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.

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.

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.

Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education

by Eric Hellweg  |   12:12 PM January 29, 2013

The advent of massively open online classes (MOOCs) is the single most important technological development of the millennium so far. I say this for two main reasons. First, for the enormously transformative impact MOOCs can have on literally billions of people in the world. Second, for the equally disruptive effect MOOCs will inevitably have on the global education industry.

While at Davos, I was fortunate to attend an amazing panel — my favorite of the conference — with a murderer’s row of speakers. Moderated by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, the list of speakers: Larry Summers, former president of Harvard; Bill Gates; Peter Theil, a partner at Founder’s Fund; Rafael Reif, president of MIT; Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity; Daphne Koller, CEO of Coursera, and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has taken a number of Stanford physics classes through Udacity. Below is a collection of some of the highlighted comments from this remarkable panel as well as a couple from audience members who were given an opportunity to comment.

Why this disruption is happening:

Peter Thiel, partner, Founders Fund
“In the United States, students don’t get their money’s worth. There’s a bubble in education as out of control as the housing bubble and the tech bubble in the 1990s. Education costs have gone up 400% since 1980. That’s the highest escalation of costs–higher than health care. There’s now a trillion dollars in student debt. And thanks to the way bankruptcy laws were restructured under George W Bush, you can’t get out of the college loan even if you become bankrupt. This is deeply broken.

“You have to ask yourself, ‘What is the nature of education as a good?’ Ideally you want it to be learning. But it also functions as insurance. Parents will pay a lot of money for insurance against cracks in our society. Education as insurance has something to be said because it connects to the economy. You know computer science, you can get a job. But education also functions as a tournament. You do well if you go to a top school but for everyone else the diploma is a dunce hat in disguise. People need to understand what they’re trying to do? Is it insurance? A tournament? Learning?”

Where we are in the evolution of this change:

Larry Summers, former President of Harvard
“It’s important to remember this really wise quote when thinking about the transition to online education: ‘Things take longer to happen than you think they will and then they happen faster than you think they could.’ If you had a discussion with dentists on tooth decay in 1947 it would have been about brushing your teeth and dental care, but the most important thing to happen with fighting tooth decay was fluoridated water and this is similar. It’s hard to know when it will happen but at some point this will be transformative. The first stage is when it does what was being done before but better. That’s what is happening now. But we’re going to where we don’t need to have two semesters, classes of same length, grading on the basis of things called exams. You can’t think of another industry where a list of top 10 providers is perfectly correlated to what it was in 1960.”

Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera
“We’re at 2.4 million students now. The biggest lesson I’ve learned on this is I underestimated the amount of impact this would have around the world. I really didn’t envision this scale and this impact this quickly.”

Raphael Reif, president of MIT
“We manage this transition very carefully. How can MIT charge $50,000 for tuition going forward? Can we justify that in the future? We see three components to MIT- first there’s the student life, then there’s the classroom instruction, but for us, the projects and labs activity is where real education occurs. But I don’t think we can charge that much for tuition in the future and it’s a big pressure point for us.”

Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft
“When people first put courses online people thought they could charge money and no one bought them. They put them online but from a global perspective, all these high numbers of students we’re hearing about today, the effective number of people who use them is zero. It’s not widely used as a percentage of the global population. Our whole notion of ‘credential’, which means you went somewhere for a number of hours, needs to move to where you can prove you have the knowledge and the quality of these online courses need to improve. Over the next few years the quality will improve. 90% of these courses will be long forgotten and never viewed. Over the next five years this transformation will be phenomenal but only through a pretty brutal winnowing out process.”

On what an online education world means for hiring and talent for educators:

Rafael Reif
[On the question of how to hire professors in the MOOC era] “Can you hire MIT professors who know that they need to teach 150,000 people and not 150? We have spectacular researchers who are lousy teachers. That’s sad. A teacher in the future will become more like a mentor. The model of on campus education will be more about mentorship and guidance with research as an important factor.”

We can’t presume to know what format will work in the future:

Larry Summers
“It’s important to remember that we’re not so good at understanding the subtleties of environments that make them attractive to people. Look at football for example. One way to watch a game is to sit on a cold bench with no good food and bad bathrooms, the other is in your own living room, with replay, and food you like at your convenience. And then ask yourself- which would you guess people pay for? Which do people cheer for? You’d get it wrong. There are aspects of bringing people together in groups that we can’t quite understand and judge. The working out of this will depend a lot on formulas for making it attractive and collaborative. And as football example suggests, it won’t be immediately obvious what those models are.”

