The Presentation Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making

During an interview, your potential new boss asks you to briefly describe your qualifications. At this moment, you have a single objective: be impressive. So you begin to rattle off your list of accomplishments: your degrees from Harvard and Yale, your prestigious internships, your intimate knowledge of essential software and statistical analysis. “Oh,” you add. “And I took two semesters of Spanish in college.” Not technically an impressive accomplishment, but since the company does a lot of business in Latin America, you figure some Spanish is better than none at all.

Or is it? 

Actually, it isn’t. You’ve just fallen victim to a phenomenon that psychologists have recently discovered, called the “Presenter’s Paradox.” It’s another fascinating example of how our instincts about selling — ourselves, our company, or our products — can be surprisingly bad.

The problem, in a nutshell, is this: We assume when we present someone with a list of our accomplishments (or with a bundle of services or products), that they will see what we’re offering additively. If going to Harvard, a prestigious internship, and mad statistical skills are all a “10” on the scale of impressiveness, and two semesters of Spanish is a “2,” then we reason that added together, this is a 10 + 10 + 10 + 2, or a “32” in impressiveness. So it makes sense to mention your minimal Spanish skills — they add to the overall picture. More is better.

Only more is not in fact better to the interviewer (or the client or buyer), because this is not how other people see what we’re offering. They don’t add up the impressiveness, they average it. They see the Big Picture — looking at the package as a whole, rather than focusing on the individual parts.

To them, this is a (10+ 10+ 10+ 2)/4 package, or an “8” in impressiveness. And if you had left off the bit about Spanish, you would have had a (10 + 10+ 10)/3, or a “10” in impressiveness. So even though logically it seems like a little Spanish is better than none, mentioning it makes you a less attractive candidate than if you’d said nothing at all.

More is actually not better, if what you are adding is of lesser quality than the rest of your offerings. Highly favorable or positive things are diminished or diluted in the eye of the beholder when they are presented in the company of only moderately favorable or positive things.

Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies . For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download.

More just seems like it must be better when you are on the presenter’s end, even though it doesn’t seem that way at all when you are on the consumer’s end. And somehow, despite the fact that we are all both presenters and consumers in our everyday lives, we just don’t make the connection.

The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior. In another study, participants were asked to choose between two punishments to give for littering: a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine. 86% of participants felt that the fine plus community service would be the stronger deterrent. But they were wrong — in fact, a separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe than the fine alone. Once again, they reasoned that the overall punishment was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn’t so bad.

If the bias in presenter thinking is so pervasive, how can we stop ourselves from making this kind of mistake? The short answer is that we need to remind ourselves when making any kind of presentation to think of the big picture.What does the package I am presenting look like taken as a whole, and are there any components that are actually bringing down its overall value or impact? Three 10’s and a 2 is not better than three 10’s. A free carwash with the purchase of any new car is not going to make your cars seem more valuable. If your very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi, don’t mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot. And unless you speak Spanish well, keep your ability to count to ocho and ask where la bibioloteca is to yourself.

— by Heidi Grant Halvorson

(Source: blogs.hbr.org)

The Myth of Chinese Efficiency (an American point of view)

Many people in the U.S. and Europe believe China is a model of modern transport and political effectiveness. They should try to live here.

On the road to ’s international airport the other day, I noticed dark clouds moving in on the horizon. My stress level immediately spiked. Flight delays have become almost the norm here in , even on the brightest of days; a little rain would certainly spell trouble. As the drops began to splat on the windshield, I had dispiriting visions of getting stuck in and missing my connecting flight in Hong Kong — and my next deadline for TIME with it. My fears were confirmed when I arrived at the gate, where the departure time came and went. Though the sun had peeked through the clouds, the damage had already been done.

Of course, the trials of air travel are not unique to China. Just ask anyone brave enough to depart from a major American airport these days. But no one would ever call the U.S. airport system a model of efficiency. For some reason, though, lots of people think China is.

(MORE: Is India’s Growth Story Over?)

One of the most persistent – and persistently bewildering – conversations I’m forced to endure with international businessmen (and especially Americans) is about their view on the marvels of Chinese efficiency. They paint China as a wonderland of quick transport, quick decision making, and quick-witted government officials. If only the U.S. operated like China, the argument goes, all of America’s problems could get solved.

My response to this is: Live here for a while. I can imagine pampered visitors thinking China is something it is not. If you fly into the nifty airports in or Shanghai, get whisked by a waiting driver to your snazzy hotel, have a few meetings, and then get escorted out again, China might appear to be a sparkling vision of modernity. But spend any time here, or try to really do anything, and the notion that China is an efficient place is rudely exposed as a myth.

The trouble with transport is the least of the problems. As I noted in a recent TIME magazine story, businessmen operating in China complain about the time-consuming and excessive bureaucratic hurdles they face – endless waiting for necessary permits and licenses, confusing and opaque regulation, and constantly shifting customs procedures. Even small companies have to designate staffers to do nothing but handle relations with the government. Many foreign businessmen, furthermore, think the bureaucrats are becoming more intrusive – in other words, less efficient. This is a function of China’s heralded “state capitalism,” in which the government still wields tremendous control over what happens in the economy and what private companies can and cannot do.

