How a Culture of Accountability Can Deteriorate

An interview with Tom Ricks, journalist and author of the article What Ever Happened to Accountability? His latest book is The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today.

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JULIA KIRBY: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast. I'm Julia Kirby. And I have the pleasure of hosting Tom Ricks today. For those of you who don't know his work, Tom is a journalist whose beat, for a long time, has been the US military. He covered it for the Washington Post from 2000 to 2008, and before that, for the Wall Street Journal. These days he's at the Center for a New American Security and serves as a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine. He's also written several books. And his new one is called, The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today. Welcome Tom.
TOM RICKS: Thank you very much. It's great to be here.
JULIA KIRBY: Now, HBR often looks to the military for lessons in management, whether it's in supply chain management or technology or leadership. And your article in our October issue focuses on that last topic. But it's called "Whatever Happened to Accountability." And it's describing a sort of pathology that you see in the leadership ranks of the US Army, which you absolutely don't think others should emulate. So why did you start looking into the Army's leadership ranks and the practices that shape them?
TOM RICKS: Well it's odd because the end of the book is kind of where I began. The book covers from 1939 to the present, looking at the generals of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. But for me, the genesis of the book came from being in Baghdad and watching very good soldiers, tactically excellent units, led by pour generals. Generals who didn't understand their jobs, who didn't think strategically, who really in many ways acted like jumped-up battalion commanders.
And watching that, I came to the conclusion that the major thing that went wrong in Iraq, after the mistake of doing the invasion at all, that the major thing that went wrong was generals who weren't able to adapt, to adjust, to understand the nature of the war they were fighting. Which after all is what Clausewitz, the great Prussian philosopher of war, calls the basic task of the general.
So I came to the conclusion that really it was our generalship that was poor. And I came to wonder why was it so different from World War II.
JULIA KIRBY: And I think you came to this conclusion that the main difference was this lack of accountability, or at least a lack of relief of command, right?
TOM RICKS: That's what struck me is that when you looked at these generals, they were very similar in characteristic and personality to their predecessors back in World War II. They had been trained much the same way, educated much the same way. The single biggest difference in our contemporary military from the more successful military of World War II was exactly as you say, accountability. In World War II, successful generals were rewarded, were promoted quickly. Eisenhower goes from a regimental executive officer to a five-star general in about four years. And he's representative of his peer group.
In subsequent wars, especially Vietnam and Iraq, success was not rewarded. Failure was not punished. Everybody kind of became risk averse. And you have a military leadership that seems to veer towards mediocrity and stalemate. And the problem with this is you end up expending a lot of blood and treasure. But without leadership, you don't get much of anywhere.
JULIA KIRBY: So the problem is the generals. And we know the facts. And there's no debating that generals used to be relieved of command quite often. And now it practically never happens. So you make an important point about the lasting damage that happens when standards aren't upheld in leadership ranks and mediocrity begins to infect them. And it isn't just the unfairness to the individuals involved, is it?
TOM RICKS: No, I think it's unfair to the soldiers being led. This is, literally, a life-and-death activity. When generals don't adapt, people die for no good reason, both soldiers and Iraqi civilians in this instance. More importantly to the nation, we don't move towards victory, towards outcomes, towards success. We have generals who really don't think it's their job to think about the end game. That's, somehow, they decided the job of politicians. And that's really an abdication of responsibility.
If in World War II a general had said it wasn't his job to think about the outcome, I think he would have been fired. Lots and lots of generals were fired in World War II, as you alluded to. Of the 165 men who commanded combat divisions in World War II, that is divisions actually in combat, 15 were released.
JULIA KIRBY: Wow. So the real problem that kind of manifests over time, if you're not doing a constant pruning and cultivating of those leadership ranks, is that you're really losing that ability to even think strategically. Is that it?
TOM RICKS: Yeah, you have an organization that, overall, seems to move towards mediocrity rather than towards excellence. When no one takes risks, risk-takers are disproportionately punished because they stand out like sore thumbs. But also that's right. You don't get strategic outcomes.
We've had a series of recent actions, Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, in which generals sincerely believed that it was not their job to think about the end of the war. So we've had organizations that are very successful at getting into the war, which is a difference from US history in the past, but not very successful in bringing these wars to conclusions. They really don't think about conclusions.
That's such a striking difference from World War II when the Army chief of staff, George Marshall, thought very clearly about where this war was going and insisted on separating what was essential from what was merely important. There are a lot of important things when you're fighting a global war. But he was ruthless in deciding what was essential, what could be put off for a day or two, and ruthless in deciding who were the right people for these jobs and who simply wasn't cutting it.
JULIA KIRBY: Yeah, so you draw that stark contrast in your article between General Marshall and another general, General Maxwell Taylor. I guess if those are the things that we should take away from Marshall as advice on leadership cultivation, then what are the bad things that we should avoid that General Taylor did?
TOM RICKS: George Marshall and Maxwell Taylor are almost opposites. Marshall, of course, is the Army chief of staff, a very important position in World War II. Maxwell Taylor was the Army chief of staff in the late 1950s and then the chairman of Joint Chiefs under President Kennedy in the early 1960s.
They are opposites in that Marshall insisted on candor from his subordinates and also insisted on giving candor to his superiors. When he spoke to FDR, the president during World War II, he was ruthless in is honesty. In fact, that's one reason he was given the job. Because he was one of the few people who seemed willing to stand up to Roosevelt in meetings. Roosevelt could be almost bullying in his cajoling of people, kind of charming but getting his own way. And Marshall, even before he became Army chief of staff, would say no, Mister President, that's not right, or no, I disagree.
He also kept his distance from the president. It's striking to me, for example, that George Marshall never visited President Roosevelt at Roosevelt's getaway in Hyde Park, New York until Roosevelt was dead. He went there the first time in his life for the funeral for the present.
By contrast, Maxwell Taylor, when he became adviser to President Kennedy before he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs, made the White House his base. He was a very politicized officer. He was not trusted by the other members of the Joint Chiefs when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And where Marshall had insisted on integrity and candor and being very clear with your superiors, Taylor was mendacious. He went behind the backs of other generals. He would not convey their honest views to the President of the United States. And went out of his way to make sure that the president didn't get the views of the other members of the Joint Chiefs.
JULIA KIRBY: Even this very interesting assertion in the piece that we can maybe blame the whole decision process of entering Vietnam on Army leadership. And that is the General Taylor and his fear that the Army was losing power, losing relevance vis a vis the other branches of the military.
TOM RICKS: Certainly that's a big part of it. In the 1950s the Army was adrift. It had a great World War II, a not so good Korean war. And then suddenly in the 1950s it finds itself overwhelmed by the advent of nuclear warfare. Nobody's really even sure if we need a ground force anymore. The Navy is going with nuclear submarines. The Air Force is building the B52. It's getting missiles and satellites. And the Army is dwindling.
By the late 1950s, when Maxwell Taylor is chief of staff of the Army, his budget was precisely half that of the Air Force's. And so Taylor begins looking around as chief of staff of the Army for what the Army could do. And he kind of decides let's go down to the low end of the spectrum. If the Air Force and the Navy are going to have nuclear war, we'll do the brush fire wars. And Vietnam looks like a nice, tasty example of where they can show this off. So he starts eyeing Vietnam when he's in the White House, even before he becomes chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He starts studying Vietnam and maybe what the military could do there.
JULIA KIRBY: So just to anticipate some takeaways for what we could learn for business people, it just seems like as we demand more accountability for meeting objectives, we need to make sure that the objectives themselves are right and that they're transparent.
TOM RICKS: I think there's a ton of lessons in looking at Marshall and his predecessors. And there's a lot to learn from the Army. They've done a good job in several areas, recruiting people, in building a diverse workforce, in maintaining cohesion and morale. That said, I think there are some very negative lessons from leadership. The Army seems to have lost that connection, fundamentally, on accountability between rewarding success and punishing failure.
There's other related lessons to that. Candor is so important in talking to one's superiors. Something that I would take away as a business person is a good meeting is not necessarily a pleasant meeting. When you are going in to a crisis situation, you really need to examine your differences. And that means some pretty heated arguments. You need to say you're assuming this, but this other guy's assuming this. Why are your assumptions different? And that might be a heated argument. So a pleasant meeting is not necessarily the productive one.
Analyze differences and examine them. Where do they come from? Why do we think differently about this? And finally, examine harshly a strategy. Look at it from the enemy perspective. What would he do? How will he react? And as Marshall and Eisenhower both were fond of pointing out, in looking at strategy, separate the essential from the merely important. Strategy is, in many ways, about prioritizing. What must we do versus what we would want to do. What are the two or three things that really are essential here?
And that's really where Marshall was so good in World War II because once you pick strategy and say this is what we're going to do, then you can measure your people against that. Who was helping us fulfill that strategy? Who doesn't understand it? Or who else is getting in the way of that strategy? And then you can make personnel decisions against your strategy and have a very effective institution.
JULIA KIRBY: Tom, I know your focus is on the military. But if a corporate board were to consult with you, then all of that would be perfectly applicable advice to the problems they face. Thank you so much for talking to us today.
TOM RICKS: Thank you very much.
JULIA KIRBY: That was Tom Ricks. His article is "Whatever Happened to Accountability" in the October 2012 edition of Harvard Business Review. For more, go to HBR.org. Thanks for joining us. And have a great day.

