. Trung Nguyên now markets its coffee in more than 40 countries, including the US and the UK.

Most of the brand’s appeal is to niche markets, to consumers interested in exotic coffees and, especially in the US, to visitors to Vietnam who have seen the brand there. Most of the coffee is sold online through franchisees. Sales volumes are very small compared with those in Vietnam.

Attempts to replicate the domestic coffee shop branding strategy and set up Trung Nguyên outlets overseas have met with mixed success. There are now two stores in Singapore and a few elsewhere in the world. But, generally, in spite of its success in Vietnam, the Trung Nguyên brand is not well-known elsewhere.

Current challenges. Trung Nguyên must expand its export market if the company is to continue to grow. Although rising prosperity in Vietnam means there are opportunities for domestic growth, Trung Nguyên is under pressure from competitors.

Key lessons. Creating a luxury brand in an emerging market might seem contradictory. But the Trung Nguyên case shows how it can be done. By appealing to national culture and values, and creating an aspirational brand with which rising middle classes could identify, it transformed the coffee market in Vietnam.

However, Trung Nguyên has also learnt that extending the brand overseas will take longer, and require more finessing.

The author is honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

WSJ: Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

APRIL 25, 2011

Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

Employees share information in their personal lives. Companies can use those skills to improve workplace collaboration.

By TERRI L. GRIFFITH

To recognize the huge potential social networking offers for companies looking to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees, consider these two facts:

• About half of company knowledge-management initiatives stagnate or fail.

• There are about 131 million U.S. Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 64, and more than 500 million world-wide.

Leadership in IT

See the complete Leadership: Information Technology Journal report.

That's more than half a billion people using the same kinds of tools so many companies have struggled to put to productive use. In their private lives, users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media are completely at ease forming communities of shared interests and keeping everyone up-to-date with messages, pictures and documents. Now they are ready to put those same tools to work at the office—to help everyone see who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate their work.

In other words, employees already have the skills for more collaboration. It's up to companies to take advantage of them. Here's how to do just that:

Have employees identify areas that would benefit from greater collaboration.

View Full Image

Margaret Riegel

Be explicit. Raise the subject with a question like, "If we had something like Facebook [or Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.], what part of your work would be better?"

It's likely that many of your employees are already thinking about how they might apply these same tools to improve how they get their jobs done. In fact, they may already have started without you.

In some companies, teams have created Facebook groups around their projects to help them get to know their teammates and have a single place to store project documents. Other savvy teams have studied Facebook, and then asked their IT staff to create a similar online space for collaborative work.

In both cases, employees are taking action based on recognizing unmet needs for online collaboration and knowledge-management tools.

Don't say no to social networking because of concerns about public sites.

Many companies have valid concerns about security breaches, privacy issues, bandwidth hogging and loss of productivity when employees use social-networking sites like Facebook at the office. But social networking for a business doesn't have to involve public sites. There are many products that allow businesses to set up private systems with internal database, search and chat functionality. Socialtext Inc., Altus vSearch from Altus Inc., Yammer Inc., and Chatter from Salesforce.com Inc. are a few.

These tools support social networking but let the company stay in control and maintain security. Altus vSearch, for example, lets companies capture videos of formal presentations and their associated slides—or informal how-tos and any other video content—and make the material searchable. As on YouTube, viewers can choose to follow particular people or topics. The video files can also integrate personal-profile information about the employees involved. The result is a database of work-related video for training, informal learning, reuse of presentations, and a more-developed, work-focused social network. Material can be made available to employees only, to invited outsiders, or to the public.

Set clear guidelines for both external and internal social networking and collaboration.

Make it clear to employees that they are personally responsible for the information they post and that real names should be used. Instruct employees as to what information is confidential or proprietary to the company, and how they can get the most out of sharing without putting company secrets at risk. In choosing or creating a system, ask your IT department about their biggest concerns around social networking and how these concerns can be dealt with while still supporting collaboration.

Start with goals everyone can understand.

Communicate to everyone at the company what you want to achieve, such as better team collaboration or brainstorming for new product or service ideas. Send a clear message that social networking at work should be about work. And make sure everyone at the company is part of the network. Don't build barriers that might exclude people just because of their position in the organization. New ideas can come from unexpected places.