My own experiences with civil servants have only confirmed to me how inefficient the government is. Earlier this year, I had to move the visa that allows me to reside in China from an old to a new passport. This should have been a simple clerical procedure, since the visa was still valid for nearly a year. But instead, it ate up two full days of my time, running between offices to get necessary documents and simply figuring out what was required. The officials we spoke with disagreed on what forms and documents I needed. One contended (incorrectly, as it turned out) that I didn’t have to switch the visa at all.

(MORE: China’s Economic Slowdown: Why Stimulus Is a Bad Idea)

Yet those who wax poetic about Chinese efficiency believe it runs deeper than such mundane matters – to the supposed virtues of the political system itself. While Washington is gridlocked by partisan politics, China’s government, they contend, makes and implements decisions with clinical effectiveness. China’s government operates like a big company, the thinking goes, with a “CEO” at the top able to see the greater needs of the nation and act to meet them.

There is an element of truth here. While the U.S. can’t figure out how to refurbish its sagging infrastructure, China is able to construct new airports, bridges and roads at will. That’s what happens when you remove the vast majority of your population from the political process, and routinely beat up those who disagree with state policy. But even in this regard, China is not nearly as efficient at it appears. Sure, the government can dig up a bunch of farms and lay down a road whenever it wants. That’s because the idea that the government should spend lots of money on infrastructure is not a controversial one in China, as it is in the U.S. It’s the same with state industrial policy. While the case of government support for Solyndra in the U.S. has stirred vociferous debate about the state’s role in the economy, in China, on the other hand, is free to offer subsidies and protection for targeted industries because there is no ideological opposition to doing so. In other words, the Chinese government can act quickly when there is no disagreement.

In that way, the U.S. is much the same. America can spring to action with blazing speed when there is general acceptance of a certain policy. After 9/11, Washington was able to mobilize the resources and will to conduct a major military operation halfway around the world in Afghanistan in a matter of weeks. There was no significant opposition to going to war. Or look at how efficiently the U.S. stepped in during the depth of the last financial crisis to rescue the banking sector.

But Chinese policymaking is not nearly as smooth when there is no consensus on the direction of policy. Chinese officials know full well what the government needs to do to ensure that the country’s growth is more sustainable: Increase the role of consumer spending, strengthen its financial sector, and rein in state-owned enterprises. But the reforms that would achieve these outcomes are coming extremely slowly, if at all. There is no agreement among the senior leadership on these sensitive issues, and thus there is limited action. Factions within the government advocate different methods of dealing with China’s economic weaknesses. Some favor faster market liberalization; others want the government to keep a tighter grip on the economy. China has gridlock of its own. We just don’t see it, since the wrestling matches happen behind closed doors instead of on CNN.

(MORE: The Rise of the Salafis)

Nor is the entire political process in China any more efficient. We have been expecting a once-in-a-decade change of political leadership in China to take place late this year for quite some time, and we’ve known for a while who the top guy is going to be (Xi Jinping). But we only found out exactly when this change will take place (in November) last week. Nor are we well-versed in Xi Jinping’s views on the major issues facing China’s future – economic reform, relations with the U.S., civil liberties, the income gap, and so on. Xi doesn’t feel the need to share them. The electoral process in the U.S. might create uncertainty, but at least we know who’s running for office and what they might do if they win. In China, it’s a guessing game.

China will certainly become more efficient over time. We tend to forget that China is still very much a developing country and many of its problems — inadequate infrastructure, poor regulatory enforcement — are common in any emerging market. But before China becomes the paradise many in the U.S. think it is, the country will have to learn a bit from America. Without greater transparency and rule of law, China will never become truly efficient. Keep that in mind next time you’re flying to .

MORE: China’s Economic Slowdown: Why Stimulus Is a Bad Idea

— By MICHAEL SCHUMAN

The Unintended Consequences of Good Ideas

To drive through Europe, as I did this summer, is to see history recorded in city skylines. Their buildings reflect the transfer of power through the centuries, beginning with the old castles (now museums and grand hotels). Below them, in the city centers, are the parliamentary palaces of the people. These, in turn, are dwarfed by the towers of the corporate world, where the real power now lies.

They’re full of paradoxes, those towers. Built of glass, they are impossible to see into. The names emblazoned on their doors and rooftops are, as often as not, words or initials that convey no meaning. To most passersby, these are anonymous organizations, run by anonymous people, who are the appointed agents of anonymous investors. The economic engines of democratic societies, they are as centrally controlled as any monarchy and squat in the midst of democracies like islands unto themselves. No wonder there’s a growing perception that their power has escaped popular control—and that the concerns of wider society are being ignored.

Why have these business organizations acquired so much power? Because two good ideas of the 19th century—both sanctioned by British law and rapidly copied around the world—have had unintended consequences. One was the joint stock company, and the other was limited liability. These two social inventions spurred unprecedented economic innovation and growth, but they also put us on a dangerous course. By effectively separating the theoretical ownership of a company from its management, the first turned shareholders into something more like punters at a racecourse. Using shares as betting slips on the nags of their choice, they behave like neither trainers nor owners. As a result of the second, limited liability, managers gained their own license to gamble, at no personal cost.

