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April 26, 2013

Untapped Talent: Unleashing the Power of the Hidden Workforce

Filed under: Book Reviews,General Management,Human Resources/Organizational Development,New Releases,Uncategorized — Tags: Monroe, Organizational Development, Talent, Untapped — Sally @ 10:04 am

Kudos to the author and publisher for coming up with such an intriguing title. It’s impossible not to wonder just who this “hidden workforce” is, and surprisingly, organizational development expert Dani Monroe reveals that an untapped source of talent is right under our noses: our current underutilized employees.

Over the course of my career, I saw hundreds of extremely intelligent, well-credentialed men and women with master’s degrees in business, degrees in engineering, math, technology, and liberal arts. They all had a strong desire to succeed in their work, but they all faced unique organizational obstacles. For a variety of reasons, many of which it took me years to uncover and understand, these professionals represented silenced voices in their workplaces. They represented what I’ve now come to define as “untapped talent”–professionals with relevant skills and abilities who aren’t making the most of them.

Before we look at the “variety of reasons” that causes a person to languish in an organization never realizing his or her potential, let’s define just who these folks are in context of Monroe’s Untapped Talent. “Untapped” doesn’t necessarily mean “unsuccessful,” at least in the way we recognize. “Ironically, the people who fall short of their potential often appear as if they have achieved the upper-middle-class American dream,” Monroe writes, explaining that despite outward appearances, these employees are often just going through the motions, no longer able to engage, not able to move forward. “They aren’t just hidden. They are, in a word, unhappy.” So this book isn’t so much geared toward finding diamonds in the rough; instead, it’s about polishing the slowly-tarnishing silver.

The author is careful to acknowledge that it is the responsibility of both the organization and the employee to solve this problem, and emphasizes that both the person and the organization will benefit from solving said problem. “When you find yourself in the hidden workforce,” Monroe warns, “…you lose. When that happens with the people on your team, your team and you lose. And your organization loses. And your customers and clients lose. And your community loses.” In other words, everyone wins by recognizing untapped talent–even if that person is yourself.

Monroe explains that there are a number of factors that contribute to losing good people within an organization: restricted access to the right people/mentors/resources/feedback, indoctrination or unification, seeing talent as nontransferable to other tasks/projects, promoting without training, assumptions about which people are appropriate for certain roles, exclusion from decision-making, and general passivity. At play here, she says, is an “unconscious bias” that limits our ability to be creative and progressive thinkers.

So how can organizations change? First, address the culture. “[A] culture of talent stewardship begins with the informal practices of its leaders. These leaders take the time to get to know people throughout their organizations, not just those within their immediate sphere of influence.” Then, appreciate the importance of soft skills (in addition to intelligence and technical skills.) “The nontangible nature of the skills makes it difficult for some people to recognize their importance in daily operations.”
And how can the employees change? Monroe tells us to become “personally sound” which includes self-awareness, confidence, just sort of settled with ourselves, so that we can clearly see what we bring to the table.

Getting to these untapped talents begins with a simple, but often difficult, three-step process. It starts with identifying our crucible moments. Then we must reflect on how those moments shaped us and where they are taking us. Finally we recognize ourselves with who we were, who we are, and who we want to become.

Circling around to how this concentration on the self can help change an organization, Monroe says that after we have achieved a sense of personal soundness that (re)sparks our own engagement, it is important to mentor others. How do you recognize untapped talent in your organization? Typically, Monroe says, these people, no matter what work they currently do, display the 3 R’s “resourcefulness, resilience, and resolve” and she closes the book with chapters on each.

Untapped Talent is an efficient book and Monroe doesn’t spend a lot of time offering anecdotes or case studies. Instead, she relies on her expertise to lay out this common conundrum and offer pragmatic fixes. But that’s not to say the book lacks passion. Clearly Monroe is a champion of the underappreciated and/or the underperforming, and it is clear that helping people find fulfillment and achieve their potential motivates her work. Both leaders and employees can benefit greatly from reading Untapped Talent, in order to recognize that untapped talent within yourself or your organization.

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January 30, 2013

Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Filed under: New Releases,Personal Development — Tags: decision-making, Holmes, Mastermind, mindfulness, psychology, science, Sherlock — Sally @ 6:51 am

Have you ever driven to or from work only to arrive at your destination not remembering much at all about the drive? If someone asked you to describe the colors of the other houses on your street, could you? We often excuse our lack of attention or memory by saying that we are “on autopilot.” How much time do you think you spend at your desk, in a meeting, at the dinner table on mental autopilot? And as such, how much do you miss? Test yourself:

How many steps lead up to your house? (I personally could not tell you precisely.)