Make policies and procedures supportive.

Employees will need to make social networking part of their work routines—interacting and answering questions from one another. They'll also need incentives to collaborate. Raises and promotions based solely on individual performance won't encourage workers to share new ideas or possible solutions.

It's also important for employees to be able to track the results when they share an idea, suggest a solution or support a team working on the other side of the world.

Prepare for expectations of greater democracy.

Social networkers are accustomed to seeing what their friends are doing, expressing their opinions in polls and being welcomed into conversations. Not all companies wish to be as transparent and open to dialogue as the public social-networking environment is. But there will be pressure for greater transparency in the workplace as social networking is introduced.

"If social media can democratize a country, you had better believe it can democratize your company," Vijay Gurbaxani, a professor of information systems and computer science, said in a speech to chief information officers in February in New Delhi. Mr. Gurbaxani teaches at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine.

You can sidestep tensions by being ready with clear and thoughtful responses as to where employees can expect transparency and open dialogue and where they cannot.

Be open to change.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are some of the first collaboration models your workers encountered, but they won't be the last. Some of your employees may now be experimenting with mobile video and location-aware applications. Always be willing to learn from employees about new technologies.

Dr. Griffith is a professor of management at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif. She can be reached at reports@wsj.com.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Fortune: Advice from a Maestro

 
Advice from a Maestro

Posted by Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter

March 29, 2011 5:00 am

 

Looking for new ways to manage your troops? Some tips from New York Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert.

Gilbert conducting, holding a penlight, which creates the effect in this photo.

It's not easy to find a management book that has anything approaching a fresh idea. Maybe that's why people looking to become change agents are turning to unusual sources for their leadership fix. Navy SEALS, chefs, and, of course, pro sports coaches have all weighed in with popular advice books.

Even musical maestros are getting in on the act. Ben Zander, the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic, has devoted followers of his book, The Art of Possibility. And conductor Roger Nierenberg in his book, Maestro: A Surprising Story About Leading by Listening, "teaches executives how to turn a company into a euphonious symphony of work," says Publisher's Weekly.

Another conductor with a good management story to tell is Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic. Not only does he manage a large, creative crew in a pressure-cooker market, but he also had to follow, at a relatively young age, in the footsteps of legends like Leonard Bernstein and Gustav Mahler. The 44-year-old Gilbert's appointment in 2007 raised a few eyebrows, partly because his parents were career violinists with the orchestra. (Gilbert's mother, Yoko Takebe, continues to play under him.) Now in his second season with the philharmonic, Gilbert has won over critics, thanks in some measure to his skillful management of the 106 musicians who play for him. How does he do it?

Inspiration via democracy

In guiding the orchestra through a musical work, Gilbert has his own ideas about how it should sound, from the volume to the tempo. But his musicians have worked with many conductors and have experience playing popular classical works.

"I'd be an idiot not to make use of the experience," he says. Gilbert gets them to buy in by asking them for help. He meets with senior musicians and section leaders, saying, "This is the kind of thing that I'll be looking for over the next period of time from your section. Could you try to encourage that as well?" That gives the musicians a sense of ownership and responsibility, while also "planting seeds," as Gilbert says, that will help him achieve the effect he is aiming for.

Gilbert carefully avoids the perception that he is imposing his will. Sure, his musical choices or decisions about scheduling or personnel can ruffle feathers. But he explains that he's doing what he thinks is right "for the good of the music or the institution, rather than for some personal gratification." It's a delicate balance, because Gilbert knows he's been hired to put his stamp on the orchestra. Still, "the best conducting," he says, "happens when all the musicians are able to feel that they're accessing their own point of view about the music as well."

The office door is always open

Conductors and orchestras have traditionally kept a distance from each other. Many of Gilbert's musicians, in fact, had never been in the music director's office before he arrived.

But Gilbert doesn't work that way, partly because he knows many of the players from his days as an orchestra brat. Still, he actively works at being more accessible than his predecessors: "I actually think it's possible to get more out of the musicians by really showing them you know who they are and you identify with them and you trust them," he says.

