Adopt an Immigrant Mindset to Advance Your Career

by Glenn Llopis  |   7:02 AM August 24, 2012

If you want to remain relevant and advance your career in today’s global marketplace, you need to serve as an enabler of business growth and innovation. One of the best ways to do this is to adopt an “immigrant mindset.”

The immigrant mentality has proven time and again to accelerate careers and build enterprise. Astudy in 1996 from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) used the issuance of new patents to measure immigrants’ inventiveness and spirit of enterprise. Examining 250 recently-issued U.S. patents chosen at random, AdTI found that over 19% of them were issued to immigrants alone, or to immigrants collaborating with U.S.-born co-inventors. These patents generated more than 1,600 jobs. A 2011 study by Partnership for a New American Economy found that 76% of patents awarded to the top 10 patent-producing U.S. universities that year had at least one foreign-born inventor.

According to another study, more than 40% of Fortune 500 companies operating in 2010 were founded by immigrants or their children — including some of the most well-known brands, from Apple and IBM to Disney and McDonalds. The companies noted in this study had combined revenues of $4.2 trillion — more than the GDP of most countries.

You may not think of yourself as an immigrant. But you can still learn to think like one. Based onresearch my organization has conducted (PDF) on the immigrant business population, here’s how to get started:

1. Look for Opportunities Everywhere
Like an immigrant who comes to a new country, managers need to see that opportunities are everywhere, every day, and that they need to make the most of those that cross their paths.

This is exactly what Andrew James Viterbi, an Italian immigrant, did in 1967 when he invented the Viterbi algorithm, an error correcting code which has been used widely in cellular phones. Mr. Viterbi took this immigrant perspective and went on to co-found Qualcomm, Inc. And it’s what Pierre Morad Omidyar, an immigrant from France, did when he revolutionized the selling and purchasing of goods by founding eBay. Their stories are just some of the many examples of immigrants who’ve seized opportunities and brought them to market.

2. Stay on Your Toes
Many immigrant families experienced crisis and change in their mother countries, which can make them more proficient at anticipating crisis and managing change before circumstances force their hand. All managers need to develop this ability to see around the corners up ahead. Filtering career advancement and business opportunities through this lens allows you to put your options into proper perspective with much greater clarity.

Estée Lauder, the child of Hungarian immigrant parents, created a family dynasty by proactively managing change in the cosmetics industry. In the postwar consumer boom, women began to want to sample cosmetic products before buying them. Lauder noticed and responded to this shifting dynamic by pioneering two marketing techniques that are commonly used today: the free gift and the gift-with-purchase. It’s exactly this type of inventiveness that’s born from immigrating to a new country and having to fight for every opportunity.

Born to Greek parents, Peter M. Nicholas co-founded medical device firm Boston Scientific. In areport by the Partnership for a New American Economy (PDF), Nicholas reflected on his immigrant influence when he said, “It was like a gift being raised in a Greek family. All of us kids had embedded in us this ambition to work hard and achieve a better life than what our parents could have ever imagined.” This proved helpful in the early days of Boston Scientific, a company that now employs 25,000 people.

3. Unleash Your Passion
History has shown many immigrants to be potent pioneers, blazing paths few others would go down, and seeing them through to the end. Once unleashed, this passionate sense of purpose — as long as it remains consistent and authentic — opens new doors.

Immigrants represent 18% (90) of the company founders on the Fortune 500 list — including the founders of Pfizer, Intel, AT&T, Dupont and others. This passionate pursuit of pioneering crosses over to the children of immigrants who represent the founders of 23% (114) of the companies on the list; these include Citigroup, Walgreens, UPS, Office Depot, H.J. Heinz and others.

4. Live With an Entrepreneurial Attitude
Seizing opportunities to build relationships, advance commerce, and improve humanity is a survival mechanism for many immigrants. Career advancement must be approached with this same hunger for survival. Like an entrepreneur, you must be able to navigate your career knowing how to sell, market and continuously reinvent yourself — constantly cultivating business growth and new opportunities.

Google is a great example of what an entrepreneurial spirit can do. The hunger and focus of its founders, one of whom — Sergey Brin — was an immigrant, not only enabled Google to survive the competition; it kept other companies from even coming close to competing on the same scale. While their paths have diverged — co-founder Larry Page is now CEO and Brin is reportedly spearheading Google X, a top-secret hardware lab — the company owes at least half of its success to Brin’s immigrant entrepreneurial spirit, which he himself attributes to growing up as a Soviet Jew in Moscow in the 1970s, where he felt alienated as a minority. His sense of whom to trust and whom to ask for help, his vision to see something better, and the conviction to go after his dreams are traits that Brin’s father, Michael Brin, taught him by example. He developed a tenacious, risk-taking mentality, which led him to unique entrepreneurial opportunities.

5. Work With a Generous Purpose
In the immigrant populations that my organization researches, children are often raised to consider others’ needs as much as their own. This begins with giving inside the family when they’re young. When they’re older, they’re taught that they’re part of a larger community. Sharing momentum within this community ensures continuous prosperity for everyone. Being generous enough to share your career goals and aspirations gives you a larger sense of purpose in your own career, fostering a sense of community that lifts and serves everyone. An essential part of career management is nurturing relationships founded on the trust that comes from having each other’s best interests at heart.

