Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012

Dorie Clark blogs.hbr.org  December 15, 2011

I recently got back from a month's vacation — the longest I've ever taken, and a shocking indulgence for an American. (Earlier this summer, I was still fretting about how to pull off two weeks unplugged.) The distance, though, helped me hone in on what's actually important to my professional career — and which make-work activities merely provide the illusion of progress. Inspired by HBR blogger Peter Bregman's idea of creating a "to ignore" list , here are the activities I'm going to stop cold turkey in 2012 — and perhaps you should, too.

1. Responding Like a Trained Monkey. Every productivity expert in the world will tell you to check email at periodic intervals — say, every 90 minutes — rather than clicking "refresh" like a Pavlovian mutt. Of course, almost no one listens, because studies have shown email's "variable interval reinforcement schedule" is basically a slot machine for your brain. But spending a month away — and only checking email weekly — showed me how little really requires immediate response. In fact, nothing. A 90 minute wait won't kill anyone, and will allow you to accomplish something substantive during your workday.
2. Mindless Traditions. I recently invited a friend to a prime networking event. "Can I play it by ear?" she asked. "This is my last weekend to get holiday cards out and I haven't mailed a single one. It is causing stress!" In the moment, not fulfilling an "obligation" (like sending holiday cards) can make you feel guilty. But if you're in search of professional advancement, is a holiday card (buried among the deluge) going to make a difference? If you want to connect, do something unusual — get in touch at a different time of year, or give your contacts a personal call, or even better, meet up face-to-face. You have to ask if your business traditions are generating the results you want.
3. Reading Annoying Things. I have nearly a dozen newspaper and magazine subscriptions, the result of alluring specials ($10 for an entire year!) and the compulsion not to miss out on crucial information. But after detoxing for a month, I was able to reflect on which publications actually refreshed me — and which felt like a duty. The New Yorker , even though it's not a business publication, broadens my perspective and is a genuine pleasure to read. The pretentious tech publication with crazy layouts and too-small print? Not so much. I'm weeding out and paring down to literary essentials. What subscriptions can you get rid of?
4. Work That's Not Worth It. Early in my career, I was thrilled to win a five-year, quarter-million dollar contract. That is, until the reality set in that it was a government contract, filled with ridiculous reporting mechanisms, low reimbursement rates and administrative complexities that sucked the joy and profit out of the work. When budget cuts rolled around and my contract got whacked, it turned out to be a blessing. These days, I'm eschewing any engagement, public or private, that looks like more trouble than it's worth.
5. Making Things More Complicated Than They Should Be. A while back, a colleague approached me with an idea. She wanted me to be a part of a professional development event she was organizing in her city, featuring several speakers and consultants. She recommended biweekly check-in calls for the next eight months, leading up to the event. "Have you organized an event like this before?" I asked. "Can you actually get the participants? Why don't you test the demand first?" When none materialized, I realized I'd saved myself nearly half a week's work — in futile conference calls — by insisting the event had to be "real" before we invested in it. As Eric Ries points out in his new book The Lean Startup , developing the best code or building the best product in the world is meaningless if your customers don't end up wanting it. Instead, test early and often to ensure you're not wasting your time. What ideas should you test before you've gone too far?

Eliminating these five activities is likely to save me hundreds of hours next year — time I can spend expanding my business and doing things that matter. What are you going to stop doing? And how are you going to leverage all that extra time?

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant who has worked with clients including Google, Yale University, and the National Park Service. She is the author of the forthcoming What's Next?: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). You can follow her on Twitter at @dorieclark.

Involving Employees in Change

Organizations going through change should involve their workforce as much as possible in the process.
Employee surveys have now become standard in most organizations. Yet too often, the wrong questions are asked and the wrong things are measured. To make employees feel completely involved in the organization, "satisfaction" with the workplace alone is not enough. An employee who is satisfied with his salary or the amount of annual leave is not necessarily, of his own free will, going to lend full support to his employer and his employer's goals. Satisfaction can be connected to passivity -- employees can be satisfied and yet still be indifferent.

The stronger the engagement, the more likely the employee will act in the interests of the employer.

