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Harvard Business School Professor Sunil Gupta explores the infiltration of Amazon into dozens of industries including web services, grocery, online video streaming, content creation and, oh, did we mention physical bookstores? What’s the big plan? Is the company spread too thin? Or is it poised for astronomical success?

 

Brian Kenny: In the world of computer science, Jon Wainwright is kind of a big deal. A computer language pioneer, he was the principle architect of both Script 5 and Manuscript. What makes John a legend has nothing to do with programming. Let me explain.

On April 3, 1995, Jon was in need of work-related reading material. He fired up his T1 modem and navigated the fledgling internet to the beta version of a new online bookstore. With the click of a mouse, he became the very first customer to make a purchase on Amazon.com. Fluid concepts and creative analogies, the book he purchased, never became a best seller, but Amazon took off like a rocket ship and hasn't slowed down since. With a market cap larger than all other retailers combined, including Walmart, Amazon owns 49 percent of all online sales. In the time it takes me to read this introduction, the company will earn over $300,000. Will we ever see the likes of it again?

Today, we'll hear from Professor Sunil Gupta, about his case entitled, 

Amazon in 2017. I'm your host Brian Kenny. You're listening to Cold Call, part of the HBR Presents network.

Sunil Gupta is an expert in the area of digital technology and its impact on consumer behavior and firm strategy. He is the author of the recently published, Driving Digital Strategy, a Guide to Re-imagining Your Business. This case is the perfect stepping-off point to cover some of the ideas in that book. Sunil, thank you for joining me today.

Sunil Gupta: Thank you for having me.

Brian Kenny: The case is a great foundational piece to launch into some of the ideas [of the book]. I'm going to assume that anybody listening to this podcast has purchased something on Amazon, or watched something on Amazon Prime. I had forgotten about their modest beginnings, and just how much they've grown and expanded and changed… Let me start by asking you … what led you to write the case?

Sunil Gupta: As you said, everybody knows Amazon. At the same time, Amazon has become quite complex. They have grown into a business that defies imagination. That raises the question, is Amazon spreading itself too thin? Are they an online retailer? Are they video producers? Are they now making movies? In strategy, we learn everybody should focus. Obviously, Jeff Bezos missed that class.

You start to wonder, what is the magic behind this? What is the secret sauce that makes Amazon such a huge success? Their market cap almost touched a trillion dollars a few months ago.

Brian Kenny: Insane. The case takes place in 2017. (Editor’s note: 

Amazon in 2019 has just been published.) Start us off by setting it up. How does the case open?

Sunil Gupta: At that point in time, Amazon had just bought Whole Foods, which was very counterintuitive. Amazon has been an online player. Why is it getting into an offline business? That was against their grain as an online player. The second thing is, food is a very low-margin category. Amazon is a technology company; its stock is going to stratosphere. Amazon had been (operating) Amazon Fresh for 10 years, and hasn't succeeded. Why don't they give up? That was a starting point. Of course, the case describes all the other 20 things they have done in the last 20 years and asked the question, what is Amazon up to?

IT'S ALMOST A 25-YEAR-OLD COMPANY THAT STILL WORKS LIKE A STARTUP.”

Brian Kenny: Amazon and Jeff Bezos are sort of synonymous. He's a cult of personality there, like Steve Jobs was with Apple. Jeff's been in the news a lot lately for other reasons, you know, personal reasons. He is probably one of the best-known CEOs in the world. What's he like as a leader?

Sunil Gupta: I don't know him personally. Based on the research I've done, he certainly is very customer obsessed. He's focused on customer. He always says, "You start with the customer and work backwards." He still takes calls on the call center. The culture is very entrepreneurial, but also very heart driven. I mean, the idea for Amazon Prime evidently didn't come from Jeff Bezos, it came from a person low in the organization. He's quick to adapt the ideas if he sees some merit in it. It's almost a 25-year-old company that still works like a startup.

Brian Kenny: Was the original concept for Amazon . I mean, he sold books originally. Was it ever really a book company?

Sunil Gupta: I think it started more as an online retailer. Book was an easy thing, because everybody knows exactly what you're buying. It's no concern about the quality. His premise in the online store was a very clear value proposition of three things. One was convenience, that you can shop in your pajamas, so we don't have to fight the traffic of Boston or Los Angeles. The second was infinite variety. I don't have the constraint of a physical store. Even if I have Walmart, which is a huge store, I can only stock so many things. As a result, you only have the top sellers. In Amazon, I can have the long tail of any product, if you will. The third was price. It was cheaper, simply because I don't have fixed costs of the brick and mortar store. I can reduce the cost structure and therefore I can be cheaper. Those were the three key value propositions. That's how it started. The idea was, I'll start with books and then move on to electronics and other things. But then of course, it moved far beyond being an online retailer.

Brian Kenny: This gets into some of the ideas in your book. I was really intrigued in the book about the notion of what kind of business are we in? Just that question alone. At face value, it looked like Amazon was a retailer. They went in directions that nobody could have imagined.

Sunil Gupta: Right. The purpose of the case was to illustrate how these are all connected. From a distance they look completely disconnected, and completely lack focus. Let's start with how the concept evolved.

The first thing was, as I said, it was online retailer. Very soon it became a marketplace. Now, what is a marketplace? They basically allow third-party sellers to also sell on the Amazon platform, which is distinct from a traditional retailer. Walmart doesn't allow me to set up shop within Walmart, but Amazon allows me to do that. Now, why would they do that? Simply because it increases the variety that they can sell on the platform. Therefore, consumers are quite happy with the variety of the product they can get on Amazon. Amazon gets commission without having the inventory and the capital cost.

Perhaps the most important thing about becoming a platform is that it creates what we call network effects. If everything I can buy is available on Amazon, more consumers are likely to go there. Because there are more consumers, more sellers are likely to go there. It just feeds itself and becomes a virtual cycle. That's why there is only one Amazon. Even if I start an online retail [store] that is in many ways better than Amazon, nobody's coming to gupta.com, because buyers and sellers are not there. That became the next phase, changing from an online retailer to a marketplace. Then it went into AWS (Amazon Web Services), and you say, "How can it go into being a technology company and compete with IBM and Microsoft?" It was competing with Walmart before.

Sunil Gupta: In fact, at that point, Wall Street was very down on that. They said, "What is Bezos thinking?" The idea, if you think about it, was very simple. Amazon was building (web services technology) for its own purpose, and then started giving this technology, using this technology, for third-party sellers who were selling on its platform.

Brian Kenny: Let me just interrupt for a second. That's a marked change in direction. They had always been a consumer platform. Now they're in a business-to-business play. I bet a lot of consumers don't even know about Amazon Web Services.

Sunil Gupta: Correct. That was not saying in a traditional sense, "This is my market." That's simply saying, I have this capability. There's a demand for this capability. Can I do it?" Part of that was opportunistic, also. If you remember in 2001, the dot.com bubble crashed. If you're a B2C company, you hedge your bets and get into B2B business. Part of that may have been luck. And then Amazon started producing hardware, Kindle, and now competing with Apple.

You sort of say, why is an online retailer getting into hardware production? If you think a little bit about it, the answer is very easy. Kindle was designed to sell eBooks as people move from buying hard copy books to downloading eBooks. The Kindle is the classic razor and blade strategy. I sell razors cheap in order to make money on the blades. I'm not making that much money Kindle, but I'm making money on e-books, which is very different from Apple's strategy. Apple actually makes money on devices, but Amazon is not making money on devices, or at least not making huge money. Similarly, it moved into online streaming of the video content and suddenly became a competitor of Netflix. You say, "Why is a retailer becoming a competition of Netflix?" Again, if you think a little about it, the answer becomes clear. As you and I moved on from buying DVDs [to] streaming the stuff, that's what Netflix did. They used to send the DVDs to us.

Brian Kenny: I remember that. I still have a couple.

Sunil Gupta: Amazon is very good in moving with the customer. If the customer moves from buying books to e-books, Amazon moves in that direction. If customers move from buying DVDs to streaming, it moves in that direction. Now, can Amazon do it? Of course, they can. They have AWS. Netflix is one of the largest AWS customers.

AMAZON IS VERY GOOD IN MOVING WITH THE CUSTOMER… IF CUSTOMERS MOVE FROM BUYING DVDS TO STREAMING, AMAZON MOVES IN THAT DIRECTION.”

Brian Kenny: Are they leading or following? Are they creating a market? In the beginning it seemed like they created something entirely new. Now, are they anticipating, or are they just sort of reacting to what's happening?

Sunil Gupta: It's a combination of both. In some ways they are following the consumer behavior. [When consumers started] moving to streaming, Amazon was not the first—Netflix started the streaming thing, and then Amazon comes up with it. If you think about it, Amazon not only distributed third party content on videos, but now they have Amazon Studio. They are making movies. The competition now becomes Hollywood instead of Walmart.

You sort of say, "What has gone wrong with Jeff Bezos? Why is he making movies?" Making movies is a pretty expensive business and highly risky. Again, the key is to understand the purpose of the movies, which is to hook consumers on Amazon Prime. If you remember, Amazon Prime started at $79 dollars per year. The benefit at that time was two-day free shipping. Now, you and I are smart enough to do the math, saying, how many shipments do we expect next year, and is $79 worth it? Bezos does not want you to do that math. He basically says, "Oh, by the way, I'll throw in some free content, some free music, some free unique movies.” Now you can’t do the calculation. Why does he care about Prime? Right now, Amazon has about 100 million Prime customers globally. Let's say I get an average 100 dollars per year, that's $10 billion in my pocket, before I open the store.