Gilbert, for instance, sits in with his musicians. Last season he played viola in a sextet with philharmonic members, and he plans to play in a chamber ensemble with them again this year. He also has opened his home to his musicians, inviting them to informal dinner parties.

Connect with your customers -- and actually listen to them on occasion

Yup, it's a cliché. But it isn't always done in Gilbert's line of work. In 2009, before the official start of his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic, Gilbert conducted all the parks concerts in each of New York City's five boroughs -- a first for a New York Philharmonic music director. Gilbert also conducted the annual school day concerts during the past two seasons, and teaches classes at Juilliard.

About his mother, Yoko Takebe, Gilbert says, "I hear things from her that no other musician would mention."

Classical music has a rep for being too buttoned-up, so Gilbert has also tapped more informal (and modern) modes of communication to make himself accessible. Last year he agreed to take part in a series of playful videos posted on YouTube to promote an upcoming performance. During the concerts in the parks, he offered audiences the chance to vote via text message for the encore piece: Rossini's William Tell Overture vs. the "Toreador's Song" from Bizet's Carmen.

Gilbert even tweets,  and his blog on the website Musical America offers a behind-the-scenes look at the life of a musical director.

Learn everything about the enterprise

Gilbert says aspiring conductors should apprentice in every part of the operation. In other words, get to know what the people in marketing actually do for a living.

Gilbert had a little business-side experience going in. He was an assistant conductor at the Cleveland Orchestra for three years, and at Harvard he took a liking to marketing and the logistics of staging a production when planning performances on campus. To a greater extent than his predecessors, Gilbert weighs in on decisions across the organization.

Why should he waste his time fussing with marketing materials? Nothing better to do? Gilbert says such things as brochures play a large role in audience expectations. He adds: "It all is ultimately feeding into the musical product."

Managing mom

Given his long history with the orchestra, some might wonder how Gilbert separates the personal from the professional, especially since his violinist mother has a constant eye on his podium. Gilbert says that while he was conscious of her presence in the beginning, he rarely thinks about it anymore. Still, he admits, "occasionally I do go offstage and she'll say, 'You didn't shave' or 'Your shirt's not pressed.' I hear things from her that no other musician would mention."

He thinks the arrangement has actually been tougher on her. No matter how well things are going for an orchestra, it's common for musicians to complain about the conductor when they gather in their dressing room. Now his mother gets left out of such backstage banter. "She wants me to do well," Gilbert says, "and she wants her colleagues to like what I'm doing, so she must feel there's a pressure."

FT: You might be a total genius, but I wouldn't tell you so

You might be a total genius, but I wouldn’t tell you so

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: April 10 2011 17:19 | Last updated: April 10 2011 17:19

Last week, when a woman in our travel department booked me a flight, I sent her an e-mail: “That’s absolutely marvellous – thanks so much.”

In congratulating her so warmly for doing her job, I thought I was being charming and gracious, but now I see I was actually doing something rather darker. Not only was I debasing the language, but was pushing a drug that turns people into demotivated, infantile, praise-dependent junkies.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Pen and paper are a forgotten management tool - Mar-06

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

This rethink was brought on by a discussion with a columnist friend who has just gone to work for a rival newspaper.

He told me that his first column was declared by his new editor to be “utterly brilliant”. The second was deemed “a simply extraordinary piece of writing”. And when he filed the third, he got an e-mail back before the editor had even had time to read it saying: “Got it – you’re a total genius.”

When I said that this sounded rather nice, he gave me a scornful look. It made him think his editor stupid, which made him feel stupid by extension. To be considered a total genius for merely delivering his column on time was degrading all round.

My friend may not, in fact, be a total genius but is definitely a total weirdo – at least by comparison to me. I am exceedingly fond of being called a genius; even though I prefer to have genius status granted for big things, I’m prepared to accept it for any achievement at all, even for pressing send on my computer.

In fact there is no amount of praise that sets my teeth on edge. Mine is a debased condition, but is at least perfectly normal. There was a study done recently by a woman at the University of California, Berkeley, who found that you can go on and on laying on the flattery and it goes on working. There is no level when people say: stop, now you’ve gone too far.