China and India Are an Opportunity, Not a Threat

An interview with Michael Silverstein, cofounder of The Boston Consulting Group's global consumer practice and coauthor of The $10 Trillion Prize: Captivating the Newly Affluent in China and India.

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SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. I'm here today with Michael Silverstein of BCG. He's one of the founders of Boston Consulting Group's global consumer practice, and he's co-author of The $10 Trillion Prize. Michael, thanks for joining us today.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: Thank you.
SARAH GREEN: So Michael, I'd like to start with that provocative title. What is the $10 trillion prize, and how did you come up with that nice round number?
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: We were doing research about the development of the Chinese and Indian market. And one of the base pieces of research is a forecast of demand. And lo and behold, if you look at the consumer markets that are growing at roughly 8% per year in China and India and you lay out consumer consumption, in 2020 the combination of China and India equals a $10 trillion dollar consumer business.
SARAH GREEN: Wow. So I want to just ask one question about that before we really dive in, about grouping China and India together that way. And I know that at HBR and in a lot of business publications we tend to do that, even though they're really very different countries. Why do we do that, and what is the usefulness of fusing them together in that way?
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: They are the two fastest growing markets in the world. They are the two most populous countries in the world. They have completely different development models. But if you put them in one book, if you put them in one container, it is the two biggest opportunities for global companies in the world, in the history of man.
Both markets are experiencing unprecedented growth. Indians are growing their per capita income from $1,000 to $4,000. Chinese are growing their incomes from $4,000 to $12,000. This book is about the time period from now till 2020. Between 2020 and 2050, it's not clear which one, India or China, ends up on top.
SARAH GREEN: That's interesting. OK. So I'd like to start with China, and then we'll move on to India. And I'd like you to paint the picture for us of what's going on in China. I know there was one really startling number that really grabbed me that a Chinese person born in 2009 will spend 38 times as much as their grandparents did. And as a Westerner, it's almost hard to imagine that rate of growth. So take us there. What's going on?
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: If you were a Chinese person born in 1960-- and I met and talked with a lot of Chinese people born in 1960-- life expectancy was 47 years. If you jump forward to a baby born in 2009, life expectancy is 73 years. That is a staggering difference. The China person born in 1960 lived on $100 a year. The China person born in 2009 has $1,429 in spending per capita.
The lifetime consumption for the 1960-born China person is $16,400. The lifetime consumption for the 2009 China-born is $632,000. The difference is 38x. It has to do with health care, education, job classification, earnings potential, moving from being subsistence rural agriculture to being urban middle class, buying packaged food, buying health care services, buying housing, housing that has cement and steel and corn and copper built into the house.
SARAH GREEN: So when you talk about some of those shifts there, I think as a Western person it's easy for me to say, oh, they're becoming more like us, they're becoming more like me. Is that what's happening? Or are they finding their own path to prosperity.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: They are very attuned to Western culture. If you go to China and you go to Shanghai or Beijing or any of the urban markets, there is a huge amount of popular culture that is American origination or European origination. They buy European luxury goods. They buy American music. They watch American television. They are obsessed with what is happening in the United States. But it's their own development.
It is a specific Chinese orientation around what is hip, what is cool, what is with it. They are very consumptive. Every one of the Chinese people that I talked to-- I talked to thousands over the last 18 months-- has a family member that somehow suffered horrible things in the famine, in the post-Communist revolution, that experienced the cultural revolution, that had people taken out into the countryside. They remember a life of misery.
And they're living for today. They are living because they believe that the future is going to be bright. They can consume now, they can consume in the future. They are the most optimistic population on the plant. 80% of the Chinese will tell you that the life of their children is going to be better than their life. In the United States, only 20% of adults say that life for their children is going to be better than their life.
SARAH GREEN: Wow. For a country that is supposed to be based on the American dream, that's very surprising.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: The American dream is alive and well in China. The American dream is perhaps a nightmare in the United States right now.
SARAH GREEN: Well, let's put that to one side for just a moment and just contrast that with what's going on in India. Because I'd be interested to know how that's similar and where it differs.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: The most interesting thing about India is if I try and just repeat back what I said about China. Life expectancy in India for a child born in 1960 is 42 years versus 47 in China. Life expectancy for a child born in 2009 is 64 years, so a dramatic increase.
In 1960, the Indian consumed at a rate that was twice the Chinese. So they were actually much more affluent than the Chinese. In 2009, the Indian-born is going to consume about $800 worth of goods, roughly 55% or 60% of the Chinese.
Indian incomes are growing at about the same rate, but from a much smaller starting base. And so what we would expect to see in India, which is still largely a rural country-- a rural agrarian country-- 70% of the population living on the farm. We would expect to see lifetime consumption increasing for the baby born in 1960 from $14,000 to $184,000, an increase of 13x.
But again, India comes into its own as a country in the time period from 2030 to 2050. In the timeframe 2030 to 2050, India becomes the most populous country on the planet. It still is populated by very young people with ambition, energy, and drive. It has created a university system that delivers literally tens of millions of graduates. And India has a history of English that gives it advantage in the world market.
SARAH GREEN: So this is interesting. With this kind of background, I almost see it as a chessboard with three pieces on it. And you've got China, in one sense, growing very fast now. But then you've just mentioned a number of things that would give India an advantage. And then you're also talking about some of the challenges America is facing. How do you see this all playing out over the next 20 or 50 years? I know you say it's sort of hard to tell.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: No, I know exactly how it's going to play out. I don't think it's hard to forecast at all. I think the demographics are perfectly clear. So population fertility rates are pretty stuck. And we know that the average Indian family is bigger than five children. We know that the average Chinese family is one or 1.1 children. We know that the US population will grow 0.9%. The Chinese population will slightly decline. We know that the Indian population will grow at about 1.8%. We can count the bodies.
And then the question is, who will get the jobs? And the ones that will get the jobs are the ones that are motivated, ambitious, hungry, and educated. And that will be a colossal competition. That will be something that is unheard of, that there's no reason to do legal work with a US lawyer. So if your dad is a lawyer and you're in the United States and you want to be like your dad, don't expect to make his kind of money. Expect to see anything that can be transported to a low-factor cost country to have that happen.
And that doesn't say that there aren't going to be a lot of opportunities, because the world's going to need a lot more food. The world is going to need really good engineers. The world is going to need great computer scientists. And where they grow up and where they come from, they can come from anywhere.
And what's very interesting is that this competition is not a zero sum game. We do not expect that US incomes will decline in real terms. We expect that US incomes will actually grow in real terms. We believe that Chinese incomes will grow faster than US or Indian incomes over the next 10 years.
So it's a wonderful thing. It's a great thing for humanity. It will require people to save water and save energy and be less consumptive and be more environmentally sensitive. And I believe that the net result is good.
SARAH GREEN: I know some people have looked at these demographics and looked at these trends and written a very depressing story for America, one of decline. But clearly your view of it is very positive, and that's why the book is more of a seizing opportunities book then a ringing the alarm bell type book.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: One of the things I would say is that there are going to be depressing stories in the United States. If you do not finish high school in the United States, you are pretty much doomed to life of poverty. If you graduate from college with the wrong degree, you're going to find it very hard to make as much money as your parents. But if you decide that you're going to study mathematics or high science or engineering or computers, there'll be lots of jobs. And the unemployment rate for you will be just transitive, very low.
SARAH GREEN: Yes, you are talking here to a recovering English major. So I know what you're talking about there. I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the ways that you went around finding out this information and thinking through what the opportunities are here and what consumers in these markets would want.
I know that one common problem businesspeople have when they're thinking about the opportunity of China or India is that they make assumptions about what people would want, or they don't do their due diligence, and so they end up stereotyping. How did you get around doing that with the book? And then how would you suggest that people who want to capture that $10 trillion dollar prize do the same?
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: The major message would be upfront and personal. And let me tell you what I mean by upfront and personal. First, BCG, Boston Consulting Group, has more than 1,000 people on the ground in China and India. We've been in both countries for more than 20 years. My coauthors are Abheek Singhi, who is an Indian graduate of IIT, and Carol Liao, who's a graduate of the University of Peking, and David Michael, an American who moved to China 15 years ago to open up our offices in China.
Upfront and personal is qualitative and quantitative. I've spent a serious amount of time in the last 18 months in both China and India meeting with consumers in their homes in major urban markets and in rural markets. That gave us a qualitative understanding of ambition, drive, and energy. We then had $2 million of BCG casework in China and India that we devoted [INAUDIBLE] book, quantitatively understanding the consumption habits of Chinese and Indian consumers at lower, middle, and upper incomes, in-depth understanding of their consumption by category, their purchase patterns now, and the purchase patterns of the future.
If you want to get into these markets, you need to get to know them. You need to understand hopes, dreams, wishes. You need to understand category usage, habits, and practices. And you really have to be inside their head.
A great example in the book is Kraft's story in China and Kraft's story in India. In China, Kraft in 2006 had a $100 million business. In China it was losing money. They decided that they were going to fix that. The fix had three steps. The first step is they had to get to scale. So they bought Danone biscuit business in China and around the world. It's called LU Biscuit Business. It doubled their size.
The second step was they needed to get their cost structure right. So they dramatically reduced cost. And the third step, and the most important step, is that they needed to focus by brand and category. And they decided the category that was going to be their growth vehicle. It was going to be biscuits, and within biscuits it was going to be Oreo cookie.
They customized the cookie to the Chinese market. They made it smaller and less sweet. And if you were to listen to the analyst reports for Kraft very recently, they'd be saying that their business in China is just about $1 billion, and very profitable.
They decided they also wanted to be in India. And to get into India they bought Cadbury and got the market-leading chocolate position-- 70% share in India, a business that is 50 years old and growing at 30% a year. So you need a plan. If you want to get into these markets, it's not going to happen by accident. It's not going to happen with a little amount of resources.
You're going to have to make an upfront commitment to understanding, and then a follow-up commitment of investments. And then the senior management team of the multinational is going to have to really stay on top of it. Businesses in China and India are not easy to create. But once they're created they're worth an enormous amount of money.
SARAH GREEN: I like how we've talked about on the individual level what people need to be doing in order to compete successfully with rising talent in India and China and America. And now we've talked a little bit about what businesses need to do in order to capitalize on the opportunity of that growing middle class. Could I ask you just to speculate a little bit about what you think we ought to be doing at the national level?
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: I'm a big follower pf the current election. And I think the $10 trillion prize is an election topic. Both Romney and Obama have it wrong. They have it flat-out wrong. They have attempted to demonize China, and to a less degree, India. They have tried to make it a conflict as opposed to an opportunity. They have both deemed it to be a zero sum game.
And what they have and what they will get is something that they, as the campaign speech says, is being taken away from America. That is not a fact. It is in fact an opportunity for American businesses and American consumers to enter China, to learn about China, to learn about India, to participate in this $10 trillion prize. It is about Western companies deciding that they're not going to have their place of origin on their sleeve.
SARAH GREEN: Well, Michael very provocative thoughts there, and I know many more insights and good provocations in the book. Thanks so much for sharing some of them with us today.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN: You're very welcome. It's really nice to talk to you.
SARAH GREEN: That was Michael Silverstein of BCG. The book is The $10 Trillion Prize. For more, visit HBR.org.