Brian Kenny: Right.

Sunil Gupta: The research also shows that Amazon Prime customers buy three to four times more than non-Prime customers. I mean, if you're a Prime customer, you don't even price shop.

Brian Kenny: Once you're Prime, you’ve got to justify being a member. You buy everything on Amazon.

Sunil Gupta: Exactly. Your purchases increase. You become price insensitive, which is fantastic. Jeff Bezos has said that every time we win a Golden Globe award for our content, we sell more shoes. The purpose of creating their own content is not to make money on the content. This is a different razor, to sell you more shoes. Once you understand that, what looks like disparate business is actually extremely tied together.

Brian Kenny: It all comes right back to the core. They haven't always had good ideas. Have they had some misses along the way too?

Sunil Gupta: I think the biggest failure was Fire phone.

Brian Kenny: Remind us what that was?

Sunil Gupta: Amazon launched their own phone. They were obviously very late in the market. iPhone was already there. Samsung had done very well. You have two major players, if not many others, who are very well established. Consumers love their iPhones. The question of course was, why is Amazon launching a phone? What are the odds of success? Clearly the odds of success were low.

The reason was they didn't want to be beholden to the iPhone or to the Googles of the world. They know that the world is moving towards mobile, in terms of shopping. Certainly in emerging markets everybody's moving to mobile shopping. If tomorrow Apple or Google sort of restrict … availability or use of Amazon—because they're all competing with each other now—it becomes a challenge. Not all innovations succeed, but you've got to take a shot. If you think about it, all the technology and thought processes that went into Fire phone were not a complete waste. That went into Echo. Now Alexa is a big hit.

Brian Kenny: They're a market leader in that in that space. Let's talk a little bit about the ideas that underlie this Amazon case. I think it starts with knowing what business you're in. Your book addresses this. I think I know we're in the education space here at Harvard Business School. Should we be thinking about other businesses?

Sunil Gupta: I think you're right. The bigger question that Amazon case raises is, how do you define what business you are in? Most of us tend to define business by the traditional industry boundaries. If I'm a bank, I'm in banking and other banks are my competition. I think industry boundaries are getting blurred today. Amazon can get into banking. If I have lots of customers, I can start giving loans to small and medium enterprises.

Brian Kenny: You would know a lot about those customers.

Sunil Gupta: The key asset now is customers and data, not the product and services that you offer. Once you know about customers, you can do lots of different things. Industry boundaries are getting blurred. You need to think not about competition, but what do customers want. Do I have capabilities to serve that? The second thing is that the traditional definition of where competitive advantage comes from is changing. When I learned my MBA, we used to read Michael Porter's competitive strategy stuff. If I were to simplify and summarize what I learned in competitive strategy it was that competitive advantage comes from making your product better or cheaper. Differentiation or cost leadership, which makes sense. If you think about it, it's very much product focused. I think in today's world competitive advantage comes from connecting products and connecting customers. The Kindle, and e-books is an example of connecting products, multiple products, right? Making movies on Amazon and selling more shoes is connecting products. Razor and blade have been around forever. I think what’s different today is razor and blade could be in completely different industries. Movies and shoes.

The other side is connecting customers. We are in a network economy. That's why there is only one Facebook, or one WhatsApp. If you are the only person on Facebook, what's the value of Facebook? Not much, unless you love yourself. As more and more people get onto Facebook, the value of Facebook increases. It's not about improving product. Without changing product, Facebook value increases. I think in this connected world that we live in, it's about connecting products and connecting consumers.

Brian Kenny: We've got a lot of listeners out there, many of whom are probably leading firms of one kind or another. How do they go about exploring or redefining their business?

Sunil Gupta: I think again, you need to think about what is your key asset? Everything starts with the consumer. In the Amazon case, you move with the consumer to some extent. I asked the same of a company for a medical device manufacturer. I said, "Who's your competition?” The typical answer is: the other medical devices. Medical business is now becoming a lot about data. Google is getting into that. Apple. iPhone is becoming a medical device. Suddenly you have a very different kind of player getting into this thing. When I say, "What business are you in?" you need to think about who might get into that business, and that changes the whole picture.

Brian Kenny: Why is Amazon so good at engaging customers?

Sunil Gupta: I think it comes from the culture of being customer obsessed, that no matter what the customer is right. They deliver on that promise. The level of convenience that customers expect from companies has changed. It used to be that if a company delivered a product within a week that was considered good. Now, if you don't deliver on the same day, it just seems awful. They've raised the bar in everything. Of course, they're using technology very effectively, whether it's in their warehousing or now investing in drones. I think they're still a 25-year-old startup.

Brian Kenny: That's another point that I wanted to touch upon. They're able to adapt their supply chain it seems almost effortlessly to whatever business direction they move in. Is it possible for another entry to come into this space and scale in the same way that Amazon has? Is this a once-in-a-lifetime type thing?

THAT'S THE KEY QUESTION: ARE THE PIECES FITTING TOGETHER NICELY, OR DO THEY JUST HAPPEN TO BE ANOTHER BUSINESS BECAUSE IT'S PROFITABLE?”

Sunil Gupta: That's a tough question. It's not that they're adapting supply chain for everything, right? For example, I don't think the Amazon supply chain is ready for delivering frozen food. If I have a supply chain to ship you electronics, I can use the same supply chain to ship you prescription medication. That opens up another several-billion-dollar market. If I call myself an online retailer, I will never think of prescription drug delivery. If I think of my capabilities, I have the warehouse to deliver electronics and books. Why can't I deliver your prescription medication? That opens up completely different businesses.

Brian Kenny: What are the kind of pitfalls that you need to be careful of, as you start to move into adjacent markets?

Sunil Gupta: I think definitely the big challenge is: how far do you go? On one hand it's good to expand the business scope, because the industry boundaries are getting blurred. The danger is, do you lose focus? The classic challenge of losing focus. There's a balance. I think in Amazon's case, if you notice, everything is very tightly connected. If you remove one part, the whole becomes less. That's the key question: Are the pieces fitting together nicely, or do they just happen to be another business because it's profitable?

Brian Kenny: We've done a couple of cases on Cold Call that touch on the organizational impact of firms that move into new businesses. Some of them are examples of where it’s benefitted the employees. In other cases, it seems to have disrupted the culture in negative ways. How do you see this playing out at Amazon? Does it impact them in any way?

Sunil Gupta: Amazon has grown the top line 20, 25 percent every quarter without fail, except for one quarter in 2001. Right now, in 2019, their sales are @232 billion. I don't know many companies that can grow at that rate, even when they're over $200 billion. I think that as an employee, if you're on a winning team it has to energize you. If you are in a culture which encourages experimentation and innovation, it has to excite you. At the same time, I'm sure it's a very demanding culture, and there have been reports about how demanding the culture of Amazon is. It probably is not for everybody. For the people who are innovative, who are entrepreneurial, who want to be on a winning team, I'm sure it's an exciting place.

Brian Kenny: There are sort of shades of Apple there. I mean, I think Apple had the same reputation. Have you've discussed this case in class with students?

Sunil Gupta: Oh, many students.

Brian Kenny: What are sort of the top line things that surprise you as you discuss it?

Sunil Gupta: I think the nice thing about this case is that everybody knows Amazon as a consumer. Everybody has shopped at Amazon. People see it as very surface level. They sort of don't realize the deep insights that comes out. As a three-page case, you think you’ll be done in 10 minutes, but then you peel the layers of the onion. That was a shocking thing to them, as to how you peel the layers of the onion and how you see the connection across different things. Why did Amazon buy Whole Foods? It makes no sense. Why did they get into AWS? It makes no sense. When you start unpeeling that layer, you see the connection as to why Amazon is doing all these different things. I think that's the A-ha” moment that comes across.

Brian Kenny: Much more on that in your book. How's the book doing?

Sunil Gupta: Book is doing great.

Brian Kenny: I bet you can buy it on Amazon.

Sunil Gupta: You can certainly buy it on Amazon.

Brian Kenny: That's great. Sunil, thanks for joining us today.

Sunil Gupta: Thank you very much Brian.

Brian Kenny: If you enjoyed Cold Call, you should check out 

HBS SkyDeck, a podcast series that features interviews with HBS alumni from across the world of business, sharing lessons learned and their own life experiences. Thanks again for listening. I'm your host Brian Kenny. You've been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School, and part of the HBR Presents network.

 

From:

https://hbswk.hbs.edu

Linda Hill explains how the digital workplace is generating greater burdens on managers but also creating new opportunities to shine. PLUS: Book excerpt.

Complex trends in globalization, demographic shifts, and new technologies are raising urgent challenges for managers on an everyday level. Because of the number of companies undergoing digital transformation, managers need to navigate an intense speed-to-market landscape while juggling virtual teams within and sometimes outside their organization.

This raises questions like: How will you innovate? How will you bring out the best ideas in your teams working together near and far? How will you drive change within the organization and the broader business ecosystem?

