How Playing Hard Ball Achieves Competitive Advantage & Attract More Customers

 

The winners in business have always played hardball. When companies play hardball, they use every legitimate resource and strategy available to them to gain advantage over their competitors. When they achieve competitive advantage, they attract more customers, gain market share, boost profits, reward their employees, and weaken their competitors’ positions. Then they reinvest their gains in their businesses to improve product quality, expand their offerings, and sharpen their processes to further strengthen their competitive advantage.

When they can continue this virtuous cycle of activity for a prolonged period, companies can transform their competitive advantage into a position even more powerful and desirable: they can achieve decisive advantage. With that, they put themselves into a far more powerful and influential position than just that of the market leader. They can use their decisive advantage to bring about fundamental change in an entire industry, put their competitors into a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still.

Winning through competitive advantage may sound like nothing more than good, serious, and sensible business practice. But hardball companies are further distinguished by their attitude and behavior.They play with such a commitment to the game, such a fierceness of execution, and such a relentless drive to maximize their strengths that they look very different from other companies that have admirable performance and sound business skills. Hardball players always play to win, in every aspect of the game. They always seek decisive victory. They don’t want to win a 2–1 squeaker. They would prefer a 9–2 rout.

Softball players have no competitive advantage or, if they have one, may not know what it is or may be unable to exploit it. Some softballers can drift along for years, finding ways to stay afloat from quarter to quarter—through trade loading, for example, or cost cutting. A few may seek to disguise their poor performance through activities that are questionable, if not illegal, such as creating shell customers. In the parlance of pitching, such companies are throwing junk.

Fundamental Corporate Purpose

We believe that the fundamental purpose of companies in our society is to compete as hard as they can against one another. In the September 13, 1970, issue of theNew York Times Magazine, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman quoted from his bookCapitalism and Freedom: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

Friedman’s comments sparked a debate about corporate purpose that raged in corporate suites across the United States and around the world, in the halls of academe, and in the influential “chat societies” of Washington and other power centers. The debate continues to this day.

Bruce Henderson, founder of The Boston Consulting Group, fundamentally agreed with Friedman but placed even more emphasis on the importance of competition. In 1973, troubled by the antitrust actions taken against IBM and AT&T in the name of competitive “fairness,” Henderson wrote:“The dominant producer in every business should increase his market share steadily. Failure to do so is prima facie evidence of failure to complete."

Henderson went on to describe the virtuous cycle that creates decisive advantage: “Competitors’ market shares should be unstable. Low-cost competitors should displace higher-cost competitors. Customers should share the benefits of lower cost with those suppliers who make it possible. Any failure to gain market share even with lower cost is self-evident restraint of trade.”

In Henderson’s view, a failure by companies to strive for decisive advantage would lead to a failure of their industry to “concentrate” (consolidate and improve), which would lead to an even larger failure—“a failure of the national economy to optimize productivity and reduce inflation.” In other words, as self-centered as playing hardball and seeking to win may appear to be, they are, in fact, essential to the health and strength of the larger economy and society.

Our book follows in the tradition of Milton Friedman, Bruce Henderson, and many others who believe that it is the function of companies to compete as hard as they can to gain customers and profits, with the goal of achieving the greatest advantage they can over their competitors.

A Never-Ending Cycle

From our experience working with clients over many years, in many industries, and in many countries, we know that the leaders of the world’s most successful companies—the hardball winners—believe it is their obligation to their shareholders, customers, employees, and society to seek and exploit their competitive advantage to the fullest. And, when possible, the hardball leaders will push that advantage to the point where competitors are squeezed and even feel pain.

When competitors find themselves in this position, they have two choices. They can play softball, using nonstrategic means to get society to bend its rules to hobble their hardball opponents. Or they can look for the chinks in the armor of the hardball players to change the rules of the game in their favor. We advocate the second approach. Business, like life, goes on as a never-ending cycle of achieving advantage, facing threats from bold and innovative competitors, and adjusting to or succumbing to those challenges.

But when an organization achieves advantage, it develops a tendency to continue operating with the same strategy or model that produced the advantage. The leader’s main role, then, is to keep alive the quest for advantage. As Roger Enrico, former chairman of PepsiCo, said to us, it’s impossible for an organization to “shadowbox” its way to continued advantage building. The leader’s task is to make his or her people understand that their company’s advantage is always in peril and, if necessary, to create an opponent against which the organization can focus its efforts.

In addition to strong leaders, hardball competitors also have what is generally called “good management.” In the development of our book and in the writing of theHarvard Business Review article that preceded it, however, we were criticized for downplaying the importance of the “soft” issues, such as culture and employee relations. We do not mean to downplay them but rather to place them in the context of strategy.

Good management is a necessary but insufficient condition of business success. Differences in profitability correlate very strongly with differences in competitive advantage. We believe that a management team that can provide a hardball strategy and push the organization to use it to gain competitive advantage is the most likely to deliver benefits—emotional, intellectual, social, financial, and professional—to its people.

By championing hardball, we are not advocating that we discard or ignore all we have learned about how to create good relationships with people both inside and outside the organization. On the contrary, we believe that people who work for and with hardball players are exceptionally well rewarded and among the most fulfilled people you will find in business. Courtesy of BCG Perpsectives

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As A Leader You Feel Ready, But Ready For What? - Leadership and Change

One of my favorite quotes is from an executive in Europe who said, “You feel ready, but ready for what?” 

His question addressed the angst of increasingly more leaders. Many leaders and small business owners tell me that they feel ill-prepared for today’s complex environment. With increased connectivity come strong and too often unknown interdependencies. For this reason, the ultimate result of these decisions has been poorly understood. 

Nevertheless, decisions must be made. 

As leaders turn their attention to growth strategies many have told us their success depends on doubling their revenue over the next five years. The services that contribute to the lion’s share of their revenue today will be the second largest source of revenue in five years. Finding new growth strategies is not easy in a complex and uncertain environment.

This means leaders must shake up their business models, old ways of thinking, and long held assumptions. They have to address what customers now care about and reassess engagement with employees to create optimal value. 

Leaders must learn to be comfortable with complexity and uncertainty. They have to see disruption in one form or another as an opportunity. 

Another leader said, “The Great recession has been a wakeup call. It felt like looking in the dark with no light at the end of the tunnel.” 

So, what can you do? Create a nimble and adaptive organization. One not disrupted by complexity. Innovate your management and leadership styles for an unconventional new normal. Create new approaches to better understand customers and engage employees. 

 

 

John C. Maxwell on Personal Development - How To Climb Out of That Rut

Have you ever felt stuck? Like you couldn’t get where you wanted to go? That you couldn’t break free of the confines of your current situation? When you couldn’t move up to the next level? Maybe you were in a rut, and maybe you feel like you’re in one now.
If that’s the case, you need to be willing to do something about it. Why? Because as writer Ellen Glasgow said, “The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.” If you allow yourself to stay in a rut too long, it could mean the slow death of your dreams. Nobody wants that.
If you’re in a rut and you want to break out of it, then I encourage you to take the following advice:

1. Accept responsibility for your own life.

I believe it is human nature to look elsewhere for the source of our difficulties, but the truth is that the older you are, the more responsible you are for your circumstances. True, many things are out of our control, and bad things do happen to good people. But we also make choices every day that contribute to our conditions.