This is the question Sherlock Holmes poses to Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” How many steps lead up to 221 B Baker Street? Watson cannot say, but of course Holmes can. And it is with this example that author, psychologist, and journalist Maria Konnikova opens her new book, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, and with it her entertaining gambit: Sherlock Holmes was a master of a mindful interaction with the world, and by learning to think like Holmes, you too can engage in “improving our faculty of mindful thought and in using it to accomplish more, think better, and decide more optimally.”

All too often, when it comes to our own minds, we are surprisingly mindless. We sail on, blithely unaware of how much we are missing, of how little we understand about our own thought process–and how much better we could be if only we’d taken the time to understand and to reflect. Like Watson, we plod along the same staircase tens, hundreds, thousands of times, multiple times a day, and we can’t begin to recall the most mundane details about them….

If you are skeptical about how serious a book touting a methodology belonging to a fictional character can be, Konnikova would answer that while Holmes was indeed fictitious, he was a product of both his author and of the day. Arthur Conan Doyle, Konnikova explains, was known to be quite a resourceful investigator in his own right. And Doyle created Holmes at a time when “the scientific method was coming into its prime in all manners of thinkings and doings–from evolution to radiography, general relativity to the discovery of germs and anesthesia, behaviorism to psychoanalysis–then why ever not in the principles of thought itself?”

It is here, in observation and inference and deduction, that we come to the heart of what it is exactly that makes Holmes who he is, distinct from every other detective who appeared before, or indeed, after: the detective who elevated the art of detection to a precise science.

She lays out Holmes’ use of the scientific method while also teaching us the process. Observation serves as the base for solving any problem and represents the objective overview. Then comes the time for hypothesis and trialing possibilities until a conclusion is reached. The problem for those of us who are less Holmes and more Watson is that scientific reasoning takes time and it takes practice. But Mastermind makes the practice fun, even somewhat fantastical as Konnikova assigns Holmes a “real-life” personae:

Holmes had thousands of hours of practice on us. His habits have been formed over countless opportunities, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, for every year since his early childhood. It’s easy to become discouraged in his presence–but it might, in the end, be more productive to simply become inspired instead. If he can do it, so can we.

Konnikova is so clearly a fan of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works that it seems she must know the stories by heart. But she never strays far from her overall purpose: to not only celebrate with us the popularity of this character, but to learn from him. And despite the unusual element of intertwining Doyle’s stories into her book, Konnikova is all seriousness about her subject matter. The scope of the book includes a chapter on how the typical brain is likely to store information (titled with Holmes’ own metaphor, “The Brain Attic”), then moves on to how we can improve our powers of observation (“Stocking the Brain Attic”), accelerate creativity to create hypotheses (“Exploring…”), ignite our deductive reasoning (“Navigating…”), and finally, continue with the practice (“Maintaining…”) until you’ve stockpiled your own “Dynamic Attic.” She concludes with a short chapter on failure. Like Holmes, we are human beings who will make mistakes when employing our new deductive talents. It’s a sure thing, and even Holmes’ creator Doyle was not exempt, Konnikova explains with an entertaining story about Doyle having been duped by some fairies, or rather, pictures of fairies.

We are all limited by our knowledge and context. And we’d do well to remember it. Just because we can’t fathom something doesn’t make it not so. And just because we screw up for lack of knowledge doesn’t mean we’ve done so unredeemable–or that we can’t keep learning. When it comes to the mind, we can all be hunters.

Other than being an enjoyable read, Mastermind reminds us that we all can stand to turn off the auto-pilot more often and gain control over how intensely we engage with the world. The benefits are “elementary.”

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September 13, 2012

Infographics

Filed under: Blog,Book Reviews,Design,Marketing,New Releases — Michael @ 7:30 am

My 3-year-old daughter will only tolerate a certain ratio of words to pictures. Generally the pictures win the war for her attention. Looking at the popularity and apparent effectiveness of infographics, adults actually like pictures too (I certainly do). According to this infographic, created by Neo Mammalian Studios, there is some basis for this preference. Content publishers using infographics see increased traffic growth, and data or content presented in the form of infographics tend to have higher likelihood of viral lift. Perhaps this is because our brains are more likely to hang on to information that is communicated visually. The Power of Visual Storytelling is the subtitle of a new book on infographics by Jason Lankow, Josh Ritchie, and Ross Crooks, founders of the multimedia company Column Five.