There is more value in optimizing the work environment, thereby increasing emotional attachment -- or engagement -- to the organization by rigorously fulfilling employees' core needs and expectations. The stronger the engagement, the more likely it is that the employee will act in the interests of the employer -- and the more engaged employees there are, the more productive the organization will be. It is possible to measure the degree to which these core needs and expectations of the workplace are met.
What to ask and where to start
Building on years of research, Gallup has developed 12 items -- the Q¹² -- and employee responses to these items give information about the state of employee engagement, which in turn correlates with organizational performance. It is crucial that the results are discussed at the workgroup level as well as with the leadership and that action plans are put into place and followed through. The results act as a focus point for intense discussion within the team. (See graphic "The Employee Engagement Hierarchy.")
To ensure that the process is sustainable, the survey should be carried out regularly. Also, changes in the survey results over time need to be discussed within the team, and both action planning and follow-through must be monitored. Only when this happens will the employees feel really included and get actively involved in action planning. The results of the employee surveys can also be correlated with key performance indicators (KPIs). By combining these two types of organizational data -- the "soft" employee engagement data with the "hard" KPI data -- we can demonstrate the direct economic benefit of the actions on costs and growth.

Stryker Navigation is an example of how this can be put into practice. As a company, Stryker is a global leader in the manufacturing of navigation systems for computer-assisted surgery. Stryker's machines help doctors and surgeons perform operations more quickly, more safely, and more accurately. Development and production for global markets is done at Stryker's site in Freiburg, Germany.
Decreasing motivation rang alarm bells
When the Freiburg management team registered that the engagement of its employees was decreasing, it set alarm bells ringing, as the company was facing some difficult technical issues that needed to be resolved. It was not going to be possible to produce some important products as quickly and economically as previously thought. This lack of engagement became particularly apparent in the cooperation between teams -- for example, between the Development and Production teams. While the individual departments were performing well in their own range of tasks, they were not prepared to view the manufacture of new products as a complete process that required their collaboration.
Stryker turned to Gallup to measure the employees' engagement and to help the company develop actions for improving the situation. In addition to the Q¹² items, questions were asked about the collaboration between teams. The results were analyzed at the project team level and at the department level. The advantage of this approach is that it allows many different opinions on a project to be heard and discourages siloed thinking. The employees involved in a project can then work together to produce a list of actions, which serves to strengthen connections beyond departmental borders.
The most striking results were gathered in a presentation. Using Gallup's database comparisons and benchmarks, Stryker was able to see the areas in which the company was performing at excellence and those in which it was below average. Each team received its own scorecard, and internal benchmarks were used to show the teams how they ranked within their department as well as within the company as a whole.

How Many Customers Did You Lose Today?

Rita McGrath  blogs.hbr.org Dec. 7, 2011

My theme this month appears to be tone deafness among business designers. Cue Bank of America!
But genuinely, one of the most vexing dilemmas for senior executives is being plugged in to what is actually going on in the front lines of their business. It's all too easy to miss critically important customer experience information when one is engaging in the day-to-day grind that constitutes an executive's job. All the same, not being attuned to the way your business is perceived by customers can lead to a lot of damage.
Here's a recent example. My husband and I were traveling from Edinburgh to London, where we were to attend the Thinkers50 gala dinner, on a Monday in November. Our train was due to depart in 15 minutes, and my husband was anxious for a coffee. Aha! Conveniently located next to Track 2 was a Café Nero, one of the more ubiquitous brands of coffee shop that grew up in the wake of Starbucks' enviable success. I was given the task of watching the luggage; he went to get coffee.
Here's where it gets interesting. From my vantage point just opposite the entrance, I was able to observe customers coming and going. I was fascinated to see how many of them came and went — without buying anything — because they took one look at how long the line was and abandoned their coffee mission then and there. Intrigued, I started to count. Fully 3 people looked at the line and bailed on the thought of purchasing for every 1 person who actually made a purchase. Imagine — the café would have increased its business by 300% if everybody who thought they might like a coffee had been converted into a coffee buyer. And this is at a train station, where people risk missing a train if they stand around!
My guess is that these lost sales won't even be picked up in a corporate database. After all, how do you identify the dissatisfaction of people who were potential customers but ended up not being customers at all? How do you measure a non-event that should have been a sale?
I'm not picking on Café Nero, particularly, or the friendly people behind the counter. The business issue, however, is that their potential business was more than cut in half — in fact, cut by 75% — because they missed the obvious about buying coffee at a high-end café in a train station. This sort of thing happens over and over again because business designers miss one or more of customers' critical decision triggers. The companies that can fix this have the potential to create real profits by designing better, more complete customer experiences.
So, here's the challenge — how do you get the people who make strategy and resource allocation decisions to deeply understand what is actually happening on the front lines of their business?

Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath studies innovation, corporate venturing, and entrepreneurship. Her latest book is Discovery-Driven Growth (2009).

The 5 basic manners you need to know in business

Tom Searcy cbsnews.com Dec. 5, 2011

I stand up when a lady arrives at or leaves a table. I know, that is nostalgic and even possibly risky as it might be perceived as sexist. However, it is one of a set of manners I was taught as a child that I still follow. Holding doors, taking hats off indoors, pulling out chairs and lowering voices all seem to be quaint throwback ideas that are dying rapid and unceremonious deaths.

Because of diversity training, political correctness and the changing mores of society, I think the clarity of what are considered to be "good manners" has become murky. The basic guideline of "treat others as you would wish to be treated" is less of the clear path to follow as individualism changes the interpretation.

Manners are still important and can be differentiating, often times in the negative. When you make a mistake, it sticks out and is memorable. For that reason, there are certain things that you must get right.

1. Use of names -- Get the names right. Phonetically write them down and make certain that anyone who is prospect or client facing knows their names. Spelling, correct titles and deciding whether to use a nickname or proper name are all on the "must-get-right" list. I have seen big sales blown up because of a repeated misspelling of a key player's name.

2. Confirm before you proceed -- Ensure that you have agreement at each step in a meeting, tour, phone call or visit and that all of the participants have their questions answered before going to the next set of ideas or concepts. Adults not only stop listening to you when they get stuck or are in disagreement with what has been put forth, they also begin building resentment towards the speaker who proceeds without clearing up the issue.

3. Declare your accountability and keep it -- At the end of each meeting, visit, or call. It is your responsibility to declare what comes next. It is rude to ask the typical question, "What are the next steps?" You asked for the meeting, now you need to be able to provide an encouraged path to follow.

4. Host well when you host -- If you are feeding your visitors, feed them well. Creature comforts including temperature, lighting, drinks and room conditions are all noted. In the better sales organizations, even when those companies are tiny, the handling of a visitor is handled like a guest at Sunday dinner. Even the little details can make the person feel honored and valued.

5. Be gracious as a guest -- Diana Ross may be able to pull of a diva routine, but you can't. Your goal is to be gracious for what you receive. I am amazed at the number of people who miss the most basic of "Please" and "Thank you" courtesy when support staff brings them water or provides help with the projector. Buyers notice and cast a broad net of perception as to what you and your company are like based upon how you handle the simple courtesies of interacting with support staff. Be gracious in every contact.

These manners probably seem like common sense. They are to the degree you get them right. They are deal killers when you get them wrong.

Tom Searcy is a nationally recognized author, speaker, and the foremost expert in large account sales. Tom is the author of RFPs Suck! How to Master the RFP System Once and for All to Win Big Business and the co-author of Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Sales and Transform Your Company.