As Harvard Business School Professor Linda A. Hill and Kent Lineback write in the new preface to their book 

Being the Boss: The Three Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, first published in 2011 and reissued this spring, Leadership has always been hard, and in a world in which the competitive rules are being upended, we know it's getting harder. We all need to keep learning and adapting.”

We asked Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration, to discuss how managers can work faster, embrace digital transformation to cultivate collaboration within and beyond the organization, and build networks for innovation.

Martha Lagace: How can you as a manager guide your reports through a business world where speed-to-market is everything?

Linda A. Hill: In Being the Boss we describe three interrelated imperatives:

·         Manage yourself.

·         Manage your network.

·         Manage your team.

It comes as no surprise that so many managers are overwhelmed and burned out these days. In our dynamic, competitive environment, speed matters. If managers do not develop their people so they can delegate to them, or if they do not turn their groups into agile teams able to learn and adapt together, then they cannot leverage themselves. If they cannot leverage themselves, they have no time to build relationships with their peers and bosses to get access to the resources their teams need to deliver. And let’s face it, reaching out and cultivating relationships in global companies often means staying up late or getting up early to cope with time zone challenges or living in airports sometimes being 50 percent of a manager’s time.

IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE THAT SO MANY MANAGERS ARE OVERWHELMED AND BURNED OUT THESE DAYS.”

Many companies are working overtime to break down the silos in their organizations. But managers need to do their part and devote time and attention to aligning their interests and cultivating collaborations across the organization. Only when everyone understands the big picture and feels a part of it can they prioritize and focus together on that which is urgent and important to the enterprise.

Lagace: As you teach MBA students and Executive Education participants, are they describing new pressures that weren’t there before?

Hill: Leadership is truly getting more demanding. I don’t think anyone ever succeeded by him- or herself anyway, but for sure they don’t now.

In fact, the managing your network” imperative that we address in Being the Boss is becoming as important to being a great leader as managing your team. C-suite executives tell us it is no longer enough to just be a value creator—that is, someone who is delivering value for today. If you want to be high potential, you also have to be a game changer—someone who is delivering value for tomorrow. Consequently, we need managers who build teams that are collaborative-ready” and who can cultivate healthy relationships across the organization. In today’s world, horizontal collaborations are key if companies are to reap the benefits of digital transformation and platform plays, or deliver a differentiated end-to-end customer experience.

Another challenge we’ve seen for managers is that if they want to attract and retain top talent, they need to make sure the work is meaningful. There has to be a sense of shared purpose; managers need to answer not just what the team should or could be doing, but also why doing so matters. All of us, particularly the younger generations in the workforce, want to be in organizations where we can make a difference. If MBAs are to work hard and take the risks necessary for companies to thrive today, managers need to make sure team members can have an impact on an organization whose purpose they deeply care about.

Lagace: You’ve spoken recently about the importance of building ecosystems. What do you mean?

Hill: For innovation to happen and take hold nowadays, managers often need to build ecosystems, networks with those both inside and outside the organization. We are collecting data on how managers build partnerships, even with other industries, to gain insights into how to drive innovation in their organizations. For instance, a manager in the entertainment industry might be working with peers in pharmaceuticals or defense to accelerate the development of virtual reality capabilities.

In my work, I use the ethnographic methods of anthropology to study transformation as it takes place through shared mindsets and everyday behaviors and practices. With these methods—and with attention to ecosystems—we are watching up close and personal” as managers build innovation labs or corporate accelerators to facilitate innovation in their companies. We are interested both in understanding how to most effectively build out these labs and accelerators and how to ensure that the innovations produced in these entities actually get integrated and scaled in the core business.

Lagace: How is the digital age helping or hurting new managers?

Hill: In class, when we talk about how to build a team, the discussion includes how to build a virtual team with different nationalities, languages, and diversity in the broadest sense.

THERE ARE A NUMBER OF SPECIAL CHALLENGES ASSOCIATED WITH WORKING VIRTUALLY.”

There are a number of special challenges associated with working virtually. How do you build trust? Without mutual trust, it’s very hard to work together. We have not evolved as people as fast as the business world has required us to—to be able to innovate with people so different and far away from us. Research makes clear that, as people and colleagues, we much prefer firsthand evidence and direct experience with people to help us figure out whether they are trustworthy. New technologies do help, but there is still no substitute for face-to-face interactions.

It’s a human reality we all need to thoughtfully build into our work processes. There is a leader at a major automaker who realized there was no way his company could build a global brand unless everyone all met physically at least once. For sure, he had invested in the latest video and e-communication technologies. Still, he used a significant portion of his budget to have everyone meet together to develop a sense of shared purpose. It was important for them to practice new ways of thinking, working, and making decisions together if they were to fully embrace the rich diversity of culture, expertise, and experience the team represented.

As one manager in a global company put it, Social media will never replace the dinner party.” Leaders are realizing that such investments are required to build healthy relationships. And, on this basis, global teams can work together virtually on any number of complex problems and exciting opportunities.

About the Author

Martha Lagace is a writer based in the Boston area.
[Image: metamorworks]

From:

https://hbswk.hbs.edu

با سلام

بنده هستم و جهت مشاوره، و برگزاری دوره همراه با صدور گواهی نامه معتبر  در موارد ذیل در خدمت شما هستم:

1-     مشاوره سیستم های مدیریتی (ISO)  و اخذ گواهینامه از سوی شرکت های معتبر:

IMQ

TUV NORD

TUV INTERCERT

MIC

NISCERT

DQS

SGS

2-  جایزه تعالی (EFQM و INQA)

3-  استراتژی و کارت امتیازی متوازن (BSC)

4-    بهبود کسب و کار

در خدمت شما هستم

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Hi

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3-   Strategy and BSC

4-   Business performance improvement

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با سلام

شما میتوانید با تماس با بنده جهت برگزاری دوره های آموزشی و مشاوره ذیل اقدام بفرمایید:

استراتژی و ارزیابی عملکرد (BSC)

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All organizations have the ability to be smarter than the sum of their members’ intelligence and talent. Unfortunately, most are actually dumber. The good news is there are a handful of practical steps to boost collective intelligence.

Create tools that allow everyone to communicate strategically about innovation. Good ideas can come from all corners of a company, but would-be innovators may need help developing a strong strategic argument. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the innovative government agency focused on transformational breakthroughs in national security, uses a set of simple questions called the Heilmeier Catechism (named after a former director), to think through and evaluate proposed research programs:

• What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
• How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
• What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
• Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
• What are the risks?
• How much will it cost?
• How long will it take?
• What are the mid-term and final exams” [that will allow you to measure] success?

Materials science company W.L. Gore puts its key innovation criteria in the form of a one-page Product Concept Worksheet,” which contains: a concise statement of the product concept, the technology to be utilized, the form of the product, and the customer needs that the product will address.

Either approach can easily be adjusted for use in most organizations; they provide common language that allows anyone to propose a new idea — and everyone to judge its merit.

Vet and refine ideas collectively and continuously. In nimble organizations, innovation ideas aren’t reviewed once or twice a year by a senior committee. Instead they undergo a constant process of review, refinement, and — if necessary — death. The goal is for only the best ideas to survive. In our research, we found that successful collective vetting depends on at least two things.

The first is clear, commonly understood guidelines (also known as simple rules) by which to judge proposed innovations. In an effort to rejuvenate its innovation pipeline, Corning created a set of simple rules, derived from successful past innovations:

• address new markets with more than $500 million in potential revenue
• leverage the company’s expertise in materials science
• represent a critical component in a complex system, and
• be protected from competition by patents and proprietary process expertise.

Second, diverse stakeholders are invited in early and often to help judge and refine the idea. At Gore, passionate champions” for new innovations use the company’s tools to frame the strategic case for their idea, vetting it with customers and colleagues in the process. If the idea gains support, the champion schedules regular peer review sessions with people from manufacturing, R&D, sales & marketing, and other areas of expertise who are in a good position to judge and refine the idea. The company’s culture of frank talk drives these review sessions. People understand that their collective job is to kill bad projects as quickly as possible and accelerate those that show the most promise.

Guidelines make it easier for everyone to judge the value of new innovations and avoid large, bad bets on relatively untested ideas. Senior leaders periodically review the portfolio of project ideas that are bubbling up and knit them together, using their knowledge of organizational capabilities and market/technology trends to create organizational strategy.

Bust through barriers that block innovation. Most organizations have regular  procedures for leaders to determine which new projects should get funded and who will be assigned to these initiatives. But at nimble organizations, leadership is flipped upside down. The job of top leaders is to serve people who are close to the market. They do whatever they can to clear the way for promising new projects and get innovation teams the resources they need.

NASA’s leaders are undertaking an intensive effort to understand and transform several major barriers to innovation. They asked their employees to help; people responded with nearly 300 recommendations. Some of these aimed to encourage more idea generation by giving people more time, money, recognition, and dedicated physical space for innovation. Others focused on reducing process requirements for innovations, for instance, fast-tracking low-cost missions and giving special treatment to high-potential technologies. One proposal would require new flight programs and projects to include an element of innovation to encourage informed, appropriate R&D risk, as a means to counter the agency’s risk-averse culture. The outcome of this effort remains to be seen, but NASA’s leaders are certainly making a concerted effort to tackle the blocks to innovation.