It was to correct those flaws that, in the 1970s, another good idea was suggested, this time by two academics in an obscure economics journal. Michael Jensen and William Meckling argued that managers were effectively the agents of shareholders and should work for them. To reinforce this principle, the thinking went, managers’ rewards should be linked to those of the shareholders. Managers were quick to see their opportunity in this idea. Stock options and later bonuses tied to share prices became their compensation of choice, and not unnaturally, many massaged those share prices in their own interests, all too often to the longer-term detriment of the business. Thus another good idea has been undone by its unexpected consequences: While the earnings of managers have soared, those of shareholders have generally declined.

In the midst of all this, people forgot (or never realized) that shareholders do not actually own the company; they own only its stock. This entitles them to get the residual assets of the company upon its breakup and to vote on resolutions at annual meetings and on the appointment of directors, but not to tell the firm what to do. A company is in law an independent person, and its directors have a fiduciary duty to the company as a whole—that is, to its workers and customers as well as its investors.

Perhaps, then, the next good idea would be to require directors to obey the law and to put the long-term interests of the company as a whole before those of themselves or their shareholders. They might well discover that all of the above were better served. And many years later, as a consequence (not unintended), we might find companies to be less opaque, anonymous, and ominous to the people passing by.

— Charles Handy

Charles Handy is a longtime contributor to HBR and the author of more than a dozen books, including The Age of Unreason (Harvard Business School Press, 1991).

(Source: hbr.org)

Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate

Big companies are really bad at innovation because they’re designed to be bad at innovation.

I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss’s more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar “stickler.” And, like Truss — author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves — I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

Now, Truss and I disagree on what it means to have “zero tolerance.” She thinks that people who mix up their itses “deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave,” while I just think they deserve to be passed over for a job — even if they are otherwise qualified for the position.

Everyone who applies for a position at either of my companies, iFixit or Dozuki, takes a mandatory grammar test. Extenuating circumstances aside (dyslexia, English language learners, etc.), if job hopefuls can’t distinguish between “to” and “too,” their applications go into the bin.

Of course, we write for a living. iFixit.com is the world’s largest online repair manual, and Dozuki helps companies write their own technical documentation, like paperless work instructions and step-by-step user manuals. So, it makes sense that we’ve made a preemptive strike against groan-worthy grammar errors.

But grammar is relevant for all companies. Yes, language is constantly changing, but that doesn’t make grammar unimportant. Good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet. In blog posts, on Facebook statuses, in e-mails, and on company websites, your words are all you have. They are a projection of you in your physical absence. And, for better or worse, people judge you if you can’t tell the difference between their, there, and they’re.

Good grammar makes good business sense — and not just when it comes to hiring writers. Writing isn’t in the official job description of most people in our office. Still, we give our grammar test to everybody, including our salespeople, our operations staff, and our programmers.

On the face of it, my zero tolerance approach to grammar errors might seem a little unfair. After all, grammar has nothing to do with job performance, or creativity, or intelligence, right?

Wrong. If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use “it’s,” then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with. So, even in this hyper-competitive market, I will pass on a great programmer who cannot write.

Grammar signifies more than just a person’s ability to remember high school English. I’ve found that people who make fewer mistakes on a grammar test also make fewer mistakes when they are doing something completely unrelated to writing — like stocking shelves or labeling parts.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.” The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings — not just computers.

And just like good writing and good grammar, when it comes to programming, the devil’s in the details. In fact, when it comes to my whole business, details are everything.

I hire people who care about those details. Applicants who don’t think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren’t important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren’t issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

That’s why I grammar test people who walk in the door looking for a job. Grammar is my litmus test. All applicants say they’re detail-oriented; I just make my employees prove it.

(Source: blogs.hbr.org)

The Evolution of a Landing Page: 37signals Basecamp

A company’s landing page (i.e., homepage) is a critical marketing asset for a company. In many cases, it’s one of the first impressions that customers have of your products and services. This is true even if you’re operating a traditional brick-and-mortar business, like a restaurant. For instance, a customer might find you on Google or Yelp, then click through to your website to view your menu, your operating hours, and to obtain contact information or directions.

While there is a myriad of advice online on how to design a landing page, I believe most of this guidance overlooks a key ingredient. That is, effective landing page design, and website design in general, is a process and not a one-time exercise. This design process may evolve over a number of years. [1]

To explain this further, I’d like to draw on an example, and look at 37signals Basecamp. 37signal’s is a web application company based in Chicago. Basecamp, which is project management software, is one of their first applications, launched in 2004. Basecamp is a useful example to look at for a few reasons. Most importantly, the application has been around for nearly a decade giving us some history to look at.

Thanks to the Way Back Machine, I was able to capture screenshots of Basecamp’s landing page iterations over time. I’m focusing on just the major landing page changes, paying special attention to above the fold revisions. “Above the fold” refers to the portion of the web page that is first visible on your screen, without scrolling.

First Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2004

My initial reaction:

• The main tagline is quite long, contains jargon (“client extranet”), and places an emphasis on “creative service firms.”
• The call-to-action (CTA) on the top right, although it stands out, is not well placed. It breaks the flow of the page.
• The page is very dense, containing a lot of copy. This extensive copy continues down the page.
• The top menu is a bit confusing. For instance, what’s “10 Reasons” and if Basecamp is so elegant and easy to use, why do I need “Training”?

Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2005

 

What they improved:

• There is now a clear and brief tagline: “Project Management Utopia.” The tagline is emotionally engaging and excludes jargon.
• The page includes a screenshot to give a visitor a sense of the look and feel of the application.
• The CTA (“Try Basecamp for Free”) has moved down the page and is now better placed.
• The dense copy has been boiled down into some key bullet points, such as “Centralize internal communication” and “Gather & archive client feedback.”
• The top menu has been improved, with case studies and a forum. But why is there a link to a “Manifesto”?

Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2007

What they improved:

• The “customer quotes” have been replaced with “Over 1,000,000 people signed up worldwide.” This is fantastic social proof.
• To build on the social proof, the page also points to some nice press coverage, from Business Week to Fast Company.
• The page now includes two CTAs, “Sign up for free” or “Take a tour.” The upside is that hesitant users can learn more about the application before signing up for an account. The downside is that users might be confused by having two major options to choose from.
• The bullet points on the right have been removed, making the page easier to skim and digest.
• The top menu has been improved further with a link to Help/FAQs. The “Manifesto” link has been removed.

Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2009

What they improved:

• The look and feel of the page has been improved significantly. It’s a cleaner page, with fewer distractions.
• The social proof is now baked directly into the sub-heading: “Trusted by millions, Basecamp is the leading web-based project collaboration tool.”
• There is a helpful and concise list of features (share files, meet deadlines, etc.) to quickly provide a visitor a sense of the application’s functionality.
• There is an iPhone peaking from behind the main screenshot, suggesting that Basecamp works on mobile devices.
• “Take a tour”  has been removed as a major CTA, so the next step for a user is clear: “See Plans and Pricing”
• The word “pricing” has been added to the CTA and it also mentions a 30-day free trial. So it’s now clear Basecamp is a paid application but offers a free trial period.
• The top menu has been improved further, with links to view “Who uses Basecamp,” “Extras & Add-ons,” and “Help/Support.”

Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2010

What they improved:

• There is now an excellent visual flow from the main tagline, to the sub-tagline, to the graphic, to the main CTA (“See Plans and Pricing”).
• The copy about features and the screenshot has been replaced by a useful graphic, which boils down the functionality of the application into an easy to digest visual diagram.
• A second CTA has been added (“Take a Quick Tour”) but it’s deemphasized and placed below the primary CTA. I interpret this as “We’d love you to click ‘See Plans and Pricing’, but if you’re not ready yet, then please click ‘Take a quick tour.’”

Basecamp Landing Page, Circa 2012

This latest revision, which appeared in 2012, coincided with 37signal’s launch of “Basecamp Next.” Basecamp Next was a fundamental revision of the Basecamp project management software. [2]

What they improved:

• The social proof is now baked into the main copy, both the first and second paragraph, and in the yellow note on the left. It’s interesting to note that a startup or early stage company could never have this type of landing page, since all the copy is based on Basecamp’s traction and market share.
• The top menu has been simplified, with just three links: pricing, 45-day free trial, and log-in.
• Historically, the Basecamp landing page had a lot of content below the fold. This content is now gone and is now accesible via the “Find out why” CTA. Is this is an improvement? I don’t know.

Take-away

If you look back at Basecamp’s first landing page in 2004, it’s easy to be critical. The tagline is not compelling, the CTA is placed in a poor location, and there is an overload of copy. With each iteration, however, the landing page incrementally improved, with clearer messaging, a less cluttered and more visually appealing design, and a better flow between page elements.

How was the Basecamp team able to significantly improve its landing page over time? It gained a better understanding of its target market, the value of its product, and other elements of its business. Basecamp also gained traction and was able to incorporate this into its landing page. First in the form of testimonials, then press coverage, then data about usage (e.g., “Last week 13,066 companies kicked off new projects using Basecamp”), and finally about market leadership (“More people in more places manage more projects on the web today with Basecamp than any other app”).

If the Basecamp team had spent more time on its first landing page, could it have created something like its latest page? Maybe in form, but not in function. The team was missing key information that it needed to acquire through learning and by growing its business. It took a number of years before the team was able to distill the essential components of Basecamp that were (and are) most important to its customers. It also needed to grow its business so it could incorporate this traction into its messaging.

In short, effective landing page design is a process, not a one-time exercise. If you’re new to a market, whether you’re launching a new company or a new product or service, then be prepared to regularly update your landing page (and your other marketing pages) as you learn and grow your business. It took Basecamp eight years to develop its current landing page, so be prepared to be persistent and patient.

————-

[1] In this post I am just focusing on the landing page and related marketing pages (e.g., about, tour, contact).

[2] It looks like Basecamp is A/B testing its current landing page. I was served several different versions when viewing the page in different browsers.

(Source: socialmediatoday.com)

Collaborating in a Hierarchical World

What are the key issues facing collaboration-minded managers in government? Two thoughtful academics identify what they think are the Top Ten and offer some advice on areas for future research.