Infographics: The Power of Visual Storytelling is a picture book (3-year-olds rejoice!) that provides a good overview of the medium and touches on the broader concerns that publishers might have when considering using an infographic. The chief question: what are your goals? This leads to questions about what kind of format should you use: static, motion, or interactive. What is your audience, and how does your audience shape your story? How will you distribute your content, and who can you work with to help spread the impact of this content? Branding via infographics (yes!)? But then you can get a general idea of what’s happening in this book straight from the authors’ short segment at the beginning, titled “The Purpose of This Book”:

…we will focus primarily on [infographic] implementation in improving business communication, from their new-found use in marketing to their more traditional application in reporting and gaining business insight. Along the way, we will also discuss some of the related pruposes for their use in other fields, which will shed light on the approach and critical framework for analyzing their quality and efficacy that we will establish toward the end of this book. Our primary purpose is to provide an in-depth understanding of the value of their use…

Don’t misunderstand: the book is more than simply pictures. But the rich and engaging graphic content included here probably accounts for more than 70% of the 263 pages. There is plenty of explanation to accompany the graphic demonstrations, and perhaps this ratio has something to do with the fact that this is a book about the power of graphics—what better a way to communicate the what and why than to offer demonstrative evidence. If it’s true that human beings are more likely to retain information presented in graphic-rich contexts, then it makes sense for this book to be rich with graphics. From a designer’s perspective, there is little discussion of technical details, but explaining the how is not quite what the authors intended to do. That said, the pictorial content is thoroughly engaging, regardless of what you hope to get out of this book. Whether you need to beef up your content, increase virility, or you simply need something for your coffee table, this book is interesting.

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September 10, 2012

Daring Greatly

Filed under: Big Ideas,Leadership,New Releases,Quotations,Thought Leaders — dylan @ 4:46 pm

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,”
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

I’ve always loved that quote from the two-term president, naturalist and explorer, soldier and cowboy progressive Teddy Roosevelt. So when I cracked open Brené Brown’s new book, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, and found that she begins her exploration of vulnerability with an excerpt of that quote—that she had, in fact, pulled the very title of the book from Roosevelt’s speech—I was immediately intrigued and interested in more.

But what does Roosevelt’s description of “the strong man”—the man “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly”—have to do with vulnerability? The author explains it beautifully in her introduction:

The first time I read this quote, I thought, This is vulnerability. Everything I’ve learned from over a decade of research on vulnerability has taught me this exact lesson. Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.

Vulnerability is not weakness, and the uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure we face every day are not optional. Our only choice is a question of engagement. Our willingness to own and engage with our vulnerability determines the depth of our courage and the clarity of our purpose; the level to which we protect ourselves from being vulnerable is a measure of our ear and disconnection.

When we spend our lives waiting until we’re perfect or bulletproof before we walk into the arena, we ultimately sacrifice relationships and opportunities that may or may not be recoverable, we squander our precious time, and we turn our backs on our gifts, those unique contributions that only we can make.

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don’t exist in the human experience. We must walk into the arena, whatever it may be—a new relationship, an important meeting, our creative process, or a difficult family meeting—with courage and a willingness to engage. Rather than sitting on the the sidelines and hurling judgement and advice, we must dare to show up and let ourselves be seen. This is vulnerability. This is daring greatly. In the meantime, here’s a bit more from Ms. Brown herself:

In a note that came to me with the book, the publicist wrote that “Brené is the new Tipping Point … Vulnerability is the new leadership.” Curious, cryptic words at first, but just three pages into the book and I understood what she meant. Daring Greatly will be in bookstores tomorrow, and you’ll be hearing more from us on this book, and I hope many others, very soon.

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September 29, 2011

Uncertainty

Filed under: Big Ideas,Blog,New Releases — Jon @ 2:24 pm

I remember taking swimming lessons when I was a kid. I hated them. They were early in the morning so the water was a bit colder than usual, and besides, it was swimming – something I couldn’t really do, and worst case scenario, if I really screwed up, could drown from it. Not a fun way to start your day, in my book.