Using these three practices, companies can harness the insights and energy of all of their people through a collective prediction market,” in which innovation ideas are examined, improved, and pushed forward by the many, not the few. An innovation prediction market makes many small bets on new ideas at early stages, only a few of which will pan out after intensive collective vetting. In so doing, nimble companies aggregate the intelligence of their workers to better predict future success, and act to make that future real.

From: https://hbr.org

 

 

با سلام

 

 

بنده هستم و جهت مشاوره، و برگزاری دوره همراه با صدور گواهی نامه معتبر  در موارد ذیل در خدمت شما هستم:

 

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  احتراما، از شما دعوت به عمل می آید تا در  همایش "هدایت تحصیلی پیشرفته"  روز یکشنبه مورخه 98/07/21 

از ساعت 17:00 الی 19:00  با حضور محترم سرکار خانم دکتر فردوسی، روانشناس مطرح صدا و سیما و

جناب آقای دکتر ، مشاور تحصیلی به آدرس ذیل حضور به هم رسانید.

امید است حضور شما در این همایش زمینه ساز آینده ای درخشان برای فرزندان نازنین شما و این مرز و بوم باشد .

آدرس:

سیدخندان، خیابان شهید کابلی (دبستان)، کوچه حمیدی، پژوهش سرای اشراق، جنب آموزش و پرورش منطقه 7.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 2012, Denmark’s biggest energy company, Danish Oil and Natural Gas, slid into financial crisis as the price of gas was plunging by 90% and S&P downgraded its credit rating to negative. The board hired a former executive at LEGO, Henrik Poulsen, as the new CEO. Whereas some leaders might have gone into crisis-management mode, laying off workers until prices recovered, Poulsen recognized the moment as an opportunity for fundamental change.

We saw the need to build an entirely new company,” says Poulsen. He renamed the firm Ørsted after the legendary Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered the principles of electromagnetism. It had to be a radical transformation; we needed to build a new core business and find new areas of sustainable growth. We looked at the shift to combat climate change, and we became one of the few companies to wholeheartedly make this profound decision, to be one of the first to go from black to green energy.”

That strategic impulse—to identify a higher-purpose mission that galvanizes the organization—is a common thread among the Transformation 20, a new study by Innosight of the world’s most transformative companies. Fortifying this new view, the Business Roundtable last month released 

a statement signed by 181 CEOs stating that serving shareholders can no longer be the main purpose of a corporation; rather, it needs to be about serving society, through innovation, commitment to a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all.

Our aim was to identify the global companies that have achieved the highest-impact business transformations over the past decade, using the same methodology as 

our 2017 study. Our research team screened all the firms in the S&P 500 and Global 2000 using three lenses:

1. New growth: How successful has the company been at creating new products, services, new markets, and new business models? This includes our primary metric: the percentage of revenue outside the core that can be attributed to new growth areas.
2. Repositioning the core: How effectively has the company adapted its traditional core business to changes or disruptions in its markets, giving its legacy business new life?
3. Financials: Has the company posted strong financial and stock market performance, or has it turned around its business from losses or slow growth to get back on track? We looked at revenue CAGR (combined annual growth rate), profitability, and stock price CAGR during the transformation period, which was different for each firm.

Our initial phase of research identified 52 companies making substantial progress towards strategic transformation—merely 3% of the public companies in our data set. From this second-round list, an Innosight partner panel voted to narrow it down to 27 finalists. For the third round, the following companies were selected as the Transformation 20 and ranked by a panel of management experts (see judges).

 

Each of these companies developed new-growth businesses outside its traditional core  which have become a significant share of the overall business. However, we believe it’s the decision to infuse a higher purpose into the culture, one that guides strategic decisions and gives clarity to everyday tasks, that has propelled these companies to success.

The #1 company, Netflix, is a case in point. In 2013, CEO Reed Hastings released an 11-page memo to employees and investors detailing a  commitment to move from just distributing content digitally to become a leading producer of original content that could win Emmys and Oscars.

As the memo said, We don’t and can’t compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish.”

Since unveiling that new purpose, Netflix revenue has roughly tripled, its profits have multiplied 32-fold, and its stock CAGR has increased 57% annually, versus 11% for the S&P 500.

Finding new purpose

In a comparable way, the purpose-driven mission of preventative healthcare has spurred major change at other large organizations that made the list. China’s AIA Group has moved beyond insurance to become a wellness company, whereas Dutch electronics giant Philips has largely divested its legacy lighting business to focus on healthcare technology.

The technology companies on our list also discovered ways to infuse purpose into their organizations as part of their fundamental change.

Siemens moved beyond a purpose of maximizing shareholder value to a mission of serving society.” This transformation began in 2014 with a plan called Vision 2020 that called for harnessing technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things. However, changing the mission also called for changing the culture. The biggest obstacle to any transformation is literally just the way we’ve always done things,” says Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton. Infusing a higher purpose into the company called for pushing decision making out from the center to every business unit, so that managers and rank-and-file employees feel they have a stake in future success. Ownership culture is central to everything,” Humpton says. This shift in the culture at Siemens has propelled it to divest its core oil and gas business and redeploy the capital to build a new Smart Infrastructure business focused on energy efficiency, renewable power storage, distributed power, and electric vehicle mobility.

In the case of Tencent Holdings, the company was founded in 1998 to harness the Internet opportunity, launching online chat forums and video games for China’s new generation of digital natives. As of 2005, shortly after its IPO, Tencent defined its purpose in terms of implementing our Online Lifestyle strategy, which strives to cater to the basic needs of our users.”

Only in subsequent years did founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng broaden the firm’s outlook by embracing a mission of improving the quality of human life through digital innovation.” Since 2011, Tencent has invested heavily in new growth ranging from education and entertainment to autonomous vehicles and ride sharing to fintech and the industrial internet—areas that together now represent 25% of its $46 revenue. Through its Tencent Education business unit, the firm is now developing educational content and services for individuals, schools, and education management. All of this growth helped Tencent become the first Asian company to surpass $500 billion in market valuation.

In 2019, Tencent refined its mission once again, in response to the growing global backlash against technology’s dominance in our lives, boiling it down to: tech for social good.

 Several companies found that refocusing the organization to help save the planet can be especially powerful. Ecolab, #16 on our list, is a prime example.

 In the early 2000s, when Douglas Baker Jr. became its CEO, Ecolab was an 80-year-old firm growing 10% annually by selling industrial cleansers and food safety services. Our strategic plan was to sell more of what we had,” Baker says. To grow much beyond its $3.8 billion in revenue, the company could have kept moving into adjacent markets or new geographies, but Baker felt that wasn’t bold enough.

The transformation began by talking to customers, Baker says. The same customers who were buying its core products were also voicing concerns about access to clean water. And they weren’t alone. Projections for the year 2030 showed that 70% of the world’s GDP would be based in water-stressed regions, California and Southern India being prime examples.

In 2011, Ecolab had a $12 billion market cap when it acquired water technology company Nalco in an $8 billion deal. The combined company is now one of the world’s leading suppliers of hardware, software, and chemistry that helps manufacturers and service firms become more efficient users of water. A primary metric driving the organization is how much water is saved by its clients annually, which now stands at 188 billion gallons, against a 2030 target of 300 billion gallons.

We broadened our vision and our purpose changed,” Baker says. As our teams widened their awareness of global issues, our pride has been enhanced.” So has Ecolab’s market value, which has surpassed $55 billion, placing it among America’s top 100 most valuable firms.

Performing mission impossible

Such transformations are never easy. When the firm now known as Ørsted divested its coal, oil, and natural gas businesses, that created a giant revenue gap that urgently needed to be filled. The company had experimented with offshore wind power, but the technology was too expensive, producing energy that was more than double the price of onshore wind.

Under Poulsen, Ørsted embarked on what critics called an impossible mission: a systematic cost-out” program to reduce the price of offshore wind while achieving scale. The company managed to cut the cost by more than 60% while building three major new ocean-based wind farms in the U.K. and acquiring a leading company in the U.S.

The result: Previously about 80% owned by the Danish government, Ørsted’s IPO in 2016 was one the year’s largest. Operating profits have quadrupled since it began the transformation, and Ørsted is now the world’s largest offshore wind company, with about a third share of booming global growth market.

The takeaway lesson from these mission-changers is clear: In an era of relentless change, a company survives and thrives based not on its size or performance at any given time but on its ability to reposition itself to create a new future, and to leverage a purpose-driven mission to that end. That’s why strategic transformation may be the business leadership imperative of the 21st century

 

Algorithms are becoming increasingly relevant in the workplace. From 

sifting through resumes to 

deciding who gets a raise, many of these new systems are proving to be highly valuable. But perhaps their most impressive, and relevant, capability is predicting which employees will quit. IBM is in the process of 

patenting an algorithm that can supposedly predict flight risk with 

95% accuracy. Given that we are in a candidate-driven market, this is a significant innovation. 

There are now more job openings in the U.S. 

than there are unemployed Americans.

Losing an employee can have a drastic effect on team 

morale, and result in a domino effect that leads to poor performance and 

productivity. Not to mention, it is expensive, and not just because of lost talent. It takes an average of 24 days to fill a job, costing employers up to 

$4,000 per hire — maybe more, depending on your industry. The good news is that only 

about a quarter of employees that leave do so within their first year. This means you have plenty of time to assess flight risks and address them.