To Grow, Leave What You Know Behind

John Coleman  blogs.hbr.org December 6, 2011

Last year, I was fortunate to moderate a fascinating panel discussion with Harvard's Center for Public Leadership on the topic of "Next Generation Leadership." One of the panelists, Rosalinde Torres, encouraged us to ask the following question: "What has made you successful in the past that you need to change to move forward as a leader?"
As we go through different phases in our personal and professional lives, we're called upon to adapt, to marshal skills different than those we've used in the past. And in the modern world — where the pace of technological and social change is as fast as at any time in human history, those demands on our adaptability are greater. An exceptional grocery store cashier, for example, will need a different set of skills to be a store manager as her career evolves. And those in computer repair have had to learn and unlearn a myriad skills over the past 30 years to keep pace with the changes happening around them.
So what skills do you need to modify or leave behind to grow? For me, a few suggestions come to mind.
Stop seeking answers; start asking questions. In our 20+ years of education, we have been trained to get ahead by having the right answers — to tests, to class questions, to business problems. But the most difficult challenges require leaders who can identify and ask the right questions.
The world needs great problem-solvers, but it also needs people who can make sure their organizations focus on the right problems and miss nothing in the process. One of the more intellectually impressive senior executives I've worked with asked questions twice as often as he offered answers. As a result, the people who worked for him always took full responsibility for their work — because they knew they'd have to answer a stream of deep and thoughtful questions as soon as they entered the boardroom. This leader's questions not only showed his thoughtfulness and helped drive deeper solutions, but they created ownership among the people who worked for him.
Focus on people, not problems. Junior businesspeople often work on heavily analytic, stand-alone problems. They're asked to build models and plans — to find the "right" solution. But the most difficult problems can't be solved and implemented by individuals alone. Good leaders can't just get the right answer. They have to involve people — those who will ultimately implement their programs and those teammates who can help them solve the problem faster and better than they could on their own.
When an individual becomes too rigid about his or her "own" solution at the expense of working collaboratively with others, that individual often loses the momentum to generate change and misses the valuable insights of his or her peers in the process. A famous example of collaboration in the face of a difficult problem — no matter your thoughts on the project itself — is the Manhattan Project. The project, which ultimately led to the construction of the first atomic bomb, was led by General Leslie Groves. Knowing he couldn't handle the project by himself (and neither could anyone else), he called upon as many great minds and competing perspectives as possible to come to the right solutions collaboratively and created an environment in which they could implement against that plan.
Stop working as a generalist. Many of us have lived life so far as generalists — "Jacks of all trades," so to speak — focused broadly on a variety of skills, functions, or industries. Sure, we may have picked some topics on which to become knowledgeable, we've chosen professions, and we've completed "majors" or built specific skills. But by-and-large, we've cast our nets wide, learning broadly to gain context about the world around us. At some point, however, most of us will need to generate proficiency in a very specific topic, both because it makes us valuable sources of expert knowledge and teaches us the habits of mind to generate deep insight.
Take, for example, Steve Jobs's early obsession with calligraphy. After dropping out of Reed College in 1972, Steve spent months immersed in calligraphy, which, at Reed, was an incredibly strong program. In his words, "I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture." That experience not only helped Steve build the practical toolkit to create beautiful text and designs, but also improved and sharpened his mind, attention to detail, and his fascination with design.
You may be at a different stage in life — a great "people" manager who needs to work on her problem-solving or a specialist who needs to broaden his experience — but I've found that as my professional career evolves to include more collaboration, management, and implementation, the skills I've depended on, while helpful in their time, need to evolve for successful growth. These adjustments provide new areas of focus that may be common to a number of young leaders who are making the transition from individual contributor to manager as they advance in their careers.
What do you think? In your own work life, what are the traits that have made you successful in the past that you'll need to leave behind to be successful in the future?
John Coleman is a coauthor of the new HBR Press book, Passion & Purpose: Stories from the Best and Brightest Young Business Leaders.

People Are Not Your Greatest Asset

Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald,  blogs.hbr.org. Dec. 6, 2011