Drs. Rosemary O’Leary and Nidhi Vij presented a paper at the recent annual conference of the American Society for Public Administration, “Collaborative Public Management:  Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going?”  They surveyed the literature (so you wouldn’t have to) to find the most important issues facing the field, at least from the perspective of academia.  They identified ten that kept surfacing in the literature:

1.   Competing definitions of collaboration.  “there is considerable confusion in the literature regarding the distinction between collaboration, coordination and cooperation… these concepts are different because ‘cooperation’ and ‘coordination’ do not capture the dynamic, evolutionary nature of ‘collaboration.’” An important challenge is “to make sure that there is a shared definition.”

2.   Changes in the environment of public management that have encouraged the growth  of collaborative public management.  “… [T]here have been many changed in the environment of public, private, and nonprofit organizations that have encouraged the growth of collaborative public management.” These include:  (1) major public challenges are larger than what any one organization can address, (2) outsourcing has grown as a strategy, (3) the pressure for greater effectiveness encourages public managers to innovate, and (4) technology has become a great enabler of greater collaboration.

3.  “Thinking DaVinci” – use of lateral thinking and interdisciplinarity.  “Da Vinci’s genius stemmed from his mastery of lateral thinking ….  taking knowledge from one substantive context or discipline and applying it to an entirely different one.”  Approaching a public challenge with this mindset encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration.

4.   The management challenges of working in networks. Understanding the paradoxes and complexities of the motivations to collaborate are important to network leaders.  Some participants collaborate in order to increase performance and better serve the public.  Others collaborate in order to be free-riders and obtain benefits to their organization without sharing their own resources. Understanding and managing these potential motivations is important.

5.   The paradox of balancing autonomy and interdependence. Collaborative managers must recognize the inherent paradoxes of working in a collaborative environment.  They must be willing to work both with autonomy and independence, have common and diverse goals, work with a fewer number – and greater variety – of groups.  They must be both partcipative and authorative, balance advocacy and inquiry, and see both the forest and the trees

6.   Factors to consider before collaborating.  Engaging in collaboration is context-specific, there is no one-size-fits-all recipe.  The context dimensions include:  purpose or mission, member selection and capacity building, motivation and commitment of members, structure and governance of the group, powers and accountability mechanisms, communication mechanisms , perceived legitimacy and trust, and the availablity of technology tools to facilitate collaboration.

7.   The importance of the individual in a collaborative arrangement.  Collaboration is more between individuals, than it is between the organizations they represent:  “collaboration is deeply dependent on the skills of officials and managers … to be effective collaborators.”  These skills include being able to think strategically, be able to facilitate groups, solve problems collaboratively, and be effective in conflict management.

8.  Leading when you are not in charge.   “…[C]ollaboration and collaborative governance shift the emphasis from the control of large bureaucratic organizations and the bureaucratic way of managing public programs to enablement skills [which include] negotiation, facilitation, collaborative problem solving, and conflict management.’

9.   Weaknesses in collaborative public management research.  The authors say “there is a need for a consistent overarching theory…what we have is a piece-meal approach.’  They also observe that the field lacks depth, has not understood how collaborative initiative unfold over time, how mandated vs. voluntary collaborative ventures work, and how the field of collaborative public management lacks a distinct identify as an area of academic inquiry.

10. The missing link between theory and practice.  The authors also observe:  “Research seemingly does not inform or influence the world of practice at large… The knowledge that is produced is not widely read, and so has little relevance to scholarly and academic readership, as well as practitioners.”

Their conclusion?  “…[T]the study and practice of collaborative public management is generally fragmented with low level of consensus.… To advance the study and practice of collaborative public management the authors urge (1) agreement on definitions of commonly used terms, beginning with the term ‘collaboration,’ (2) agreement on pressing collaborative public management challenges and substantive research and practice questions; (3) more precise theoretical models of behavior; and (4) agreement on the measurement of relevant variables.”

My sense is that practitioners have a more upbeat view of the whole field of collaborative governance and are less concerned with developing definitions than they are with sharing practices that work.

The Egoless Manager

This blog post attempts to complete the Hypertextual holy trinity of the 21st century organisation members. After the Egoless Knowledge Worker and the Post-Heroic Leader, please welcome the Egoless Manager.

Likewise the one dedicated to the Egoless Knowledge Worker, this article aims to propose a behavior pattern for managers to succeed in a highly collaborative environment.

This pattern is defined by the following 10 values …

1- Hyperlink Subvert Hierarchy

In the previous blog post, Hypertextual quotes an impressive Fortune Magazine articlewritten by John Huey more than 15 years ago : The New Post-Heroic Leader. Excerpt :

Leaders must learn to change the nature of power and how it’s employed.” If they don’t, technology will.

David Weinberger summarized this in The Cluetrain Manifesto with only 3 words : Hyperlink Subvert Hierarchy (these #7).

In an interconnected world where employees and customer alike have access to just as much information as anyone in the company, Egoless Managers resist the thrill of power and controlling the information.

2- It’s the manager fault

Scott Berkun has been Microsoft Internet Explorer Project Manager in a previous life. He wrote a best seller (The Art of Project Management) and dozen of essays on the ProjectManagement topic : they all serve as endless inspiration for Hypertextual.

Scott fully buys into Leffert law of management : it is the manager fault. Rob Leffert is Program Manager on Microsfot Sharepoint project and his principle is this :

Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice

This brings awareness to the Egoless Manager : she constantly watches over the people of her team or her project to make sure she anticipates any potential problem that may arise.