The worst was the day most people in the class feared: The High Dive. For some, it was a great opportunity to finally get to try it. But for the rest of us, it was the ultimate dread, the chance that something could really go wrong. I remember as I was waiting in line I could barely stand thinking about what would happen when I jumped off – that leap seemed contradictory to nearly everything I had learned up to that point, yet now I was expected to climb to a high platform and jump off into water I had barely learned to swim in. The risk seemed outrageous.

Jonathan Fields’ new book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, came out today, and it takes my high dive scenario and translates it to the adult world. What scares us? And how we react to that fear can determine what opportunities and successes we experience, and don’t. For Jonathan, his high dive was much higher than mine. He quit a well-paid job as a NY attorney to open a Yoga studio. That’s already a leap, but consider these other factors: he wasn’t trained to be a yoga instructor, and the day after he signed the lease for the building he’d use as the studio was a profoundly bad day: September 11, 2001.

Check out the story in his own words:

For him, the risk was high, but the circumstances surrounding that risk brought an even greater focus on his passion and doing what really mattered for him and his interest in helping others. This book is his story, but not just that, it greatly encourages those who read it to not be so afraid of the unknown, and to take a chance on things that truly are important to you. Fear and uncertainty can be what holds you back, or what inspires you to think creatively. How we deal with it is our choice.

As for my choice? I climbed the high dive, stood on the edge, and looked down. I could faintly hear my instructor yell, “Don’t look down. Look at the clock over on the wall, and then just take one step forward!” I was terrified. Time stood still.

I stared at the clock, and…

We all share these kinds of experiences, and without getting too hung up on what I did, ask yourself what fear and doubt you can confront. Uncertainty is a great guide if you need one.

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March 22, 2011

World Water Day and The Big Thirst

Filed under: Current Events,New Releases,Social Responsibilty — dylan @ 4:35 am

Designated by the United Nations General Assembly in 1993, World Water Day is held annually on March 22. It’s a day to focus attention on the importance of freshwater and sustainable management of water resources that grew out of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. With over half of the world’s population now living in cities, this year’s focus is understandably on water and urbanization, under the slogan “Water for cities: responding to the urban challenge.”

To observe the day, we’d like to share some sobering (yet mind-boggling) statistics that Charles Fishman, author of the upcoming The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, was kind enough to share with us.

But first, a little background on Fishman. He has been a favorite of ours for years here at 800-CEO-READ. His previous book, The Wal-Mart Effect, was a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week bestseller, a finalist for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and a Jack Covert Selects in 2006. And we’ve used his 2007 article for Fast Company, Message in a Bottle, as an example of superb writing in our writing sessions at past author pow-wows (author gatherings we host every year).

The statistics and factoids below come from his new book, the aforementioned Big Thirst, being released on April 12 by Free Press.

➻ Water is the oldest substance you’ll ever come in contact with. The water coming from your kitchen faucet is about 4.3 billion years old.

➻ A typical American uses 99 gallons of actual water a day—for cooking, washing, and the #1 personal use in the U.S., toilet flushing.

➻ The average cost of water at home in the U.S.—for always-on, purified drinking water—is $1.12 per day, less than the cost of a single half liter of Evian at a convenience store.

➻ Americans spend almost as much each year on bottled water ($21 billion) as they do maintaining the nation’s entire water infrastructure ($29 billion).

➻ Microchip factories require water that is so clean it is considered dangerous to drink.

➻ The difference in price between home tap water and a half-liter bottle of water at the convenience store is a factor of 3,000—you could take the bottle of Poland Spring that you buy for $1.29 at the local 7-Eleven and refill it every day for 8 years before the cost of the tap water would equal that original price, $1.29.

➻ We often hear that “only” 2 percent of the water on Earth is fresh and available for human use, outside of the polar ice caps.

The “only” 2 percent comes to 1.5 billion liters of fresh water for each person on the planet. It’s 400 million gallons for every person alive. That’s a cube of fresh water for each us as long as a football field and as tall as a 30 story building.

➻ The U.S. uses more water in a single day than it uses oil in a year.

The U.S. uses more water in four days than the world uses oil in a year.

➻ Enough water leaks from aging water pipes in the U.S. each day to supply all the residents of any of 30 states.

➻ The city of London loses 25 percent of the water it pumps.

➻ Seventy-one percent of earth is covered with water, but water is small compared to earth. If Earth were the size of a minivan, all the water on Earth would fit in a half-liter bottle in a single cup holder.