Campaign for Your Career

An interview with Dorie Clark, strategy consultant and author of the article "A Campaign Strategy for Your Career."

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SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Sarah Green. I'm talking today with Dorie Clark, a strategy consultant, former presidential campaign adviser, and the author of the HBR article, "A Campaign Strategy for Your Career." Dorie, thanks so much for coming in.
DORIE CLARKE: Thanks for having me, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: So in the article, you essentially argue that you need to map out a campaign strategy to get ahead, just like a politician does. Some of principles here were actually really helpful. For instance, you start by talking about how politicians have two things a lot of people don't, which is a clear goal and a deadline. Talk to us about how we can use those principles to plan our own careers.
DORIE CLARKE: Well, when I used to work in politics, one of the things that we'd do on most campaigns is you'd literally take a huge calendar, and you'd photocopy it and blow it up and paste it on the wall. And it was this guiding purpose in our life, that whenever you went into the conference room, you would see this calendar and you were working backwards from election day.
And so you had to think about very strategically, OK, if we're actually going to get x number of votes, how many voters do we need to contact? How many doors do we need to knock? How many phone calls do we need to make?
And so for a lot of people in their careers, they maybe have a long-term goal. Oh, I want to make vice president, or someday I want to start my own company. But usually, it's vague. There's not necessarily a timeline attached to it.
And I think people sometimes think, oh, well, things will just happen. I'll seize opportunities. And in a campaign, you can't afford to do that. You have to be very strategic. And so I think that sometimes if you apply some of the campaign tactics and strategies, you may be able to accelerate your career success.
SARAH GREEN: Can you give us an example of someone you know who's actually done that, who's sort of set the goal, set the calendar, and made it there?
DORIE CLARKE: Yeah. One of the people that I met, who I think is actually really remarkable, is a guy named Lenny Achan, who is the head of communications at Mount Sinai Medical Center, which is a former client of mine. And I met Lenny through the course of working with him, and he was somebody that everybody talked about. Whenever they mentioned him, everybody said, oh, this guy, he's really moving fast. It's remarkable. He's 35 years old. He has this big job.
And so when I finally got a chance to meet him, I said, Lenny, everyone tells me you've got this really high-speed career. How did you do it? And so he looks me and says, well, I pre-wrote my resume. And I said, what do you mean by that? What does that mean?
And he said, well, in 2002, I wrote my resume for 2012. And I thought about everything that I would need to do between now and 2012 and all the jobs that I would have and the steps and the organizations I'd be affiliated with. And he literally mapped out. And that degree of planning and forethought, I thought was so rare. I had never heard of anyone doing that, and it's helped accelerate his success dramatically.
SARAH GREEN: One of the interesting things, I think, about the kind of principles you talk about in the piece about doing that reverse mapping is that it can sometimes entail going to graduate school. But often, it doesn't. How do you make that decision when you're kind of doing that reverse planning, about whether or not you need to spend the money on tuition for that big fancy degree?
DORIE CLARKE: Yeah, it's a great question. I think the first question you need to ask yourself is, will a graduate degree be mandatory? In some fields, it is. If you want to be a lawyer, if you want to be a doctor, if you want to be an engineer in some cases, you have to go to graduate school, and that's it. So if it's a requirement, then yes. You have to build it in.
If it is not a requirement, then you need to say, all right. Well, if there are skills that I need, are there other ways that I could acquire them? Could I do the reading on my own? Could I take isolated classes? What's the best way to obtain it?
And the other factor besides skills is connections. And so I would say one of my hobbyhorses is that a lot of people, almost sometimes because they're not sure what to do, and they think, oh, well, I'll get an MBA, and then that will solve the problem. And if you're going to really top-notch, prominent school, I would say, sure, go for it. Because you're going to get incredible connections in addition to your skills.
If you're going, however, to a place that perhaps has a less stellar alumni network, you may actually be better off saving your money and strategically getting the skills on your own. I mean, one of the things that Lenny cited as being an important part of his success was that he decided on his own-- he was interested in digital technology-- and he decided, you know what? I'm going to create an app. I'm just going to figure out how to do that.
And so he did. He started a small business where he was creating an app. He actually ultimately did two. And at first, he was worried that his employer would think, oh, he's maybe goofing off because he's got this other thing on the side. But on the contrary, when they found out he had created an app, and he knew how to do that and had taken the initiative to do it, they said, actually, will you head up digital communications for us? And that was how he got into that role. And within a year or so, they gave him the job running communications as a whole.
SARAH GREEN: Mmm. That's a really great example. And actually, you mentioned in that something I'd like to go back to, which is the networking piece of this. Because that's obviously a huge piece of this, and a lot of the reason, as you mentioned, that people decide they do need an MBA. But I think a lot of us may make the mistake of assuming that networking is just sort of indiscriminate schmoozing, right? You're just shaking as many hands as possible. Or if you're a politician, you're kissing all the babies. How do you really be strategic about building your network?
DORIE CLARKE: Well, one of the things you can do, thinking like a politician, is to think about the categories of people that you need to meet. If I'm a politician, certainly I want to make friends with people who can be big donors, for sure. I want to make sure that I'm schmoozing with opinion leaders who control blocs of votes. So if someone's a head of the powerful organization, I want to be friends with them. You may want people who are well-known in a certain niche or something like that.
And so similarly for your career, you can think, all right, who are the people that can help me learn certain skills? Who are people that I admire? Maybe Ben is really great at time management. Or maybe Jessica really has a great digital profile, and that's something I admire. And if you make a point of connecting with people that you really think are top-notch, and you let them know that in an honest and sincere way, you can build good relationships and be able to learn from that as well.
I think another thing that's really critical, and this was something-- I did an interview recently with Robert Cialdini, who's the author of Influence and an eminent psychologist. And we talked about the question of how do you get someone to like you quickly. You meet someone. How do you form a powerful connection as soon as you can? And he said that the key thing is finding a commonality as quickly as possible.
And so in some cases, you're already going to have a pre-fabricated one. Maybe you're at an alumni event-- oh, we both went to Cornell, so yeah, we are brothers-in-arms. Sometimes, you have to dig a little bit, and you ask questions. And maybe you're both from the Midwest, or maybe you both like to run marathons, or whatever. But as soon as you can find that connection, the person begins to think of you in a different way, that we're on the same team. And that can help accelerate networking and make it more pleasurable as well.
SARAH GREEN: Mmm. One thing that you mentioned there which I'd like to dig a little deeper on is the idea of influence. And you have a great story in the piece that actually was news to me. I didn't know the story. You talk about how in New York State the marriage equality legislation got passed and how activists used influence in a really smart way to get that done. Tell us that story.
DORIE CLARKE: Yeah. I was really impressed by the New York Times' coverage of this when gay marriage happened in New York. Because it was very surprising that in New York, which has a lot of conservative legislators-- and for a long time, marriage legislation had been debated. It wasn't going anywhere. And finally, it just got pushed through in this burst. And so the question is, how were they able to manage it? Especially because, frankly, over time a lot of the gay activists had built up rancorous relationships with some of these conservative legislators that had been blocking them for so long.
And so, it was really interesting. Because what happened-- Governor Cuomo deserves a lot of credit for this, because he basically said, you know what? I'm going to be captain of the strategy, and I'm going to tell you how to do it. And what he came up with, which was brilliant, was he said, you know what? These conservative legislators are not going to listen to you. They're just not. But we need to find people who they will listen to, and that is their donors. You have to think about who matters to the people you're trying to influence.