Michael Korda, former Simon & Schuster editor in chief, observed, “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility.… In the final analysis, the one quality that all successful people have… is the ability to take on responsibility.”
Think about your life; where are you shirking responsibility or playing the victim? Have you blamed others for bad choices you made? Are you failing to follow through on anything that you know you should be doing? Are you doing things that you should never have agreed to do?
Take time to examine your life and how you’re spending it. Where can you take responsibility to make changes—even if your past choices haven’t led to your present predicaments? Getting out of a rut begins with the acknowledgement you must make the choices to do so.

 

2. Know where you want to be.

I have known a lot of people who hoped and dreamed of being successful, but their goals never become more specific than that. Hope is not a strategy. To quote baseball great Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you want to go, you might end up someplace else.”
You must define where you want to go in life; it’s not a guarantee you will reach your goals or achieve your dreams, but if you don’t define them, it’s almost guaranteed that you won’t.
You’re going to spend your life doing something. It might as well be what you really want to do. Have you given yourself a target? Have you written out your goals and described your dreams? If not, you need to.

3. Divide your dream into manageable parts.

One thing that often paralyzes people is having a dream or even a big goal with no realistic way of achieving it. How do you solve that? By breaking it down into bite-sized pieces that you accomplish with focused effort.
Motivational expert Tom Hopkins advised, “Take it in steps. If you’ve never made more than the minimum wage, don’t aim for a half-a-million-dollar goal the first year in selling or with a new company. Always aim for the earnings level that excites you a lot and only scares you a little.” And figure out the smaller steps necessary to get there. Break it down from your dream, to major goals, to intermediate steps, to annual goals, to monthly or weekly steps, and on down to what you need to do today.

4. Take action today.

Now you’ve arrived at the next step: taking action. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Well done is better than well said.” All the dreaming, hoping, planning and goal-setting in the world won’t do a thing for you if you never follow through.
Says producer-director Brandon McCormick, who owns the Atlanta-based boutique film company Whitestone Motion Pictures: “I meet artists all the time who learn about Whitestone and say, ‘I’m a director’ or ‘I’m a writer’ or ‘I’m a composer,’ but they don’t actually make anything. It’s very frustrating. At Whitestone, we’re a community of artists and artisans who actually make things.”
McCormick and team follow through. They take action. They make films, starting small and getting better as they go. As I write this, McCormick has 19 producer credits and 15 director credits on IMDb.com. And he’s only 28 years old!
What kind of action can you take today that will start moving you out of your rut and take you one small step closer to your dream? It doesn’t have to be a big step. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a significant step. It just needs to be a step in the right direction.

5. Grow into your tomorrow.

While the steps you take today don’t need to be earth-shattering, you don’t want every step forward to be small and insignificant. You want your steps to be progressively bigger, smarter and more strategic. The only way I know to make that happen is to be intentional about getting better every day.
In my new book The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential (in bookstores the first week of October), the last law, the Law of Expansion, says, “Growth always increases your capacity.” Tenure won’t make you better. Experience isn’t any guarantee of success. Having the best resources doesn’t automatically help you improve. The only thing that guarantees that you will be better tomorrow is growing today.
If you don’t have a highly intentional plan for personal growth, you might get out of today’s rut and dig yourself a new one tomorrow. Don’t do it. If you keep getting better, keep climbing higher, you’ll never find yourself stuck—at least, not for long.
My one final piece of advice is to tell you to get help. Too often we are so embarrassed about where we are that we become afraid of admitting to someone else that we’re stuck. That shouldn’t be. There’s no shame in getting stuck—only in staying that way when you have a choice to change.
There have been times that I’ve had to ask others to give me a hand to move forward when I couldn’t figure out how to do it. And there have been times when others have asked for my help. That’s the way it ought to be. I believe that God put us on this earth to help one another. via success.com

Follow me on Twitter @innothinkgroup, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/Center-for-Creative-Leadership-and-Strategy, or check out my website http://innothinkgroup.com for more tips and strategies effective leadership, engaged employees, increase growth, and customer effectiveness through innovation.

These 8 Steps to Authentic Leadership Leads to Growth

Sooner or later every leader realizes that 99% of the people he depends on for success don’t report to him.  Authentic leadership relies on persuasion and persuasion relies on trust. Trust is the most important asset that any organization, brand, product, leader, or individual can have.  Most importantly, trust is not a scarce resource. We can all have more than we need.  However, trust is fragile: Once squandered it is often impossible to regain.  Here are 8 ways to guarantee that you, your product, your brand, and your company will always be trusted.