But not every company has a fancy algorithm to help them out. Even predictive models that can identify the behavioral patterns that reveal who will quit don’t excel at explaining why they do. This is likely because the reasons people quit are deep-rooted and complex. During my fifteen years working in data science, I have run countless predictive models on employee retention, student retention, and customer churn across industry verticals, including healthcare, energy, and higher education. Through my work, I’ve identified eight common leadership mistakes that help explain this why. Understanding them, and how they impact your team, will help you identify those who are at flight risk, and make changes that may convince them to stay.

Mistake 1:  Setting inconsistent goals or expectations.

Consider this scenario: A sales representative at a rental car company has to choose between serving her next client, or correctly logging her previous client’s information into the system. Her manager has made it clear that slow service is poor service,” but she knows that improperly entering customer information could get her fired. Choosing between these two tasks causes her to experience high levels of stress on a daily basis, and as a consequence, she hates her job.

This situation is not uncommon. But when employees are forced to choose between tasks in order to meet competing expectations, the result is a team of stressed out people without clear priorities.

How can you avoid this situation? Take a note from Disney. Each 

worker in the Magic Kingdom is given a list of priorities with items ordered from the most to the least important. Safety comes first, followed by courtesy, show (or performance) next, and finally, efficiency. When a team members find themselves in sticky situations, no one is confused about how to manage them.

You can create this same kind of stability on your team by being consistent and clear with your expectations. Write them down — even if it is only for yourself — to see if any contradict or overlap. Then, make necessary changes and share. In doing so, you will empower your team and ease their stress by giving them a greater sense of control over their tasks. Most importantly, you will be making work a more pleasant place to be.

Mistake 2: Having too many process constraints.

Process constraints often occur when a lack of information, resources, or another factor, stops an employee from doing their job. I’ve seen this take place, for example, when a worker is forced to wait for several other tasks to be completed before they can move forward with a project. Such conditions will naturally inhibit performance — which are evaluated by managers — even if it is not the employee’s fault. In turn, the employee begins to feel powerless, and displays low morale, poor work quality, and frustration.

How can you avoid this situation? Consider context when evaluating performance. Look at the criteria, and consider how much control your employee has over their outcomes, as well as how much control you have over any constraints that may be affecting their output. Talk openly to them about their performance and ask questions that will help them communicate any concerns on their end.

If you find that process constraints are in fact affecting their performance, use your influence to try and improve the situation. Sometimes this might require having difficult conversations with other departments or leaders. But these conversations will ultimately benefit your employee, as well as your bottom line.

Mistake 3: Wasting your resources.

Pretend you are a marketing manager. You have until Friday to roll out a new campaign. It’s Tuesday, which should theoretically leave you with plenty of time. But there’s a problem. You have six meetings for a total of four and a half hours today. The following day, you have seven meetings, which eat up six hours. On Thursday, you have to attend a team training session for five hours. So, when are you supposed to work?

This is what we call resource waste. In the case above, and many others, the resource going to waste is time. Employees who are constantly crunched for time tend to get 

burned out faster, which impacts the quality of their deliverables. If you don’t give your team the resources they need to succeed, you are setting them up to fail. It’s not uncommon for employees in this situation to leave and seek out a company with a more sustainable work culture.

How can you avoid this situation? Sometimes busy weeks that result in wasted resources are unavoidable. But creating a list that ranks the importance and impact of your employees’ tasks can help. If your employee knows their campaign plan is due Friday, for example, help them itemize the tasks they need to complete by that deadline, and consider if doing so is realistic given their current workload. Before assigning them additional tasks or inviting them to meeting after meeting, ask, Is this new task a priority? Does this employee really need to be in the room?” If the answer is no,” give them space to do their most important work.

Mistake 4: Putting people in the wrong roles.

If you ever hear an employee say, I went to college for this?” you can bet they are not happy with where they are or what they are doing. This is another example of waste, but I call it knowledge and skills waste.” Unused abilities can leave employees feeling undervalued and faceless. 

An algorithm can easily take a job posting, outline the skills required for it, then take a resume, and infer the knowledge and abilities of a job candidate. But if there is a disconnect by the time that candidate becomes an employee, you’ve got a risk factor out of the gate.

How can you avoid this situation? It’s best to 

be transparent about the roles you are hiring for and what they require during the interview process. But if you’re already in too deep, there are a few ways you can handle it. Start by checking the job description your employee was hired into, and compare it against their current task load. Are there gaps, and if so, how wide are they? Take notes. Then discuss them with your team member to see which gaps are falling short of their goals, and which are the most important.

You may not be able to change the role entirely, and it may take time, but together, you can come up with a plan to help them take on more meaningful responsibilities, and drop tasks that add the least value to your team.

Mistake 5: Assigning boring, or overly easy, tasks.

Think about the last time you had to go to a work event that you really didn’t want to attend. Maybe you had to converse with too many people about uninteresting topics or sit through several hour-long seminars in a single day. How did you feel after the fact?

You were likely exhausted, very exhausted — even though all you had to do was talk a little and listen.

Why? Because you were suppressing your emotions. Suppressing, rather than acknowledging, any feeling can take a toll on your energy level, even if that feeling is boredom. If you have an employee with a light workload who constantly takes an excessively long time to finish their tasks, don’t assume they are lazy. Less work is not always easier work. When employees don’t have enough to do, they can lose motivation and experience negative emotions. If they suppress those emotions, they can become physically and emotionally exhaustion. The net result is a lack of work satisfaction and engagement, forcing employees to finally ask whether this job is the right fit for them.

How can you avoid this situation? Get creative. If your team member has a history of stable performance, they’ll likely be open to extending their capabilities and taking on more challenging work during their downtime. Before assigning tasks, ask your employee about their interests and passions. Based on their answers, give them work that will enhance their knowledge, skills, or help them grow in the right direction. A learning agenda with target goals, and a roadmap outlining how they will reach them, will also help you keep track of and check in on their progress.

Mistake 6: Failing to create a psychologically safe culture.

Hostile environments are easy to spot. If you notice your team members being overly agreeable or quiet in meetings, that’s a bad sign. When employees fear their thoughts or ideas will be met with repercussions, they tend to behave this way, which means you are likely operating in a fear culture. Employees who do not feel 

psychologically safe are more prone to error, and less likely to take risks, participate in healthy conflict, or 

grow in their roles. Contrarily, team members that feel psychologically safe are productive, innovative, and enjoy a sense of belonging.

How can you avoid this situation? To create a psychologically safe work environment, show your team that you are open to new ideas. In meetings, ask questions before posing answers and reward those who speak up by thanking them for their input or following up with additional queries. Consider all viewpoints when brainstorming solutions to difficult problems and make sure your team knows that there is no such thing as a wrong answer.” If an idea has a lot of potential, you might even ask your employee to run with it and present what they come up with at the next meeting. The more you can incorporate your team’s feedback into projects and strategies, the more empowered, valued, and safe they will feel working for you.

In addition, show some humility. When you own up to your faults, or admit that you don’t have all the answers, you show your team members that it’s okay to fail.” Take on the perspective that failure is an opportunity to grow, and your team will start to do the same.

Mistake 7: Creating a work environment that is too safe.

Studies show that a moderate level of pressure and friction at work is healthy for employee growth. But the key is moderation. When employees feel overly pressured to perform well in their roles, they can lose sight of what’s important, and in acts of desperation, 

use unethical means to excel. On the other hand, if your employees have no pressure at all, they may start to wonder if their work even matters. People who find no meaning or purpose in their work perform below their 

potential, are less productive, and are often 

less loyal than those who work in purpose-driven organizations.

How can you avoid this situation? One way to create a 

healthy amount of friction is to provide your team with regular feedback — both positive and negative. When delivered 

thoughtfully and without judgement, negative feedback can give people something meaningful to work towards. You should also be sure to remind your employees of what they are doing well, and how their role contributes to the goals of the larger organization (no matter how big or small their contribution is). In turn, they will begin to see how they fit into the big picture, and may even start to feel a greater sense of purpose.

Mistake 8: Leading with bias.

Consumer studies show how much customers value being treated fairly by the companies they give their money to, and the same can be said for workers on the inside, giving up their time. Leaders who are fair — without bias — are leaders who employees can trust, and a trusting manager-employee relationship

defines the best workplaces,” improves performance, and is good for revenue. A lack of trust, however, can result in low morale and a team with little or no guidance. Think of it this way: if your employees don’t trust you to lead them down the right path, how will they come together and align their efforts to meet a shared goal? Put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to work at a place without clear direction?

How can you avoid this situation? Practicing self-awareness is a good start. Managers who can recognize their implicit 

biases and make adjustments to overcome them are more likely to lead in a fair and just manner. Before you make an important decision consider what is driving you. Are you basing your choices off of evidence, or preference? Have you considered other perspectives? Are there any gaps in your knowledge you need to fill first? Asking for regular feedback from your team, and acting on it, will also build a culture of fairness and open communication.

It’s true that there is no way you can control every aspect of your team’s work experience. If someone wants to leave bad enough, sometimes they just will. That said, focusing on your own behaviors, what you can control, will do wonders to improve the performance and cohesiveness of your team. The better you manage, the more productive, innovative, satisfied, and most importantly, loyal your team will be.