This means we all go too far all the time. In the US, people have been over-egging praise for generations. But now in Britain, proud traditions of cynicism and understatement have been cast aside. The most banal observation counts as an “insight”, while anything that vaguely makes sense is said to have “compelling logic”. In the UK, all workers are called “talent” no matter how profoundly untalented they actually are, and even this is not enough. At KPMG, every member of staff is a genius. “We have 138,000 outstanding professionals,” it says on its website, an exaggeration so gross that I would think twice before allowing KPMG anywhere near my audit.

The result of such inflationary pressure is that language has ceased to be a store of meaning. One evening last week I was judging some awards for business TV programmes and one of my fellow judges described his favourite entry as “moderately interesting”. At the time I was faintly disgusted by his lack of enthusiasm, but now I see he was quite right: most business TV is pretty feeble and so to be moderately interesting is pretty high praise.

The same day, I’d observed an editor in my own office tying himself in knots trying to describe an article that he genuinely admired. “What can I say?” he asked, paused, and then went on: “To edit copy like this . . . is . . . a privilege.”

Congratulation inflation not only damages language, it is bad for us psychologically. Praise is a Class A drug and we crave more and get upset when we don’t get any in sufficiently pure form.

When I was told recently by someone that they had “liked” my column I felt downcast. Liked? I thought, reaching what seemed to me the inevitable conclusion that they therefore hated it.

The most worrying thing about over-egged praise is that it makes us less good at our jobs. Not because it makes us complacent, but because it makes us neurotic.

There was a fascinating experiment done a decade ago at Columbia University, comparing 10-year-olds who were praised for being clever to those who were praised for diligence. The first group got distressed and demotivated when faced with any task that they couldn’t do easily. The second met failure with composure: they simply worked harder to succeed next time.

As most workers are similar to 10-year-olds, praise at work should be doled out in the same way – never for inspiration, always for perspiration. Fortunately, according to this distinction, I deserve some praise for filing this column. The wireless router at home is on the blink, and so getting online has required many hours of extreme aggravation on the phone to Virgin, and then calling a neighbour to use their wireless network. Thus, by dint of successfully having pressed send, I am a total genius, after all.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

Bloomberg Businessweek: The Games Companies Play

CEO Guide to Business Gamification April 4, 2011, 11:24PM EST text size: TT

The Games Companies Play

Siemens, Hilton, and Target are using games to train workers and improve how they design and market products

By Rachael King

 

Siemens (SI) is pinning high hopes on Pete. A cheery fellow, Pete wears a yellow hard hat with his name emblazoned across the front. He's polite and eager to lend a hand. He's also animated: Pete the Plant Manager stars in a new online video game from Siemens called Plantville that simulates what it's like to run a manufacturing facility. The aim is to take three dilapidated factories and make them more efficiently meet customer orders by hiring employees, redesigning layout, and buying and installing new Siemens equipment.

Germany's Siemens, which makes power plants, scanners, and trains, created the game to fuel equipment sales and foster greater employee knowledge of its products. "Employees are sometimes siloed in their business units and don't see the breadth and depth of our portfolio," says Tom Varney, head of marketing communications at Siemens Industry. The company joins a growing roster of enterprises as diverse as Hilton Worldwide's Embassy Suites hotel chain and German software maker SAP (SAP), which are using technologies that make games interesting in order to interact more effectively with customers and employees.

The trend, known as gamification, lets businesses weave elements of games into applications that otherwise have little to do with playing. The market for gamification will grow to $1.6 billion in 2015, from $100 million in 2011, according to Wanda Meloni, founder of M2 Research, a consulting firm that researches the gaming industry.

Companies such as Cold Stone Creamery and United Parcel Service (UPS) have for years used games for such tasks as training workers. Gamification is now letting managers push aspects of gaming into marketing, product design, and everyday work experience. It's also helping companies compensate for shortfalls in traditional forms of advertising and marketing, says Gabe Zichermann, chief executive officer of Gamification, a company that runs workshops for businesses that want to implement a gamification strategy. "What we have is a crisis of engagement," he says.