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Several months after taking a new job as head of sales and marketing for a software company, the head of another department came into my office and said, “I think you have a commitment problem.”  She said she had given me several suggestions yet there was no evidence that I was acting on any of them.
“I do have a commitment problem,” I replied. “I am fanatical about keeping them.” I told her that I never commit to more than ten things at a time, and showed her a document containing her suggestions as well as my ten top priorities. I said that if she could make a case for replacing one of my priorities with one of hers I would gladly listen.  She ended up agreeing with my priorities, and this rocky start actually led to a deep personal friendship and the most trusting and productive relationship of my entire career.
Love may make the world go round, but even love depends on trust.  Trust between the United States and Canada produced the longest unguarded border in the history of mankind saving untold billions in defense expenditures and economic friction.  I was in Russia recently and a woman summed up Russia’s tragic and enduring problems with, “There is no trust in Russia.” We accept bits of valueless paper called currency in exchange for goods and services because we trust others to do the same, and I wouldn’t dare climb into my car if I didn’t trust you to obey traffic laws.  Without trust the world quickly descends into William James’ “Bloomin’, buzzin’, confusion.”
The first secret to trust is keeping promises. Trust depends on promise and fulfillment or what lawyers call contracts.  Few realize that corporate profit and loss statements consist of promises not money.  There is no cash or “real money” on the P&L; instead the meat is accounts receivable and accounts payable which are merely promises to pay for goods and services already rendered or received.  In my own company we considered keeping promises so mission critical that we implemented formal internal and external processes for making, tracking, and fulfilling promises.  For example, despite being a perpetually cash starved startup we paid our vendors on time simply because this is what we had promised to do even if it meant I didn’t get a pay check.
To build trust we also must be willing to make promises and this is the second step.  One of the most difficult management challenges I ever encountered was getting others to use goal language. We often assume that if we don’t make promises we will never have to worry about breaking them.  So we hide behind “I’ll try” rather than “I’ll do” in an attempt to side step accountability through ambiguity, equivalence, obfuscation, or even downright double talk.  Unfortunately this stratagem merely signals a person who can’t trust himself, and someone who can’t trust himself is never trusted by others.  We all want solid commitments from others and this means we must be willing to offer accountability ourselves.
The third secret to establishing trust is to under commit and over deliver.  Over promising is the flip side to under promising and just as damaging. Negotiating up front is far more effective in creating and maintaining trust than the inevitable excuses that arise when a promise is not fulfilled. We overcommit because we want others to like us, but the best way to ruin a relationship is by not following through on our promises.
The fourth secret to trust is proactive communication. I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal (don’t ask why!) evaluating various firms that clean and preserve bridal dresses.  An expensive process that takes months, one firm dazzled the article’s author by sending weekly progress reports. As fallible human beings we will never keep all our promises, but no matter how compelling our excuses may be for failing to deliver on time and on budget there is no excuse for not giving others a heads up.   Keeping everyone in the loop is not just common courtesy it is essential.  If the news is good people can relax, and if the news is bad there is plenty of time to go to plan B. In the story I related above, my mistake was in not communicating therefore forcing my colleague to confront me in the first place about her suggestions.
The fifth secret is don’t cut corners. We are far better off doing a few critical things to the nth degree than a lot of things with a “good enough” attitude. Cutting corners assumes that no one will notice, and this adds insult to injury because it implicitly treats others as if they were too damn stupid to notice.
The sixth key to trust is never hide mistakes.  Inevitably some of our mistakes will be discovered and when they are any rational observer will assume that where there is one there are others yet to be discovered.  Autonomy or being our own boss is what turns work into fun, and hiding mistakes is the quickest way to trade hands off autonomy for a hands on boss or regulatory agency anxiously monitoring our every move.  Also beware of excuses; a simple apology is far more effective in maintaining trust than a box car full of trumped up excuses and finger pointing.
The seventh trust building secret is purifying motivations.  Putting our own agenda first always dooms trust.  Others rapidly see through the smoke screen, and from then on every move we make is screened for ulterior motivations real or imagined.  Conversely, team players who put the interests of others ahead of their own accrue the incredible power that only trust can bestow.
The final secret to trust is never make people ask.  When you repay a debt or fulfill an obligation without being reminded you get ten times the trust building credit that you would otherwise.   Nobody likes hounding a company or an individual to fulfill a promise, and when you add this emotional cost it is always subtracted from your treasury of trust.  For example, when your friends must remind you to pick up the check once in a while you end up picking up more than your share of the checks while getting little or no credit for the gesture.  When I forced my colleague to come to me about her suggestions I was guilty of violating this simple rule which put me on the defensive.
Louis R. Mobley my mentor and the founder of the IBM Executive School said that what makes business possible is trust.  In our own company, for example, our commitment to building trust meant going from a tiny start up to eventual acquisition without ever suing or being sued while collecting over 99% of our receivables without ever running a credit check. A society, company, brand, product or individual can never have too much trust, and if you follow the simple steps outlined above I guarantee you will always have all the trust you need to be successful. via forbes.com

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Leadership Development - Effectively Influencing Decision Makers - Marshall Goldsmith

'The great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors 'owe' them and should do for them.'

"The great majority of people tend to focus downward. They are occupied with efforts rather than results. They worry over what the organization and their superiors 'owe' them and should do for them. And they are conscious above all of the authority they 'should have.' As a result they render themselves ineffectual."—Peter Drucker

One of my first BusinessWeek.com blogs was called "The Art of Influencing Up." In the last couple of years, I have received countless questions from leaders who not only need to influence up but also influence across in their organizations. In this post, I would like to share a more comprehensive version of my ideas on how to make a positive difference when you do not have direct line authority.

Please be warned in advance, this post is longer than my regular ones.

Peter Drucker has written extensively about the impact of the knowledge worker in modern organizations. Knowledge workers can be defined as people who know more about what they are doing than their managers do. Many knowledge workers have years of education and experience in training for their positions yet have almost no training in how to effectively influence decision-makers. As Peter has noted, "The greatest wisdom not applied to action and behavior is meaningless data."

The 11 guidelines listed below are intended to help you do a better job of influencing decision-makers. In some cases, these decision-makers may be immediate or upper managers—in other cases they may be peers or cross-organizational colleagues. I hope you find these suggestions to be useful in helping you convert your good ideas into meaningful action.

1. Every decision that affects our lives will be made by the person who has the power to make that decision, not the "right" person or the "smartest" person or the "best" person. Make peace with this fact.

As simple and obvious as this statement may seem, I am amazed at how few (otherwise intelligent) people ever deeply get this point. When your child comes home from school and complains, "It’s not fair! The teacher gave me a 'C' and I really deserved an 'A.' "" we, as parents, should say, "Welcome to the real world, kid. In life you have to accept the fact that decision-makers make decisions—and that you are not always the decision-maker." Once we make peace with the fact that the people who have the power to make the decisions always make the decisions and we get over whining that "life isn't fair," we become more effective in influencing others and making a positive difference. We also become happier.

2. When presenting ideas to decision-makers, realize that it is your responsibility to sell, not their responsibility to buy.

In many ways, influencing ultimate decision-makers is similar to selling products or services to external customers. They don't have to buy—you have to sell. Any good salesperson takes responsibility for achieving results. No one is impressed with salespeople who blame their customers for not buying their products.

While the importance of taking responsibility may seem obvious in external sales, an amazing number of people in large corporations spend countless hours blaming management for not buying their ideas. Former Harvard Professor Chris Argyris pointed out how "upward feedback" often turns into "upward buck-passing." We can become disempowered when we focus on what others have done to make things wrong and not on what we can do to make things right.

If we spent more time on developing our ability to present ideas and less time blaming others for not buying them, a lot more might get accomplished.

A key part of the influence process involves the education of decision-makers. To again quote Drucker: "The person of knowledge has always been expected to take responsibility for being understood. It is barbarian arrogance to assume that the layman can or should make the effort to understand the specialist." The effective influencer needs to be a good teacher. Good teachers realize that communicating knowledge is often a greater challenge than possessing knowledge.

3. Focus on contribution to the larger good—not just the achievement of your objectives.

An effective salesperson would never say to a customer, "You need to buy this product, because if you don't, I won't achieve my objectives." Effective salespeople relate to the needs of the buyers, not to their own needs. In the same way, effective influencers relate to the larger needs of the organization, not just to the needs of their unit or team.

When influencing decision-makers, focus on the impact of your suggestion on the overall corporation. In most cases the needs of the unit and the needs of the corporation are directly connected. In some cases they are not. Don't assume that executives can automatically make the connection between the benefit to your unit and the benefit to the larger corporation.

4. Strive to win the big battles. Don't waste your energy and psychological capital on trivial points.

Executives' time is very limited. Do a thorough analysis of ideas before challenging the system. Don't waste time on issues that will only have a negligible impact on results. Focus on issues that will make a real difference. Be willing to lose on small points.

Be especially sensitive to the need to win trivial non-business arguments on things like restaurants, sports teams, or cars. People become more annoyed with us for having to be right about trivia than our need to be right on important business points. You are paid to do what makes a difference and to win on important issues. You are not paid to win arguments on the relative quality of athletic teams.

5. Present a realistic "cost-benefit" analysis of your ideas—don't just sell benefits.

Every organization has limited resources, time, and energy. The acceptance of your idea may well mean the rejection of another idea that someone else believes is wonderful. Be prepared to have a realistic discussion of the costs of your idea. Acknowledge the fact that something else may have to be sacrificed in order to have your idea implemented.