 

https://hbr.org/2019/09/8-things-leaders-do-that-make-employees-quit

from hbr

An increasing number of large firms are taking action on big social issues—from education, to gun control, to climate change, even impeachment. This follows, in part, consumers’ growing desire to shop with and support companies that reflect their own values and beliefs. But Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) isn’t limited to big corporations. Small businesses do this, too, and have for a long time.

Small business leaders often build tight bonds with the communities they serve and because of that, their civic engagement is driven by the customers and clients they see every day, not Madison Avenue marketing firms, focus groups, or message testing. In a recent study, 72% of people believe locally-owned businesses were more likely than large companies to be involved in improving their communities.

CSR can be a risky undertaking. Approach the wrong cause, and you risk alienating customers and even employees. Devote too many of your resources, and you risk missing your financial goals. So how are small businesses so successfully navigating these waters? Below are my top three takeaways from my time spent with small business owners through the International Franchise Association.

Focus on Needs Close to Home
Small businesses’ clear advantage is that owners see every day what issues matter to their communities. Consider Jimmy Jamshed, the owner of Dallas-area Captain D’s restaurants. After encountering several individuals desperately rummaging through trash cans in search of food, Jamshed began a casual effort to donate some of his restaurant’s food to deliver to impoverished areas of his community. Soon community members and customers joined in, transforming Jamshed’s efforts into a full-fledged charitable program called Food for Homeless. Jamshed remains deeply involved, paying out-of-pocket for meals and visiting a local park almost daily to deliver meals and clothing.

Similarly, Premium Service Brands in Charlottesville, Virginia identified a problem in their community—children with school-provided lunches didn’t have access to healthy meals over the weekend. To change that, the office staff began spending Friday mornings grocery shopping for underserved students at the elementary school down the road. Now, students enrolled in their meal program receive a backpack filled with a weekend’s worth of food for easy-to-make meals containing high nutritional value. The program provides year-round stability to local families, removing a source of stress from students’ lives.

While the small business advantage in identifying challenges is clear, larger corporations can create a more organic, bottom-up strategy for engaging their consumers to know what issues matter to them most. This approach of directing focus to community needs will undoubtedly help companies stay on-brand and authentic.

Local Leadership is Authentic
Local business owners understand that listening to constituents needs before acting is essential to achieving the highest results. For example, when Norm Robertson, the owner of Express Employment in Indiana, organized veterans to speak out for legislation that could help, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Robertson himself was a veteran, but he also heard regularly from veterans who used his company’s employment services that they needed a better way to move from public service into the private sector. After listening to them, Robertson became an advocate for the Veteran Entrepreneurs Act, which aims to lower up-front costs for veterans wishing to open local businesses and creating a tax credit to cover 25 percent of initial fees.

In some cases, though, engagement goes beyond legislation alone. When Hurricane Michael closed in on Florida last October, Just Between Friends franchisee Karen Miner partnered with city officials to gather and deliver supplies to families affected by the storm. Miner realized the most effective way to distribute items was by collaborating with her locally elected officials to determine which areas were most affected. By working with her local police departments, Minor successfully influenced public efforts and significantly increased the effectiveness of relief for those in need. She utilized her political voice to ensure that those affected by the natural disaster were given the supplies and support essential to recovery.

There are many ways for corporations to engage in their communities, but these examples show that the most successful efforts have a common thread. They require listening, understanding and action, carefully focused on what matters to the communities they serve. These initiatives show consumers that the welfare of your community is part of your business’ value proposition.

Putting People Ahead of Politics
While it’s important for businesses to exercise their influence in the community, the best strategy for most brands is to remain out of politics. Most businesses are not pushing their political views, rather they are raising awareness on the issues that matter to their communities – where the rubber meets the road—and their customers appreciate that.

Catherine Chuck is an owner of several Applebee’s locations across ideologically diverse states. In order to be effective in her philanthropic efforts, Chuck has successfully navigated the varying political leanings of her locations by supporting initiatives that bridge party lines and bring people together rather than divide them. And she has excelled at this, raising over $14.5 million in funds and in-kind support to community nonprofits and organizations including local schools, veterans’ organizations, and for childhood cancer research. By supporting non divisive causes such as these, Chuck has successfully exercised her influence in bringing communities together for the common good.

Even education, which can be a contentious issue, can be made non-political. For example, Sonic Drive-In’s Limeades for Learning” campaign works with the brand’s franchisees and the community’s teachers to support educational programs and products for students. Through Limeades for Learning,” customers at local Sonic locations are encouraged to vote online in support of teacher-nominated supplies and educational materials, which Sonic then delivers to the classrooms. This unique partnership combines the community’s priorities with both locally owned and operated stores, as well as corporate engagement.

Key Takeaways

We so often talk about CSR as if it were a new concept, but in reality, small enterprises have toiled in their communities and acted upon local needs for a long time. Small businesses’ CSR and community engagement efforts may never receive the splashy coverage that large corporate donations garner, but they play an instrumental role in the success of communities and, from their local vantage point, have an ability to impact their cities and towns in ways that go beyond just jobs or service creation. Estimates by the Franchising Gives Back program, founded by Roark Capital’s Steve Romaniello to quantify charitable giving from franchises, show that locally owned and operated franchised small businesses have given more than 2.6 million volunteer hours to charitable causes in recent years. With their ability to listen to and understand local needs that matter most to the people they serve, they highlight how businesses across the country can develop relevant and authentic approaches to CSR.

 

It’s hard to find a CEO today who doesn’t tout the importance of innovation, yet many seem stumped by how to achieve it. A widely cited McKinsey survey from 2008 found that 84% of executives believed that innovation was critical to their business’s growth, but only 6% were satisfied with their company’s current innovation performance. A more recent study by KPMG and Innovation Leader asked executives to rate how advanced their companies’ innovation efforts were on a five-point scale. Nearly 60% of respondents said they were at the earliest stages (ad hoc, which was one point, or emerging, two points) while only 2% said their innovation activities were optimized (5 points).

Having studied innovation at more than 40 companies over the last 25 years, I believe the disconnect between ambition and execution comes from an overly narrow view of what innovation entails and a tendency to conflate innovation and R&D. When business leaders don’t see breakthrough results from their R&D divisions, they take it as a sign that long-term investments in innovation don’t pay off and cut R&D spending.

In reality, innovation is much bigger than R&D. It involves three distinct capabilities: Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration (DIA). R&D is just one part of the Discovery capability – invention. Corporate leaders need to recognize that developing business applications, revenue models, and markets for new products often requires as much time and resources and deserves as much emphasis, as inventing the technologies themselves.

Without a strategic innovation function that includes a comprehensive Discovery process and the capacity to Incubate and Accelerate new technologies, companies end up stockpiling undeveloped inventions in their R&D departments and, according to our research, don’t see a strong return on investment from their exploratory R&D. They fall into the trap of having breakthrough ideas that are incrementally executed,” as the CTO of a well-known Fortune 500 company put it during our research.

Innovation Requires Thinking Bigger

The answer to boosting innovation, then, isn’t just about R&D spending, but about building a robust innovation capacity. Corporate leaders would do well to heed the lessons of a well-known home goods company I studied extensively from 2010 to 2016. In the early 2000s, ambitious product experiments, like a tankless water heater, failed to catch on in the market. When new leadership arrived in 2007, they were alarmed by years of investment in big bets with little commercial payoff.

Instead of giving up on Discovery, however, the company regrouped. According to a senior VP, while they were able to perfect new products on a technical level, they saw they had a critical shortcoming in developing the markets for them. They were also picking projects that stretched them into new technological areas and markets simultaneously, pulling them too far from existing competencies.

By sharpening their existing strengths and growing their capabilities to Incubate and Accelerate promising products, they struck gold. Within two years, the company launched a high-tech faucet that became their biggest seller in decades. This was followed by a series of home fixture products that together more than doubled their sales volume in those categories and increased profits by more than 20%. Along the way, they learned an essential lesson: No matter how many amazing inventions R&D produces, it is just the beginning of the innovation process. A robust innovation function is necessary for any new technology to reach its peak potential and successfully mature into a full-fledged business.

Building Capability for Incubation and Acceleration

A well-functioning innovation team has capabilities beyond what a typical R&D department or existing business unit can provide. It not only refines the technical aspects of a new product during Discovery, but also maps the complete opportunity landscape of its use cases and business applications. In the Incubation phase, the team expands, tests, and elaborates the most promising opportunities and hones a business model and strategy. It Accelerates opportunities that start to take off, transitioning them into the mainstream once they have achieved the scale needed to survive under normal operations and metrics.

Rather than pigeonholing promising inventions into existing business units and the most obvious applications, a robust innovation function fosters an expansive view of what a technology might become and then shepherds it down the most promising pathways. For example, in the 1990s, the semiconductor company Analog Devices, which I studied, developed a new accelerometer capable of sensing changes in speed at 5% the cost of existing technologies. While perfecting this invention to be used for airbags in cars, other opportunities emerged to use it in video games, satellites, and scientific instruments. Experience in these smaller, specialized markets helped the company refine the technology and strengthen their position once they broke into the automotive market.