While researching immigrants who exemplify the meaning of generous purpose for my book, Earning Serendipity, I came across the story of Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA. Kamprad notably rooted out the exploitation of child labor from his own manufacturers and then worked to eradicate the problem at its source — by fighting poverty, hunger, illness and illiteracy. Long before social responsibility became the buzzword it is today, IKEA was already setting the standard, thanks to its founder’s immigrant mindset of working with a larger purpose in mind, for the greater good of the community.

6. Focus on Leaving a Lasting Legacy
Our research has shown that immigrants’ familial style of relating to their community expands their circle, creating new opportunities that are built to last. Likewise, some of the strongest bonds in business, across the entire value chain, occur when employees, partners and distributors are treated like family. According to a study conducted by Harvard Business School professor Belén Villalonga (PDF), family firms are often able to take a longer-term, more strategic approach, and keep stronger relationships with their customers. In his study, family-controlled firms outperformed their public peers by 6% on company market value. Today, one-third of all companies in the S&P 500 index are run by families.

The immigrant’s cultural promise is that success comes most to those who are surrounded by people who want their success to continue. You’re not just working for yourself, but for your organization, for your family, and for those whom you’re leading and serving. Managers who embrace this attitude, and practice this skill, will find themselves with more opportunities to build a lasting legacy.

Each of these six ideas interconnect. Their impact becomes greater as they build upon one another. Make them a natural part of your identity, and your career will flourish.

More blog posts by Glenn Llopis

More on: Entrepreneurship, Managing yourself, Personal effectiveness

GLENN LLOPIS

Glenn Llopis is the Chairman of the Glenn Llopis Group and Founder of the Center for Hispanic Leadership (CHL). He is the author of Earning Serendipity, 4 Skills for Creating and Sustaining Good Fortune in Your Work, which introduces the immigrant mentality advantage.

What You Can Learn from Your Professional Rivals

by Dorie Clark  |   11:00 AM October 26, 2012

Professional rivalries often seem like the ultimate waste of time. Why is she spending so much time worrying about what someone else is doing? Why doesn’t she focus on her own business? Doesn’t she have anything better to do? It’s true that obsessing about a competitor isn’t the healthiest long-term activity. But I’ve also come to believe you can glean important lessons from the very act of rivalry — if you use it as an opportunity for growth, rather than just an opportunity to crush your enemies.

Where are you weak? Oftentimes, rivalry is a form of envy: your competitor has a trait or skill you (sometimes grudgingly) admire. That was the case when a friend — let’s call her Sara — reached out to me, asking if I was connected with a particular colleague on Facebook. “If so,” Sara wrote, “I want to discuss his social media presence with you.” It turned out Sara was livid about this guy’s frequent, self-promoting Facebook posts and wanted validation that our colleague was grossly misusing the network and ruining his personal brand. Unfortunately — to Sara’s astonishment — I hadn’t really noticed. I casually followed his exploits; only Sara was obsessed enough to be bothered. She was a shy, introverted entrepreneur who had long hesitated about promoting herself. Our colleague’s blatant self-promotion raised the uncomfortable specter Sara might have to start doing it, too. She felt much better after realizing it was OK to tackle social media in her own way, that didn’t feel phony or self-aggrandizing.

What do you value most? For years, I’d known a woman whom I was quite sure had fabricated her credentials. She cited ties to world-famous universities and institutions, but grew vague and evasive when asked about them. It was mildly annoying to see her at conferences, but my indignation grew to a fever pitch when she landed a book deal with a major publisher and began winning media attention. In an inspired move, I wrote to my friend Michael, who worked at one of the august institutions she claimed to be affiliated with, in hopes he might devise a clever way to “out” her. Instead, he wrote back with a question: “Why does she irk you?” I wrote back, defensive: It’s about justice! Fairness! Truth! But Michael was right. One’s rivals often poke at a tender spot. I worked hard for my degrees and credentials, never benefiting from family connections or other shortcuts. And perhaps, it seems, I’ve made a religion out of it, because the thought that someone could invent their resume and get away with it makes me apoplectic. Knowing that bias helps me keep a better perspective (for instance, I may be liable to overvalue a job candidate who “made their own way in the world”).

Are you thinking big enough? At their worst, professional rivalries cause a form of myopia; you’re inventing products or launching initiatives to beat the competition, not to benefit the customer. That’s rarely the recipe for breakthrough innovation, as you focus on one-upsmanship and incremental improvements. (Indeed, there’s speculation following Apple’s patent infringement victory against Samsung that smartphone makers may be forced into a new era of design creativity, now that the negative legal consequences of “following the leader” are so clear.) But occasionally, stalking a rival can unlock breakthrough possibilities for growth (think of the impact Roger Bannister shattering the four-minute mile had on his competitors). How can you increase your impact or make a new contribution in your field?

Professional rivalries can be a powerful vehicle for self-discovery — if you step back and think analytically about them. Learning where you’re weak, what values you cherish, and how to think big are important advantages. But even if you struggle to rise to that level of self-reflection when it comes to your rival, the blood-boiling effects of a competitor can sometimes be salubrious: if it kills me, I’m going to make sure my book outsells that of my veracity-challenged rival.

How have professional rivalries inspired or motivated you?