By getting ready for a realistic discussion of costs, you can prepare for objections to your idea before they occur. You can acknowledge the sacrifice that someone else may have to make and point out how the benefits of your plan may outweigh the costs.

6. "Challenge up" on issues involving ethics or integrity—never remain silent on ethics violations.

The downfall of Enron, WorldCom, and other organizations have dramatically demonstrated how ethics violations can destroy even the most valuable companies. The best of corporations can be severely damaged by only one violation of corporate integrity. I hope you will never be asked to do anything by the management of your corporation that represents a violation of corporate ethics. If you are, refuse to do it and immediately let upper management know of your concerns. You need to take this action for the ultimate benefit of your company, your customers, your co-workers, and yourself.

When challenging up, try not to assume that management has intentionally requested you to do something wrong. In some cases, inappropriate requests may be made because of misunderstandings or poor communication. Try to present your case in a manner that is intended to be helpful, not judgmental.

7. Realize that powerful people are just as human as you are. Don't say, "I am amazed that someone at this level…"

It is realistic to expect decision-makers to be competent; it is unrealistic to expect them to be anything other than normal humans. Is there anything in the history of the human species that indicates when people achieve high levels of status, power, and money, they become completely 100% wise and logical? How many times have we thought, "I would assume someone at this level…" followed by "should know what is happening," "should be more logical,&qu "wouldn't make that kind of mistake," or "would never engage in such inappropriate behavior."

Even the best of leaders are human. We all make mistakes. When your managers make mistakes, focus more on helping them than judging them.

8. Treat decision-makers with the same courtesy that you would treat customers—don't be disrespectful.

While it is important to avoid kissing up to decision-makers, it is just as important to avoid the opposite reaction. A surprising number of middle managers spend hours trashing the company and its executives or making destructive comments about other co-workers.

Before speaking, it is generally good to ask four questions:

• Will this comment help our company?

• Will this comment help our customers?

• Will this comment help the person I am talking to?

• Will this comment help the person I am talking about?

If the answers are no, no, no, and no, don't say it! There is a big difference between total honesty and dysfunctional disclosure. As we discussed earlier, it is always important to "challenge up" on integrity issues. It is inappropriate to stab decision-makers in the back.

9. Support the final decision of the organization. Don't tell direct reports, "They made me tell you."

Assuming that the final decision of the organization is not immoral, illegal, or unethical, go out and try to make it work. Managers who consistently say, "They told me to tell you" to co-workers are seen as messengers, not leaders. Even worse, don't say, "Those fools told me to tell you…" By demonstrating our lack of commitment to the final decision, we may sabotage the chances for effective execution.

A simple guideline for communicating difficult decisions is to ask, "How would I want someone to communicate my final decision when that person disagreed with me?" Treat decision-makers the same way that you would want to be treated if the roles were reversed. If you stab your boss in the back in front of your direct reports, what are you teaching them to do when they disagree with you?

10. Make a positive difference—don't just try to "win" or "be right."

We can easily become more focused on what others are doing wrong than on how we can make things better. An important guideline in influencing up is to always remember your goal: making a positive difference for the organizations.

Corporations are different from academic institutions. In an academic institution, the goal may be just sharing diverse ideas, without a need to affect the bottom line. Hours of acrimonious debate can be perfectly acceptable. In a corporation, sharing ideas without having an impact is worse than useless. It is a waste of the stockholders' money and a distraction from serving customers.

When I was interviewed at the Harvard Business Review, I was asked, "What is the most common 'area for improvement' for the executives that you meet?" My answer was "winning too much." Focus on making a difference. The more other people can be "right" or "win" with your idea, the more likely your idea is to be successfully executed.

11. Focus on the future—let go of the past.

One of the most important behaviors to avoid is whining about the past. Have you ever managed someone who incessantly whined about how bad things are? When people consistently whine, they inhibit any change they may have for bettering the future. Their managers tend to view them as annoying. Their direct reports view them as inept. Nobody wins.

Successful people love getting ideas aimed at helping them achieve their goals for the future. By focusing on the future, you can concentrate on what can be achieved tomorrow, not what was not achieved yesterday. This future orientation may dramatically increase your odds of effectively influencing decision-makers. It will also help you build better long-term relationships with people at all levels of your organization.

In summary, think of the years that you have spent "perfecting your craft." Think of all of the knowledge that you have accumulated. Think about how your knowledge can potentially benefit your organization. How much energy have you invested in acquiring all of this knowledge? How much energy have you invested in learning to present this knowledge to decision-makers so that you can make a real difference? My hope is that by making a small investment in learning to influence decision-makers, you can make a large, positive difference for the future of your organization.

via marshallgoldsmithlibrary.com

What if you maximized your effectiveness? What if you increased employee and customer engagement? How would you rate your competitive advantage?

For over 25 years, Jim Woods has worked with hundreds of people all over the world, helping them discover their ultimate effectiveness through breakthrough educational and coaching programs. Jim is an expert on leadership, competitive strategy, and organizational issues. He is president of InnoThink Group and Center for Creative Leadership and Competitive Strategy.

For Speaking or Consulting Engagements Contact Jim
Jim Woods
President and CEO InnoThink Group
jwoods@innothinkgroup.com
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719-266-6703

10 Ways To Overturn Traditional Organizational Hierarchy To Create An Open Culture - Chris Hirst

Three years ago, Grey London really needed to change. The industry had changed, the media landscape had changed and Grey remained a relatively successful (in financial terms at least), safe, but dull London outpost of a global network. Not a great, or ultimately sustainable, place to be if you’re in a creative industry.

Grey had tried to change before. The business wasn’t in denial, but it just seemed like the "uncrackable" problem. This time, we did it differently. Our strategy for change was to change our culture. We called this Open. It is both an expression of a culture and how we believe today’s people-based businesses should work in order to survive, evolve and thrive. It is a philosophy of collective creativity and collective responsibility. It encourages increased collaboration between departments, the agency and its clients. Any business can be Open; what follows is a brief description of how we did it, the lessons learned and the results we’re achieving.

As a team, we have a shared dissatisfaction for how most agencies choose to work. Despite selling creativity, many behave in the exact opposite way and the most conservative department is often the creative department. We believe that most "people" businesses are actually "talent" businesses and conventional pyramidal structures squash and stifle this talent. This makes them slower, less innovative and ultimately frustrating places to work. In 2009, we set about turning this pyramid upside down, re-framing the role of management as coaches and cultural guardians.

To achieve actual change rather than paper change we needed three things: vision, courage and urgency, with the greatest focus on the latter--because talking about change rather than doing it is where most programs come unstuck. We set metrics, a timeline, identified our key stakeholders (primarily in our case staff and clients) and published targets for all to see. It was scary, because metrics and transparency set targets that demonstrate success, but can also highlight failure.
Focusing on actions ahead of words and documents, we held focus groups internally, removed all offices, official processes--even sacrosanct "sign-offs"--and department boundaries, creating a place that allowed people to be the best they could be. We believed that if we did this, breaking the traditional parent/child relationship that exists in most businesses, we would achieve radical change.