Many of us in business have heard the popular aphorism, "People are your greatest asset." Some of us may even believe it. But is this sentiment reflected in our corporate cultures and the way our leaders lead? For the most part, no — and there's a reason for that.
People are not your greatest asset. Even great people are not your greatest asset. In fact, great people can be your greatest liability. If Enron wasn't enough evidence of this, the 2008 financial crisis has now given us plenty more. What about Lehman Brothers, AIG and Countrywide? Arguably, these companies employed some of the smartest business people not only in the room but in the world, and yet those same folks took their firms to ruin (or near it) and came close to causing a collapse of the U.S. economy.
So if it's not people, what is your greatest asset?
It's how you empower your people. Think about it. What is the primary purpose of a business organization? To assemble a group of people, who previously may have had no association, and empower them to accomplish productive work toward the organization's objectives. More effective empowerment typically equals more productive work. As leaders and managers, we are familiar with empowering people. We organize them into divisions, units, groups and teams. We provide goals and incentives to motivate them. And we enable them with authority, tools, resources and processes.
Social media ushers in new ways to enhance your greatest asset, because it is about empowering people to collaborate at unprecedented scale. With powerful implementations of social media, we motivate people to form communities around a meaningful and common purpose . We enable them with new technology, seed content, and guidance on desired participation. The aim is to facilitate "mass collaboration" and its accompanying behaviors.
For our book on the social organization, we studied hundreds of social media implementations and identified a set of key mass collaboration behaviors. Understanding them is critical to successfully engaging and empowering people.
Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Collective intelligence is not new, but the mass collaboration enabled by social media provides it at scales never before possible. Even the most modest individual contributions can be tremendously valuable when meaningfully combined at scale. Wikipedia, YouTube and Flickr are all social Web examples of collective intelligence. Each Wikipedia article by itself is relatively insignificant, but a million articles collected and linked together is highly powerful.
Expertise Location
Expertise location involves seeking and finding specific expertise in the masses of people and the often-staggering amount of available content. One view of expertise location is almost the opposite of collective intelligence. It is "selective intelligence," where the goal is not to collect numerous small contributions from many, but to find just what is needed. Crowdsourcing is a well-known example of expertise location.
Emergent Structures
Emergent structures are structures such as processes, content categorization, organizational networks and hidden virtual teams that are unknown or unplanned prior to social interactions, but that form naturally as activity progresses. The goal of emergent structures is to gain a better understanding of the true "nature of things" to more effectively organize, guide or interact with a community or its efforts. Social media, applied with transparency, can surface these structures.
Interest Cultivation
Interest cultivation is the forming of communities around a shared interest, with the goal of indirectly deriving enterprise value. Social media facilitates the mass sharing of interests like never before. Enterprises often pursue interest cultivation with the aim of engaging customers to enhance product/service utilization and enjoyment, improve delivery and indirectly spur sales.
Flash Coordination
Flash coordination involves rapidly organizing the activities of a large number of people through fast and short mass-messaging, often spread virally. By effectively employing flash coordination, enterprises can more quickly marshal a powerful and sophisticated response to an important occurrence. We are now seeing the emergence of a new set of business sense-and-respond systems inspired by social-media-enabled flash coordination.
Relationship Leverage
Relationship leverage is the practice of effectively managing and deriving value from a prodigious number of relationships. Relationship leverage strives to maximize the strength of numerous weak ties and the power of unbalanced relationships. Facebook is all about relationship leverage. We can keep numerous people up to date on what we are doing and thinking with minimal effort. We only need to respond to those who choose to interact around something we exposed. We may sacrifice intimacy for scale, but that is the trade-off with relationship leverage.
Examine these behaviors in the context of your business goals, major collaboration challenges, core business practices, etc., to determine where and how mass collaboration might empower your people to deliver strategic value to your organization and enhance what is truly your greatest asset.
Anthony J. Bradley, group vice president, Gartner Research, and Mark P. McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow, Gartner Executive Programs, are co-authors of The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees. You can follow them on Twitter at @BradleyAnthonyJ and @markpmcdonald.

The best way to recognize employees

Jeff Haden December 15, 2011 cbsnews.com

(MoneyWatch)
According to a SHRM survey conducted earlier this year, most organizations have employee recognition programs in place. So why don't many of those programs work?

Effective employee recognition isn't based on following arbitrary guidelines or creating insincere recognition systems. That's why so many formal recognition programs only pay lip service to praising employees for their efforts.

Your small business doesn't need a formal program in place to recognize and praise employees. Just follow these tips and it's easy to give the recognition your employees deserve:

See every employee as an individual. Every employee responds differently to recognition. Many appreciate public praise. Others shrink from the limelight. Don't pass out praise on your terms; recognize each employee in the way that produces the greatest impact for that person.

Assume too soon is never soon enough. There's an inverse relationship between recognition and performance: The longer you wait, the lower the impact. Praise employees immediately. Don't wait for "the right time," because the only right time is right now.

Provide details that show you know. Generic praise is nice, but specific praise is wonderful. Don't just tell employees they did a good job. Tell them how they did a good job. Not only will they appreciate the recognition, they'll also know you pay attention to what they do.

Be genuine. We've all received recognition that felt forced, like the boss who walks around once a month and says, "Thanks for your efforts." Only recognize hard work and achievement when you mean it.

Skip constructive criticism, at least for now. Say, "You did a great job, but next time..." and all the employee remembers is what they did wrong or could have done better. Follow up at another time with constructive feedback. Let the warm glow of praise be the feeling the employee carries with them.

Actively find employees to praise. We're all trained to spot issues, hunt down problems, and eliminate errors. We're usually not trained to find people doing things well. Spend part of every day looking for positives. (You might be surprised by how skilled your employees really are.)

Leverage the surprise factor. Unexpected recognition is incredibly powerful. Winning the employee of the month award is great, but being recognized in the middle of a meeting for outstanding achievement can feel even better.