More blog posts by Dorie Clark

More on: Competition, Managing yourself

DORIE CLARK

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant and speaker for clients such as Google, Yale University, Microsoft, and the World Bank. She is an Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and author of Reinventing You: Define Your Brand, Imagine Your Future. Follow her on Twitter at @dorieclark.

The Laws of Money and Meaning

by Dan Pallotta  |   3:00 PM November 13, 2012

It has always been an either/or proposition: Either you go into charity and give up money, or you go into business and give up meaning. It’s mutually exclusive, or so the story goes. Even cutting-edge thinking operates from a binary context: It ties itself in knots trying to figure out how you can have both. But there is actually another, mind-bending, soul-satisfying dimension in which possibilities are endless and the choices aren’t mutually exclusive. Access to that dimension, though, is restricted by an unwritten code that conspires to dramatically limit the options we perceive as available to us. It infects us with a tunnel vision that obscures our real passions and potential.

Its false tenets go something like this:

1. You make a difference by what you do.
2. You make a difference in the future.
3. If you want to make a real difference, you work in the nonprofit sector.
4. The impact you have is correlated to the financial sacrifice you are willing to make.
5. You earn serious money by going into the for-profit sector.
6. The for-profit sector consists primarily of banks, oil companies, and greedy, soul-sucking corporations.
7. Nonprofit organizations have a duty to be frugal and keep overhead low, because that’s what the public wants.
8. You cannot change what the public wants.

The REAL laws of money and meaning go like this:
Law #1: You make a difference by who you are being. All of our focus is on the doing. We obsess over the latest models churned out by for-profits and nonprofits alike. The social enterprise classes at Harvard Business School study the things people are doing. When a foundation asks for an impact report, they mean the impact of the doing. It is all backwards. What we should be asking is who people are being. Are you being courageous? Are you being authentic? Honest? Rigorous? Unstoppable? Because that’s what really makes a difference. You can run the largest NGO on the planet, and if you’re being chicken-shit, then you’ve squandered the powerful position you’ve been given. It’s who you are being that matters — whatever sector you’re in.

Law #2: You make a difference now. “When I get my nonprofit management degree, that’s when I can really start making a difference,” we say to ourselves. “When I start my new nonprofit…” “When my new nonprofit gets to $10 million…” “When it gets to scale…” The difference we make is always off in the future. Like life. “Boy, when I graduate from college, that’s when life will really begin.” And then it’s, “When I get married…” and on and on. But the future never arrives. Because it’s always now. You make a difference by who you are being right now. It is all you will ever have. What difference can you make right now?

Law #3: You can make a difference in any and all sectors. Consider the overwhelming number of transformative innovations that have come from the for-profit sector. iPad apps, which allow, for instance, kids in rural India to learn about the human body in 3-D, dramatically improving their knowledge of anatomy. The refrigerated boxcar developed by Gustavus Swift for his meat-packing company, which coincidentally significantly reduced food-borne illness. Canning, invented by the French chef Nicolas Appert in 1810, which greatly increased the availability of food. The assembly line, which made workers eight times more productive. The automobile itself. None of these seismic transformations in the quality of modern life was accomplished inside a nonprofit tax status. The notion that you can have a real impact on the life of other human beings only in a nonprofit context is a great hallucination.

Law #4: There is no correlation between personal financial sacrifice and impact. Larry Page’s work has made a massive difference in the world — and he is worth a gazillion dollars. Each of us is probably aware of someone who makes tremendous financial sacrifice and whines about it all day long and has zero impact in the world. There is no reliable correlation between the financial sacrifice a person makes and the impact they have in the world.

Law #5: You make serious money by pursuing your dreams. Barack Obama is a wealthy man. Bruce Springsteen is a man whose life’s work is about social justice and his net worth is estimated at over $200 million. Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, which is credited with advancing all manner of social movements, is estimated to be worth close to a billion dollars. Each of these people have made a huge difference and a huge amount of money. All by staying true to their dreams.

Law #6: The for-profit sector is a place where dreams come true and the for-profit sector creates value. Even banks make a big difference. Who do we think finances the construction of all of our art museums, hospitals, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters?

Law #7: Nonprofit organizations have a duty to do whatever will fulfill their missions. If you’re keeping your overhead low and that’s keeping you from making good on your mission, you’re violating your fiduciary duty to your donors. Going into the nonprofit sector does not have to be a prison sentence that suffocates your potential. It is an invitation to be brave enough to pursue your dreams–to be a true radical.

Law #8: The public does not always know what’s best, and you can dramatically transform what it wants. I just have one thing to say: “Pork, the other white meat.” If pork producers can change the way Americans think about pork, we can change the way Americans think about charity.

There, you’re free. Go do the thing that really turns you on, whatever the sector. Go be the person you really want to be. Do it now. Your possibilities are endless.

More blog posts by Dan Pallotta

More on: Compensation, Managing yourself, Nonprofit

DAN PALLOTTA

Dan Pallotta is an expert in nonprofit sector innovation and a pioneering social entrepreneur. He is the founder of Pallotta TeamWorks, which invented the multiday AIDSRides and Breast Cancer 3-Days. He is the president of Advertising for Humanity and the author ofCharity Case: How The Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up For Itself and Really Change the World.