And we have. Over the past three years we have transformed our creative output, winning awards around the world, and doubling in size (revenue). Crucially, our staff and client satisfaction scores have also skyrocketed.
Yet the job is not complete. Open positively affects our business on a daily basis, and with the desire to change as strong as ever, continues to drive us forward.

Here, based on our experience, are 10 ways to become Open.

Don’t just strategize for change

All businesses need to change. This is as true of a small, fast-paced creative business as it is of a global corporate behemoth. The problem is, despite the considerable money thrown at them and the legions of paper theories written about them, most change programs fail.

Strategy is, in fact, the easy bit. Paying for it hurts, but the pain passes. Doing it gets very hard indeed. You need to be prepared for the long road ahead. Only a dramatic shift in culture can yield the best results.

Do it now

Let’s face it, the ideal moment to change your business--when you’ve got a clear diary, all your clients are happy and there are no major projects in the pipeline--will never present itself. So stop waiting for the right time, just get on with it.

Image: Flickr user Francisco Delatorre

Pick the right team

The operative word here is team. You need to put together a genuine and focused group at the top of the business to make change happen. A team who invests effort in collective success and effort in making the team itself work effectively.

Do as I do, not as I say

Fundamentally, culture is the behavior of management. Too often, people accept change needs to happen, but believe it’s someone else that needs to behave differently to make it a reality. What you do as a manager, not what you say, is what really counts. Only your actions and leading by example will bring about a change in the way your whole organization behaves.

Engage, don’t mandate

The biggest barrier to change is mobilizing and energizing your workforce, which is likely to be highly skeptical. Your people need to be invited to shape the future of the business, not manipulated to satisfy the needs of management.

At Grey London we invited everyone to a series of day-long workshops to engage staff in developing our new vision and values. The management team didn’t define Open, the talent did. In an Open culture, the role of management is to create a culture that allows every individual to be the best they can be and then focus on removing obstacles and barriers that obstruct this ambition (of which inevitably there are many).

Image: Flickr user Grant Hutchinson

Break habits and make change visible

Culture is like concrete, which over time sets into a certain mold. An effective change program therefore needs a degree of physicality. Too much so-called change stays on PowerPoint. To really shake things up, you’ve got to take a sledgehammer to that concrete, but be mindful that, in time, the new way of doing things will also become too entrenched. You need to keep smashing and resetting to keep your culture vibrant and your business energized.

Fundamental to the success of Open is the breaking of barriers, physical or otherwise. So the first big step is tearing down walls: no offices (for anybody) and nobody sitting in departments. Then change your processes to involve all stakeholders throughout a project so everyone not only understands the problem, but takes pride and ownership in delivering the best answer.

Not all change has to be this radical, however. You can achieve a large amount by seemingly symbolic acts. Seen by everyone and felt immediately, symbolic acts can have disproportionate influence.

Management as mentors

Open turns the traditional organizational hierarchy upside down, recasting management as mentors. Ultimately, its success lies in the emphasis on the power of the individual and their teams to do the right thing, their way. It allows ambitious entrepreneurs to thrive and be the best they can be.

If you sit in an organization where the seventh floor doesn’t know what the first floor thinks, you can’t change a company’s culture. To combat this kind of malaise, you need to change people’s emotional contract with the organization--we went as far as giving junior executives a place on the board through the creation of "Open Chairs."

You also need tangible demonstrations of trust and devolution of responsibility. For Grey London, the most totemic act was the removal of "sign-offs." For us, sign-offs became a short hand for everything that we believed was wrong about traditional agency ways of working. Sign-offs are about control, but unfortunately, also disempower and imply that only the creative director’s point of view matters. This leads to a slow, dependent culture, frustrated clients and, most importantly of all, less good work.

Open belongs to everyone. It involves everyone. Even clients. Ideas can come from anywhere and anyone, so allow people to adapt the approach as they see fit and launch their own initiatives to promote a culture of collaboration. You’ll find leaders emerge at all levels.

Image: Flickr user Brian Duffy

Recognize that change is lumpy

Set ambitious metrics for success and be transparent about what they are. Encourage open and honest feedback and share all the results with everyone. Open is about decisions, action and continuous change. Coupled with ambitious targets and full disclosure on progress, comes the very real possibility of failure. If you’ve fully embraced Open, you will make the wrong decisions from time to time, but as long as you continue to act and make more good decisions than bad ones, your business will move forward fast. Remember, change isn’t linear--it’s lumpy.

At Grey London, implementing a "70% right" approach has served us very well. As General Schwarzkopf once said, “If you’ve waited until you’re more than 70% certain, then you’ve waited too long.”

Don’t stop

Too often, change consists of one-off initiatives that are forgotten by employees and abandoned by management. You need to nurture continual change and ongoing collaboration through workshops, training, social events and company-wide challenges.

We lie awake at night worrying "what next?" rather than, "did that work?"

The stakeholder journey

Identify your stakeholders and make sure they see the result of your change program--not just being different, but being better. Not better in the abstract or in a corporate sense, but better for them as individuals.

This applies to all stakeholders and you need to be able to articulate exactly how. From the personal association with a winning team, the potential career development if you’re the client who commissions a breakthrough piece of creative, the rewards that come with working for a successful company, and yes, even just coming to a nice place to work.

Chris Hirst is CEO of Grey London. via fastcocreate.com

We work with small business owners who have a limited budget with big dreams. Talk to us. We help organizations to achieve greater levels of success by showing them how to better connect with their employees and customers. 

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Tom Peters - Little Big Things - How To Be Extraordinarily Great

Tom Peters describes a meeting with Barry Gibbons, former chief of Burger King, in which they decide that anything is better than being ordinary. 

 

Discover What's Been Preventing You From Achieving The Top Line Growth, Peace of Mind, Relationships, Spiritual Connection And Health You Desire …and Learn the Next Step to Overcome It!

Jim is an expert on leadership, competitive strategy, and organizational issues. Some of his work has focused on how organizations attain superior performance, and how they constantly reinvent advantages to propel growth in times of stress. 

For Speaking or Consulting Engagements Contact Jim

Jim Woods
President and CEO InnoThink Group
jwoods@innothinkgroup.com
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Chris O'Connor: 3 Tips to Increase Time Spent Selling

Most businesses today are evaluating integrating social and mobile solutions into their core processes. Mobile in particular is fast becoming a necessary area of expertise for software pundits. The best strategies that leverage social and mobile do so to ultimately increase a sales team's time spent selling so that, without adding headcount, a company can grow lead generation and drive revenues.

In order to increase selling time other tasks must be streamlined and simplified. Today, IT leaders are looking for ways to derive new value from and increase productivity via tools that are commonly viewed as solely for reporting (think Salesforce and SAP). Steering these mega-systems in fresh directions takes time but as the proliferation of social channels and mobile apps illustrate, there exists an innovative, iterative start-up ecosystem today that can benefit the enterprise in the following ways:

Nimble Wins

Companies exist today that are nimble enough to be experimental. Their time scales are shorter to execute on pieces of an enterprise's overall strategy. Going outside your organization allows you to tap into the energy that these startups embody. If your product team doesn't jump as high as you'd like anymore, there's a team out there that has domain expertise and can respond to your needs likely even bringing in better ideas in the process. Tap into the nimble, be quicker to execute on your strategy and be the first mover in your industry to see the benefits of social and mobile business processes. Speed and fluidity are deal-breakers.