➻ Not one of the 35 largest cities in India has 24-hour-a-day water service. Even the global brand-name cities like Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai offer water service only an hour or two a day.

➻ Treating diarrhea consumes 2 percent of the GDP of India. The nation spends $20 billion a year on diarrhea—$400 million a week—more than the total economies of half the nations in the world.

➻ A common statistic is the 1 billion people in the world—one in six—don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.

But a less well-known statistic is equally stunning: 1.6 billion people in the world—one in four—have to walk at least 1 km each day to get water and carry it home, or depend on someone who does the water walk.

Just the basic water needs of a family of four—50 gallons total—means carrying (on your head) 400 pounds of water, walking 1 km or more, for as many trips as required, each day.

➻ Between 1900 and 1936, clean water in U.S. cities cut the rate of child deaths in half.

➻ Cooling water a typical U.S. nuclear power plan requires: 30 million gallons per hour

Water that New York City requires: 46 million gallons per hour

➻ Water required to maintain a typical Las Vegas golf course: 2,507 gallons for every 18-hole round of golf

Each hole of golf, for each golfer, requires 139 gallons of irrigation water.

➻ Average time a molecule of water spends in the atmosphere, after evaporating, before returning to Earth as rain or snow: 9 days

➻ Amount of water that falls on a single acre of ground when it receives 1 inch of rain: 27,154 gallons

This year’s official World Water Day ceremonies are being held in Cape Town, but there are events being held worldwide. To see if there is one in your area, visit the World Water Day website.

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March 15, 2011

The Filter Bubble exclusive offer

Filed under: Blog,Internet,New Releases — Jon @ 3:35 am

Are you getting the information you need or is it being hidden from you?

This is the question examined in Eli Pariser’s new book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You. Most sites on the web have begun using your online history as cues to narrow down what you will see in the future. As they fine-tune their algorithms and personalize the content they provide, we will increasingly each live in our own, unique information universe, our own “filter bubble.” We’ll receive news that is familiar, pleasant, and confirms our beliefs—and since the filters are invisible, we won’t know what is being hidden from us.

**We are offering a special opportunity for up to 50 people to join Eli Pariser on an exclusive Skype chat, where he’ll provide a 50 minute talk, including Q&A, with your group. As a bonus, 50 copies of his book, The Filter Bubble, will be provided. Please contact Jon (at) 800ceoread.com if you are interested in hosting this event for your group. Limited sessions available.

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February 15, 2011

How the West Was Lost – An Excerpt

Filed under: Current Events,Excerpts and Essays,New Releases — dylan @ 5:46 pm

Farrar, Straus and Giroux has some really great books on economics out right now, with more in the works and on the way. I will talk about Shraga F. Biran’s Opportunism on this blog soon, but I’d like to turn now to a book that’s being released today—New York Times bestselling author Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost.

In this story, Jimmy Stewart doesn’t get the girl and Gregory Peck never makes a dime gambling. The book is about the economic supremacy of the West, how it was achieved and why it is currently in decline. Unlike the many scare-mongers out there, however, Dambisa actually offers reasonable solutions to arrest that decline. In the excerpt below from the opening of the book, “Once Upon a Time In the West” (which does not even mention Henry Fonda or Charles Bronson), Ms. Moyo discusses “The Pillars of Growth,” the great possibilities at the confluence of capital, labor and technology, and why “an idea has a marginal cost of zero.”

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The Pillars of Growth BY DAMBISA MOYO

Much ado has been made of the seemingly inevitable economic decline of the industrialized West—the United States, in particular—and the ‘rise of the rest,’ led by China. While most of this debate has tended to centre on historical patterns of imperialism and strategic and military considerations, canonical models of economic growth also offer a framework that highlights just how the West continues to misallocate the key ingredients necessary for long-term sustainable economic success and growth, to its detriment.

The evolution of growth theory has been a fascinating one, and one that cannot adequately be expounded in the short space that this book allows. An earlier incarnation in the economics literature began with the Harrod-Domar idea, which identified growth as solely a
function of one input—capital.

In 1956, Vobert Solow, an American professor at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, built on this one-input model by demonstrating that labour too played a crucial and determinate role in delivering growth. For “his contributions to the theory of economic growth,” Solow was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1987, and for a time the Solow model, which saw growth as determined by capital and labour, remained the backbone of the macroeconomic growth literature for many years.