Nissan's "eco mode" dashboard service

Nissan Motor (NSANY) brought gamification to its new electric vehicle, the Nissan Leaf. The automaker uses the technology to help drivers conserve fuel. When the car is driven in so-called eco mode, its accelerator contains a counter push-back control mechanism that is activated when it detects excess pressure. The feature informs drivers that they're using more power than required. An online portal connected to the car's dashboard also lets drivers know how well they're conserving energy, compared with other drivers in the region. The most efficient drivers are given virtual bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals.

Similarly, cashiers at Target (TGT) receive a score each time they check out a customer. The score is based on the the transaction's speed, with the checkout system also calculating the cashier's success rate over multiple transactions.

Companies need to guard against adding a superficial gaming gloss to applications—for instance, by creating meaningless leader boards that have little lasting impact on employee behavior, says Aaron Dignan, author of Game Frame, a book published in March that explores game mechanics in the workplace. "My hope is that it grows beyond that into a real discipline that's more rigorous than it is today," Dignan says. Managers also need to be alert to such possible unintended consequences as hacking or employees putting too much emphasis on the wrong aspects of play. "People could pay too much attention to things that don't matter or too little attention to things that do matter if the game is designed poorly," he says.

U.S. Companies Helped on Plantville

Siemens spent a year designing Plantville, working with such companies as Eugene (Ore.)-based game-design company Pipeworks Software, advertising and design firm Shaw Co. in St. Louis, and Fusion Performance Marketing in Plano, Tex. The game can be downloaded at Plantville.com and Siemens is using advertising, social media, and employee communications to get the word out. While the game hasn't been out long enough for Siemens to have amassed results, Varney says early feedback from employees has been positive.

Hilton's Embassy Suites is using game techniques in a customer loyalty campaign. Created with a marketing company called Maritz, the campaign targeted 50,000 of Embassy Suites' most loyal guests, then solicited their participation with 10 different approaches, including direct mail, e-mail, and asking customers to play a game. The game option proved most effective, says Christian Kuhn, director of brand marketing for Embassy Suites. The 5,000 people targeted by the game were most likely to open e-mails and later spent the most money, Kuhn says. That group accounted for about $200,000 of the additional $1 million in revenue generated by the campaign, he said.

Games may be more effective in marketing because they offer the gratification people experience when surprised and rewarded. An unexpected reward releases dopamine in the brain, giving beneficiaries a pleasurable feeling, says Barry Kirk, a vice-president at Maritz. "We don't think you can gamify something without understanding the human brain and neuroscience," Barry says.

Game designers are good at creating psychological hacks into how the human brain works to determine what motivates people, says author Dignan. That's why gamification can be a good fit for companies seeking to better engage workers. "It's about managing motivation and energy level and commitment," he says.

SAP's Games for Corporate Directors

Software maker SAP is turning to gamification to help corporate board members prepare for meetings. Directors typically must slog through thick binders full of documents or dashboards that feature key performance metrics. SAP is developing an application for Apple's iPad that boasts game elements such as progress bars and leader boards to get directors "more engaged in consuming various pieces of data," says Reuven Gorsht, senior director of strategy and global pre-sales at SAP. "We're dealing with very high-ranking executives that sit on six or seven boards and may have a full-time job running a company," he says. "Their time is precious and their attention span is fairly low." he says. The app should be ready in three to four months, he says. SAP is also looking at other ways to use game mechanics to make its software easier to use and more engaging for employees.

Traci Sitzmann, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado's business school, says games can make employees better at their jobs. She spent more than a year examining 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees in a study due to be published in the journal Personnel Psychology. Those using video games had a 14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level, an 11 percent higher factual-knowledge level, and a 9 percent higher retention rate than trainees in comparison groups, Sitzmann says.

Siemens is looking to games, not only for retaining current employees but attracting future ones as well. "With Plantville, we think there's a big educational play with colleges and high schools," says Siemens' Varney. He says he hopes the game can help make manufacturing more attractive to young people. "We have about 3,000 jobs posted in the U.S. at Siemens, many in technology or manufacturing," he says. "We're hoping to inspire a new generation of plant managers."