3- Be a facilitator

The 20th century manager was an heroic one. He knew everything that there is to know on his domain. He was able to take on his own the best decisions and in case of crisis he was the most likely to save the day.

This is no longer possible. Companies constantly develop into more and more complex social entities due to technologies, permanent flow of information, constantly changing business environment. The heroic manager is long gone.

Rather, the Egoless Manager is obsessed with enabling employees to create value asVineet Hayar, CEO of HCL Technologies told the New York Times.

The Egoless Manager knows she is living in post-heroic time. She is a facilitator, an enabler. She no longer is the star of the show but rather the producer. The question she constantly asks her team/project member : what can I do to help you make your job more efficiently ?

4- Listening is doing

“Better be doing nothing than busy doing nothing” (Buddha). Strangely enough, the egoless state is a buddhist goal.

Manager is a strange job as you don’t actually produce anything tangible. The role is to operate behind the scene of the delivered craft to make things happen.

Chances are that, sometimes, managers feel guilty about it and feel the need of proving themselves they are useful and important. In such occasions they would do anything to pretend to be busy.

This is not the right approach as this is Ego driven.

Instead, the Egoless Manager considers that it’s her manager fault if she doesn’t have anything to do (refer to point #2). She takes it as an opportunity to adopt the MBWA(Managing By Walking Around) approach to practice her listening aptitude.

To be a good manager you have to be a good listener. And here again, Ego interfere and would rather speak then listen. MBWAing around, Egoless Manager learns wonders, captures tacit information and anticipate potential problems to create the best conditions for the team.

5- Pamper Team Spirit …

Anyone who has watched the football World Cup in South Africa has witnessed the devastating effect of egos on a team. France has particularly been an incredible source of embarassment for any supporter of Les Bleus, me included.

The team will perform all the better that all members are aligned on the objectives. Thebigger the egos, the more difficult it is to aligned everyone on the same objective.

The Egoless Manager knows that ego is bad for her team. So she builds it with Egoless Knowledge workers and keeps hers out of the office.

6- … with Trust

Team spirit doesn’t fall down from the skies as a miracle or some epiphany. It has to be nurtured.

Heroic managers patronize and make them look friendly with employees through bad jokes and fake friendship to create a “good atmosphere”. This sounds plastic to anyone with a couple of neurones available.

Egoless managers don’t fail into that trap. They know the greatest tool to build a solid team spirit is the High Trust/Low Fear culture. This is the manager responsiblity to enforce it so that employees are not afraid of making new things and proposing new ideas.

This trust extends well beyond the boundaries of the actual team to encompass the whole company, the customers and the suppliers. There is no such thing as Them Vs Us in Egoless Manager vocabulary or in her team’s.

7- Lead By Example

Egoless Managers put their money (and time) where their mouth is. They lead by example.

There is no such thing as a task not noble enough for an Egoless Manager to take over.

For instance, she leads by example admitting easily her mistake and thus contributes largely to nurture a High Trust / Low Fear culture.

8- Make sense

Knowledge Workers engage all the more in their job as they clearly understand the purpose and the value of their contribution.

This is something the Egoless Manager is relentless with. She makes sure that the tasks addressed by her team make sense for them, that they are part of a meanigful whole : she provides them with the big picture.  This is what John Huey means in the Fortune article :

Leaders face two fundamental tasks and the first is to develop and articulateexactly what the company is trying to accomplish.

Knowledge Workers produce intangible assets. Somewhere in the middle of the multi layer organisation, they have lost contact with the customer.

Reducing their contribution as mere obedient executors of bureaucratically disseminated work orders (Christopher Locke – Cluetrain Manifesto), as it was in the heroic manager organisation, is the best way to compromise any chance of engagement, to have plumetting morale and to decrease both happiness and productivity.

9- No Asshole rule

Leading by example as an Egoless Manager makes it very easy to spot early signs of contorted behavior with egos. And to get rid of them.

Being an egoless manager doesn’t mean being spineless. Great leaders offer willingly their trust and the benefit of the doubt. However, when something goes wrong, they adopt a merciless attitude. such as the Robert Sutton‘s no asshole rule. This aims to eradicate

those who deliberately make co-workers feel bad about themselves and who focus their aggression on the less powerful—poison the work environment, decrease productivity, induce qualified employees to quit and therefore are detrimental to businesses, regardless of their individual effectiveness.

Amongst other, this is a rule applied at Pixar (as Brad Bird makes it clear) or at Favi, another exemplary company putting intrinsic equality as a core value.

The Egoless Manager is merciless with poisonous people to preserve the team spirit and the trustful atmosphere.

10- Embrace Enterprise Social Networks

Egoless Manager is obsessed with the three objectives of the company : be profitable, take care of the customers and take care of the employees. Therefore she fully appreciates the value of Enterprise Social Networks.

While encouraging trans-department collaboration they help providing knowledge worker with a bigger picture of their contribution.

They also are a mean to share knowledge and capture the tacit part of it more efficiently : this is instrumental in creating a productive context and building a team spirit for knowledge workers.

ESN foster innovation via weak links, networking, questioning and associating. They nurture employees engagement and helps leveraging flow of information to create value.

Lastly, ESN fill the gap between enterprise systems to offer a conductor environment for ideas and information to propagate seamlessly on an enterprise-wide scale.

Egoless Manager does not even consider the fact that ESN introduces desintermediation and that as a result she may lose control. Having control is not one of her objective. Getting things done with happy employees and customers is and she has witnessed that ESN help a great deal achieving this objective.

Would you attach any further core value to the Egoless Manager ?

TED 2012: 10 innovations that could help shape a better world

LIQUID METAL BATTERIES MAY SAVE THE WORLD

Donald Sadoway. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

DONALD SADOWAY

Bill Gates is putting massive investment into a technology that Donald Sadoway, professor of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is developing. If we could store large amounts of electricity in times of abundance, we’d have it in times of scarcity.

But at the moment, demand and supply on the power grid must balance. As Sadoway pointed out to the audience at TED 2012 in Long Beach, California, last week: “The electricity powering the lights in this theatre was generated just moments ago.” So how might we approach the idea of “grid-level storage” – batteries so large as to be able to supply hundreds of homes – without incurring astronomic expense?

Sadoway’s big idea – a hugely ambitious one, pursued, he says, “not because it is easy but because it is hard” – is to use the aluminium smelting process to create massive batteries made from liquid metal. “If you want to make something dirt-cheap, make it out of dirt. Preferably dirt that’s locally sourced,” he says. Small prototypes are already working: a model to power 200 homes is on the drawing board.

BE HUMBLE… AND CARRY A LIST

Atul Gawande. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

ATUL GAWANDE

In medicine, it’s not possible for an individual to know everything, says Atul Gawande, a surgeon in Boston and New Yorker writer. It’s become too specialised. The result? Mistakes. But Gawande looked to other industries, such as aviation, and came up with his “checklist” – a 19-point plan that included introducing surgical teams by name to each other at the start of the day. Introduced in eight hospitals, results were astonishing: post-surgical complications dropped 30%, the death rate by 47%. “These tools force us to admit humility,” he says. “To value teamwork. To acknowledge that we can’t know everything.”

PUT YOUR PHONE AWAY

Sherry Turkle. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

SHERRY TURKLE

We need to converse, not just connect. Sherry Turkle is one of the most influential theorists about the online world, whose 1996 book, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet, put her on the cover of Wiredmagazine. But the devices in our pockets have the effect of removing us from our own lives, she believes, and are changing who we are.

“Technology gives us the illusion of companionship without the means of friendship,” she says. The solution? Now we need to relearn how to be alone.

TEACH ROBOTS HOW TO THINK

Vijay Kumar. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

VIJAY KUMAR

More precisely, rather than teaching them how to think, Vijay Kumar, professor of engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, showed how to get “nano quadrotors” – palm-sized, four-rotor helicopters – to navigate by themselves. The devices are “autonomous agile aerial robots” that can navigate around objects without any human intervention, autonomously co-ordinate their positions across the group and gather into what looks like a swarm of alien invaders. The applications are mind-boggling and ever so slightly scary.

BE VULNERABLE, NOT WEAK

Brené Brown. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

BRENE BROWN

When Brené Brown gave a lecture on vulnerability at a small TEDx event in Houston in 2010, the video of her personal and poignant talk went viral. Initially, at least, that made the research professor at the University of Houston’s college of social work feel more vulnerable. But more than three million people have now watched it. And Brown, who is also the author of The Gifts of Imperfection, wants to spread the message that vulnerability is a sign of courage, not weakness – and that empathy is the antidote to shame.

TEACH NEUROSCIENCE TO KIDS

Greg Gage. Photograph: Ryan Lash

GREG GAGE

As a frustrated neuroscientist in a postgraduate programme at the University of Michigan, Greg Gage decided to get out of academia and find a more grassroots approach to his subject. The result is his organisation Backyard Brains, dedicated to making neuroscience experiments possible at greatly reduced cost, both at home and in schools. His simple “spiker boxes” allow the user to hear and see neurons firing in insects. Send an electrical signal from music on an iPhone into a cockroach’s leg – and watch it dance.

BEAR WITNESS

Bryan Stevenson. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

BRYAN STEVENSON

The greatest inequality in society arises because of lack of “proximity”, says Bryan Stevenson. And until we pay attention to other people’s suffering, we cannot be fully human. Stevenson, law professor at New York University and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. He gave a gripping talk at TED 2012 last week on the US justice system – the only one in the world where 13-year-olds are sent to die in jail. . And one in nine inmates on death row turn out to be innocent.

The opposite of poverty in the US is not wealth, he told the audience, who had paid $7,500 each for a ticket – “it’s justice”. A day later, attendees had raised $1.3m for his campaign to prevent children being sent to adult jails. “You judge a society’s character not by how it treats its rich,” he said. “But how it treats its poor.”

BE NICE TO NERDS

Regina Dugan. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

REGINA DUGAN

Nerds are the scientists and engineers who build things that make life better, believes Regina Dugan, the head of Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – the US department of defence’s agency for “creating and preventing strategic surprise”. And she demonstrated a hummingbird aircraft that weighs less than an AA battery and can fly in all directions.

To learn how to succeed, though, she said, you have to be ready for failure – because “there’s no way to learn to fly at Mach 20” if you’re not prepared to leave the ground in the first place.

CITIES MAKE US SMARTER

Ed Glaeser at TED 2012. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

ED GLAESER

Cities are what happens when there’s “an absence of physical space between people”, says Ed Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University and the author of The Triumph of the City. Gandhi said that the future lay in villages, but “with great respect”, Glaeser says, Gandhi was wrong. Cities are where humans create and collaborate with other other humans to remarkable effect – as he points out, the three largest metropolitan areas in the US account for 80% of gross domestic product but only contain 13% of the population.

DABBLE IN NUCLEAR FUSION

Taylor Wilson. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson

TAYLOR WILSON

At 10, Wilson built his first bomb out of a pill bottle and some cleaning products that he found lying around the house. At 11, he started mining for uranium, taking his dad on long road trips to the fertile soil of Arizona. And at 14, having been enrolled in a gifted students’ programme and offered safe facilities at the University of Nevada in Reno, he became the youngest person in the world – and one of only a few dozen of any age – to create a working nuclear fusion reactor. Now 17, he says nuclear fusion is the fuel of the future. And children may just change the world.

7 Things Highly Productive People Do

7 things highly productive people do

You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?

Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.

Easier said than done, I know.

Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

Here are his tips for staying productive:

1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women). 
3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead. 
6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day. 
7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

How to Tell Your Business Story in 60 Seconds or Less

I recently spoke at LeWeb, a large technology conference in Paris that’s filled with entrepreneurs pitching to venture capital investors who are looking for the next big thing. In such situations where many people are vying for attention, the entrepreneurs who stand out are the ones who deliver their pitch in less than a minute, but still make their points quite persuasively.

Unfortunately, many small-business owners don’t think enough about their company’s story and how it comes across. I can say that with confidence because I’ve witnessed many ineffective pitches at conferences and chamber of commerce mixers. At the last chamber mixer I attended, I asked one person what he did. His response started with, “That’s a good question…” Five minutes later, he was still trying to describe his new company, and I was trying to find a polite way out of the conversation.

As a communications coach, I’ve developed a four-step exercise that will work for any company or product. You must simply answer each of the following four questions in no more than two sentences:

1. What do you do?
2. What problem do you solve?
3. How is your product or service different?
4. Why should I care?

By keeping each answer brief, you will develop a succinct story that should take no more than 60 seconds.

Let’s use the example of an entrepreneur who is starting a housekeeping franchise. Based on those four questions, the company’s story might sound something like this:

“We own Five Star Cleaning, an eco-friendly housekeeping service that pampers you and your home [what your business does]. Typical cleaning services make you prep your home ahead of time, supervise to prevent theft and hang around for hours while the cleaners do their work. Because we require no prep, this saves time right off the top, and we are bonded so our service is worry-free, allowing you to go about your day [what problem does it solve]. And, we always send a minimum team of three to get the job done quickly [how it’s different]. Imagine coming home from a long day and your laundry is all done, your bed has been turned down and there are fresh flowers awaiting you. That’s the extra pampering we offer that sets us apart from all the rest [why you should care].

Your first sentence should be a “Twitter-friendly headline.” You should be able to describe your product or service in 140 characters or less, short enough for a tweet. In the example, Five Star Cleaning bills itself as an “eco-friendly housekeeping service that pampers you and your home.” But many small-business owners don’t create product descriptions that are short, catchy, distinctive and memorable. The Twitter exercise will help. If you can’t describe your product in a sentence, go back to the drawing board.

If you can tell your story in well under 60 seconds and have some extra time, be ready to relate an example or story that makes your product or service more tangible. You’ll notice that in the cleaning service pitch, we offered examples of pampering, such as turning down bed sheets.

Don’t let your idea die because you’ve lost the attention of your audience. Grab your listeners in the first 60 seconds and they’ll want to hear more.

How to Encourage Ideas

The easiest way to crush creativity is to find fault with new ideas which colleagues and subordinates bring forward. The more clever and more experienced you are, the easier it is to shoot holes in any proposal You can show your superior intelligence and highly honed management analysis skills by pointing out all the flaws in their proposals. As all the experts pointed out to Marconi, radio waves travel in straight lines and the Earth is a sphere so it is silly to think of transmitting a radio signal across the Atlantic. Yet Marconi defied the experts by transmitting across the Atlantic. The radio signals were reflected by the ionosphere. As those experts showed, intelligence and experience can give us all the ammunition we need to criticise innovative ideas. All it takes is for a few crazy ideas to be shot down and people stop volunteering them. So the next time someone comes to you with a wacky, half-formed idea which you can immediately see is riddled with faults, bite your tongue and say the following:

‘That sounds interesting; how can we make it work?’

The let them talk. As they expand on their idea you will almost certainly see ways in which it could be adapted to work. Explore it constructively together and you stand a better chance of coming up with a winner. What is more the person who was courageous enough to suggest the idea feels motivated to improve on their idea and encouraged to come up with more in the future. An atmosphere where ideas are criticized will crush creativity and deter people from coming forward. An atmosphere which welcomes ideas is a necessary prerequisite for an innovative organization. It is an essential foundation on which to build an entrepreneurial enterprise.

(Source: Yahoo!)

10 trends that will shape the world in 2012