Getting Past a Career Setback: An Example and a Test

by Ron Ashkenas, Mitchell Marks and Phil Mirvis  |   1:00 PM September 22, 2014

Managers often think about their careers in terms of winning and losing. Winners ascend the corporate ladder and get the praise, recognition, bonuses, and top jobs. But what about those whose careers are sidetracked or derailed when passed over for a key assignment or big promotion? Or those who find themselves on the short end in the latest reorganization or merger selection? Are these “losers” out of the running for career advancement, or can they regain their footing, refocus their sights, and continue to rise?

Very few managerial careers proceed upward in a straight line. So, the real challenge for career success is not just how to “win” the next promotion, but also how to rebound from the next defeat, as we explain in our article in this month’s HBR.

Here’s a case example. With a background in both strategy and finance, Sheila was an up-and-coming manager at a well-known consumer products company. When her firm decided to invest in start-ups, she was asked to put together a team to make it happen. Over the next year, she recruited a small group of professionals, targeted a number of sectors that would make a difference for the company, created a process for sourcing and managing minority investments, and began to make deals.

Eventually her team ended up with a portfolio of investments that caught the attention of the CFO and CEO because some were bringing new technologies into the company’s supply chain, and others were hinting at new business models for engaging with customers. Soon she was meeting regularly with the senior executive team about deals and overall strategy. Unfortunately, her success made her direct supervisor and the head of corporate strategy jealous – and they engineered a reorganization that moved the innovation team under the strategy office and left Sheila as an individual contributor.

Naturally, Sheila was upset. She went through the emotional stages of loss, anger, and bargaining. She made her case for regaining the team to the CEO and several other executives, but soon discovered that while all were happy with her work, no one wanted to intervene or offer her a different role.

Through this process, Sheila realized that while her boss and others had probably acted poorly, she was partly at fault for not managing the relationships and politics more effectively. While she was basking in the glow of attention from the C-suite, she had not helped her supervisor or other peers receive enough credit. This insight helped distance her from the problem, so she could stop blaming others and start thinking about what to do next.

After several months of emotional churning, Sheila decided to focus on Plan B –figuring out what she really wanted to do instead of trying to overturn an “injustice.” Through discussions with a number of trusted advisors, she realized that her work of the past several years had given her fantastic contacts, experience, and credibility in the innovation world. This led her to think about launching her own start-up by combining a couple of struggling new ventures with some additional funding.

At the same time, a few discrete inquiries revealed that a private equity firm was very interested in having her roll up some consumer-based start-ups into a new business. And an innovative manufacturing company offered her a job as head of “strategic partnerships.” Of course, Sheila still had her job – and could even pursue other roles – in the consumer products company if she wanted to stay.

As she examined herself and her environment, she realized she had more opportunities than she could possibly pursue. Eventually she chose the strategic partnerships role with the manufacturing company – not only because it was an interesting challenge, but also because it would give her an opportunity to pay more attention to relationships and politics. She could leverage her past experience and use it as a springboard to continue her development.

The key to Sheila’s eventual rebound is that she used her setback as an opportunity to learn, reflect, and regroup. This allowed her to treat the situation not as a frustrating failure, but as an act of liberation – to get off of the path she was on and to consciously choose whether to continue it or select an alternative.

The lesson here is that careers aren’t just about “winning.” In fact, for most people, success requires an ability to turn inevitable losses around. And that takes time. Note that Sheila did not rush, give in to anger, or rashly jump ship. She used the setback as a chance to rethink her career, collect feedback from others, and wait for the right opportunities to present themselves.

How well do you rebound from career setbacks? Take our assessment to see whether you could improve.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas, Mitchell Marks and Phil Mirvis

More on: Career planning

RON ASHKENAS

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

MITCHELL MARKS

Mitchell Lee Marks is Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and President of the consultancy JoiningForces.org.  He is the author of eight books, including "Charging Back Up the Hill: Workplace Recovery after Mergers, Acquisitions and Downsizings" and scores of scholarly and practitioner articles.

PHIL MIRVIS

Philip Mirvis is an organizational psychologist whose studies and private practice concerns large-scale organizational change, the character of the workforce and workplace, and business leadership in society. An advisor to businesses and NGOs on five continents, he has authored twelve books on his studies including Beyond Good Company: Next Generation Corporate Citizenship.

To Build Influence, Master How You Enter a Room

by Nick Morgan  |   1:00 PM September 23, 2014

An airline industry executive has been promoted regularly for more than two decades because he’s good in a crisis.  He’s cool, competent, and authoritative when the rest of the team is panicking.  But now he finds himself in charge of a huge swath of the company — and a large number of employees.  And the board is asking for something different from him:  he needs to motivate people.  For that, he has to emote — to show people he cares — something he’s hidden for over twenty years. Where to start? How can you wield influence while being empathic? It begins with how you enter a room.

Be aware of your unconscious cues. When you stand, are you taking up all of your space, or do you shrink into corners?  When you move, do you move confidently, or do you slink? When you’re sitting alone, do you slouch or sit straight? When I began working with that airline executive, I noted that his tendency was to walk into a room as invisibly as possible.  His shoulders were slumped, his eyes were down.  In discussion, it turned out he had been bullied as a young teen for about five years.  His body had borne the trace of that misery ever since.  And he wasn’t even aware of the price paid in his posture — and in his day-to-day work.  He couldn’t connect with others because he was afraid.  In a crisis, however, he put aside his fears and focused on the job at hand.

There are two essential points here.  The first is that you’re always signaling about your intentions and feelings, and so is everyone else.  The second point is that most of the time you don’t pay conscious attention to all those signals — either the ones you’re putting out or the ones others are sending to you.  Your unconscious mind handles all that. It determines an extraordinary amount of the relationships you have with other people and your influence upon them. Thus it’s essential to get a handle on these unconscious cues.  Once you’ve formed a picture of yourself and have either embraced what you see or resolved to improve it, then you’re ready for the next step.

Focus on a key emotion. Think about the charisma of an actor like Kevin Spacey. How does he achieve it?  Most people think of charisma as something you’re born with, but in fact we all have our charismatic moments.  Think of a time when you’ve walked into a meeting, or come home to your significant other, and been asked without preamble, “What happened?”  You’ve been brimming over with some news  —  either good or bad.  You’re excited, or in despair, or triumphant, or whatever the case is. That’s charisma. It’s really about focus.

You need to focus your emotions before any meeting, conversation, or presentation.  Most of us go through our days with lots on our minds — what Buddhists call “monkey mind” — and we think of one thing and then another like the random movements of a pinball in one of those old fashioned machines. That’s not charismatic.  It’s just a to-do list.  And it doesn’t compel attention.  But the people who are able to free their minds of the usual daily detritus and focus on one emotion find that they compel attention. We are hard-wired to notice strong emotions in others.  We have mirror neurons that fire (without us being conscious of them) when we see someone else in a state of great excitement, or anger, or delight.  They leak their emotions to us; we are infected with them.  That’s how they take over a room.

And finally, have something interesting to say.  If you’re going to wield influence, you need to know what you want to be influential about.  And you’d better have done your homework because once all eyes are upon you, everyone will expect you to have something worthwhile for them.

That’s how you build influence. Take inventory of how you habitually position yourself in front of the world and repair if necessary.  Then, focus on a key emotion for any important meeting. And third, the place where most leaders mistakenly start, be prepared with something interesting and relevant to say.  Leaders often start with content because it’s the natural job of the conscious mind.  But connection, or its lack, begins in the unconscious mind.

More blog posts by Nick Morgan

More on: Leadership, Managing yourself, Presentations

NICK MORGAN

Nick Morgan is the president and founder of Public Words, a communications consulting firm, and the author of Power Cues: The Subtle Science of Leading Groups, Persuading Others and Maximizing Your Personal Impact.

The Future of You

by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic  |   9:00 AM January 1, 2013

Economic and technological changes are reshaping the nature of work. Having a great job does not guarantee your career success; your competence no longer depends on what you know; and being an affluent consumer matters less than becoming a sought-after product. Welcome to a new era of work, where your future depends on being a signal in the noisy universe of human capital. In order to achieve this, you will need to master three things: self-branding, entrepreneurship, and hyperconnectivity.

Self-branding is about being a signal in the noise of human capital. The stronger your brand, the stronger that signal. In today’s world, self-branding matters more than any other form of talent, not least because the mass market is unable (or unwilling) to distinguish between branding and talent.

We are all individuals, but unless we are also a brand, our individuality will be invisible. Being a brand means showcasing that which makes you special, in a way that is distinctive (recognizable), predictable (consistent), and meaningful (it allows others to understand what you do and why). This is why David Beckham and Lady Gaga are much more successful than their more talented competitors — they understood that being a marketing phenomenon is more important than displaying outstanding soccer skills or musical talent, and focused more on self-branding than their counterparts did.

Successful brands are polarizing (they generate strong reactions) and simple. Strong self-branding means removing all non-essentials from your public reputation or, as Antoine Saint-Exupery put it, “perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Entrepreneurship is about adding value to society by disrupting it and improving the order of things: it is turning the present into the past by creating a better future.

We are all busy, but the only activity that really matters is enterprising activity or entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the difference between being busy and being a business, and the reason why some are able to stay in business.

Everything that isn’t already optimized or automatized depends on people, and every transaction between people is a business transaction. The most important commodity in human capital today is people who can grow a business, that is, work on the business rather than in a business.

Today’s war for talent is the war for identifying, developing, and retaining true change-agents. Change-agents are hard to find, hard to manage, and hard to retain. Entrepreneurship is about being a change-agent; change-agents are signals, everyone else is noise. If you are not bringing growth, you are replaceable and recyclable.

Whether you are self-employed or employed by others, whether you work in a big business or own a small business, your career success depends on your ability to offer something new: new solutions for existing problems; new services and products; new ideas; etc. Everything that isn’t new is old, and if you are doing old you are stuck in the past. In the age entrepreneurship, the future of you is new, and your value depends on your ability to do things differently. As the great Alan Kay pointed out, “a change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”

Hyperconnectivity is about being a signal in the sea of data and making and shaping the waves of social knowledge.

We are all online, but what matters is being a relevant connector. Hyperconnectivity is not about being online 24/7; it’s about optimizing the online experience for others.

Unless you are a hyperconnector, only Netflix cares about what movies you watch, and only your friends care about where you went for brunch. But when you are a hyperconnector, thousands of people will watch the movies you like and your brunch recommendations will shape reviewers’ comments on TripAdvisor. In the era of information overload, being a trustworthy source of information is a rare commodity — it is the digital equivalent of being an intellectual and the latest state in the evolution of marketing.

The world’s knowledge is too large to be stored anywhere; Wikipedia and Google aren’t enough; the Library of Congress isn’t enough. Hyperconnectors point us in the right direction. Anybody can upload a video on YouTube or tweet, but only a few can direct us to the videos or tweets we want to see.

The most important form of knowledge today is knowing where to find stuff. In fact, the ability to find stuff is now almost as important as the ability to create stuff. Hyperconnectors are the creative of the digital era because in the age of information overload, where everybody creates online content, effectively curating content is what really matters.

In short, the future of you depends on your ability to be a brand, a change agent, and a link to useful information. Paying attention to your personality and managing your reputation (how others see you) will turn you into a successful brand; paying attention to your ideas and defying the status quo will help you become a change agent; and bridging the gap between social knowledge and collective interests will turn you into a hyperconnector.

More blog posts by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

More on: Career planning

TOMAS CHAMORRO-PREMUZIC

Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is an international authority in personality profiling and psychometric testing. He is a Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL), Vice President of Research and Innovation at Hogan Assessment Systems, and has previously taught at the London School of Economics and New York University. He is co-founder of metaprofiling.com. His book is Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt.

Take Back Your Life in Ten Steps

by Tony Schwartz  |   12:00 PM January 10, 2013

You’re smart, hard-working and good at what you do, but the truth is you also too often feel your life is just a relentless set of demands you have to meet, and too rarely a source of satisfaction. You long to feel more in control of your days, but the reality is you’re frequently racing just to keep up.

This is the story I hear over and over at every level in organizations, from first line managers all the way up to CEOs in large companies. I’m convinced it doesn’t have to be this way, and that the solution has to do with deeply embedding a series of simple practices into your life.

I have ten in mind, but it’s not realistic to add them all at once, assuming there are a number you don’t currently do. Instead, I hope to lead you on a journey in which you add them one at a time, sequentially, over the coming months. You don’t have to do all of them for your life to work really well, and even small changes will often deliver disproportionately large results. At the same time, it’s likely that the more of these you eventually add, the better and more in charge of your life you’ll feel.

Each month, starting in February, I’m going to offer a deeper dive blog here at HBR.org and a webinar on the Energy Project website about why each of the behaviors I describe below matter so much. (Here’s a link to the first webinar, February 12.) I’ll also offer very specific suggestions on how to build that behavior into your life, by ritualizing it, so you eventually do it automatically, without using much will or discipline, much the way you now brush your teeth at night, or show up for scheduled meetings during the day.

The suggestions are in order from the most basic and fundamental, to the highest level.

1. Get sufficient sleep every night. Sleep is often the single most undervalued behavior in our lives and the one with the most immediate power to improve our experience in every waking moment. If you sleep in the 6-6½ hour range, like the average American, just one more hour of sleep a night will leave you feeling more physically energized, emotionally resilient, and mentally clear.

2. Move more. It’s not only good for your heart’s health, but also for your mental health. Do some form of exercise that significantly raises your heart rate for 30 minutes at least four times a week and move frequently during the day.

3. Eat less, more often. Food is fuel. Lean proteins and complex carbohydrates are high-octane fuel. You’re best off when you keep feeding your internal furnace in small doses throughout the day, beginning with breakfast.

4. Renew more. Human beings aren’t designed to work continuously. We’re meant instead to move between spending and renewing energy. Ideally, take a break every 90 minutes, even if only to spend a minute or two breathing deeply.

5. Invest in those you love. The greatest gift you can give is your absorbed attention. Better to be fully present with someone for an hour than physically present, but distracted, for multiple hours.

6. Give thanks. We’re far quicker to notice what’s wrong in our lives than we are what’s right. At least once a week, hand write and mail a note of appreciation to someone who deserves it, telling the person precisely what you’re grateful for.

7. Do the most important thing first. Early in the morning, you’re likely to have the most energy, and the fewest distractions. Start your workday by focusing without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, on the most important and/or challenging task you can accomplish that day.

8. Practice reflection. We’re so preoccupied with the urgent that we rarely take time to think about what it is we’re doing. Set aside 15 to 30 minutes at the end of each work day (or in the evening) to reflect quietly and without interruption on what you learned that day, and what your highest priorities are for the following day.

9. Keep learning. Our brains work better if we challenge them, and life becomes more interesting when we do. Reading books is a simple and surefire way to learn and grow, but so is building a daily practice around learning a new language, a sport, a musical instrument, or around how to write code, fix a car, or draw.

10. Give back. Take at least one hour a week to put your own needs aside and devote that time instead to adding value to the world at large. One hour a week is very little time, but it’s a start — and it’s also more than most of us regularly give.

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz

More on: Managing yourself, Stress

TONY SCHWARTZ

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project.

Being Authentic Can Feel Inauthentic

by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos  |   1:00 PM January 15, 2013

Being authentic requires that you know who you are. This is, of course, easier said than done. All too often our self-image is hopelessly idealized. At other times it can be punishingly severe. And decisions that are driven by aspirations and insecurities inevitably lead to inconsistent and inauthentic behavior, reflecting the divide between reality and self-image.

To get around this problem, it helps to anchor your self-image in the set of core values: the qualities, standards, or principles that you embrace and use to guide decision-making in ambiguous situations. This, however, is not enough by itself to ensure authentic behavior because many of the values we would put on our list get questioned very little. Who would argue with the merits of bravery, generosity, openness, honesty, fairness, commitment, excellence, family, fun, harmony, health, love, prestige, respect, service, and spirituality?

But the meanings of these terms don’t stay the same. They develop as you yourself develop: what seems brave at 18 is likely to seem foolhardy at 40. In other words, to meaningfully ground one’s self-image in values a person has to spend time reflecting on what defines those values and how they relate to any given context. Since many of the concepts get imprinted at a young age, I expect that many people have not seriously confronted what they mean by the values they claim to espouse.

That’s just the first problem. The second is even harder to do: managing yourself in situations in which your values conflict, which they inevitably will. Two of my most important personal values are fairness and effectiveness. But being fair and being effective can pull you in two different directions. How you resolve this tension determines how authentic people perceive you to be.

Often the solutions you come up with may feel uncomfortable, even inauthentic, to yourself. Let me offer this small anecdote as an illustration. When I was managing my family’s company, salesmen were refunded monthly for their expenses in calling on clients — particularly their gas bills. At one point, our auditors noticed that gas expenses were going up even when sales were not. Looking more closely into it, we found that some of our salesmen were padding their gas bills to collect some extra money.

So, in the name of fairness, I devised a way to calculate the gasoline allowance for each salesman, each month taking into account the distance he had to drive, the frequency of calls, and the amount of sales to each client. This new system was rigorously fair to each salesman. But it was also complex, time-consuming, costly, and counterproductive. It forced me into “bargaining” with a number of salesman and actually lowered the morale of the whole group because it seemed obvious to them that management no longer trusted them.

Wasting everyone’s time and bringing down everyone’s morale certainly was not authentic managerial behavior on my part. I finally had to abandon my “fair” system and adopt the simple but “less fair” system of reimbursing each salesman by the amount of sales he had made that month, regardless of how much driving and gas it had taken to accomplish that. The strange thing is that, while I felt inauthentic applying this somewhat illogical system, it seemed fair to the salesmen!

The lesson I learned is that, even though you might think that one’s authenticity ought to be entirely one’s own, it actually belongs to other people as well. In other words, how I resolved my conflict between fairness and effectiveness required paying some attention to how my actions touched the values and self images of the people I was managing. The salesmen didn’t see me as less authentic because of my U-turn, because they felt I was being both fair to them and effective.

Of course, there is a balance to be struck. You cannot allow other people to dictate your values and at times you have to make a stand for your own beliefs where there is a real conflict. But real life is seldom clear-cut and it is a your job to navigate ambiguity. You will do so more effectively if you think through more carefully and more rationally your values, the contexts in which you apply them, and the concerns and priorities of the people you deal with. Taking a position and firmly never budging can make you look like an unrealistic idealogue rather than an authentic manager.

Bottom line, actually being authentic can sometimes feel inauthentic.

More blog posts by Charalambos Vlachoutsicos

More on: Managing yourself

CHARALAMBOS VLACHOUTSICOS

A former businessman and consultant, Charalambos A. Vlachoutsicos is an Adjunct Professor at Athens University of Economics and Business in Greece.

Compromise Requires Relationships (Not Friendships)

by Ron Ashkenas  |   11:00 AM January 22, 2013

To work out differences and get things done, people in organizations need to work together. To foster this kind of collaboration, managers need to develop personal relationships — and some amount of trust — with potential partners. Without this foundation, negotiations often become adversarial; parties question each other’s motives and neither side truly listens to the other.

Sound familiar? The struggle to reach consensus in Washington over spending, taxes, debt limits, and other issues is a case in point on how the absence of relationships constrains compromise. Clearly the issues involved are divisive and emotional, but watching these leaders try to find a middle ground is painful and discouraging — largely because they have so little relationship capital to draw upon. According to recent news reports, Republican leaders routinely turn down invitations from President Obama to come to the White House for social events, whether they are state dinners or movie screenings. And President Obama, for his part, has indicated that he prefers to spend time with his family instead of schmoozing with members of Congress.

Nobody is suggesting that President Obama, Speaker Boehner, and Senate Minority Leader McConnell become close personal friends. They do, however, need to understand and appreciate each other’s points of view and be willing to look for middle ground. Getting to that point takes hard work. As one manager at the World Bank once said to me, “Building relationships requires a thousand cups of tea.”

A number of years ago, many of the big commercial banks and private corporations encouraged their officers to build relationships by providing special executive dining rooms (with gourmet meals). While there was a certain amount of elitism involved, the practice gave managers a chance to get to know each other and create an underlying support structure for doing business. Similarly companies also organized regular offsite team-building retreats, and social events for managers and their families.

Today companies tend to be more egalitarian, and more concerned about costs and perceived boondoggles, so that many of these relationship-building vehicles (some of which were excessive) no longer exist. However the need may be greater than ever, since managers often do not work in the same locations as their peers, spend more time traveling, and usually do not have the luxury of extra hours to just “get together” with colleagues. The result is that many managers simply do not have relationships with a wide network of people across the company (and outside) and therefore struggle to resolve conflicts. In fact I’ve been in a number of senior management conferences in the past few years in which top-50 managers are meeting each other for the first time.