And so it turned out there were a lot of really wealthy Republican donors that had gay family members. And in many cases, they had never talked to the elected officials about this. It's not the first thing that comes up. It's maybe not the impetus behind them giving donations. But it turns out their son, their daughter, their sister, whatever, is gay. And once they were mobilized as a force, they were really able to make progress in a way that hadn't been possible before.
So I think the lesson for all of us is that if we're trying to accomplish a goal, you can't just keep beating your head against a wall. Because progress isn't made that way. Sometimes, progress is made by going sideways and being more subtle with your influence.
SARAH GREEN: Mmm. So this is all sounding great. We're sort of setting calendars and thinking about who we can influence and who influences who we want to influences. But my question now is, how do we fit this all in? Because if I look at my calendar, I just sort of see wall-to-wall meetings. And in between the meetings are emergencies. And then weekend is family stuff and-- how do we make time for this?
DORIE CLARKE: It's a great question. And certainly, it's a perennial one. One example that I like to go to, and it's something that I mention in the piece-- I was really inspired by the story of an executive I know named Chris, who his goal was to make vice president at his Fortune 500 company. And he had been trying for a long time. He's a finance guy. And he thought he was on a path to do it.
He always got good marks on his reviews, but he got passed over for a promotion. Then, he got passed over for a promotion again. Then, he got passed over a third time, and he started to freak out. He started to say, what is it that's wrong with me? Is there something that I'm missing?
And what he realized was that in order to make vice president, it's not just his boss that had a say in it. There's a team of 20 people that would vote on it, and they all had candidates. They all had their favorites. And he realized he had been so narrowly-focused on doing his job and pleasing his boss he hadn't cultivated the relationships with this cadre of people that had power over him. He said that he really had to change his philosophy, that if he said something in a meeting, he wanted people to know that it was Chris saying it, not just some guy from finance.
And so he literally printed out the names, the bios of all of these executives. He color-coded them. If they had a great relationship, it was green. If they sort of knew who he was, it was yellow. If they didn't have a clue, it was red.
And he made it his policy over time-- you have to eat. You have to get coffee. And he would invite them out. He'd come up with some idea, some excuse, something he had to talk to them about. But over time, he wanted to turn all of the reds into greens, or at least yellows. And it took him 2 and 1/2 years, but he assiduously pursued that, and he got his promotion.
SARAH GREEN: So it took 2 and 1/2 years to get that promotion. I think that timeline may sound like a long time to some of the people listening. But of course, the guys running for president have been doing that at least 2 and 1/2 years, if not longer. So do you think we have to just sort of accept that there is a long game here and get ready to play it?
DORIE CLARKE: Well, I'm an impatient person, and so I definitely don't like it any more than other people. But the best advice that I have-- when I was 13 years old, like a lot of people, I got braces. And this is this unfortunate, unpleasant, rite of adolescence. But as it was going on, my mother got braces too. She had not had the opportunity to have them. She had a little gap in her teeth when she was a kid.
And so she's in her 50s. She got braces. Who does that in their 50s? And so people would ask her all the time, why? Why are you doing this now? You've lived 50 years without doing this.
And she said, you know what? I can be two years older, or I can be two years older with straight teeth. And I decided to do that.
And so for all of us, I think we'd love to be showered with instant promotions and instant raises. But you know what? Things will unfold on their own pace, for sure. But we have to take the initiative to do everything we can possible to make the odds favorable for us.
SARAH GREEN: Mmm. Mm hmm. OK. Well, that is good advice. One thing I wanted to also ask you about is, what if you make a mistake? I think during this election season, we've certainly seen any number of gaffes come out. And what if you make a gaffe in your career? How do you recover from that?
DORIE CLARKE: Yeah. If there's some kind of a mistake-- and I often consult with clients on crisis communications and things like that-- I think the first thing that you need to recognize is that in some way, trust has been ruptured. And so you can't keep on going on the same path that you were and pretend it never happened. Because that just looks weird. It looks false if you don't acknowledge it.
And so I think, depending on the nature of what the mistake is, in some cases you just need to apologize as soon as quickly. If you really dropped the ball on something, the best thing to do-- what we always say in politics is you need to make it a one-day story, meaning if someone doesn't fully accept responsibility or there's new revelations, it plays out. And it's a week in the paper, and so that many more people know about it.
But if you just apologize, and you say, you know what? I take responsibility, my bad. Then, it's a one-day story, and people are more likely to put it past them and forget it. So I think acknowledging it is an important thing.
And the other thing is just recognizing that the balance has shifted. People may be thinking of you in a slightly different way. And so you may need to go out of your way to be conscious of how you're acting. And if there's a perception of you in a certain direction, then you need to maybe go above and beyond. If you missed a critical meeting-- you overslept or something like that-- then you certainly want to be making an extra effort to get into the office early for a long period of time so that people can realize, you know what? That was an aberration. I can count on her.
SARAH GREEN: That's a nice segue into something else I wanted to ask you about, which is personal brand. Because that's a topic you've written a lot about for hbr.org. That's the topic of your book that's coming out in 2013 called Reinventing You. So what's really the impact of having a personal brand on your career?
DORIE CLARKE: So personal branding is a new-fangled term. It's something that in the past 10 or 15 years has become popular ever since Tom Peters did a famous story called "The Brand Called You." And so people are excited about personal brands. But really, the concept is not new. It's something that's always existed, which is your reputation. It's what people say about you when you leave the room.
I mean, some people are more or less into the idea of personal branding. But I think every professional wants people to think well of them. They want people to think that they're competent, that they're professional, that they do a good job. And so the question is, how can we act in ways and how can we make sure that we're conveying a holistic message to people such that they think of us the way we would like to be perceived?
And so the online example is a good one. It's a new tool that we have at our disposal. Because in the past, you go back 15 or 20 years before the internet really penetrated most elements of our life, you developed your personal brand based on just the people that knew you, the people that worked with you and how they'd be talking about you in the halls.
Now, it's open to a global audience. And so if you do have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, LinkedIn, maybe you do podcasts, people from around the world are seeing you. And it's easier than ever for them to check up on you.
And so it is important to be mindful of that and to think, what are the things that I want to be driving? Do I want to be perceived as creative and innovative? Do I want to be perceived as a connector who's always bringing people together and coming up with new things? Or whatever it is. But thinking that through and then executing it by creating content that people can see and find is very important.
I mean, in fact, two days ago I was with a client, which is a major foundation. And one of their senior staffers was telling me, well, you know-- and they have this fellowship that they award-- and he said, we research people online to determine whether to give it to them or not. They don't know they're under consideration-- this is not the MacArthur's, by the way-- but we are looking. And that's the key for every executive. You don't know when people are looking. They could be around the corner to offer you a plum job of your dreams that you never even imagined. But they're looking. And so being conscious of your personal brand is important, because you can put yourself in a position to really have some great opportunities.
SARAH GREEN: Mmm. Well, Dorie, lots of great advice here today. Thanks so much for coming in and chatting with us.
DORIE CLARKE: Thanks, Sarah.
SARAH GREEN: That was Dorie Clark talking about her HBR article, "A Campaign Strategy for Your Career." For more, visit hbr.org.