The Integrated Stream is Not Enough

Even the biggest acquirers on the block these days recognize that they still have gaps around various aspects of their offerings -- be it mobile or otherwise. You can staff up, onboard new people and get them working on plugging that hole internally, however, time is money and if an "acquihire" isn't in your budget you're fortunate that there are people who, in many cases, have left large organizations to start companies aimed at tackling repeatable processes with innovative new approaches. Don't just stick to mobile and social 1.0 and put social streams into workflow applications -- it's not enough and that approach is viewed as pedestrian by your top performing "prosumers." Rather, add mobile and social into core product functionality that intrinsically changes how tasks are completed from the top to the bottom of your stack. If your team can gather (or, better yet, receive) information to prepare for a meeting more efficiently on the go, their effectiveness in closing deals will increase.

People are Primed

Administrative reporting, time lost due to travel, and communicating back with the "mothership" are all time sucks for road warriors. The integration of social and mobile tactics into business processes, content creation, dissemination and data management will impact each sales person's results. As I've mentioned before, a virtue of this trend is that, in the case of many employees, the training has been done for you by years of consumer phone use, social networking, information gathering through search, chatting online, app buying/use, even gaming etc. Your employees are primed and ready to intuitively navigate your social business to the benefit of the company.

Every minute your sales team spends doing something that doesn't help them network more effectively, stay in touch with existing contacts, and better understand their contacts through real-time, up to date information is a minute lost in their sales cycle. Help them help you by baking smart, intuitive, and even fun mobile and social capabilities into their everyday workflows. via huffingtonpost.com

Jim is an expert on leadership, competitive strategy, and organizational issues. Some of his work has focused on how organizations attain superior performance, and how they constantly reinvent advantages to propel growth in times of stress.   

For Speaking or Consulting Engagements Contact Jim
Jim Woods
President and CEO InnoThink Group
jwoods@innothinkgroup.com
Follow Jim on Twitter

How to Set Goals Without Caring About the Outcome

Are you confused between the difference between setting goals and being attached to outcomes? Learn the big difference between these two.

Many people experience confusion regarding the difference between setting goals and letting go of attachment to outcomes. A client and I were discussing being in the moment with her work, rather than stressing about the outcome. "Then how can you set goals for yourself? Everyone sets goals based on the outcome. Why else would you even set goals or try to accomplish anything?"

Setting goals is a very positive and powerful thing to do. Setting goals helps us take the loving action we need to take in our own behalf, to accomplish the things we desire to achieve.

However, setting goals and working toward accomplishing those goals is very different than attaching our happiness, worth and well being to achieving those goals. If we attach our happiness and worth to accomplishing our goals, then we will never feel happy until we have what we want. And, because most of us continue to create new goals once we accomplish our previous goals, this means never being happy or feeling worthy. As long as we attach our happiness and worth to accomplishing our goals, we can never be happy in the moment. There is always the proverbial carrot dangling in front of us, and we never reach it. No matter how much we have and accomplish, the carrot is always there. This is why there are so many successful people who are very unhappy and never feel that they are good enough.

Goals are wonderful, and achieving them is fun, but happiness is right now -- being fully present with all that you have. Your sense of worth needs to be based on your intrinsic qualities -- your goodness and ability to love, your compassion, caring, and understanding -- rather than on achieving goals.

Attaching your happiness to outcomes is what causes distress. As soon as you attach your happiness, worth and wellbeing to something -- to connection with someone, to money, things, approval, success, and so on -- you then want control over getting what you want. And it is your controlling behavior that causes your distress. Not only does the attachment itself cause anxiety because you might ruminate on getting what you want, but all the things you do to attempt to control the outcome keeps you from being present to your experience of life in the moment.

Taking loving action in order to accomplish your goals is not the same as trying to control the outcome. Loving actions may include hard work, staying open to learning, being honest and acting with integrity, being on time, following through on commitments, caring about others, and so on. Controlling actions may include lying, using others, ruminating, getting angry or defensive, being closed to learning and so on. Controlling behaviors not only make it harder to manifest what you want, but these behaviors often result in feeling alone and unworthy.

When you are willing to accept that you are not in charge of outcomes, you can be fully present in this moment, connected with the inner guidance that will help you to achieve your goals. It's wonderful to want to be in a loving relationship, to be rich, to have a baby, to be accomplished in your chosen profession, to lose weight or be healthy, to buy a new house or new car, to plan for a vacation, and so on. It's wonderful to do all you can do physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually to achieve your goals. But if your happiness and sense of worth is dependent on achieving these goals, and if you spend your time trying to control the outcome of things, you will not be a happy person and you will not feel worthy, even if you achieve all of your goals.

Do all you can do to achieve your goals, while being present, open, loving and caring about yourself and others. Do the work you need to do to achieve your goals, while being connected with yourself and with your inner guidance. Do the necessary loving actions to accomplish all that your heart desires, while being unattached to outcomes.

Books by this author

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This Blogger's Books from

Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child
by Margaret Paul, Erika J. Chopich

Do I Have To Give Up ME to be Loved by GOD?
by Margaret Paul, Neale Donald Walsch

Follow Margaret Paul, Ph.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/innerbonding

via huffingtonpost.com

Viral Mehta: Servant Leadership: Helping People Come Alive

In an ancient parable, three masons are sitting in a row, all chipping away at large blocks of stone. A woman observing them is curious about what they're up to. She asks the first man what he's doing, to which he responds, "I'm chipping away at this block of stone." Indeed, she thinks. She questions the second man similarly, who says, "I'm working to feed my family." Also true, reflects the woman. Finally, she questions the third mason, who responds, "I'm helping to build a beautiful cathedral."

Read Peter Drucker's What Makes an Effective Leadership

It's a powerful perspective -- holding within it a value for collaboration, agency, creativity, and meaning. What if we all could see our work in that way? What if our organizations supported us in holding that perspective, and to go one step further, how can we create institutions that release these core values? In his seminal 1970 essay "The Servant as Leader," Robert Greenleaf coined the term "servant leader" to describe someone who has that interest. For such a person, "It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead."

A servant leader -- one who wants to serve first and lead second -- strives to create a work environment in which people can truly express these deepest of inner drives. Servant leadership entails a deep belief that people are the greatest asset any organization has, and to nurture their individual growth becomes the basis for all organizational development. That growth goes far beyond the limited dimension of financial benefit -- it dives into our core motivations as people.

In his book Drive, best-selling author Dan Pink talks about the evolution in our understanding of what really motivates people, especially in our professional lives. According to Pink, the latest behavioral science research points to three key drivers: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Another way to frame this is empowerment, perfectibility, and purpose, and servant leaders endeavor to create a culture that fosters each of these three intrinsic motivations:

Empowerment:

People want to be engaged and also have some level of control over their environment. A servant leader recognizes that the people doing the work generally have the best ideas about how to improve the processes they participate in. Through tools like rapid improvement events and PDCA (Plan Do Check Act) suggestion systems, servant leaders practice participatory decision-making, empowering employees to be innovators and co-creators in positive change. Such leaders are also enablers; they spend a significant amount of time at the workplace, making direct observations, and then striving to create systemic improvements that add value to the work of their employees.