King is a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.

FT: Writing is on the wall for 'customer care'

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d19de002-572e-11e0-9035-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Hu06GM4j

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 27 2011 15:52 | Last updated: March 27 2011 15:52

On the lavatory wall of a colleague’s flat in Hong Kong hangs a framed letter. It is written on HSBC notepaper, and dated January 22, 1998. “Dear Sir,” it begins. “Please note that we have had occasion to return your cheque due to insufficient funds in the above account. This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory and the practice of issuing cheques without first ensuring that there are sufficient funds to meet them must cease forthwith, otherwise it will be necessary for your account in our books to be closed.

“Yours faithfully, P. Mandal, assistant manager customer deposits, Bangalore branch.”

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Pen and paper are a forgotten management tool - Mar-06

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

Lucy Kellaway: Banks, a conman and a homeless bloke - Feb-06

In displaying this letter in such a prominent place, my colleague was seeking to amuse his visitors with its Indian-English verbosity. In reprinting it here, I have a grander purpose. For all its stiff wording, it is the best letter to a customer I’ve ever seen. It sums up everything that used to be good about banking, but which has got hopelessly lost. Indeed, if all bankers still behaved like P. Mandal, there would have been no financial crisis.

For him, banking was a solemn matter, where prudence was all- important. In his world, there was none of the dodgy stuff that all banks now routinely engage in: pretending the customer is king while fleecing them if they go into the red, and investing their money in incomprehensible and ruinous financial instruments. Instead, recalcitrant customers were given a thorough telling off – which made them behave better. My colleague tells me that he has, indeed, ceased his unsatisfactory behaviour forthwith: he has not bounced a cheque since January 1998.

It all makes one wish P. Mandal had been transported from Bangalore to the London HQ and made chief executive instead of Sir John Bond. The Indian banker would never in a million years have agreed to the £9bn takeover of Household, the US subprime lender it bought in 2002. He would have cast one eye over the loan book with its millions of dodgy customers who could not afford their mortgages and said he wanted nothing to do with them.

But it is not just his prudence I like. It’s his writing style, too. Though somewhat pompous, it is short and to the point. And despite its threatening message, it is immaculately polite. “This state of affairs is most unsatisfactory” is a delightful and useful phrase that deserves to be rehabilitated at once.

The same day I was inspecting the walls of my colleague’s lavatory so approvingly, I was e-mailed an exchange that had just taken place between an FT reader and Comcast. She had sent a brief message to the cable operator complaining that she couldn’t find out how to get her mobile phone bill itemised. The reply was everything the lavatory letter was not: disingenuous, unintelligent, emotionally incontinent, unhelpful and miles too long.

“We are very glad to have you as part of Comcast family,” it began, unpromisingly. The idea that in signing up for an account with a mobile phone operator, one is not merely agreeing to share its airwaves but to share its genetic lineage is most disturbing.

The e-mail continued “ . . . and it is our privilege to provide you an exceptional and unparalleled customer service”. This is even worse – a combination of excessive bowing and scraping with excessive boasting, without conveying any meaning at all.

“Thank you for bringing this billing concern to our attention, Elizabeth”, it goes on. “Elizabeth”? How dare they? P. Mandal would have had a stroke at such fresh familiarity.

“Rest assured that we will properly address the concern by making sure that the best resolution will be provided to suffice your overall satisfaction . . . ”

I’m getting restive even typing this drivel out and so you will have to believe me that there are 500 more words of the same, including further apologies, further congratulations and wishes that Elizabeth have a nice day – without actually solving the problem in hand.

“We appreciate that you took time out from your busy schedule to share your concerns,” it said. But if they thought her schedule was busy, why did they think she would have time to read so much guff?