A Social Sanity Manifesto for 2012

The more time we spend using social media, the more our online conversations seem to be dominated by reflections on how social media is frustrating, aggravating and overtaxing. Our stress is compounded by each new performance metric that we're told to track and optimize, but social networking companies keep adding more, because they know each new target motivates us to do the job of growing their networks for them.
And yet much of our pain is self-inflicted, the product of online and professional pressures that are at least as much perceived as real. At the dawn of 2007, you didn't care about your Klout score, your Twitter following, your FourSquare Mayorships or your YouTube views, because those networks were tiny or not-yet-born. Five years later, you may be heading into 2012 with cellular-level awareness of how many people retweeted you today, or how many +1s you got for your latest blog post.
Perception quickly becomes reality. If you already care more about your social media metrics than you'd like to admit, then tomorrow, caring about those numbers may be essential to your personal and professional success. The more we each pay attention to still-questionable metrics like Klout or Twitter mentions, and the more we choose to structure our work and lives to optimize them, the more they matter. We are creating a world in which we live our online lives as a scorecard.
That is not a world I want to live in ten years from now, or even in 2012. Given that this is the season of resolutions, it's a perfect time to rebel against social benchmarking. We can, individually and collectively, steer our online lives according to an internal compass instead. And we can create that world by committing to very specific practices that will keep us individually and collectively sane online.
I present the Social Sanity Manifesto: 10 commitments that you can make to escape the measurement trap, and bring some humanity to the numbers people you interact with online.

• I will delete my Klout profile. (If you use social media, you probably have one, even if you haven't signed up on Klout; find out how to delete it here. ) I will assess my influence through my actual and reflected accomplishments, not enumerated, commodified relationships.
• I will only accept LinkedIn connection requests from people I am actively interested in helping. If I don't know them well enough to do them a favour, I don't know them well enough to ask for a favor, even if that favor is simply an introduction.
• I will not judge others based on their online metrics. I'll reply to emails and mentions based on my interest and availability, not the Klout score or follower count of the person who is writing to me.
• I will not game my online metrics. I will not follow accounts just to get a follow back, or stage contests to attract more Facebook likes; I'll simply take what emerges organically.
• I will not click on any score-based meme. I don't need to add any more numbers to my internal (or external) dashboard.
• I will check in with intent: whether the intent to let my friends know where I am, to motivate myself to keep going to the gym, or to keep a travelogue. I don't need badges or mayoral standing to make an outing worthwhile.
• I will ignore my ratings. The number of "likes" I get for a Facebook post isn't what matters. What matters are the names of the people who enjoyed that post, and what they have to say about it.
• I will check my site analytics no more than once a week. If I check my analytics more than once a month, it will be to answer a question, not to seek validation.
• I won't compare myself to others. I will not look at the follower count or Amazon ranking of a friend, colleague or competitor, simply to see who is more successful or more loved. I will not use analytics tools that compare me to other individuals.
• I will set my own benchmarks. I will clarify and document my online goals (become a better photographer, build a network of supportive colleagues in my industry, learn new ways to get my work done) and track the quantitative and qualitative indicators that help me assess the progress I'm making on what really matters to me.

Am I suggesting that we should live in a world without metrics or benchmarks? Of course not. Data is one of the most powerful tools the web has to give us, and social media can make effective use of data just like any other business practice. But there is a world of difference between using data as a tool for shaping your organization's presence, and using data as a way to evaluate yourself or others as professionals or individuals. Precisely because social media is social, i.e., pertaining to the relationship between and among human beings, we have to be exquisitely sensitive to the way that an obsession with social media metrics can commodify or dehumanize individuals and relationships.
The Social Sanity Manifesto offers a way to avoid that kind of dehumanization, and you can commit to it beginning on January 1. Make this commitment personally, and you'll relieve yourself of the performance anxiety that can quickly come to dominate your online experience. Make this commitment as an organization, and you can develop a social media presence that will drive deep engagement, connection and thinking within and to your organization. Make this commitment as a society, and we can pull ourselves out of this tailspin into an online culture obsessed that's measured rather than experienced.

What Did the Internet Do for You This Year?

All too often we use our online conversations to reflect on what is going awry with our lives and work online. Look at my own recent posts here, and you'll find me griping about the latest social media misfire or the way metrics are degrading our online relationships.
Avoiding crises and critiquing online degradation are crucial to correcting where we're going wrong. Yet as we look forward to 2012, it's just as crucial to see where we're going right.
Appreciating the moments when our online work and lives just click tells us that all this time we spend online is not a compulsion, but a well-deserved choice. And noticing the patterns in what's worked well in the past — the online campaigns that consistently hit home runs, the social networks that bring us joy after joy, the content that elicits meaningful conversations — can help us invest in the activities that are most likely to pay off in the future.
In that spirit, I'd like to ask HBR readers to share their online triumphs from the past year — the moments, experiences and tools that have wowed, delighted and empowered you. Here are some suggestions and examples to get the ball rolling:
Business opportunities: This year I joined Doug Richard in the School for Startups in Romania, and the forthcoming Web-Fuelled Business series online, which has allowed me to share social media guidance with thousands of European entrepreneurs. Doug found me through my blog, initiating a trans-Atlantic collaboration that would have been impossible without the web. What business opportunities have you discovered through social media or other online channels this year?
Transformational tools: Earlier this year, a student introduced me to Pinterest, a platform for bookmarking, curating and sharing online images. (Here's a quick overview. By creating "pinboards" for pictures of favourite web designs, image prototypes for an app-in-progress, and let's be honest, an awful lot of grey boots, I've been able to collaborate visually with colleagues and keep running lists of design inspiration or consumer aspiration. What online tool did you start using this year that changed the way you work?
Knowledge and capacity building: I celebrated my 40th birthday with a 40-day blogging project that traced the past 40 years of life online. It was an utterly exhausting and exhilarating project that deepened my understanding of Internet history, introduced me to the wealth of resources at the Computer History Museum, and transformed my own writing, thinking and even PHP skills! What online project helped you develop new knowledge or skills this year?
New or deepened relationships: In January, a Twitter friend in Boston (the extraordinary Eric Anderson, who is a Twitter introduction machine) introduced me to a fellow web 2.0 leader in Vancouver, the brilliant Dan Pontefract. Dan has quickly become one of my most trusted colleagues and advisers, in a relationship that would never have happened without Twitter, even though, as we recently realized, our kids were at one point in the same grade school class! What is the most important business or personal relationship that began or grew online in 2011?
Personal bonding: I discovered Cute Overload because its creators use (and blog about) the WordPress theme that I use on my own site. But videos of puppies and sloths have made it my sure-fire tool for appeasing my daughter when she wants to know why mummy spends so much time on the computer. Which of 2011's entertaining online discoveries have helped you bond with friends, family or colleagues?
Of all the extraordinary discoveries I made online this year, perhaps the most profound happened right here at HBR. When I blogged about the social media response to Vancouver's Stanley Cup riots, it was with great sadness at seeing my very worst fears for the Internet unfolding in my own city. But the passionate, profound and deeply thoughtful conversation that unfolded in the comments thread, and that extended across the web as other bloggers, tweeters and sites tackled the same issue, put the lie to every claim that the Internet can't support meaningful conversation. People not only engaged seriously and (mostly) respectfully online, but they were actually willing to painfully and publicly reconsider their perspectives. The fact that an online conversation could support that kind of evolution in a public debate, and perhaps influence the police department's ultimate call to refrain from social media vigilantism, left me truly awed, humbled and inspired by what the Internet can achieve.
Thanks to all the readers, commenters and tweeters who continually remind me of why social media is worth working in and writing about. I look forward to hearing about the online successes that will inspire all of us to aim still higher in 2012.