However, it must have come as something of a surprise that when these seemingly logical explanations for growth were subjected to empirical scrutiny, they accounted for only 40 per cent of a country’s economic prosperity. There was a missing component; and a large one at that. This hitherto unidentified factor—the 60 per cent—has come to be known as total factor productivity, a catch-all phrase which encompasses technological development as well as anything not captured by the capital and labour inputs, such as culture and institutions. Thus canonical economic models point to three essential ingredients which determine economic growth: capital, labour, and total factor productivity. These are the pistons which drive the cylinders of economic growth. Finely tuned and working in unison, they motor an engine of near limitless power.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the might, the sheer potency, of these three components coming together better than the American moon landing in July 1969.The gauntlet thrown down by President Kennedy in 1961, to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade, could not have been more ambitious. Goaded by the seemingly more adept Russian space programme, which was first with an object—Sputnik-I (1957)mdash;first w th a living creature—Laika the dog (1957)and, of course, first with a man—Yuri Gagarin (1961)—Kennedy captured the spirit of the times in his famous words: “W e choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

The history of the Apollo programme, its personalities, its spirit of adventure, remains one of the most celebrated moments in American (and world) history, and rightly so. But it is also the supreme example of the confluence of capital, labour and technology, each at the height of its powers and all of them working as one. America had the capital, it had the labour, and, ultimately, it had the technology. The facts and figures speak volumes.

In terms of capital, the costs of the Apollo project were astronomical. The annual budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) increased from US$500m in 1960 to a high point of US$5.2bn in 1965$mdash;representing 5.3 per cent of that year’s federal budget (5 per cent of today’s U S budget would be around US$125bn). As a reference point, the Vietnamese war is thought to have cost around US$111bn (US$686bn in 2008 dollars). A ll told, the final cost of the Apollo project was between US$20bn and US$25bn in 1969 dollars (or approximately US$135bn in 2005 dollars).

Cash was only one component of the Apollo challenge. To realize its goal America had to draw upon the two other essentials: labour and technology. Luckily for America, it could.

To this end, a huge army of personnel were enlisted. By 1966, NASA’s civil service list had grown to36,000 people from the 10,000 the agency employed in 1960. NASA’s space programme would also require that the agency call upon thousands upon thousands of outside technicians and scientists. From 1960 to 1965 individuals working on the programme increased by a factor of 10, from 36,000 to an astonishing 376,000. The more critical point here was not that NASA needed to find such a vast amount of talent, but rather that it could. And where the talent did not exist, NASA created it. Private industries, research institutions and universities provided the majority of these personnel. It was this labour force that would invent and build the technology which would catapult America to the forefront of the space race and put Neil A rm strong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon—an accomplishment often cited to this day as the greatest technological achievement in history.

The technological feats of the Apollo programme were truly awe-inspiring. While marveling at the wonder, the approximately one fifth of the world’s population that watched the live transmission of the first Apollo moon landing would have struggled to appreciate the phenomenal behind-the-scenes technological brilliance that had made this possible.

The idea of a lunar landing had been through ten years of trials, prototypes and numerous setbacks in order to make it a reality. From the huge Saturn rockets that had the power to lift a US destroyer into space, to the lunar module that landed two 150-pound men on the moon, and to each of the hundreds of thousands of components and parts that had to be researched, designed, built and tested, the apparatus of the Apollo was breathtaking in its vastness and complexity.

It did not stop there: the programme spurred advances in many areas of technology peripheral to rocketry and manned spaceflight, including avionics, telecommunications and computing, as well as in the fields of engineering, statistical methods, and civil, mechanical and electrical engineering. This is the power of ideas. Beyond the immediate machine or contraption the spill-over effects are the real gains of technology. And because once an idea is out it can be used and improved upon by anyone, anywhere, an idea has a marginal cost of zero.

Even if it had wished to, no country other than America had the capability—the capital, the labour, the technology—to plan, to develop and to execute the moon landing. Russia was not so far behind in space investment, hence the emergence of the Space Race, but over time it became clear that it would not be able to compete. The absence of any one of these elements would have meant that America couldn’t have achieved its lunar ambitions. The point is, with these three factors in place the implausible becomes possible; economies, and therefore countries, become forces to be reckoned with. Yet if they are misused, misallocated, a country’s economic decline is not just on the cards but accelerated.

What is clear, and what [How the West Was Lost] will demonstrate, is that deliberate (American public policies are m aking things worse, exacerbating this economic step down by weakening these three components.