Innovation Pays Off

The tendency to conflate innovation and R&D also muddies people’s understanding of the long-term value it creates. Since the 1980s, U.S. companies have slashed spending on basic, exploratory science and engineering research, largely because they believed these investments wouldn’t be rewarded in the market. The benefits were too vague and not traceable to profits in the near term. However, research shows that investment in truly breakthrough innovation does pay off — if it encompasses more than R&D and includes robust Discovery, Incubation, and Acceleration capabilities.

On first glance, a 2015 study of 141 U.S. firms I conducted with Dmitri G. Markovitch and Pamela J. Harper appears to confirm people’s fears about the return on R&D spending. Across a decade of data, we found no statistically significant relationship between a firm’s investments in basic, exploratory R&D (measured by each firm’s number of patents over the past decade, weighted by how scientifically novel they were) and the firm’s stock market value. This finding aligns with existing research showing that there is either no connection, or in some cases a negative relationship, between exploratory R&D and market performance.

But the critical insight from our study is that an innovation capability that goes beyond basic, exploratory R&D is the missing piece that produces market value. We measured the presence of incubation and innovation personnel within each firm (such as senior leadership and formal teams tasked with innovation and incubation) and the quantity of the firm’s public communications about innovation — the two most readily available public indicators of investment in innovation beyond R&D. And we found that the level of these activities could turn the relationship between R&D and market performance from a slightly negative to a significantly positive one. (Interestingly, in our statistical analysis, innovation activity alone also has no impact on market value. It is only the interaction of innovation activity and basic, exploratory R&D that has a positive effect.)

Overall, our study supports what I have found across years of research at numerous companies: that investing in innovation pays off, but not if it is limited to R&D.

 

Gina O’Connor is a Professor of Innovation Management at Babson College, where she conducts research, teaches students and helps executives develop breakthrough innovation in large companies through Babson Executive Education. Her most recent book is Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation through People (2018).

 

from hbr.org

 

About 10% of S&P 500 companies change CEOs annually. Behind these appointments are often years of intricate preparation grooming successors. We regularly get approached by CEOs and boards who find it challenging to groom the right candidates and look for effective approaches to develop the next CEO.

Venerable behemoths like GE, IBM, P&G, and McKinsey have historically been viewed as CEO factories; indeed, 20.5% of all CEOs appointed at the S&P 1500 firms from 1992 to 2010 came from 36 CEO factories such as these, with GE being the largest. The sheer brand power of these companies often helped their executives rise to the top of search lists. But today GE is run by an outsider, IBM’s performance has been mixed, and P&G had a painful do-over” on their CEO succession. Now we must look beyond the brand names to uncover repeatable practices that boards, CEOs, and HR teams can use to strengthen their leadership pipelines.

It is tempting to assume that the largest academy companies have an edge when it comes to developing talent. As part of ghSMART’s CEO Genome research, we discovered that some surprising companies produce remarkable numbers of CEOs. Moreover, the CEOs these companies produce tend to perform well, thanks in part to the leadership development practices the companies embrace. We estimate there are over a dozen stealth CEO factories” across a range of industries and geographies; these include Medtronic, Rohm and Haas, and Danaher Corporation. We’ll explore the latter two in greater detail.

Until Danaher alum Larry Culp took charge at GE, Danaher was virtually unknown to the general public despite its stellar performance in scientific innovation. Rohm and Haas (which merged with Dow Chemical in 2009) was highly respected within the chemicals industry but far from a household name. And yet both companies produced scores of successful CEOs. More important, companies led by CEOs who came out of Rohm and Haas or Danaher performed 67% better than those same companies did when other CEOs were in charge. (Our research partners at the University of Chicago, N Vera Chau and Professor Steve Kaplan, compared stock returns for companies while they were led by 35 CEOs who came out of Rohm and Haas or Danaher and compared those returns to stock market returns of the same companies during time periods when they were led by CEOs who were not Rohm and Haas or Danaher alums and adjusted for variations in industry returns.)

Three practices stand out as especially important in the success of these stealth CEO factories — and these are distinctive from the prevailing approaches we see in many large companies today. These practices are instructive for boards, CEOs, and CHROs as they groom successors. The practices also offer helpful guidance for individuals who are looking to grow.

1. Give leaders broad authority. In contrast to the complex matrix management structure prevalent among large corporations today, stealth CEO factories vest their general managers with broad roles and substantial decision authority. As Raj Gupta, former chairman, CEO, and president of Rohm and Haas reflects: Very early on in their careers, we had GMs responsible for manufacturing, selling, R&D, supply chain and asset management. These were real CEO-like jobs running a full P&L and balance sheet, making big decisions with minimal guidance by corporate.” CEOs coming out of Rohm and Haas and Danaher spent on average nearly half of their careers in P&L leadership roles prior to their first CEO jobs, arming them with valuable experience running a business. Andy Silvernail, who joined IDEX Corporation from Danaher and created over $9 billion shareholder value as CEO, says, At Danaher, I got my first P&L six months out of business school. It was a highly decentralized environment with a lot of opportunities to really run a business in your early thirties. The buck really stopped with you. You had to make real decisions from an early age.” The broader authority to make decisions is an important factor in grooming future CEOs. Our CEO Genome research showed that highly decisive CEOs were 12 times more likely to succeed.

2. Encourage them to think like CEOs. Stealth CEO factories push their leaders from very early days to think like CEOs — laser focused on metrics and stakeholders directly connected to value creation. Managers at Danaher are trained to prioritize cash, returns on working capital, and strong competitive positions in markets with growth outlook. As a result, CEOs coming out of Danaher are astute at selecting high quality businesses to run and to acquire. For example, Scott Clawson is a serially successful CEO who quadrupled the value of the first company he ran (GSI, a $800 million agricultural equipment business) and delivered more than twice the returns on the second (Culligan, a $500 million water treatment company). Scott told us that he leaned on Danaher training to complete over 35 acquisitions, helping strengthen companies’ competitive position and adding hundreds of millions of shareholder value.

Rohm and Haas ingrains in its leaders a sense of responsibility to five key stakeholders (five voices” in the company vernacular): customers, employees, investors, community, and process. In most companies this broad view doesn’t factor into daily decision making until the C-suite. At Rohm and Haas, you were taught very early to evaluate every decision from the perspective of the five voices,” says Pierre Brondeau, a Rohm and Haas alum who is now CEO of FMC Corporation. That prepares you for the CEO role – thinking about the full set of stakeholders you are accountable to. It’s not about pleasing your boss – it’s about doing the right thing by your stakeholders.” Pierre successfully applied those principles to grow value of FMC five-fold during his tenure as CEO. In our CEO Genome research leaders who effectively engage stakeholders to produce results were two times more likely to succeed as CEOs.

3. Challenge strong performers early with big opportunities. Stealth CEO factories send young managers into uncharted waters with minimal support. We made bets on people and moved them early on,” says Raj. As one Rohm and Haas executive noted, Raj was very comfortable looking beyond the obvious candidates for big jobs, often reaching or more levels down.” For example, in the late 90’s Raj bet on relatively inexperienced young manager named Carol Eicher to lead the launch of a $1 billion joint venture in Saudi Arabia, which was the first of its kind for Rohm and Haas. He didn’t hesitate to send Carol to negotiate this important and complex deal, which was larger than any of ROH existing business units at the time, because he believed she had acumen to succeed. Carol successfully launched the JV and went on to become a successful CEO of Innocor delivering fourfold returns for investors.

Our research showed that these types of bold bets (career catapults”) help accelerate leaders to the top. And CEOs coming out of stealth CEO factories have these types of career experiences more often than a typical CEO. Compared to only a third of all the CEOs we analyzed, virtually all the CEOs who emerged from stealth factories had at least one career catapult, 79% of them had two, and 37% had three or more (compared to only 6% all CEOs in our analysis).

CEO Commitment Is Critical

To benefit from these approaches, the CEO must be committed to development of the leadership pipeline as her top priority. Raj Gupta says his commitment to these practices helped him groom 16 successful CEOs during his tenure at the helm of ROH, including Ilham Kadri, who is now in her second CEO role running Solvay – an $11 billion chemical company headquartered in Brussels. Kadri says, As a young manager with just a few months at ROH under my belt I was put in charge of closing a major acquisition in Russia in the midst of 2008 financial crisis. Later on, I was appointed first ever female General Manager in the Middle East and Africa, leading the transfer of ROH technologies in UAE and executing large investments in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Those opportunities challenged me very early in my career to operate with a lot of unknowns and make decisions on a wide range of issues, which was great training for becoming a CEO.”

These three practices for developing strong leaders don’t require huge scale or large training budgets. They require leadership values and corporate structures that allow for real empowerment and risk taking. Above all, they require the leader at the top to be personally invested and genuinely eager to grow other strong decisive leaders rather than obedient corporate foot soldiers.

 

It’s human nature to grumble a little about the boss, the boring meeting, or some seemingly clueless directive from several layers above. Strictly speaking, such grumbling doesn’t cause real harm; everyone needs to vent now and then.

But an organization is in serious trouble when most discussions on crucial issues take place in side conversations, rather than in formal meetings, where concerns can be addressed thoughtfully with people in a position to instigate a change of course.