Finally, the sign off: a first name and a title, Comcast customer care specialist. At last, something with meaning. The author of this reply has proved herself a specialist in “customer care” – a virtuoso at apology and making all the most fashionable noises. The only problem is that there is no need for specialists in this area. Customers don’t want “care”. They just want their bills itemised.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Pen and paper - the forgotten management tool

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ae0e089e-46ab-11e0-967a-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1Htze1mAH

Pen and paper: the forgotten management tool

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: March 6 2011 22:12 | Last updated: March 6 2011 22:12

Last week I went out for a pizza with a man I hadn’t seen for a while. The bill was low; I picked it up. Two days later, a small, cream envelope arrived on my doormat. Inside was a folded piece of paper on which he had written a short note saying how much he had enjoyed the occasion.

This letter, which arrived in the same post as four items of junk mail and a credit card statement, pleased me beyond reason. I was almost moved to snatch up my pen and write a thank-you letter in return to thank him for his.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

Lucy Kellaway: Female quotas would target the wrong women - Feb-27

Lucy Kellaway: Talk like a loser and you might win - Feb-13

Lucy Kellaway: Banks, a conman and a homeless bloke - Feb-06

Lucy Kellaway: My measure of a good employer - Jan-30

Lucy Kellaway: Pointless conditions should not apply - Jan-23

Handwritten thank-yous are so thoroughly effective as a way of making other people feel good, it is mad that no one writes them anymore. In the last year I think I’ve only written one – and that was to thank my mother-in-law for the ham she always sends at Christmas. Had she owned a computer, I don’t think I would have written any at all.

In the office, the handwritten thank-you is even more powerful – and even more underused. Every time an employee makes a special effort they are doing the equivalent of buying a pizza or giving a ham to their employer. But they don’t expect thanks for it – which is just as well, as they don’t generally get any.

They do sometimes get a blanket thank-you to everyone (“thanks to all our people for their unstinting dedication during 2010” etc, etc) but such broad and bland declarations of gratitude have no effect on morale at all. Very occasionally, bosses take it into their heads to spit out an individual thank-you face to face (which is nice but wears off quickly) or send one by e-mail (which is nicer as it lasts longer but is somewhat flat).

One man who knows the power of the thank-you note is Doug Conant, who has been running Campbell’s Soup for a decade. In a recent blog for Harvard Business Review he says that every day he spends time with an assistant combing the company for people deserving thanks and then writes them a letter. Over the past 10 years he has fired off 30,000 of them – more than 10 each day.

My first thought on reading this is that the man is a genius.

My second thought was that he is an idiot to have revealed his secret, and thus devalue his currency. Who wants to treasure a note of thanks when they know there are 29,999 others in circulation?

Yet as I read the many gushing comments posted online by his employees, I saw I was quite wrong. The handwritten thank-you seems to be a currency that holds its value. Each letter, by definition, is written individually, so it doesn’t matter how many others there are. And once received, it can be kept in a drawer for reading until it falls to pieces.

The thank-you letter is not only incredibly effective, it costs nothing and has no nasty side effects. It doesn’t demotivate others – unless the recipients have the poor taste to frame their letters and stick them up above their desks. All in all, the ratio of effort in writing letters (very low) to pleasure on receiving them (extraordinarily high) must make this the most remarkable motivational technique there is.

Readers of the blog seem to agree: “Doug, What an inspiring post! The positive energy in written notes is healing in the workplace. Positive, genuine feedback is uplifting to our human wholeness. Thanks for sharing!” writes one.

But if these notes are so uplifting to our human wholeness, why is Mr Conant so unusual in writing any?

There seem to be three reasons. First, chief executives think their own contribution is more valuable than that of others, and as no one ever writes them thank-you letters they don’t write any themselves. Second, they aren’t close enough to the business to know who deserves thanks, and third, they have forgotten the strange human truth that almost everyone would do almost anything in return for a simple pat on the back.

On the rare occasion when they want to say thanks, they probably don’t pick up a pen because they have forgotten how to hold one or think it is going to take too long.

I’ve just put this to the test. Admittedly the start was slow as I had to rummage round in the stationery cupboard to get the right kit. But after that there was no stopping me. I took the lid off the pen and wrote: “Lucy, what an inspired column! Great positive energy! Thanks for sharing.” I put it in an envelope and wrote my name on the front. My handwriting is jagged from disuse, but still readable. Total time taken: 55 seconds.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.