Meet Your Pinterest Customer

Pinterest is the social media darling of the month, growing madly and reported to be driving more traffic to third-party sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn put together.
Think of Pinterest as a hybrid between a photo-sharing service like Flickr and a social bookmarking service like delicious: on Pinterest, you "pin" images the way you bookmark URLs with Delicious. You can curate these images into thematic "pinboards" and follow other people's pinboards to find inspiration or images you want to "repin."
From the beginning Pinterest has seemed like it should be useful to marketers, and the hype has only amplified companies' desire to be there and figure out who's the Pinterest customer and how to reach her (so far, it's predominantly her).
I'm here to help, because I am that customer. I've been an active Pinterest user for over a year, experimenting with how to use this new kind of social networking service, and watching how others use it. Here are some anecdotal observations from my year with Pinterest.
Shopping: Both compulsive shoppers and anti-shoppers who aim to get in and out of stores fast like and use Pinterest. I'm in the former camp. I created a Pinboard for my quest for the perfect grey boots, and used it to poll my friends on the best option; I've now got Pinboards going for Lego storage options and the perfect computer case. While Pinterest makes shopping even more fun for enthusiasts like me, Chris Tackett of The Atlantic points out that it can also reduce their actual volume of purchases by providing form of virtual acquisition that displaces a certain amount of consumption. Sometimes, just looking at all those pretty grey boots is enough.
What it means for your business: Target Pinterest users' experience of shopping as a creative process, not just a potential transaction, by making your online presence as pleasurable as it is functional. Product photography matters more than ever; you want your prospective customers to pin your hot-looking products, and you may want to engage with the people who've pinned your products to see if you can nudge them toward a purchase.
Bonding: Pinterest nudges online shopping into something more like the real thing: a social experience shared by friends. When I joined Pinterest it was still an invitation-only site, so I used my invitations on the friends and colleagues with style I admire or share. Like many groups of Pinterest users, we follow each others' pins to help each other find the kinds of clothes, shoes and home items we love. It's the online equivalent of that age-old female bonding ritual, the shopping spree. Marketers might note the opportunity to foster and track the social influence on purchasing, but they should also see an opportunity to build on this experience and reinforce the social experience created here, just as retail stores pipe in music and offer snacks and other freebies to bring groups of friends into the store.

What it means for your business: Busting in on a circle of Pinterest pals to hawk your wares is not unlike sticking your head into the dressing room where two girlfriends are discussing whether that dress makes her butt look good. Better to send your pro-bonding signals from afar, perhaps with a product comparison page that encourages users to pin their top choices so their friends can help them choose what to buy.
Collaboration: It's not all about shopping, though. I've also found Pinterest to be a powerful collaboration tool for both work and home. At work, I've used it build a shared file of visual inspiration for an ebook design project. At home, we used it to help find a fence that also appealed to our neighbours. By inviting other people to contribute to a board, Pinterest users can collaborate in way that is easier than Google Docs, more fun than Delicious, and quicker to scan than either one.
What it means for your business: Recognize that a single pinboard may reflect the tastes or interests of several contributors. If your customers are frequently comparing a similar set of products, consider collecting all those products on a single Pinboard.
Inspiration: Many pinboards are highly personal, eclectic or quirky collections of images that users find exciting or inspiring. When I joined Pinterest, I decided it was finally time to create a "vision board," a widely-praised technique for visualizing your professional and personal goals; I collected representative images on a single pinboard that I occasionally look at to reinforce my focus. I now use a separate pinboard to create social media infographics that can inspire my research. For users like me, images that inspire are as pin-able as images that represent what we plan to buy or wear.
What it means for your business: Engagement and branding! Create inspirational custom graphics for your blog posts or website that will appeal to your customers or clients. Cultivate your own well of inspiration by identifying the major areas where you want to develop your professional skills, and curate pinboards of inspiring images or examples that will push your own practice forward.
I try a lot of social media tools, but only a handful become part of my daily workflow the way Pinterest has in the past year. That's why I'm convinced it's here to stay, and why you should start using it to target your customers in the year ahead.

Moving Customers from Pinning to Purchase

Pinterest surged into the spotlight earlier this year when it was revealed that it drives more web traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. What's so compelling about a website that lets you make virtual bulletin boards of "pinned" images, observers wondered, and does this service now belong in the pantheon of must-use social tools like Facebook and Twitter? Perhaps most important, marketers are asking, is this something that will drive revenue?
Not long after the Pinterest spike, my employer, Emily Carr University, and research firm Vision Critical recruited 500 Pinterest users from the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia, to talk about their pinning habits.
The results: Pinterest users reported a surprisingly high correlation between pinning and subsequent purchasing: more than 1 in 5 Pinterest users has pinned an item that they later purchased. In the social world, this is a high conversion rate.
Surprisingly, the correlation between pinning and offline purchasing (16%) was stronger than the correlation between pinning and online purchasing (12%). (The overall number of people who have pinned and then purchased comes to 21%, because some purchased both ways.)
The people who are purchasing pin three times as many items (59) each month as non-purchasers (19). No wonder: the purchasers visit Pinterest almost three times as often, 27 times a month, compared to an average 10 for non-purchasers.
More than 60% of these purchasers joined Pinterest before January 2012, in other words, before the hype. This could be because they are more loyal early adopters or because those who've joined since haven't had as much time to convert their activity to buying. Probably, it's some combination of both. Click the image below for an infographic representation of the survey results.
View infographic
It's hard to assess any causal relationship between pinning and purchasing. Are people buying because they pin, or pinning what they always intended to buy? Still, the implications for marketers are clear: Pinning, especially among loyal, active Pinterest users, is intimately intertwined with buying. Pinning is a signal that says, "I'm thinking of purchasing your product".
If you're already running a social media customer relations team, you're well positioned to respond. At a minimum, your team should be monitoring the Pinterest page that shows every item pinned from your site(s): http://pinterest.com/source/yoursite.com. Take a peek at what that page looks like for brand like Adidas or Michael's and you get an instant snapshot of the opportunities for moving customers from pinning to purchase.
Pinboard names also offer clues about how seriously your customers are considering a purchase: in general, anything with "lust" or "inspiration" in the title implies fantasy rather than purchase intent, while lists named for specific product categories ("red shoes") usually read like pre-purchase shortlists. Work from these clues to reach out to customers with product information or discounts and promotions. But, take care to avoid being intrusive or creepy: if Sarah posts your product to her "Birthday Wishlist" pinboard, it's not your job to look at her Facebook profile, find the name of her boyfriend, and let him know you're happy to help him get that perfect gift.
At a higher level, our research on Pinterest speaks to the necessity of asking some tough questions about any new social media platform, and taking a data-driven approach to finding the answers.
After all, there has been a Pinterest every year for the past decade. If you cringe like I do at the memory of joining Second Life, you know how hard it is to resist the siren song of the Cool New Social Web Thing. Investing some personal time in CNSWTs can help you get inside the heads of the customers who are spending time there, and to understanding the social media zeitgeist, but taking the leap from personal interest to brand investment requires a much higher threshold of confidence. To justify a real resource commitment (dollars, technology, time) a new platform has to demonstrate that it's moving the dial on one of your key metrics, whether it's your total revenue, your average cost of sale or production, or simply the number of applications you get in response to each job ad.
Knowing the relationship between platform and metrics isn't just a matter of proving ROI, but rather, crucial to aligning your strategy for a new social media platform with the strategy for that part of your business it can reasonably be expected to enhance. To achieve that kind of alignment, you have to go beyond the aggregated stats on visits and users that any trending platform produces to dazzle its potential business audience. You have to hear about the platform's impact from the users themselves.

A Social Media Evangelist's Survival Guide

William was a contractor with Canada's largest credit union, Vancity, when he stuck his neck out — way out — to drive the creation of ChangeEverything, the first online community in the financial services industry. This was before the term social media had even been coined, let alone budgeted, and companies like Vancity had only a tiny budget for online marketing.
Driving the development of the company's social network — What's a social network? was still a frequent question — was hardly a fast track to employment in a company where nobody had a line item for the guy who was all about digital. But while some in the company were baffled by the idea of an online community, William got enough support to keep the project alive. His high risk tolerance and deep commitment to community building helped him press on with his vision of ChangeEverything (with the help of our firm), despite the fact that it shunted him onto the then-unpromising digital track.
William's story encapsulates the challenges and the opportunities of the "stranded evangelist": the often-lonely organizational entrepreneur who pushes a company to embrace social media, mobile media or other new digital arenas. I wrote about stranded evangelists in 2009, offering tips for those early social media adopters who were often still hard-pressed to sell their organizations on the merits of Twitter or Facebook.

Three years later, many of those evangelists, including William, stand vindicated as the visionaries who saw the power of social media long before it became a buzzword and a boom. ChangeEverything's success led to Vancity embracing social across the organization, and succeeding with it. William himself became a recognized industry expert. Far from career killing, it has led William to become Vancity's Director, Business & Community Development.
But success doesn't necessarily help people like William feel less stranded. The widespread embrace of social media means that instead of enjoying the freedom that comes from collegial disinterest, they are accountable to colleagues who now recognize the importance of social media without really understanding how it works, or what its limitations are. It's easier to get people to believe you than to understand you.
But it can be done, and William is doing it. I've noticed 8 ways that he and other effective social evangelists cope with disinterest and disbelief, and ill-founded expectations. Here they are:

Share your joy...Nobody joins a church because of depressing sermons. Effective evangelists' passion for technology is contagious. It infects others. Share your delight in what technology does for you, and you'll model and inspire excitement about what it can do for others.

...but be gentle... If you're a hard-core geek, it's tempting to show your colleagues the way you've got your Twitter client set up with 14 different columns. And that's awesome...if they ask. Otherwise, you're liable to scare them off from new tools by showing the deluxe turbo-charged version before they've even learned to drive.