America’s economic growth is not only less than it would otherwise have been, but its overall economic decline is undoubtedly faster and more acute than it would be with better policymaking.

[How the West Was Lost] is an exposition of how these three factors are individually and collectively contributing to the decline of the West. Further, two aspects are fundamental: their respective quantity and quality. To hammer home the point, it is not only the quantity of capital, the quantity of labour, the quantity of technology that is of concern; what has equal bearing in determining economic success or failure is their quality. That is to say, the manner in which the capital is allocated, the aptitude of the workforce and the nature of the technology.

Excerpted from How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly—and the Stark Choices Ahead
Copyright © 2011 by Dambisa Moyo. All rights reserved.
Published in February 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dambisa Moyo is an international economist who comments on the macroeconomy and global affairs. She is the author of the New York Times Bestseller Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa.

In 2009 Ms. Moyo was named by TIME magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World,” and was nominated to the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders Forum. Her writing regularly appears in economic and finance-related publications such as the Financial Times, The Economist and The Wall Street Journal.

She completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University and holds a Masters degree from Harvard University. She completed an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and an MBA in Finance at the American University in Washington D.C.

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October 22, 2010

Hacking Work

Filed under: Big Ideas,Book Reviews,Information Technology,Innovation,New Releases — dylan @ 1:36 pm

Does the infrastructure your company set up to help you get your work done actually get in the way of you doing it? Does it slow you down, or even create extra work instead of streamlining it? Well then, it’s time to start hacking work. In fact, you may be doing so already.

Are you using online tools to move information amongst your team to get around your corporate firewalls? Did you start a ladies night out to strengthen relationships at work and break down hierarchical divisions? Did you use your social network to help solve problems at work your boss couldn’t, or wouldn’t, address? If so, then you have been hacking work.

As Bill Jensen and Josh Klein explain in Hacking Work: Breaking Stupid Rules for Smart Results, hacking work, like (ethical) computer hacking, is all about “taking the usual ways of doing things and work[ing] around them to produce improved results.” And, like any great idea, the implications range from the micro to macro—from an individual using Gmail to get around their IT department’s storage constraints, to Barack Obama going straight to individuals for $25 donations to work around the monied interests of traditional political fundraising. One of the more interesting examples is the Diaspora Project‘s work to build the first open-source social network to be owned by the individuals using it, with the goal of putting users back in control of how their information and content is used, accessed, and seen online.

Jensen and Klein describe themselves as “just two guys who have dedicated [their] professional lives to finding work-arounds to corporate bullshit,” and their book is about breaking rules for the greater good. As they write at the beginning of Section 2:

Stupid rules shift the costs of work from the company onto you without delivering equal or better value back to you.

This means you pay the price for someone else’s bureaucracy or, worse, for their bad decisions.

Breaking stupid rules means getting smarter results: for you, your team and your company.

That last point is key. Hacking work is not done with malicious intent, but to “save business from itself.” It is done not only to help make your work easier, but to protect your company from its own inefficiencies by working around them—whether they be technical or relational inefficiencies, firewalls or power structures. When done right, it can fix a system that is broken and foster creativity among workers where there were once only obstacles. When done right, you’re working better, faster and smarter, which in turn makes the company around you work better, faster and smarter.

And as we’ve seen from the examples above, your “company” can be much bigger than the where you go to work everyday. It can be an online community or, even a country. The authors also use the example of Iranians using Twitter and Facebook to document protests in their country as an instance of hacking work. But they don’t stop there. Hacking work might just have been the kick in our collective evolutionary pants.

Agriculture was most likely a work hack: Instead of always roaming over the next hill every time the clan needed grain, someone cleverly figured out they could grow it closer to camp. Gronk, their leader, neither asked for nor approved this change. And his head of manufacturing—Club and Spear Guy—most certainly felt threatened. The clan’s operations would have to change to meet the needs of of its new farmers.

Harvard Business Review has called the book “one of the top ten breakthrough ideas for 2010,” but as the authors note above, humans have been hacking work long before this year. And it all begins with three motives:

Curiosity: “I wonder what would happen if…”
Imagination: “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if…”
Drive: “I will not accept ‘no.’ There has got to be a better way!”

No one expects you to change the foundations of human social organization, but there is always a better way close at hand. So… how are you hacking work?