What’s next in this space?

Bill Gates
“Who is going to jump first into granting a degree that doesn’t have the seat time requirement that we do today that employers will see as credible? Where does the credibility come from?

Sebastian Thrun, CEO of uDacity
“I think the question is how do you make the credential have currency that an employer knows? We’ve had good success. We have 350 companies who have hired our students. Employers worry about soft skills and we can measure that and it’s on equal performance with hard skills. The credential thing is interesting- we launched a class for credit with California schools for remedial math. We priced them at 10-15 percent of what college costs. There are lots of improvements to be made, but the outcome tends to be better today with us.”

Jimmy Wales, founder, Wikipedia
“The overall quantity and quality of formal education hasn’t changed whereas the informal education has skyrocketed in the last 30 years. People used to go to library and now go to Wikipedia. We haven’t really begun to understand the impact on that.”

Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Founder Grameen Bank
“What does this all mean? The technology gives us tremendous power to solve this stark problem all around us. We need to design these so no child is left out of this. What need to ask, what is education after all? We need to resolve that. What are we getting our young people ready for? It’s for the purpose of our life. And we need to make sure we give people a purpose to their life. It won’t be done by current system. It will be done by people who have nothing to do with current system.”

More blog posts by Eric Hellweg

More on: Education, Innovation, Internet

ERIC HELLWEG

Eric Hellweg is the Managing Director of Digital Strategy and an Editorial Director at Harvard Business Review. You can follow him on Twitter.

What Government Should Relearn from Business (And It's Not Efficiency)

by Mitchell Weiss  |   11:00 AM March 13, 2013

When, eventually, sequestration has passed and Washington and its watchers have moved on to the next big debate, alongside all the recriminations there will be this: the familiar calls for government to demonstrate more of the effectiveness that we see in the most successful private sector companies.

The clamor won’t be altogether misguided. After all, the best-run companies might have a thing or two to teach this D.C. drama’s main players about leadership, negotiation, and protecting our (national) brand.

Of course, government has long looked to business for new ways of managing. Benchmarking was a key feature of President Clinton’s effort at Reinventing Government. Public variants of outsourcing were pushed as part of George W. Bush’s President’s Management Agenda, and President Obama appointed the country’s first Chief Performance Officer.

So it’s a fair bet that when the sequester’s dust has settled, government may once again turn to (or have thrust on them) the latest business bestsellers as “how-to” guides for avoiding the next crisis. Though positive results cannot be guaranteed, it is good when private sector ingenuity is offered up — amidst other solutions — for consideration by the public sector. American business remains the country’s most vibrant source of innovation.

Problem is, where government is now most likely to look — and where the private sector seems most poised to push — is in the wrong place. Government has traditionally looked to business for tools and techniques to help improve productivity and cut costs through greater efficiency. Lean Six Sigma, which even made its way into a candidate pledge in the last presidential campaign, is one in a series of such business-to-government waves. Big data is rolling in after it. But these are the wrong tools for the job that now needs doing. What government needs most right now — what it will needespecially after the sequestration debacle — are tools that build trust.

Pew’s January 2013 poll drives this point home — their survey found that a mere 26% of Americans trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. Post-sequestration, the only thing harder to envision than trust numbers climbing rapidly is that government officials can lead without it.

The failed deficit dialogue over the last year has shown us that staggering budget deficits at the federal level and huge unfunded pension and health liabilities in states and cities can’t be bridged by squeezing the next nickel (or even 10 trillion of them) out of government operations. Addressing these challenges will require reasonable dialogue, debate, and, ultimately, decision-making about the scope of what we want as a country and how we want to pay for it. Business strategies focused on process and efficiency won’t help the country manage that.

There is, however, a new wave of business techniques more suited to the job. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino has embraced these lessons with an engagement-driven strategy dubbed New Urban Mechanics. Companies that have learned how to foster community, cultivate trust, and engender participation — they hold the real lessons government needs now.

There is, of course, a certain irony here. After all, community, trust, and participation are (or were) the tools of the trade of government in the first place. Cities and towns — with their squares, community groups, and network of relationships — knew the value of “social” centuries before Facebook figured it out. It turns out that what the public sector can learn from the private sector, the private sector actually learned from the public sector.

Government would do well to look at businesses that are innovating best and fastest in the area of engagement. And as they do, business managers should take note. Millions are being invested by Cisco, IBM, Phillips, and other global companies to help cities and countries operate efficiently. Some of these efforts look too tech- and operations-laden to solve the biggest challenges. The next wave of successful public-private partnerships won’t be top down, process-driven, and systems-heavy. Businesses that learn to help government cultivate and harness its own strength — in community — will serve our democracy best and succeed for their own stakeholders.

More blog posts by Mitchell Weiss

More on: Government, Innovation, Social enterprise

MITCHELL WEISS

Mitchell Weiss is a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and was Chief of Staff to Boston’s Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

How Happy Is Your Organization?

by Susan David  |   8:00 AM March 20, 2013

Today, March 20, 2013, marks the first ever International Day of Happiness. This was decreed last year by the United Nations following a meeting on well-being attended by government officials, economists, scholars, and business and spiritual leaders from around the world. It was hosted by Bhutan, a small but visionary country which famously uses Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to index its progress.

The King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar, has described GNH as “the bridge between the fundamental values of kindness, equality and humanity and the necessary pursuit of economic growth.” He’s talking, of course, about the well-documented connection between well-being and productivity — an interplay that should interest business leaders as much as it does political ones. As this issue of HBR makes clear, happy, engaged employees are good for the organization. Research shows they have better health, are more creative, produce better results, and are willing to go the extra mile. What’s more, happiness is contagious; it creates a virtuous spiral that leads to further engagement.

So how can leaders create happier organizations?

Perhaps the first step is to clarify what we mean by “happy”. Psychologists typically identify happiness by three distinct pathways. The first is the pleasant life, which involves positive experiences including contentment, hope, and sensory enjoyment. This kind of well-being is often referred to as hedonia, based on the Greek term for pleasure. The second is the engaged life, oreudaimonia. The ancient Greeks believed in a “daimon”, or guardian spirit, that would guide you toward your destiny; the word also means genius. The engaged life thus refers to a person’s ability to deploy his personal genius — to use his unique strengths and talents in a way that engages and absorbs him. The third pathway is the meaningful life, which relates to the desire to be part of something bigger than oneself — to belong and contribute to an institution that has purpose.

All three of these pathways — pleasure, engagement, and meaning — are important. And business leaders can use this knowledge to ask some important questions about their organizations:

• Do my employees enjoy their relationships and their environment at work?
• Do they laugh?
• Are my people in the right roles — ones that fit their skill sets and offer appropriate challenge?
• Do they get to use their genius?
• Do they understand the purpose of the organization?
• Do they feel they’re a part of something that matters?

On this first International Day of Happiness, it’s worth pausing to consider what contributes to happiness in your organization — your own happiness, as well as that of the people around you. I hope you will share what you discover.

More blog posts by Susan David

More on: Leadership, Managing people, Morale, Motivation, Organizational culture, Productivity

SUSAN DAVID

Susan David is a founder of the Harvard/McLean Institute of Coaching and is on faculty at Harvard. Her HBR article Emotional Agility was listed in their Management Ideas of the Year. She edited the Oxford Handbook of Happiness (OUP, 2013) and directs Evidence Based Psychology, a management consultancy. Connect with her on twitter@SusanDavid_PhD 

"Just How Old Are You?"

by Meredith Fineman  |   8:00 AM March 29, 2013

How old are you?

I get asked that question all the time. In meetings, on conference calls, while pitching a new client. The answer really shouldn’t matter. I find myself wondering whether male entrepreneurs get asked the same question, and why the person asking me doesn’t consider it rude.

Age is messy these days, especially when it comes to jobs. While anecdotally, older workers (those 55+) claim that there is a bias against hiring them, their unemployment rate holds steady at 5.8 percent, according to the Department of Labor. While American culture often glorifies the young, this isn’t translating into young people getting hired. In fact, the unemployment rate for those aged 18-29 rose to a staggering 12.1 percent last December, up nearly a percentage point from a year before. And yet we’re not having a national conversation about age bias, even as we increasingly talk aboutother forms of bias.

Yes, employers want fresh, “hungry” college grads and workers (if you ask me, “hungry” is a euphemism for literal hunger, as jobs that often post for “hungry” individuals pay pennies) but it’s still very hard to find employment. Law students from prestigious universities are taking unpaid internships. After graduating Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, I found it so difficult to find a job I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to work for Young & Rubicam. I found many of my classmates following suit — moving to other countries.

Hence my discomfort with the question: How old are you?

When I am asked that question, it’s usually to gauge if, at recently 26, the fact that I’ve had my own company, FinePoint Digital PR, for nearly two years is admirable, suspect, or something else. When asked, I often respond with, “You should never ask a lady her age.” Where did I get that? Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, apparently in the 19th century while my other business was churning butter.

And yet the world of digital media and tech entrepreneurship has turned a lot of our assumptions about age on its head.

It used to be that in any industry, years of experience meant knowledge, leadership, and wisdom. And this paradigm hasn’t completely died away; many male friends of mine lament about grey hairs, to which I often respond that it will probably help them in business, especially if they’re in more traditional sectors like insurance or finance. They will be taken more seriously because they’ll be perceived as older and more experienced. (Grey hair is decidedly more complicated for women.)

But if you work in entrepreneurship, technology, or digital media, it can feel like a competition to see who’s the youngest. This, too, is complicated. The Forbes 30 Under 30 is a goal for many entrepreneurs I know, myself included. And yet I wrote the satirical Highlights “5 Under 5″ to underscore my ambivalence about how obsessed we are with youthfulness these days, from wunderkinds to genius college dropouts. At SXSW this year, I was struck by how young everyone was — and how it sets a bar that is almost impossible to meet. This year’s TED Conference even highlighted some speakers as young as 12. The speaking series has an entire teen division.

As complex as these ages issues are for men, being female renders them even more problematic. Too young, too old — we seem to instantaneously switch from one to the other. For instance, a close friend was asked her age at SXSW Interactive this year, and at 31, shocked the lothario who asked because, and I quote, “Girls aren’t usually pretty after 28.” Sure, that is only one guy’s obnoxious comment. But it does seem like there’s an awfully short window between “too young” and “too old,” whether you’re talking about business or pleasure. And with female leaders judged more harshly on their appearance, the two may not be as far apart as we like to think.

An entrepreneur is often the face, literally, of her company. When that face doesn’t match our expectations, it’s easy to become nonplussed. A male client, with whom I had worked for months before meeting in person, began our first face-to-face meeting with the exclamation “You’re so young!” I wasn’t quite sure what to say, and mostly I felt belittled and furious. (Think how you’d feel if you sat down with a client who blurted out, “You’re so old!” Exactly.)

Sure, I’m young compared to some of my clients. To my grandmother, I’m eleven. (And I hope she keeps sending care packages, forever.) But compared to app developers out of Stanford, I’m ancient.

Working hard, disruption, and the entrepreneurial spirit knows no age. To judge based upon it would be juvenile.

More blog posts by Meredith Fineman

More on: Entrepreneurship, Generational issues

MEREDITH FINEMAN

Meredith Fineman is a publicist and writer living in Washington, DC. She is the founder and principal of FinePoint Digital PR. You can read more of her writing here.

Change Management Is Bigger Than Leadership

by Gregory Shea and Cassie Solomon  |   12:00 PM March 29, 2013

If an organization needs to undergo significant change, that’s a leadership issue, right? Old dogs will learn new tricks when the lead dog — or ape, or penguin, depending on the management fable of the moment — shows them off. Leaders need to craft compelling elevator speeches, relentlessly deliver the message of change, and above all, walk the talk.

That is all well and good for animal packs, and it helps with humans, too. But by itself, the lead-animal theory is woefully insufficient for changing large organizations or large parts of organizations. Leaders modeling behavior and talking the case for change can indeed help enterprises transform. But how often is that corporate alpha dog actually sitting among the pack? Most people in large organizations catch a glimpse only briefly, via dispatch or WebEx or the rare visit. Soon, the appearance fades and the banners droop. The workers, the managers, and even the executives look around to see if their environment has changed, if the tried-and-true behaviors that made their world work will continue to do so. If the environment has changed, fine; it’s time to adapt. If it hasn’t, then why bother to change?

How, then, does one lead the changing of an organization, whether it is a company, business unit, service line, department, or work unit? By changing the work systems that comprise the work environment around the people whose behavior is supposed to change. Therein lies the key to successful, embedded, and sustained change: alter the environment, and people will adapt to it. Call it a species strength. We behave based on the reality around us.

Eight aspects comprise our world at work and, therefore, patterns of behavior at work: organization(organizational chart), workplace (its physical or virtual configuration), task (work flow or processes),people (specifically the skills and orientation), rewards (and punishments), measurement (the metrics employed), information distribution (who gets to know what when), and decision allocation(who is involved in what way in which decisions). A skilled change leader can convert these eight aspects into eight levers for change.

That is just what Hyundai’s Chung Mong-Koo did and the results speak for themselves. He took a carmaker arguably within sight of going out of business in 1998 and led the creation of what Bill Holstein (writing in Strategy+Business) describes as “a coherent mix of quality improvement, design, and marketing that gives Hyundai a clear advantage over its industry competitors.” A remarkable feat made only more remarkable by the fact that it occurred in a highly competitive, well-established global industry.

This change took time and far more than an inspired “motivational” leader. It took a concerted, coordinated, and sustained reworking of multiple work systems. For instance, Hyundai established a new and powerful quality division along with a Global Command and Control Center and brought transmission design and manufacturing in-house, implemented many Deming and systems-oriented approaches to task or work flow, flattened organizational hierarchies to drive more collaborative decision-making, made far more production information available throughout the organization in real time, significantly upgraded the level of technological tools available (especially on the production floor), altered measurement to include “qualitivity” (a unique combination of quality, productivity, and customer satisfaction) and rewards (e.g., good pay by local standards in an Alabama plant), and hired outside designers leading to a new approach to design termed “fluidic sculpture.”

At another global organization, the Roman Catholic Church, a change in leadership has many hoping for the revitalization of what some see as a scandal-ridden, unresponsive, and secretive organization. What might a change-minded pontificate learn from Hyundai? Do the aforementioned levers of change apply? They might start by articulating what scenes they want to see occurring regularly and reliably within the church that currently do not, and, conversely, what now-common scenes they wish would stop. That work done, they might step back and look across the scenes and ask questions such as the following:

1. What changes in the organizational chart or in supporting structures (such as meetings) would support the scenes occurring? For example, does the traditional parish structure facilitate or hinder the scenes occurring?
2. What design of physical or virtual space would make the desired scenes more likely? For example, would easy access to global digital connections serve to build a larger sense of community?
3. What protocols might ease realization of desired scenes? For example, how standardized should the handling of financial or educational tasks be?
4. What skills and orientation should people playing key roles in the desired scenes bring to their roles? For example, what attributes should qualify someone for hire into those roles?
5. What rewards or punishment should depend upon people acting consistently with the desired scenes? For example, on what basis should disbursement of church funds occur?
6. What measurements would foster the regular unfolding of the desired scenes? For example, is there a RCC version of Hyundai’s qualitivity?
7. What distribution of information would facilitate desired scenes occurring and frustrate the occurrence of undesired scenes? For example, would greater transparency be a goal? If it is, with whom would the RCC wish to be more transparent and how would this work, from speed of message to method of communication?
8. What allocation of decision-making roles would serve to bring desired scenes to life? For example, what role should clergy and laity play in which decisions to support the occurrence of desired scenes?

Watch the Roman Catholic Church. The more that it approaches the need for change strictly as a need to “get a different leader,” the less real change will occur, let alone endure. The more that it approaches change as a concerted, coordinated, and sustained reworking of multiple work systems, the more real change will occur…and endure, as it has at Hyundai, and as it would for your organization.

More blog posts by Gregory Shea and Cassie Solomon

More on: Change management, Execution, Organizational culture

GREGORY SHEA AND CASSIE SOLOMON

Gregory P. Shea, PhD, is president of Shea and Associates, Inc. and an adjunct professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Cassie A. Solomon is the president and founder of The New Group Consulting, Inc. Their new book,Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work, is just out from Wharton Digital Press.

"Actually," She Said, "He Works for Me."

by Karen Firestone  |   8:00 AM April 9, 2013

Let’s agree that gender stereotyping still exists. We may try to suppress the subconscious image of political leaders, doctors, and CEO’s as male, but that’s what pops into our heads when we hear those professions. What’s ironic is that I’m the CEO of an investment company, so, if I struggle with this, I suspect others must too.

One of the most ubiquitous forms of stereotyping is when someone (whether male or female) assumes that a woman working with a male colleague is working for him. In my case, people of both sexes ask me if I work for David, the partner with whom I co-founded our firm. When Ava, a well known dermatologist in Los Angeles, bought a large practice, most patients assumed that she was working for the selling doctor, who was male. According to Marsha, a top executive at a medical center, the doctors often defer to the male nurse in the operating room, who is often junior to all the female nurses present.

Does it really matter that this occurs? I think so. Such remarks can be annoying at best, but also, at times, demeaning and confidence-eroding. The literature strongly suggests there is a benefit to explaining to the speaker, whether innocent or intentionally discriminatory, that he or she is mistaken.

However, even if they want to confront such stereotypes, research shows that most women, regardless of their status in an organization, are reluctant to actually do so.

We don’t need to over-think this. Whether the person is making an innocent mistake or being actively patronizing, just answer directly about your position — while keeping your tone friendly and open. For instance, when people assume David’s my boss, I usually just say something like, “Actually we co-founded the company together,” and move on. Even for powerful women, there is a cost in antagonizing a client, a prospect, or a peer. Depending on your tone, the response “I’m the boss” or “He works for me” may sound angry or overly defensive. Sue, an accomplished scientist and leader of a well-known research lab, told me, “I don’t make a big deal if they don’t realize it’s my lab, but I correct them, often with a joke, and then move on.”

You can also make your response less direct — perhaps by using the politician’s strategy of answering a question by referring to something that wasn’t in the original query, such as “we started the company eight years ago when I felt we had the right product.” Or if you prefer to make more of a point, you might say, “You seem like such an open minded person. I would have thought you’d guess right away that I’m the CEO.” (Or “his supervisor,” or “the chief consultant on the job,” or whathaveyou.) This approach appeals to the person’s sense of him or herself as egalitarian, which Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Kathryn A. Morris, and Stephanie A. Goodwin have described as a very effective strategy in their Academy of Management paper.

Then there are the times that actions speak louder than words. Laura, a high-ranking attorney, remembers walking into a client meeting to take a deposition, only to be asked for some coffee by the client. Although fuming inwardly, she got the coffee, then sat down to begin the deposition. The client apologized profusely.

More blog posts by Karen Firestone

More on: Communication, Diversity, Gender

KAREN FIRESTONE

Karen Firestone is the President and CEO of Aureus Asset Management, an asset management firm which serves as the primary financial advisor to families, individuals, and nonprofit institutions. She cofounded Aureus after 22 years as a fund manager and research analyst at Fidelity Investments.

Your Brand Is the Exhaust Fume of the Engine of Your Life

by Nilofer Merchant  |   8:00 AM July 1, 2013

“How do you manage your brand?” I get asked that question really often, especially at public-venue speaking events. Typically, I sigh. It is not that the question is silly, or the questioner shallow, but because this question itself represents so much of what is stopping all of us from doing work that matters.

We talk about “reinventing your brand” when in reality the goal is to reinvent what you work on. We talk about the “brand called you” when we talk about being able to do more of the work you love to do. We talk about ways to “deliver on the impact equation” without asking first, “what is it you want to impact?” We are told by marketing gurus that “everyone now owns a media company!” — as if somehow this is, itself, the goal — rather than a means to an end. Marketing has become the default language — the lingua franca of the day — that we use to describe work, and it is distorting how we evaluate what matters.

Yes, it’s true that web tools can let you be known for the work you do more easily and more cost effectively, letting you own how you present yourself to the world. But that’s probably the least interesting thing about these social constructs and social media tools.

The much more relevant point is that you now get to create, share, and connect ideas with others to do work, ideally meaningful and impactful work. As in the person who was able to accelerate scientific research because of the online game, “Fold It.” This particular game enables important research in the medical field, research that is usually conducted by scientists with PhDs. But making it a game that anyone could play allowed someone “unexpected” to help. A woman who worked as an executive assistant by day turned out to be the best protein folder in the world at night.

As I’ve written in more depth elsewhere, connected individuals can now achieve what once only centralized organizations could. The implications for this are huge. It changes the basis of market power for organizations because size no longer protects competitive advantage. It changes management because people can figure out for themselves what needs to be done to implement the larger strategy. It changes careers because we no longer need to belong to an organization to be able to create scale or impact. You don’t even need to be “old enough” — five-year olds can invent consumer goods products. Today, what matters is the ability to create, not the ability to first prove you can.

So let’s stop using the language of marketing to talk about meaning.

The truth is this: The brand follows the work. Your brand is the exhaust created by the engine of your life. It is a by-product of what happens as you share what you are creating, and with whom you are creating.

It is a sign, yes. Significant, yes. But the real signal comes from being able to answer these two questions:

What is it you care about? It takes courage to find and follow an individual path; finding our own path takes us off the path that others are following, in directions that can seem distinctly alone. Each of us is standing in a place no one else stands in as a function of our history, experience, vision and hopes. I call this onlyness, that thing that only you can bring to any situation. Go with it, and you end up being able to design your own life — and maybe redesign entire industries, too. At the very least, it lets you improve the results of any group you are a part of. Berkeley professors Charlan Jeanne Nemeth and Jack A. Goncalo have proven that “minority viewpoints” aid the quality of decision making by juries, by teams, and for the purpose of innovation. In other words, even when distinct points of view turn out to be wrong, speaking them lets everyone think better, create more solutions, and improve creativity. But if you don’t know what it is you care about and why, you lack the ability to contribute meaningfully.

How will you find and work with allies? While it may be lonely to step into your own path, once you do, you attract those with affinity. The clearer you are in your onlyness, the strong your magnet for the right people for you (and possibly repulsion for others.) This is a good thing. It helps you find, filter, and formulate. It eliminates wasted effort to convince those who will never be convinced. It lets you know what kind of workplace is right for you, and it lets you find the right people for your projects. It lets you align in purpose with others. Esther Dyson points out that the “trick today is not just to find the right target (that is, a person), as social networks such as LinkedIn and search tools can do, but to enlist allies and manage the work to achieve a specific goal.” (Emphasis mine.) Proximity used to reign supreme — where you lived, what school you went to, and whom your parents knew was more of a factor in what opportunities you had. Proximity is still one factor, but in the social era, the other four Ps of community end up growing in importance and power. Communities of passion who share a common interest (photography, or food, or books) can inform new product lines. Communities of purpose willingly share a common task to build something (like Wikipedia) together. Communities of practice, who share a common career or field of business, will extend your offer if it extends their expertise (like Intuit has with its accountant community). Communities of providence allow people to discover connections with others (as in Google+) and thus enable the sharing of information, products, and ideas.

Just recently, I passed up an opportunity to serve on a Fortune 100 Board of Directors. The company has a well-known history of dysfunctional board dynamics and it became clear to me that there was little one person could do to change it. When a friend asked why I was still considering the opportunity, I answered, “It would lend me legitimacy.” When I heard those words come out of my mouth, I knew I had to turn it down. If I’d said yes, it would have been because of “brand” — because I’d want readers like you to see me with more esteem. But in truth, it wouldn’t have meant I was doing more good work.

I’ve studied how actual value is created for over 10 years now, and what I know to be true is this: While what people think of us does matter, what matters much more is our ability to do and deliver. That’s what makes the ultimate difference in the world. And that’s what reputations are really built on. That’s what will draw people to you.

Yes, we are in the middle of a vast sea change in which social can put the power of connection to work to solve meaningful problems. But in order to do that more meaningful work, we need to recognize what is holding us back. In a world of “personal brand” and “leadership brand” and “personal reinvention” and so forth, we should not forget: the real signal is the work itself, and the social signaling is just its echo.

More blog posts by Nilofer Merchant

More on: Branding, Career planning

NILOFER MERCHANT

Nilofer Merchant has personally launched 100 products amounting to $18B in revenue. Her blue-chip career includes Apple, Autodesk, GoLive/Adobe. She's served on both public and private boards. Today, she lectures at Stanford. She’s an expert on collaborative leadership and author of The New How and 11 Rules for Creating Value in the Social Era.