Spot opportunities to share the "praise wealth." It's easy to recognize your great employees. They're great because they perform well. Look for ways to praise less stellar performers when they deserve the recognition. Sometimes all an average performer needs is a little attention and encouragement.

And keep in mind providing praise will get easier over time, because when you do a better job of recognizing employees they naturally perform better - and that gives you even more achievements to recognize.

3 habits of highly effective leaders

By Amy Levin-Epstein www.cbsnews.com  Nov. 30, 2011

Are you a leader? Whether you're an executive or an entry-level employee, leadership is a truly essential skill that can propel you and your career to bigger, better things.
That holds true for both leaders of large teams and self-employed people who are guiding a team of one. I recently spoke to leadership consultant Jennifer Garvey Berger, whose new book, Changing on the Job: Developing Leaders For a Complex World, is already garnering praise from industry executives and academic experts at Microsoft, Fidelity, Harvard University and Boston College. Here are some of her insights on what good leaders do -- and what separates them from the pack.

What are three habits a competent leader practices regularly?

The first habit is asking different questions. This is about expanding your curiosity. The second habit is taking multiple perspectives. This habit is about listening well and understanding the perspectives of others. The third habit is looking at systems, and that one reminds us that while the human brain likes to break things down into manageable parts, it is the unwieldy combination of those unmanageable systems that opens us up to new possibilities.

Do even the best leaders make mistakes?
Yes. They'll get mad and make mistakes and hurt people. And sometimes they won't even recognize that they've done that. But the best leaders never stop learning, never become so arrogant or complacent that they stop believing they have room to grow. They never become so hopeless or discouraged that they believe it's not worth the effort. John F. Kennedy wrote that "leadership and learning are indispensable to each other." The good leaders (almost) never forget this.

What else separates great leaders from everyone else?

They create environments where people can be at their biggest. We all have the experience of people who make us smaller and less capable versus those who make us more capable in their presence than we are without them. Good leaders remember that their perspective isn't the only truth, and they welcome entire human beings into the workplace -- inconvenient emotions, vague hunches, thoughtless mistakes and all. When people see us in our messy wholeness, we can spread out and become bigger.

If I want to become more of a leader today, how should I start?


The most important thing? Believe that you can change and begin to look for the ways you might need to by asking for feedback from others. Forgive yourself for your limitations (rather than denying them or beating yourself up about them), and then seek to grow beyond the way you understand the world today.

How to Get Past Your Customer's Lies

Alessandro Di Fiore November 30, 2011 blogs.hbr.org

It's well established market research fact that customers lie.
Business history offers innumerable stories of companies that launch whizz-bang new products on the basis of extensive quantitative customer research only to find that the customers didn't end up doing what they said they would.
But how else are companies to get a handle on what customers will do? To see an alternative approach, take a look at Geox, an innovative European footwear company. Founded in 1995 it has a turnover today of nearly € 900 million, a 20% profit margin (even in the crisis) and its products are distributed in more than 100 countries.
Here's how Geox happened. During a business trip to Reno, Nevada, to promote the family's wine business at a trade fair, Geox's founder, Mario Poletti Polegato, decided to take a walk. After a while his feet began to swell in the heat and irritate him. To cool them down he poked a couple of holes into the rubber-soled trainers he was wearing, and soon felt better. He had just discovered a simple way to let excess heat out of his shoes.
Now the invention of the rubber sole, over 50 years ago, was an important achievement which changed the lifestyle of millions of people. It made shoes impermeable, thus allowing people's feet to stay dry — especially in winter. The problem was that they didn't allow your feet to breathe. For Polegato, of course, this wasn't an immediate problem because it doesn't rain a lot in Reno. But millions of people had to face the uncomfortable choice of having hot sweaty feet or cold, wet ones.
The walk got Polegato thinking about this dilemma and, once home, he started experimenting in the workshop of a small footwear company in his town in the north east of Italy. After a few months, the idea became reality. Geox found a way to micro-perforate the rubber sole around the area of the foot with the highest concentration of sweat glands. Since a water molecule is 700 times smaller than a water droplet, vapor can still escape even though the sole remains waterproof, so Geox-clad feet are both cool and dry.
Michael Bloomberg did something very similar. Before becoming mayor of New York, he was considered a visionary business man for the insight behind his company's success. Providers of financial information needed to offer analytics to help users make sense of the data. The idea should have been obvious to anyone who had ever watched and experienced "a day in the frustrations of the trader" using Reuters or Dow Jones Telerate. Traders used paper, pencil and calculator to run analytics off the Reuters or Telerate raw data then made their trading decisions. As a former trader, Bloomberg had lived the frustrations of working that way and it was from that experience that he saw the market gap he filled.
These cases and many others (Netflix, Intuit ...) highlight an important managerial lesson. Time and again I've seen that a strategic insight into customer needs is very seldom the result about data crunching or analytics hype of today.
All you need is to put yourself few times — just eight or ten, my research suggests — into customer's shoes. Observing customers while they are using existing products and services is often the only way to detect latent frustrations that they may not even be consciously aware of. And it was in removing those unspoken frustrations, undetectable in customer surveys, that innovators like Polegato and Bloomberg found their opportunities.
Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. Where the main challenge comes is about who does those probes and observations. These people have to be smart about business, strategy, and people because they've got to be able to spot the really significant behaviors and issues. And the best people to do that are going to be the folks in the top management team: the CEO and the people just below him, who have the strategic understanding needed to recognize the opportunity and the authority to act quickly on it like Polegato and Bloomberg.
Bottom line, if you want to start a billion dollar business you can't rely on market researchers and consultants to find the strategic insight for you. If they could, why would they give it to you? Real market research should be a core part of any top executive's job and they should be going out doing observations and explorative probes of customers — preferably incognito — at least twice a year for a few days. That's how entrepreneurs work and it's what CEOs should do as well.