For a concrete example of this kind of engagement, in "Improving Healthcare Using Toyota Lean Production Methods," Robert Chalice reports that Toyota Corporation employees globally generate 2 million ideas a year. And they come from all over -- more than 95% of the workforce contributes these suggestions, with each person submitting over 30 ideas each. Even more importantly, over 90% of these ideas are implemented. Leaders who understand how to unleash this kind of creativity build systems that support idea generation. But this kind of empowerment is also grounded. Servant leaders promote learning by doing and testing iteratively in a scientific way, and they demonstrate accountability. It's a great example of assuming value in all people, which soon translates into a scientific, transparent system for everyday improvement, which in turn fosters a culture of continuous perfection.

Perfectibility:

Perfect is a verb -- and every person can tap into an intrinsic drive toward perfection. A carpenter can strive to be a perfect craftsman, a nurse looks to provide perfect care at the bedside, and Michael Jordan was known to inexorably seek the perfect shot. The role of servant leadership is to create a culture and context in which that inherent drive toward improvement is channeled in a way that benefits the whole. If people are engaged in perfection as a journey and not a destination, then they are constantly looking for ways to innovate.

This brand of innovation follows a very conscious design philosophy -- one that is inherently collaborative. All of us are smarter than any of us, as the adage goes. Far from being a cold, individual, strictly rational process, servant leaders design highly collaborative systems that balance the scientific method with in-depth engagement of people from all levels. They also actively break down silos and promote a shared view across functions and departments: in healthcare (where I currently work), that view is: "how can we maximize the real value to the patient, and as they move along the care delivery stream, what improves their well-being?" In that sense, servant leaders have a worldview of interdependence, and recognize that they have to own the entire value stream (including suppliers and partners), on behalf of the patient.

Purpose:

In the words of Picasso, "The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away." In healthcare -- and especially in serving the underserved population -- it becomes all the more important (and necessary) to create structures that enable us to give in concert. Atul Gawande, the famed surgeon-author, uses a sports analogy to urge modern healthcare (though it's easily generalizable) to evolve from "cowboy medicine" to "pitcrew medicine," referring to the unbelievable preparation, synchronization, and seamless way in which a pit-crew services a race-car in the thick of intense competition. If a pit-crew can deliver flawless results in less than 12 seconds, imagine what a team of people can do longterm in the service of better care for all.

“Jim is inspiring. One of the best presentations I have heard." MITRE See what they are talking about.

At the root of such collaboration is still each person's own connection to greater purpose. Civil Rights leader Howard Thurman said, "Don't ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Perhaps that is the essence of servant leadership: to facilitate people in coming alive. Interestingly enough, when we support people in tapping into that part of themselves that is most alive, then their most selfless motivations surface. So people who've come alive are naturally amenable to working in a collective.

In this way, by supporting people in finding purpose, servant leaders inspire true, collective service. And it's all done invisibly, such that people can truly feel that they are each "helping to build a beautiful cathedral." In the ancient words of Lao Tzu, "The Sage is self-effacing and scanty of words. When his task is accomplished and things have been completed, All the people say, 'We ourselves have achieved it!'" via huffingtonpost.com

Since 1987 as a nonprofit foundation we've helped organizations create competitive advantage to bring about fundamental change, put their competitors into a reactive position, cause their partners and suppliers to make adjustments, and deliver so much value to their customers that their market share grows larger still. We work with government, corporations, and small business owners like you. See our client list.  

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Learning The Deep Bow of Gratitude and Happiness - Bro. David Steindl-Rast - Centered Leadership

People often ask me how Buddhists answer the question: “Does God exist?”

The other day I was walking along the river. The wind was blowing. Suddenly I thought, Oh! The air really exists. We know that the air is there, but unless the wind blows against our face, we are not aware of it. Here in the wind I was suddenly aware, yes it’s really there.

And the sun too. I was suddenly aware of the sun, shining through the bare trees. Its warmth, its brightness, and all this completely free, completely gratuitous. Simply there for us to enjoy.

And without my knowing it, completely spontaneously, my two hands came together, and I realized that I was making gassho. And it occurred to me that this is all that matters: that we can bow, take a deep bow. Just that. Just that.

If we were able to experience this fundamental gratitude at all times, there would be no need to talk about it, and many of the contradictions that divide our world would at once be resolved. But in our present situation, talking about it might help us at least to recognize this experience when it is granted to us and give us courage to let ourselves down into the depth which gratitude opens up.

(Please donate to our fund to help children stay in school and learn to become entrepreneurial leaders. Learn more.)

We can begin by asking ourselves: “What happens when we feel spontaneously grateful?” (It is, of course, this concrete phenomenon which concerns us here, not any abstract notion.) For one thing, we experience joy. Joy is certainly there at the basis of thankfulness. But it is a special kind of joy, a joy received from another person. There is that remarkable “plus” which is added to my joy as soon as I perceive that it is given to me by another, and necessarily another person.

I can treat myself to a delicious meal, but the joy will not at all be the same as if someone else treats me to a meal, even though it be a little less exquisite. I can prepare a treat for myself, but by no means of mental acrobatics can I be grateful to myself; there lies the decisive difference between the joy that gives rise to gratitude and any other joy.

Gratitude refers to another, and to another as person. We cannot in the full sense be grateful to things or to impersonal powers like life or nature, unless we conceive of them in some confused way as implicitly personal, super-personal, if you wish.
The moment we explicitly exclude the notion of personality, gratitude ceases. And why? Because gratitude implies that the gift I receive is freely bestowed, and someone who is capable of doing me a favor is by definition a person.
A joy, even though I receive it from another, does not make me grateful unless it is meant as a favor. We are quite sensitive for the difference. When you get an unusually big piece of pie in the cafeteria, you may find yourself hesitating for a moment, and only when you have discarded the possibility that this may indicate a change of policy or an oversight, you take it to be a favor worthy of a smile for the fellow that hands it to you across the counter.

It may be difficult in a given case to say whether the favor I receive was meant for me personally. But my gratitude will depend on the answer. At least the favor must be meant for a group with which I am personally identified. (When you wear a monk's habit you not infrequently receive a bigger piece of pie or some other unexpected kindness from someone you never met before and who you will never meet again. But there, the people do mean you, in so far as you are a monk, and it is quite a different case from the painful experience of smiling back at someone only to discover that the smile meant not you but someone who stood behind you.) 

via gratefulness.org Bro. David Steindl-Rast

Please donate to our fund to help children stay in school and learn to become entrepreneurial leaders. Simply click the link. Thank you. Jim

Must See Video on Living In Gratitude and Happiness In Times of Stress

In 10 minutes you like me will learn to see every employee, family member, and stranger on the train differently. You'll see that despite our differences we are yet the same. In these times of tumult we can easily lose sight of the blessings of our Creator as we pray thinking for more of everything. He has not forgotten us. This video if viewed daily will make an immense improvement in your life and career. I promise. I'd be delighted to hear your comments. Jim

Frank Mattes invigorating presentation on Open Innovation Culture Change.