...and get an escape valve. You will scare away colleagues with geekiness, but you shouldn't suppress that part of yourself. Channel the intensity of your enthusiasm by having a place where you can seriously nerd out for an audience that cares about how to edit their MySQL tables, without scaring those who don't know what MySQL is. That might be a blog, a podcast or a meetup group. Just make sure it's an escape valve you access regularly so that you don't leak your nerdiness onto innocent bystanders.
Find a buddy. When you're out ahead of the rest of your organization, it's hard not too feel nuts. That's why you need someone outside with enough distance to help you talk through your ideas, formulate a vision, and turn that into a game plan for moving your organization forward.

Play to (almost) the lowest common denominator. If learning new tools is easy for you, you may be happy to use forty-five different pieces of software in the course of a week, so that you're using the right tool for each job. But if you work with a team, you have to adjust your workflow to their comfort level. Limit the number of tools you expect your colleagues to adopt, and adapt your own working style to do everything via email if that's the only way you can actually get a timely response.

Rewrite your job description. Maybe your formal job title includes a word like "digital" or "technology" or "social media." But you need to recognize that your actual job isn't about configuring servers, or blogging, or providing tech support: it's change management. Rewrite your job description, at least in your head but preferably on paper, to prioritize the projects, relationships and professional development opportunities that allow you to play this role effectively. Focus your description on the strategic, project management and people skills that will help you move others towards an embrace of the key technologies and ways of working that enable success in the digital realm.

Legitimize the digital. Share too many YouTube cat videos, kid pictures or Internet memes, and you reinforce the image of the Internet as the land of the trivial and frivolous. Fall into the common usage of "real life" to refer to life offline, and you're endorsing the idea that what happens online is somehow second-best. See yourself as an ambassador and advocate for the digital realm, and ensure that all your communications focus on the worthwhile parts of digital and social.
Recognize that you're never done. If you're the kind of person who told your organization five years ago that they had to get on Twitter, or ten years ago that they had to change to a content-managed website, or twenty years ago that they needed to get an internal email system, you're always going be the kind of person who is looking around the curve to the next tech opportunity. If you're thinking that all you need now is to get them on mobile, or get them using analytics, or get them using Salesforce, and then you'll have them all set...well, it's a safe bet that there will be a next thing. The curse — and the joy — of being a stranded evangelist is that you're destined to live in the gap between what your organization is today, and what it could be tomorrow.

Accept that this gap can be a deeply uncomfortable, exasperating and even painful place to live, and you will be freed to do what you do best: inspire your organization with contagious excitement about technology's potential to transform your communications, your customer relationships and your core value proposition. Like William does at Vancity.

The High Price of Social Media Risk Management

In the event of uproar, please invoke social media policy.
That's the in-case-of-emergency sign that might as well hover over the desk of any communications manager, as the latest social media crisis reminds us. This week, it's The New York Times that finds itself in hot water, after contributor Andrew Goldman responded to a critical tweet with a reply that public editor Margaret Sullivan aptly characterized as "needlessly rude and insulting."
The Times responded by invoking its social media standards — even though it has no written social media policy. As Times associate managing editor Philip B. Corbett wrote in his memo about the incident:
"[Y]ou are a Times journalist, and your online behavior should be appropriate for a Times journalist. Readers will inevitably associate anything you post on social media with The Times."
Working from this principle, the Times suspended Goldman from his weekly column for the next four weeks.
Right result — wrong reasons. And doubly worrying if emulated by those who see the Times as the gold standard in media.
Yes, Goldman needs to be held accountable for his tweet. It was written in his capacity as a Times journalist, speaking directly to a Times reader, and in that context, would be reasonably seen as part of the Times' collective voice.
But it's one thing to hold a journalist (or any employee) accountable for what they post about their work (or in conversation with a customer). It's quite another to — as Corbett puts it — "always treat Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms as public activities."
After all, like most of us, journalists now live much of their lives online. And while some people patrol the boundary between church and state by maintaining separate social media profiles for their personal and professional lives, many of us thrive on the holistic perspectives and relationships that can develop when people tweet, blog or Facebook as their own true selves, 24/7.
In the course of that 24/7 online life, there are moments when you — or one of your employees or colleagues — may not be on brand or on message. Maybe your sales director will tweet something unflattering about a purchase she made at a store that just happens to be on your client list; perhaps your corporate recruiter will lampoon a political candidate for views that are shared by at least some of your prospective hires.
Seen through the lens of an approach like that of The New York Times, those posts are all potentially problematic. In content or tone, they diverge from the voice your company is trying to project online, and possibly expose you to a backlash from clients, customers or employees. No wonder companies try to hedge against that possibility with overly broad policies that subject the entirety of an employee's social media presence to the abstract standard of propriety or brand alignment.
But that kind of risk management comes at too high a price. For the same reason most social media sites explicitly disavow responsibility for the content that they host, employers would do well to embrace written policies that make it clear they don't police their employees' online presences. In the absence of a written policy that sets out the narrow circumstances in which employees will be held accountable for their online posts, the employer may be held accountable for anything. When New York Times advertisers spot tweets by journalists that rudely insult their products, will they now conclude that the Times considers those tweets "appropriate"?
The greater cost comes from the ambiguity of what is, in fact, appropriate. A social media policy — even an unwritten one — that holds employees accountable for everything they post can lead to a chilling effect: inhibiting them from making use of a powerful channel for authentic, real-time communication. That's bad strategy for an employer, and even worse news for us as online citizens. It's in all of our interests to ensure that a good chunk of online conversation remains outside the editorial purview of managers who are policing content for its brand and message alignment.
And yet our habit of treating social media policy as a form of disaster-proofing leads us down just this path: a path where vague or overly-broad policies are embraced as a way of safeguarding against any and all unfortunate online conversations. As Goldman's misfire demonstrates, a much narrower policy can do the job — and do it much better.

The Middle East Could Be a Cradle of Innovation

We in the West tend to think of innovation as the next, new, shiny, tech, globally-accepted thing. But in emerging growth markets, new access to even existing technologies (e.g., higher-speed broadband, mobile phones, smart devices), can lead to fresh and surprising thinking about local and regional problems, and one day these over-looked corners of the globe may produce world-class innovations as a result.
Consider mobile devices in Africa. Throughout the continent — and this is true throughout other emerging markets too — millions of people are glued to their cell phones. Since Africans were never tethered to landlines, innovation has been astounding. Kenya's M-Pesa, for example, allows customers to withdraw and deposit money via text message. The company is now one of the largest mobile cash-transaction companies in the world — roughly 20% of the country's GDP passes through it. The growth doesn't stop there. With hundreds of thousands of cell towers providing reception to the most rural corners of the world, mobile providers have been compelled to build their own power generators. As a result, they've spawned entire ecosystems of entrepreneurs who are using the excess electricity to power local towns and build community charging stations. And thanks to "social entrepreneurs," people with little voice are using mobile technology to report crime and corruption to authorities while holding the "powers that be" accountable — which was impossible even a few years ago.
Long before the Arab uprising in 2010 — and uninhibited by uncertainty and instability today — Middle East entrepreneurs have used innovation to overcome challenges and to find new opportunities for growth. As I have suggested in a recent post here on HBR, the Arab world alone represents a large and hungry consumer market. So it's no surprise that companies in the region are finding innovative ways to reach consumers. In the face of country-by-country regulatory complexity, Aramex, the region's largest logistics company, created Shop and Ship, which allows customers to order products from nearly any e-tailer in the U.S. and China and eventually the Middle East. It's a seamless process. Aramex receives the ordered goods at its facilities, takes care of all the bureaucratic headaches, and then delivers the goods right to the shopper.
Other e-commerce companies are overcoming obstacles in innovative ways as well. With only two million credit card users in the Middle East, and even fewer comfortable using their cards online, and with well over 60% of package deliveries paid COD, payment services create as much friction as regulatory concerns. But innovators such as CashU have created safe gateways (e.g., cash cards) for buyers who are weary about shopping online and on mobile devices.
The fact that new markets are using technology to solve local and regional problems is no longer surprising. But what's provocative, for me, is at some point these efforts will yield globally-competitive innovation as well. As Dartmouth Professors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble argue in their new book on innovation in emerging markets, Reverse Innovation: "It is easy to understand why a poor man would want a rich man's product. But why would a rich man ever want a poor man's product? The answer is that under certain circumstances, it offers new, unexpected or long-overlooked value."
This is why, when I travel throughout the Middle East, I look hard for situations and experiences that could foster innovation on a global scale. Simply put, the Middle East — despite its uncertainty — is rife with potential. This is a region that barely knew phone lines, yet mobile penetration regularly nears 200%. And when cheap smart phones (below $40) hit the market — as they have just started to in Africa — mass adoption of mobile computing will follow. What might this market have to teach the world about the future of mobile innovation?
There are other opportunities for innovation as well. The largest untapped resource of fresh water in the world lies beneath the Egyptian-Libyan desert but there isn't an adequate, cost-efficient, and reliable way to deliver petroleum in order to pump it. What innovation in solar pumping and agriculture may lie here? And what about the millions of people who communicated and coordinated on mobile devices and Twitter and Facebook during the Arab uprisings? They told stories. They toppled regimes. Might the next great global social network rise from these experiences?
There was a day, in my lifetime, when no one could imagine that Japan, or Finland, or Korea would become leaders in hardware innovation or computer gaming. True, there hasn't been a great, global software innovation outside of the United States in years, arguably ever. But as the region continues to use creativity to overcome its unique problems and as long as access to inexpensive technology continues to spread, "made in MENA" doesn't seem that far off.