Alessandro Di Fiore is the CEO of the European Centre for Strategic Innovation, based in Milan.

Stop Competing to Be the Best

"Compete to be Unique"

Joan Magretta Nov. 30, 2011 blogs.hbr.org

Very Inciteful Message

With Cyber Monday, the tablet wars kicked into full swing. Which one is the best? Is it the iPad? The Kindle? Who has the best technology? The best distribution? Who's the best overall? For most people, "being the best" is what competition is all about. So General Motors CEO Dan Akerson was simply echoing popular sentiment when, on the day the new GM went public, he threw down the gauntlet: "May the best car win!" he told reporters. The phrase reflects an underlying belief about the nature of competition that feels so intuitively correct that it is almost never examined or questioned.
But if you want to win, says Michael Porter, this is absolutely the wrong way to think about competition. In fact, it's practically a guarantee of mediocre performance.

The first problem with the competition-to-be-the-best mindset is that, in the vast majority of businesses, there is simply no such thing as "the best." Consider a business as prosaic as seating for airport waiting areas. You would think that there would be a "best" here — standardized, functional seating. Well you would be wrong. Different airports have different needs. Some want waiting passengers to shop. They don't want seats that are too comfortable. Some need the flexibility to reconfigure waiting areas. They don't want long rows of fixed seats. Many airports have to watch their spending. But others — airports in the Middle East, for example — have snapped up luxury designs. Some airports value seats built to take extraordinary abuse. London-based OMK makes "prison-worthy" seating, the industry's highest standard, using self-sealing polyurethane that can withstand a stabbing without showing the knife scar.

If there is no "best" airport seat, now think about all of the industries in the economy. In how many does the idea of "being the best" make real sense? The best hotel for one customer is not the best for another. The best sales encounter for one customer is not the best for another. There is no best car. There is no best art museum. No one best way to promote environmental sustainability.

Yet, it's a pervasive idea. Management writers — and leaders seeking to inspire — regularly reinforce it by using colorful metaphors from warfare and sports. These lend emotion and drama to business competition. But, they are misleading.
In war, there can be only one winner. Not so in business, where companies like WalMart and Target can thrive and co-exist, each offering a different kind of value to its customers. In sports, there is just one contest with one set of rules. Not so in business, which is more complex and open-ended. Within an industry, there can be multiple contests, not just one, based on which needs are to be served. McDonald's is a winner in fast food, specifically fast burgers. But In-N-Out Burger thrives on slow burgers. Its customers are happy to wait ten minutes or more (an eternity by McDonald's stopwatch) for non-processed, fresh burgers cooked to order.
Here's the problem: When rivals all pursue the "one best way" to compete, they find themselves on a collision course, trapped in a destructive, zero-sum competition that no one can win. Everyone in the industry follows the same advice. Companies benchmark each other's practices and products. Customers, lacking meaningful choice, buy on price alone. Profitability deteriorates.