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E-mails Ignored, Meetings Denied: Bias at the Search Stage Limits Diversity

 

Much of the talk about ending workplace discrimination focuses on gateways -- that is, what happens after a woman or a minority candidate applies to college or sends in a resume for a particular job.

But some of the biggest barriers to a truly diverse applicant pool and workforce may actually be occurring at the stage just before that -- what Wharton operations and information management professor Katherine Milkman and collaborators Modupe Akinola of Columbia University and Dolly Chugh of New York University call the "pathway" stage. If women or minorities are not given the same level of encouragement -- or the same ability to access "insider" information -- as their white male colleagues, they may be discouraged from even trying to pursue a particular opportunity, or they may start the application process at such a disadvantage that there is no chance of catching up.

In two recent papers, Milkman, Akinola and Chugh examine how this type of discrimination plays out in the world of academia. Using an experiment that explored the treatment of prospective applicants to doctoral programs, they found that professors were significantly less likely to be responsive to communication from women or minority applicants -- and that the level of unresponsiveness was greater within academic disciplines that tend to pay more, and at private institutions, where faculty salaries are higher on average.

"In a lot of industries, you need insider information to successfully break in," Milkman says. "There are a lot of things that an insider knows that an outsider wouldn't, and an applicant who receives encouragement and mentoring is therefore at a huge advantage."

The papers, Heterogeneity in Discrimination? A Field Experiment, and one published in the journal Psychological Science titled, Temporal Distance and Discrimination: An Audit Study in Academia, were inspired in part by Milkman's personal experience as one of just a few female PhD students spending time in the computer science and economics departments at Harvard. She also points to an enlightening study by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and University of Chicago economist Marianne Bertrand, who in 2004 explored race and gender biases in hiring by sending out resumes in response to ads for entry-level jobs in Boston and Chicago. The resumes were identical except for the candidate's name, which was designed to indicate the applicant's race and gender. Bertrand and Mullainathan found that white job candidates received a 50% higher callback rate for interviews than identical black job candidates.

"It was an amazing study, but it only scratches the surface of what's going on," Milkman notes. "The study showed that discrimination remains a problem in entry-level hiring. But I wondered: Is it still an issue in organizations where people are particularly focused on trying to increase diversity? Is it just as prevalent in highly educated, highly paid industries?"

In addition to Milkman's personal interest in how race and gender bias may play out in academia, she notes that the setting is also unique in that basic demographic and contact information about professors is easily accessible on the Internet, and further, faculty are often contacted by students when they are thinking about applying to a particular doctoral program. "I get e-mails all the time from people who are hopefuls. It's a really competitive industry and the way they figure out their chances of admission is to contact professors and ask for our advice and support," she says. "They want to know if they have a shot. [Our] response can make all the difference."

Milkman and her co-authors designed an experiment in which they sent e-mails to 6,500 professors at 258 U.S. universities representing 89 different disciplines. All of the e-mails contained meeting requests from prospective doctoral students. But the names of the fictional prospective students were randomly varied to indicate whether the sender was a man or a woman, or if he or she was white, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese. In some of the requests, the student asked if he or she could come in for a meeting that same day; others asked to meet in a week.

[When emailed one week in advance of a proposed meeting (N=3,241), rates at which professors ignored or declined prospective PhD students’ requests to meet as a function of student race and gender.]

Varying the timing of the requests was a particularly important aspect of the research, Milkman says. "Timing is one of the biggest contextual factors known to shift behavior," she notes. "When you're focused on the now, you're really focused on the how and not thinking about the why.... Discrimination really comes out when people are thinking about why to meet with someone. When you have a lead time of a week, [your answer] isn't only based on looking at the calendar and thinking, 'Can I fit this in?' It's based on your evaluation of whether the meeting is worthwhile."

Indeed, the researchers found that there was virtually no difference in the rate of response when prospective students asked for an immediate meeting. But when they tried to schedule one in a week, white males were 26% more likely to successfully schedule a meeting and 16% more likely to receive a response. While white males were more likely to get a response if they asked to meet in a week rather than the same day, female and minority students had a better response rate when they asked to meet immediately. The response rate for women and minorities was 14 percentage points higher at public institutions than at private schools. Further, a $13,000 increase in a faculty member's salary was associated with a four percentage point drop in the email response rate to women and minorities, but faculty salary had no such effect on white males.

'Any Ambiguity Can Be Used Against You'

All faculty members who responded "yes" to the meeting requests got an e-mail minutes later saying the student couldn't make it. All were sent messages two weeks after the experiment telling them that the queries were part of a study. Reactions were mixed. While some thanked the researchers for examining the issue of discrimination, others were upset because they felt the methods used were intrusive and wasted their time.

"Some were certainly worried that they would be labeled as discriminating," even when they had practical reasons for not responding, such as being out of the country when the message came, Milkman says. "Our study was set up very intentionally to prevent the identification of any individuals as having done something wrong.... It's the overall patterns that tell us whether discrimination exists, but there's not any one person we can point to and say, 'They did the wrong thing.' Lots of people have valid reasons for not responding. But there shouldn't be more valid reasons for people not to respond to a message received from an African-American student or an Asian student than to a message received from a white student."

Based on her findings, Milkman offered two pieces of practical advice for students or job candidates. "We found that minority students got a better response from minorities of their race ... so one prescription would be that if someone in that department shares your identity, they are more likely to be an advocate or willing to help you and less likely to discriminate," Milkman says. "Another prescription is to not leave any ambiguity about your quality as a candidate. One reason why people discriminate is that they don't think you're going to be as good of a candidate, so show that you are -- attach your CV, say whom you've worked with. Any ambiguity can be used against you."

[Response rates experienced by minority and female students relative to Caucasian males as a function of a faculty member’s academic discipline (for all faculty in the sample working in a known discipline, N = 6,519). Reverse-discrimination is shown in black.]

But Milkman suggests that the more important takeaways are for managers, many of whom may believe it is enough to emphasize diversity when looking over resumes or conducting interviews. Few probably consider the information-gathering phase most job candidates go through before throwing their hats in the ring. "Don't just think about solutions at gateways," she says. "Also think about having rules of thumb in place at the encouragement stage. If people in your organization are getting requests for assistance from potential applicants, instead of just responding with their gut instinct, there should be a policy in place for how to handle those requests."

Admissions directors and hiring managers often have a specific idea in mind of how a successful applicant should frame his or her resume, meaning that those who know what to do have an edge over like-skilled candidates who don't, Milkman points out. "How do we level the playing field? If we can eliminate opportunities for bias to seep in, then we're getting closer to leveling the playing field. This research highlights that bias is still seeping in -- it's still there."

The paper has already changed the way Milkman responds to prospective students who seek out her advice. "I used to just hit 'delete' if I didn't know the person. I did not respond to those emails," she says. "I have completely changed my behavior. Now that I have done this study, I know that this is where subtle discrimination can seep in. I now try to respond uniformly across the board to everyone." 

via knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu