Harvard Business Review 5 years 2004 – 2009

No, You Can’t Have It All by Eric C Sinoway. It is hard for high achieving people to accept that they can’t have it all. Instead you must focus on your long-term fulfilment rather than short term success and, at various points in your life, think carefully about your priorities.

Unleash Your Inner Odysseus by Kevin Evers. Success and discovery are not plan oriented endeavours. They are the results of excessive tinkering and improvisation. Our worst enemy is not randomness; it is our own hubris. Unfortunately we don’t have absolute control of our success. Admitting this is crucial, and helps us endure the rashes of bad luck we face.

Interview with Barbara Streisand by Alison Beard. One question was interesting: You’ve been described as bossy and demanding. How do you respond to that? Those words would never be applied to a man. I addressed this in a speech years ago, when I said, “A man is commanding – a woman is demanding. A man is forceful – a woman is pushy. He’s assertive – she’s aggressive. He strategizes – she manipulates. He shows leadership – she’s controlling. He’s committed – she’s obsessed. He’s persevering – she’s relentless. A man is a perfectionist – a woman is a pain in the ass. I insisted on one thing early o when I did my records and TV shows – artistic control. That is what mattered to me.”

Notes by [e-mail] 6 Oct 2012

Harvard Business Review September 2012

The theme for this month’s issue is Strategy and strategic planning. My personal experience of this process working for large organizations is that it has felt like a compliance issue, a required piece of work that seldom yielded much benefit. I wonder if some companies devolve strategic planning too widely; whether it isn’t best centralized with structured input from line units. Having worked for many banks, I recall one Swedish bank I worked for where the CFO said don’t worry about cost of capital – I will worry about that. I thought this made a lot of sense, trying to reduce worries for front liners and not ask them to consider every aspect of the business for every single transaction.

Please find below a few notes from the September 2012 issue.

Effective Leaders Talk and Listen. Command-and-control leadership is a sign of weakness – it’s hiding behind appointed status because you don’t have the courage to engage openly and honestly with the staff. You are scared to ask people’s opinions, in case they’re better than yours. A good leader consults the staff but still has the confidence and gravitas to make decisions and take the lead. / Deborah Benson/

Think of Start-Ups as Shots on Goal. To make the argument that an economy benefits from more start-ups, you need to make the assumption that some fixed percentage of start-ups survive, a lower percentage thrive, and a vanishing small percentage become Fords or Microsofts. If this probability of success is not fixed, then what we need are better start-ups – and fewer doomed enterprises sucking resources out of the economy. Income inequality has an effect on start-ups and once people realize the game is rigged, few take the plunge. / Stephen Stanley/

Greased Palms, Giant Headaches. Bribery and how to resist it. By Dan Currell and Tracy Davis Bradley. Companies with higher levels of “integrity capital” have lower levels of misconduct along with higher levels of reporting when employees do witness wrong doing. Companies should proactively solicit information from frontline employees and use surveys or online tools to guarantee anonymity. The question is not whether you have business units with elevated levels of bribery and misconduct; it is which ones they are.

It is disheartening career moments when managers dismiss or sweep under the rug credible reports of misconduct. Employees who have courage to call out wrong doing should be praised. This is critical to employees’ perceptions of organizational justice, and they can help head off or mitigate the damage from offences.

/This article caused me to write a letter to the editor saying: With reference to the denouncement of Wiki leaks whistle blowing on U.S. government secrecy and wrong doing, something which is quite manifest through slanted and untrue information/ propaganda, will it be possible to hold corporates to a higher standard?/

You’ll Feel Less Rushed If You Give Time Away by Cassie Mogilner. This research suggests that spending as little as ten minutes helping others from time to time can make you feel less time constrained. Giving time away makes you feel more effective!

Use It or Lose It by Eamonn Kelly. This article makes the points that hoards of cash in corporations need to be channelled into employment-creating initiatives and ideas. If this doesn’t happen, government will make it happen through taxation or incenting desired behaviour. It raises the issue to what extent corporations should be concerned with overall societal problems – and if they fall short in this respect, regulators and law makers may well do the thinking for them. If for example all are successful in cutting staff and payroll, aggregate demand will fall and all will suffer from less growth or economic contraction.

Prada’s CEO on Staying Independent. By Patrizio Bertelli. You could say that work is about duties. People have a duty to work hard for me, but I have a duty to respect them as individuals. Another duty I have is to help them learn. I don’t believe in starting young managers off the bottom rung. They won’t learn a lot there and I won’t benefit from what they know. When I hire young people it is because they have something to offer.

The New Corporate Garage by Scott D Anthony. To encourage catalysts, companies must embrace open and systematic innovation, simplify and decentralize decision making, be learning focused and failure tolerant, and, above all, make innovation purpose driven. Catalysts are mission-driven leaders who corral corporate resources that are outside their traditional span of control to address sprawling challenges. They form networks or coalitions within and outside the company and are motivated by the desire to solve big, often global, problems.

Additional financial incentives can actually decrease performance on creative tasks. The way to motivate creative people is to give them autonomy, provide opportunities to develop mastery, and instill a sense of purpose in their work. Young innovators set on improving the world should recognize that working for a large company isn’t selling out – it can maximize their impact. Corporate leaders must critically examine the degree to which their companies’ environments are hospitable to the work of catalysts. Employees who find their innovation environment inhospitable should consider whether another company would provide more fertile ground for catalytic work.

The people changing the world today are as likely to be in corporate cubicles and conference rooms as in Silicon Valley or at social-impact conferences.

Bringing Science to the Art of Strategy by A G Lafley, Roger L Martin, Jan W Rivkin and Niclaj Siggelkow. Move from Issues to Choice – the team must produce more than one possibility. It is useful to include individuals who did not create, and are therefore not emotionally bound to, the status quo. This implies the participation of promising junior executives.

Conventional strategic planning is not actually scientific. It lacks the creation of hypotheses and the carful generation of tests. Move away from asking what is the right answer - to asking: what is the right questions? Many are better at advocating their own views than at inquiry.

Simple Rules for a Complex World by Donald Sull and Kathleen M Eisenhardt. Set corporate objective, identify a bottleneck that hinders you, and create simple rules for managing the strategic bottle neck. Let the users make the rules. Managers’ first instinct is often to draft a set of rules to send down the chain of command. Big mistake! The people who will apply the rules are best able to craft them. They also can test the rules in real time to evaluate whether they are too vague, limiting or cumbersome. Senior executives should select the team. Watch out for rules that use abstract language (such as innovative or strategy) or management buzzwords (synergy or convergence). If strategy in your organization lives in binders on shelves you have a problem.

Other Articles Include: Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, Are You Solving The Right Problem and Better Customer Insight In Real-Time.

Will Working Mothers Take Your Company To Court by Joan C Williams and Amy J.C. Cuddy. This is an interesting article, perhaps most pertinent to the American market. It demonstrates the legal risks with showing any kind of bias to working mothers and how juries frequently award significant damages. Beyond the legal aspects, the article points out how we need to act to eliminate overt and subconscious biases. Well written and educational.

Working Mothers At a Glance: If a woman has a child, her chances of being hired falls by 79%. She is 50% as likely to be promoted as a childless woman. Her salary offer, on average, will be reduced by $ 11,000. (I would say this would not be the case in Sweden and I believe New Zealand also is much better than that).

As with many managerial challenges, the first step is to create an awareness of the problem. The second, to put it plainly, is to cut it out. It seems obvious, but in our research and conversations with women in the workplace it’s become clear that some managers still behave in a remarkably biased fashion. Leave your opinions at home. Eliminate formal or informal flexibility stigma. Incorporate lessons on how to avoid maternal wall bias into existing training programs. Consider fathers as well as mothers. Men can’t be denied benefits that are offered to mothers in terms of child care.

Finding the Profit In Fairness by Christoph H Loch, Fabian J Sting, Arnd Huchzermeier, and Christian Decker.

More and more voters, not just in the US, are convinced that the financial system benefits its institutions more than the consumers they serve. As a result, bankers and other finance professionals in the US and Western Europe are bracing themselves for waves of regulation. Banking can be both fair and profitable – in fact, fairness can be a source of competitive advantage.

The particular bank in this article TeamBank in Germany has assembled a customer council comprising 14 volunteer customers plus one representative of a customer protection NGO, each of whom serve for three years.

/This article caused me to write a letter to the editor saying treating people fairly is not good enough. It is better than treating people poorly but good companies should aim towards treating people with care and affection. Airlines and Hotels would not win much approbation by advertising that they are fair to all/

Notes by [e-mail] 1 September 2012

Harvard Business Review July August 2012

Another useful issue of HBR. The theme of this issue is smarter sales. I have long been an advocate for philosophy to be mandatory for business school students and I find HBR bears that requirement out. If you understand or try to understand how people think and what motivates them you will have so much more potential to do well and sustain your successes. For a long time business and commerce in its teachings have been so mechanized and dry so emotions and humanities that really drive people's behavior have been pushed aside. These qualities need to be at the forefront of our reasoning and analysis. I perceive that this – i.e. a degree of wisdom rather than skills - is coming through in the HBR articles. Please find below a few notes from this issue:

Stars for Hire; Sometimes you need to cut out the middleman – your boss – and work directly with the customer or client, to whom you are accountable.

Idea watch: Why Life Science Needs Its own Silicon Valley by Fariborz Ghadar, John Sviokla and Dieter A Stephan. Studies have shown that having a high concentration of people working on similar problems in the same location speeds progress. People run into each other in hallways, cafes, and train stations, and during these encounters they often exchange ideas. The collaboration and inspiration necessary for innovation are much easier on the ground than in the cloud.

One factor seems to be very important for cluster creation: government support! A national government will have to play a big role. The government of Iceland has fostered the establishment of a national genomics data bank that draws on that country's unusually extensive family records.

Why Top Young Managers Are in a Nonstop Job Hunt by Monica Hamori. Three quarters of young high achievers sent out resumes, contacted search firms, and interviewed for jobs at least once a year during their first employment stint. They left their companies on average after 28 months. Each change of employer created a measurable advantage in pay; in fact, a job change was the biggest single determinant of pay increases.

Dissatisfaction with some employers’ development efforts appears to fuel many exits. By offering promising young managers a more balanced menu of development opportunities, employers might boost their inclination to stick around.

In the Hot Finance Jobs, Women Are Still Shut Out. By Nori Gerardo Lietz. Relatively few women work in the private investment sector and of those that do, most of them are in the marketing, HR or other support functions. Of 283 firms studied, women accounted for 17 – 23 % of employees. Almost 60 % of these firms had no female investment professional at all. Those who touch the money typically earn the most and run the firm. Change is not just a matter of time but will require active efforts from all parties.

You'll golf better if you think Tiger Woods has touched your clubs by Sally Linkenauger. People told they were using a pro's clubs scored better. They thought the whole was bigger than it was and they made the puts. I guess this proves the old adage that if you think you can do it for whatever reason you are much more likely to succeed.

Expanding the Entrepreneur Class by Carl Schramm. A system that leaves the education of entrepreneurs to school teachers (whose choice of profession displays little appetite for economic risk taking, and who thus may be ill equipped to convey what entrepreneurs actually do) is inherently weak. We hang our hopes on too few start ups. Only about 400,000 people started business in America last year. This is less than the 1 % goal; in fact it is less than 1 % of 1% of 1%.

What Good Are Shareholders? By Justin Fox and Jay W Lorsch. In the modern corporation the role of outside shareholders is to provide money, information, and discipline. In recent years they've done poorly on all three fronts. The rise of short term trading has brought increased volatility and less-patient capital. The signals sent by market prices are masked by so much noise that heeding them has proved problematic for corporations. Major growth in shareholder activism and clout has failed to prevent managers from engaging in value-destroying and pocket-lining behavior. Shareholder demands may have encouraged such behavior. Improving corporate governance will require separating out patient shareholders from short term traders and determining how others can step in to perform tasks that shareholders can't. Today's shareholders aren't quite up to making shareholder capitalism work.

And then seven articles on Smarter Sales.

The End of Solution Sales. Star salespeople now seek to upend the customer's current approach to doing business. By Brent Adamson, Matthew Dixon and Nicholas Toman.

The superior reps have abandoned much of the conventional wisdom taught in sales organizations. They evaluate prospects according to criteria different from those used by other reps, targeting agile organizations in a state of flux rather than ones with a clear understanding of their needs. They seek out a very different set of stakeholders, preferring sceptical change agents over friendly informants and they coach those change agents on how to buy, instead of quizzing them about their company's purchasing process. Reps must learn to engage customers much earlier, well before customers fully understand their own needs.

Successful sales people seek out customers that are primed for change, challenge them with provocative insights and coach them on how to buy. Key is to sell insights. And this will much increase the chance of doing business.

Motivating Salespeople: What Really Works. By Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne. Companies that take individual differences into account will realize better results across the performance curve – and see a higher return on sales expenditures.

A Radical Prescription For Sales. The Reps of the future won't work on commission. By Daniel H Pink. Commissions can sometimes do more harm than good and getting rid of them can open a path to higher profits. ‘If-then’ rewards, as in 'If you do this then you get that' work well with routine tasks social scientists dub 'algorithmic'. Those same if-then rewards turn out to be far less effective for complex, creative, conceptual endeavors – what psychologists call 'heuristic' work. Today the transactional aspects of sales are disappearing. When routine functions can be automated, and when customers and prospects often have as much data as the salesperson, the skills that matter most are heuristic: Curating and interpreting information instead of merely dispensing it. Identifying new problems along with solving established ones. Selling insights rather than items.

Selling Into Micro markets by Manish Goyal, Maryanne Q Hancock and Homayoun Hatami. Micro market strategies work only if sales teams have simple tools that make them easy to implement, in particular, tailored sales 'plays' for the opportunities similar micro markets represent. These strategies require new types of cross-functional collaboration- for instance, between sales and marketing, which have to function as a single team.

Tweet Me, Friend Me, Make Me Buy. Social networks is an exciting development for sales reps. With a little managerial discipline, all that clicking, following, and sharing will win more business. by Barbara Giamanco and Kent Gregoire. As you equip your people with a social media tool kit, don't stop with the social media team or the marketing organization. Don't even stop with sales. Make the whole workforce comfortable with the possibilities. It's only a matter of time until your competitors do so. And once your customers have learned to expect social network connections, it may be impossible to sell without them.

Teaching Sales. Great sales professionals are scarce and getting scarcer. Why aren't universities working harder to create more? By Suzanne Fogel, David Hoffmeister. 39 % of B2B buyers select a vendor according to the skills of the salesperson rather than the price, quality or service features. Although sales is so crucial, only a small fraction of business school graduates have been taught anything about it. There is a growing consensus that professional sales has entered a new era, requiring skills that are scarce but teachable- and best taught in a collegiate setting. Sales has become more about helping customers define the problem they are trying to solve and assemble a complete solution. Annual staff turnover for all sales positions averages 28%. What one requires are the analytical skills necessary to understand a customer's value proposition, frame business issues, create customer insights, and present direct solutions. New sales education programs need to partner with industry.

The View from the Field. Jim Koch of Boston Beer Company. From my years at Boston Consulting Group I know how to interpret data on a spread sheet, but that can't compare with the knowledge I get from being in the market talking to customers. Most of our ideas for new products come during sales calls. If you listen to 40 smart customers, you learn more than you would from any consultant's study. I've come to see making a sales call one of the most challenging intellectual challenges there is – certainly more immediately challenging than anything I did at BCG. The essence with selling is figuring out how what you are offering will help customers accomplish their objectives- not your objectives, their objectives. Being a street salesman can be very humbling. You don't get a lot of positive reinforcement and you certainly don't get treated like a CEO.

James Farley Group VP of Ford. Marketing and Sales need to be aligned. Marketing experts who are not measured on sales success is a mistake. Today the customers know everything.

Susan Silbermann, Pfizer's President of Vaccines. Your sales success rests in your ability to build trust, adapt locally, and get close to your customers.

Duncan Mac Naughton, Chief Merchandising and Marketing officer of Walmart. We try to be partners with our suppliers. We love to be involved with the upstream innovation and we regard selling these products as a partnership. We think about running one store at a time, one isle at a time – and that is the way to think about dealing with us.

Phil Guido IBM GM North America. Our credo is 'dedication to customer service and excellence in all we do.' Our sales teams increasingly view themselves as consultants who solve client problems. We think more about industry leadership and true consultative selling, and about how to create synergies among the systems, software, and services we offer in order to better meet the needs of our clients and their industries. Solution selling really starts with listening.

Experience. Disrupt Yourself. Finding the career path you really want. By Whitney Johnson. Zigzagging – moving between jobs and organizations can be very positive for development and careering. If as an individual you have reached a plateau or you suspect you won't be happy at the top rung of the ladder you are climbing, you should disrupt yourself for the same reasons a company must. A core principle of disruptive innovation is that customers control the resource allocation and they don't buy products but instead 'hire' them to fulfil a need. As you look to disrupt yourself, don't think just about what you do well – think about what you do well that most others can't. 'Search intelligence' – the ability to discern connections across spheres and to see opportunities for cross-pollination is a key parameter. A successful designer said his success came from veering from the traditional industrial design path to study anthropology, ethnography, sociology, cultural theory, and art history – which have become the bedrock of his work that blends design with customer insights and product strategy. Be prepared to step back or sideways to grow. Personal growth often stalls at the top of the classical S-curve. “The sideways moves accelerated my career by five years or more each time.” 70% of all new businesses end up with a strategy different from the one they initially pursued. 'If you want to succeed you should strike out on a new path, rather than travel worn paths of accepted success.' / John D Rockefeller/.

The status quo has a powerful undertow, no doubt. Current stakeholders in your life and career will probably encourage you to avoid disruption. When a company pursues growth in a new market rather than an established one, the odds of success are six times higher and the revenue potential 20 times greater. For many of us, though, holding steady really means slipping – as we ignore the threat of competition from younger, more agile innovators, bypass opportunities for greater reward, and sacrifice personal growth.

The most overlooked economic engine is YOU. If you really want to move the world forward, you need to innovate on the inside – and disrupt yourself.

Other articles include: Cultural Change That Sticks; Do You Know Your Cost of Capital; Points of Law: Unbundling Corporate Legal Services to Unlock Value; A Better Way To tax US Business; The Growth Opportunity That Lies Next Door; Bonuses in Bad Times.

[e-mail] 3.08.12

Harvard Business Review June 2012

This is another really great issue of HBR with a number of interesting articles. The highlight for me was the interview of the Unisys CEO Paul Polman who answered all the questions very inspiringly (and consistent with my own strongly held views). His approach, totally aligned with trying to build the good society, is, I believe, the way of the future. And because his company of 170,000 employees reaches two billion consumers there is good hope he will impact the way business is done. Please find below a few notes from the issue.