Instead, Porter urges a different kind of competition: compete to be unique. Focus on innovating to create superior value for your chosen customers, not on imitating and matching rivals. Give customers real choice and price becomes only one competitive variable. But understand that doing this profitably means accepting limits and making tradeoffs — you can't meet every need of every customer. Nothing is more absurd — and yet more widespread — than the belief that somehow you can do exactly what everyone else is doing and yet end up with superior results.
Grasp the true nature of business competition and you'll see that the performing arts provide a better analogy than war or sports. There can be many good singers or actors — each outstanding and successful in a distinctive way. Each finds and creates an audience. The more good performers there are, the more audiences grow and the arts flourish. This approach produces positive sum competition. Companies that do a good job can earn sustainable returns because they create more value. At the same time, customers benefit by getting real choice in how their needs are met.

What's your organization's underlying model of how competition works? It's a question well worth asking. If "best" is your model, you will follow the herd. Copycat products and services will always make sense. Growth at any price will seem reasonable. Acquisitions will always look better than they really are. How you think about competition will define the choices you make and your ability to assess those choices critically.

Joan Magretta is a senior associate at the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School. She is the author of What Management Is
and the forthcoming Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy.

What's in a Name - The Generations of the Past 100 Years

generation name	born (range, loosely)	characterizing features typically described (loosely)
The Lost Generation	1880-1900	The term reflects the unthinkable loss of human life in the First World War- approaching 16 million killed and over 20 million wounded. This happened in just four years and five months (1914-1918). We cannot imagine this today.
The Interbellum Generation	1900-1913	Interbellum means 'between wars', referring to the fact that these people were too young to fight in the First World War and too old to fight in the Second.
The Greatest Generation (The Veterans)	1914-1930	These people are revered for having grown up during the Great Depression and then fought or stood alongside those who fought in the Second World War (1939-45). As for other generations of the early 1900s, life was truly hard compared to later times.
The Silent Generation	1930-1945	Characterized as fatalistic, accepting, having modest career and family aspirations, focused on security and safety. These people experienced the 1930s Great Depression and/or the 2nd World War in early life, and post-war austerity in young adulthood. They parented and provided a foundation for the easier lives of the Baby Boomers.
Baby Boomers	1946-1960	Equality, freedom, civil rights, environmental concern, peace, optimism, challenge to authority, protest. Baby Boomers mostly lived safe from war and serious hardship; grew up mostly in families, and enjoyed economic prosperity more often than not. Teenage/young adulthood years 1960-1980 - fashion and music: fun, happy, cheery, sexy, colourful, lively.
Generation Jones	1953-1968	Acquisitive, ambitious, achievement-oriented, cynical, materialistic (a reference to the expression 'keeping up with the Joneses'). Generation Jones is predominantly a US concept, overlapping and representing a sub-group within the Baby Boomer and Gen-X generations.
Generation X (Gen-X)	1960-1980	Apathy, anarchy, reactionism, detachment, technophile, resentful, nomadic, struggling. Teenage/young adulthood years 1973-2000 - fashion and music: anarchic, bold, anti-establishment.
MTV Generation	1974-1983	MTV Generation is a lesser-used term for a group overlapping X and Y. Like Generation Jones is to Baby Boomers and Gen-X, so MTV Generation is a bridge between Gen-X and Y.
Generation Y (Gen-Y or Millennials)	1980-2000 and beyond (?)	Views vary as to when this range ends, basically because no-one knows. Generational categories tend to become established some years after the birth range has ended. Teenage/young adulthood years 1990s and the noughties - fashion and music: mainstream rather than niche, swarmingly popular effects, fuelled by social networking and referral technology. Also called Echo Boomers because this generation is of similar size to the Baby Boomers.
Generation Z (Gen-Z or perhaps Generation ADD)	after Gen-Y	Too soon to say much about this group. A name has yet to become established, let alone characterizing features. Generation Z is a logical name in the X-Y-sequence. Generation ADD is less likely to establish itself as a name for this cohort - it refers ironically to Attention Deficit Disorder and the supposed inability of young people in the late noughties (say 2005-2009) to be able to concentrate for longer than a few seconds on anything. Gen-Z is difficult to differentiate from Gen-Y, mainly because (as at 2009) it's a little too soon to be seeing how people born after Gen-Y are actually behaving, unless the end of the Gen-Y range is deemed to be a few years earlier than the year 2000. Time will tell.