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October 18, 2010

An Excerpt from Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing

Filed under: Marketing,New Releases — 800-CEO-READ @ 4:47 pm

Ernan Roman didn’t just fall off the marketing turnip wagon. Rather than just discussing the latest trends in marketing—in social media and elsewhere—he puts them in a larger context and provides you with performance indicators and benchmarks to measure your marketing efforts over time. And he has the experience to do so… As president of his own direct marketing consultancy, Ernan Roman has worked on marketing strategy with companies such as Microsoft, NBC Universal, Walt Disney, Reliant Energy, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM.

Roman’s latest book, Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing: A Proven 5-Step Process to Create Customers Who Care, Spend, and Stay, was released today by McGraw-Hill, and while it won’t necessarily leave you a warm and fuzzy feeling about the new wave of marketing and a desire to conquer the world, it will leave you with something that may be of more use to your company: real, proven strategies that you can implement to get your marketing to start bringing in money—rather than just spending it. It is a research, data and analysis-driven book, so you’ll want to dig into it rather than just browse, but it’s worth the effort to do so.

Ernan was kind enough to provide an excerpt from the book’s introduction that outlines the five steps of his strategy.

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In recent years, there have been many customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives that have not listened well to the Voice of the Customer. As well intentioned as these initiatives have been, we must acknowledge that today’s customers do not feel like being “managed” (or, for that matter, manipulated).

Going forward, the premise of marketing and indeed the entire enterprise, must begin not with the idea of “managing” relationships—as we might “manage” a crisis or “manage” risk. Rather, we must begin with the vision of creating a community in which customers know their voice is being heard and acted on and in which they therefore look forward to engaging with us because they derive value from doing so.

We must acknowledge that today’s customers do not feel

like being “managed” (or, for that matter, manipulated).

The five steps that allow us to engage customers in this way are illustrated below. Notice that the first step, Voice of Customer, drives the subsequent four steps and that all five steps are interrelated.

STEP 1.
CONDUCT AND APPLY VOC RELATIONSHIP RESEARCH

This involves in-depth interviews with prospects, customers, and key stakeholders to understand how they expect the marketer to satisfy their needs for a high-value relationship that includes increasingly relevant offers, services, and communications.

By doing this, MSC Industrial Direct, a Fortune 1000 industrial supply company, was able to:

Avoid investing time and resources in a campaign to “win back” customers who had not really left at all, but instead had changed their buying patterns.
Develop competitively powerful strategies for strengthening relationships with high-value customers.
Identify significant opportunities to further drive incremental sales within the most critical customer segments.

STEP 2.
CREATE VOC-DRIVEN OPT-IN RELATIONSHIP STRATEGIES

This means engaging prospects and consumers to tell you exactly what they value and want from you… and what they don’t want from you.

By creating an opt-in relationship marketing program, software giant Microsoft experienced the following “unprecedented” results:

Opt-in rates that range between 45 to 95 percent
Response rates that are currently performing in the double digits
Revenue that is expected to continue being significantly greater than the revenue from the control population

STEP 3.
CREATE A VOC-DRIVEN MULTICHANNEL MIX

This means creating an integrated, multichannel marketing program that engages and inspires your customer.

The Walt Disney Companies created such a program for its resort operations. As a result, Disney has achieved the following:

Grown the database by over 100 percent
Increased the number of targeted interactions by over 10 times
Expanded e-mail coverage by over 10 times

STEP 4.
CREATE A VOC-DRIVEN SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE

This means creating strategies or real-time engagement with your customers and prospects.

By doing this, Ford Motor Company not only took control of a public relations crisis but also generated the following:

4.5 million YouTube views
3.5 million Twitter impressions
80,000 “hand raisers” who asked to be kept up to date on the U.S. launch of the Ford Fiesta (A staggering 97 percent of the hand raisers did not own a Ford vehicle.)

STEP 5.
INVEST IN AN EXCELLENT CUSTOMER SERVICE EXPERIENCE

This means not pretending that customer service is something for operations to worry about.

By building this philosophy into its corporate culture, QVC experienced the following:

20 percent reduction in complaints and/or queries from customers
93 percent repurchase rate among the most satisfied customers.

These companies prove that the VOC-driven vision is attainable and drives remarkable increases in revenue. I believe we all should be striving to attain this level of excellence—no matter how “customer centric” we consider our organizations to be right now.

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If you’d like to delve into specifics of each step and read about them coming to life successfully in almost every industry, get yourself a copy of the book today.

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