The bottom-line is that whether you are the president of the United States or a mid-level manager, it’s worthwhile to be strategic and proactive about building relationships. To do so, here are two steps you can take:

First, identify the people in your company, or in adjacent organizations (e.g., customers, thought-leaders, partners) with whom you might need to collaborate at some point. In particular, focus on managers who are likely to hold divergent views or may see the world through a different lens.

Second, develop a tailored way to reach out to each person on the list — a few at a time — with the simple goal of getting to know each other. I know one manager, for example, who commits to setting up 10-minute calls with three people each week, just to “say hello.” Another manager makes sure that he contacts people on his list whenever he’s going to be traveling to their city or country. And still another uses social media to connect to some people and builds an email dialogue with others.

Most people understand that building relationships with potential business partners is a critical strategy for success. But it’s a strategy that often won’t happen by itself.

More blog posts by Ron Ashkenas

More on: Communication, Negotiating, Networking

RON ASHKENAS

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

What If You Could Truly Be Yourself at Work?

by Tony Schwartz  |   10:00 AM January 23, 2013

For two years now, we have been holding regular “community” meetings at our office to give team members an opportunity to check in about how they’re doing, not just professionally but also personally. Each person answers several questions beginning with a deceptively simple one: “How are you feeling today?”* The rest of us simply listen.

It was only when we faced a sudden crisis that I finally understood why these meetings had been so important. On a weekend last October, the 23-year-old son of one of our team members died unexpectedly and tragically. On Monday morning, I called our team together in our conference room.

The feelings that surfaced that morning were raw — grief, bewilderment, fear, an acute awareness of the fragility of life and the preciousness of our own loved ones, and empathy for our grieving colleague.

The emotions ran even higher at a community meeting on the first day our colleague returned to work several weeks later. Painful as it was for all of us, we were able to create a container for our colleague’s heartbreak. Sharing our feelings also made them feel less burdensome. We held her, and holding her held us. It was cathartic, and that helped each of us to go back at the end of the meeting and focus again on the work at hand.

It dawned on me that day how powerful and liberating it is to say exactly what you’re feeling, and to feel truly listened to without judgment.

The impetus to hold community meetings came to us from something called “the Sanctuary Model,” developed by a psychiatrist named Sandra Bloom as a way to help people deal with chronically stressful and overwhelming circumstances — mostly in the world of mental health.

Increasingly, however, the everyday experience of corporate life can be overwhelming in and of itself.

In addition to whatever stresses we bring from home, including not getting sufficient sleep, we’re deluged with email, running from meeting to meeting, skipping meals, and working longer and more continuous hours than ever. Is it any surprise we’re struggling? Worse yet, in most workplaces the unspoken expectation is that we will check any strong emotions we’re feeling at the door.

You know the drill. You put on your game face when you walk into work. “How are you?” a colleague asks, by rote and without real interest. “Fine,” you respond, automatically, regardless of how you’re actually feeling.

“How many of us,” Bloom writes, “have ever felt truly safe in a social setting … [meaning] cared for, trusted, free to express our deepest thoughts and feelings without censure, unafraid of being abandoned or misjudged, unfettered by the constant pressure of impersonal competition, and yet stimulated to be thoughtful, creative, spontaneous and solve problems?”

To the contrary, as demand grows, we feel more anxious, more isolated, and more vulnerable.

Each of us has a tipping point — a moment when we feel so depleted that we fall into survival mode. We’re often unaware of it, but when we move from feeling calm and secure to anxious and under siege, we literally become different people.

Our fight or flight physiology kicks in. In turn, our focus automatically narrows to protecting ourselves. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively, respond to others with care and consideration, or consider the long-term consequences of our choices. Instead, we do whatever we think we need to do to survive in the moment.

Community, I’ve come to deeply believe, is the cure. It does indeed have the power to serve as a sanctuary — to protect, ground and encourage us, not just in extreme circumstances, but also in the face of countless everyday challenges. Support in a community can also give us the strength to forego immediate gratification in favor of choices that uphold shared values, serve the collective good, and generate long-term value.

I’m convinced that it’s the strength of our community at The Energy Project which has allowed us to become a truly high-performing team. The safety and trust we feel with one another has freed us to focus our efforts on our mission. We have a small full-time staff — 14 of us, along with another dozen working part-time — but we’ve been able to work at senior levels in some of the world’s largest companies. One reason is that we squander almost no energy on internal politics. We’re in this together, including when one or another of us is struggling and needs help.

I’ve always thought of our core team as a living laboratory for the practices we teach our clients — whether it’s the power of renewal, or focusing on one thing at a time, or learning to deal more skillfully with conflict. What I now realize is that I’ve been overlooking one of the most powerful elements of our work.

Each of us is far less likely to succeed by forever pushing to stand out from the pack than by building communities of care and trust committed to raising the bar for everyone.

Transformation takes a village. None of us can truly do it alone.

* The other questions we ask at community meetings include “What’s the most important thing you learned last week?” “What’s your goal for this week?” and “What are you feeling most grateful for?”

More blog posts by Tony Schwartz

More on: Communication, Managing people

TONY SCHWARTZ

Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebook and connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz and Twitter.com/Energy_Project.