This is Your Brain on Organizational Change

Why can't we change our organizations? Year after year, the list of companies that no longer exist because they were unable to evolve continues to grow. It includes such household names as Sunbeam, Polaroid, Tower Records, Circuit City, and Drexel Burnham Lambert. After six decades of study, untold investment, and the best efforts of scholars, executives, and consultants, most organizational change efforts still underperform, fail, or make things worse.
This is bad news for 21st century organizations. Increasing competition, globalization, technological changes, financial upheaval, political uncertainty, changing workforce demographics, and other factors are forcing organizations to change faster and differently than ever before. Worse, there is little reason to believe the field of organizational change can be of much help. Not only is the track record of change efforts dismal — it may not be improving. Experts have reported similar results for organizational change efforts since the 1980s. Clearly, new insight is needed into how organizations can better adapt to their environments and change.
Although myriad factors are cited, the inability to engage people is the factor noted longest and most often. As organizational behavioral experts Kenneth Thompson and Fred Luthans noted almost 20 years ago, a person's reaction to organizational change "can be so excessive and immediate, that some researchers have suggested it may be easier to start a completely new organization than to try to change an existing one." This phenomenon, often referred to as "human resistance to change," is possibly the most important issue facing the field of organizational change — and one that continues to baffle scholars, consultants, and executives. So, how do we effectively engage the support and creativity of a company's employees at the moment these attributes are most needed — during an organizational change?
One source of insight may be the field of neuroscience. The study of the brain, particularly within the field of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience, is starting to provide some underlying insights that can be applied in the real world and, perhaps, increasingly to our understanding of how to better engage human performance and creativity during change.
At the NeuroLeadership Summit, being held in New York this week, a panel discussion with senior executives and experts from The Conference Board, the Association of Change Management Professionals, Change Leaders, and Barnard College will explore the connection between neuroscience and organizational change, understanding how we can effectively deal with the human resistance to change.
The discussion will inform our work on a new organizational change model, one that takes into account how successful change functions in a modern organization, where work is conceptual, creative, and relational, and talent is portable. Keep in mind that there is no accepted general theory of change but rather traditional "best practice" clusters around a series of activities that have contributed to the continuing poor performance of change initiatives. These include:

• Perpetual underpreparation: change is always dreaded and a surprise to employees
• A perceived need to "create a burning platform": meant to motive employees via expressed or implied threat
• Leading change from the top of the organization down: only a few individuals are actively involved in the change and either under communicate or miscommunicate with others

Most of these ideas have implications in the field of neuroscience. For instance, the need to create a burning platform atmosphere at work can trigger a limbic response in employees. Instead of motivating people to change in a positive way, a burning platform makes them uncomfortable — thrusting change upon them. In another example, driving change from the top can trigger fear within employees because it deprives them of key needs that help them better navigate the social world in the workplace. These needs include status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness — the foundation of the SCARF model. If out of synch, these five needs have been shown in many neuroscience studies to activate the same threat circuitry activated by physical threats, like pain.
Keeping all this in mind, let us propose one idea we haven't explored yet. We strongly believe that we need to think about change differently. To begin, let's think about people differently — not as commodities to be hurried and pushed around but as sources of real and powerful competitive advantage. A second step is to see change differently — not just as a perpetual crisis, but as an opportunity to be better prepared and equipped to manage organizational shakeups as a normal part of doing business, and as an opportunity to personally develop and grow.
For many years, the training field has viewed organizational change as a process that is both linear and sequential. Instead, change has revealed itself to be non-linear and chaotic. It's time to find a new model — one that incorporates insights from neuroscience research and takes into account 21st century workplace dynamics and realities.
Note: Join McFarland and other experts at the Organizational Change and Neuroscience panel at 2:00pm on Wednesday, October 17, 2012, at the NeuroLeadership Summit in New York City. If you can't join in-person, you can live stream this session for free.

We Approach Diversity the Wrong Way

I was giving a morning keynote at a diversity conference when I asked the organizer what the rest of the day's sessions would be. "In the morning we have concurrent groups focusing on women, Baby Boomers, and the GLBTQ population," she said. "In the afternoon we have sessions on Asians, African-Americans, and the physically challenged." While I maintained a frozen smile and looked at her soberly, my brain was screaming, "Still? In 2012?"
Is dicing the workforce into pre-set categories going to encourage working together? If we go that route, we'll have to expand our diversity conferences by several days as we add sessions that address the unique needs of gay Asian people, physically challenged African-American workers, and, lest anyone be forgotten, the grievously under-served gay boomer Pacific Islander demographic.
If we broke people off into affinity groups because certain categories weren't thriving — not being promoted at the same rates as white men under 40 (who I call WMUFs), for instance — that would be a worthy business topic. That way, the employer's investment in each group should theoretically yield the same returns. And of course it is easy enough to spot when women or African Americans or GLBTQ people aren't being given the assignments that the WMUFs are getting. But things get complicated when we tell a manager, "In general your talent development is great, but you suck at promoting diversity." Can you blame a manager for complaining, "I'm promoting the person who seems most capable — is that wrong?" Wittingly or not, diversity has become a numbers game.
But our notions about different cultures are more primal than practical. We shouldn't be surprised, much less horrified, to find that people have beliefs about ethnic groups, genders, age groups, and other differentiators, and that people bring those beliefs — fairly or not — into the workplace. Human beings learn something once and rely on that learning forever. For example, we learn that a stove is hot as toddlers, and don't touch hot stoves again if we can help it. Stereotyping, the bedrock of prejudice, is just a variation on the decision rules (called heuristics) that guide us in mostly positive and adaptive ways growing up.
And although in today's business world we excel at managing overt, data-driven problems — we analyze, forecast, assess, and solve multi-layered problems like nobody's business — we don't know how to manage these more primal instincts. But it's high time we recognize human topics (like talking about our differences) for what they are — business topics.
On the plus side, the left-brained way we think about diversity gave me an opportunity to shift the frame in my keynote remarks at that diversity conference:
"Look," I said to the group. "We are not going to get better at confronting the differences that hamper our ability to work together by separating our people into broad-brush groups... Instead, we're going to get better at celebrating the family backgrounds, religious traditions, and ethnic heritage that our people bring with them to work. We can do that by talking about it — all the time — and by teaching people to talk about the 'sticky human stuff' in general."
I'm referring, of course, to those "uncomfortable" discussions. For example, a subordinate tells you: "The last two birthday parties in our department featured fake tombstones and black balloons. I'm older than either of the two birthday guests of honor, and I don't appreciate the ageist humor." Sticky topics range far beyond the diversity topic, to love, sex, physical challenges, interpersonal conflict, favoritism, death or injury, or family. We need to teach all of our people to talk about human topics — the ones that are conventionally outsourced to Human Resources or just plain avoided as "non-business" conversation. There's no affinity group for blonde Texan ex-cheerleaders or Asian IT guys, but we bring our ideas about those subgroups (and countless others) to work. So why not talk about it and build some trust and community in the process?
I see diversity on a spectrum with two poles, labeled "CoPo" and "MoCo." CoPo is the standard business solution for every sticky human issue — Company Policy. Good luck writing a policy that tells people how to talk openly and compassionately about religion, ethnic history, and other beliefs, and how to grow a person or a team in the process. MoCo is short for More Conversation. In fact, we can ask a co-worker "Did you say you're going to be in a Hindu wedding? That sounds amazing. What will happen there, exactly?" And that kind of open conversation should be encouraged among everyone, everyday; not contracted out to HR or siloed in affinity groups at the occasional diversity conference.
Exposure is the best tonic for fear and mistrust. When we can talk about being gay or Methodist or Republican or the adult child of an alcoholic at work, barriers start to drop. When we put HR in charge of diversity and otherwise sweep differences under the rug, those sticky-but-fertile conversations won't happen. How can we hope to build the tolerant, idea-rich cultures we need to power our businesses unless our employees can bring themselves fully to work?