Recent news reports on Boeing reveal what appears to be an epidemic of side conversations about the 737 Max jetliner. In private emails and instant messages, employees expressed rampant concerns about the Max during its development — and outright disdain for some of the decisions being made, technologies being put forward, and even for the company’s customers. The 

117 pages of internal communications turned over to the U.S. Congress last week paint a damning portrait of Boeing’s culture — captured in persistent side conversations. Its employees derided airline customers as incompetent and idiots,” and had similarly harsh words about regulators and Boeing senior executives.

As Captain Sully” Sullenberger noted in the 

New York Times, We’ve all seen this movie before, in places like Enron.”

Side conversations occur because people believe it’s not acceptable to tell the truth publicly. They happen because employees have learned that meetings are places where you go along with the boss or the majority, even if you disagree with what’s being decided or planned. Because we all want to express ourselves and feel heard, we can’t stay silent forever. So we seek out our peers — the ones with whom we believe we can talk straight — and then say what we really think.

Here’s how to tell whether your organization might be plagued by an unhealthy degree of side conversations.

• During a development process, an overwhelming emphasis on speed or profit drives out conversations about a new offering’s quality and safety and/or a new product or service is discussed in only positive terms in formal progress meetings. It’s a given that new offerings bring risks, uncertainties, and problems. Not hearing about them should always raise a red flag.
• Subject matter experts say little or nothing at meetings. Although it’s always possible they simply have nothing to say, given their expertise and the novelty of the project, it’s more likely they feel unable to say something negative.
• People automatically agree with leaders at meetings on crucial issues. Their lack of data, substantive comments or enthusiasm is a warning sign.

The way to heal a sick” culture (as Boeing’s 

was called by Sara Nelson, president of the Flight Attendants Union) is to help all employees recognize that side conversations about substantive issues are a source of organizational pathology. It starts with senior executives building a culture of psychological safety where employees believe that candor is expected and welcome. As I have detailed in a recent 

book, this culture can be carefully built through three kinds of ongoing leadership action:

Set the stage. Be explicit about the tensions and challenges that plague all new endeavors, and constantly remind people that you understand the risks, uncertainties, and complexities. Make sure everyone knows that you recognize the tension between the profits the company desires and the absolute premium placed on quality and safety. Point out that kicking the problem down the road costs more in the long run.

Insist on input. Do not accept silence by subject matter experts in meetings. Issue explicit invitations for input. Put people on the spot by asking questions to elicit their thoughts. Force yourself to be curious and ready to hear what they are seeing and thinking.

Appreciate messengers. Respond productively to bad news and concerns. You never know how much courage it might have taken someone to speak. Focus on solutions. Invite ideas and look for volunteers to team up to help solve the problems raised.

Because of escalating uncertainty and risk in many industries, building a healthy culture for candid, challenging conversations has never been more important. It’s time to drive side conversations back onto the center stage.

from:hbr

افزایش تمرکز حواس در مطالعه

(دکتر ، مشاوره تحصیلی و کسب و کار)

 

بسیاری از دانشجویان هنگام تحصیل در تمرکز مشکل دارند. همان طور که خود می دانید، تمرکز حواس در    هر کاری از جمله مطالعه و درس خواندن - از ضروریات است. تمرکز حواس، حالتی ذهنی و روانی است که در   آن حالت، تمام قوای حسی، روانی و فکری انسان روی موضوع خاصی متمرکز می شود و تضمین کننده امر یادگیری و انجام صحیح کارها و رهایی از خطرات احتمالی است.

شاید شما تا به حال خیلی به حواس پرتی فکر کرده باشید و بارها از خود پرسیده باشید که چرا گاهی به هنگام مطالعه، حواس آدم پرت می شود؟ ما نمیدانیم که شما برای این سؤال خود چه جوابی پیدا کرده اید؛ اما پاسخ صحیح این پرسش را به شما می گوییم:
"حواس پرتی، چیزی نیست جز تمایل ذاتی ذهن به درگیری و فعالیت".
ذهن شما، همواره می خواهد درگیر و مشغول باشد؛ بنابراین، اگر آن چه اکنون انجام می دهید، در شما درگیری و مشغولیت ذهنی ایجاد کند، فکر شما دیگر احساس نمی کند که جای دیگری برود و در آن جا درگیر شود؛ اما اگر در انجام این کار، درگیری ذهنی ایجاد نشود، ذهن شما شتابان به جایی می رود تا خود را در آن جا مشغول کند و این، همان حواس پرتی است.

یلی از دانش آموزان به سختی می توانند در طول مطالعه تمرکز کنند. توانایی تمرکز در حالی که مطالعه می کنید برای داشتن عملکرد بهتر در کلاس و آزمون ها ضروری است.
 

در اینجا پیشنهاداتی برای افزایش تمرکز حواس در مطالعه برای شما عنوان می شود:

1.  در یک مکان ساکت که عاری از هرگونه حواس پرتی و وقفه باشد مطالعه کنید. سعی کنید فضایی که منحصراً برای مطالعه طراحی شده باشد را داشته باشید.
2.  برنامه مطالعه ای درست کنید که نشون بده چه وظایفی برای اجرا نیاز دارید و این وظایف چه زمانی باید انجام بشه. این کار شما را برای یک مطالعه موثرتر آماده می کند.
3.  سعی کنید در ساعاتی از روز که عملکرد بهتری دارید مطالعه کنید. بعضی افراد در اوایل صبح بهتر کار می کنند و بعضی در انتهای شب. بفهمید کدام حالت برای شما بهتر است.
4.  مطمئن شوید وقتی می خواهید مطالعه کنید خسته یا گرسنه نباشید. در غیر اینصورت، انرژی لازم برای تمرکز را نخواهید داشت. علاوه بر اینها، آمادگی جسمی تان را حفظ کنید.
5.  سعی نکنید دو کار را همزمان انجام دهید. قادر به تمرکز حتی روی یک مورد هم نخواهید بود. تمرکز به این معنی است که روی یک چیز به استثای بقیه چیزها تمرکز کنید.
6.  وظایف بزرگتر را به مجموعه ای از وظایف کوچکتر که بتوانید هر کدام را در یک زمان مشخص انجام دهید تقسیم کنید. اگر سعی کنید همه ی یک کار بزرگ را در یک زمان انجام دهید، ممکن است احساس دستپاچگی کرده و ممکن است قادر به حفظ تمرکزتان نباشید.
7.  راحت باشید. وقتی ناراحت هستید به سختی می توانید تمرکز کنید. مهم است وقتی روی یک وظیفه که نیاز به تمرکز دارد کار می کنید راحت باشید. ریلکس شدن برای بیشتر دانش آموزان کارسازه.
8.  ذهنتون رو از افکار آزاردهنده خالی کنید. آرامش ذهن برای تمرکز خیلی مهم است. می توانید به واسطه افکار خودتان حواستان پرت شود. افکارتان را نظاره کنید و خودتان را از پیروی از این افکار منع کنید.
9.  در چیزی که مطالعه می کنید به دنبال علایق تان باشید. تلاش کنید چیزهایی که مطالعه می کنید را به زندگی تان برای معنای بیشر مرتبط کنید. این کار میتواند به شما در تمرکز کردن انگیزه دهد.
10.  هر وقت احساس خستگی کردید استراحت کنید. هیچ فرمولی برای اینکه چه وقت استراحت کنید وجود ندارد. شما خودتان متوجه خواهید شد که چه وقت نیاز به استراحت دارید.
11.  قلم و کاغذ عامل افزایش تمرکز حواس

در حین مطالعه یک کاغذ کنارتون داشته باشید تا اگه ذهنتون یکدفعه رفت سمت یه موضوعی غیر از درسی که دارید میخونید مثلا دارید درس میخونید یکدفعه یادتون میاد که باید یک کاری رو انجام بدید. اگه اون کار در همون لحظه بیشتر از دو یا سه دقیقه وقت نمی بره اشکال نداره همون جا انجامش بدید. اما اگه احساس می کنید وقت بیشتری ازتون میگیره روی یک کاغذ بنویسیدش تا ذهنتون از اون کار تخلیه بشه و دوباره تمرکز پیدا کنید. همچنین سعی کنید وقتی درس می خونید یک کاغذ جلوی دستتون باشه و چیز هایی که یاد می گیرید رو روی کاغذ بنویسید چون وقتی که حواس بیشتری رو درگیر می کنید یعنی هم حس لامسه و هم بینایی شما درگیر میشه باعث میشه تمرکزتون بره بالاتر.

12.  اشیای مانع تمرکز حواس را بردارید

چیزهایی که ممکنه حواس شما رو پرت کنه از اطرافتون بردارید. هیچ وقت تبلت یا موبایلتون رو کنار دستتون نزارید مخصوصا وقتی که در حالت آفلاین نیست و یا نت روشن هست و ممکنه هر لحظه براتون پیام جدیدی بیاد. خیلی ها اینجورن که تا پیام جدیدی میاد کنجکاو میشن بخونن ببینن کیه و یا چی گفته. همین حواس شما رو پرت میکنه و علاوه بر اون ممکنه چند دقیقه هم وقت شما رو بگیره که جواب اون پیام رو بدید و یا تا مدتی بعدش تو فکر اون پیام باشید. اینها همه باعث کم شدن تمرکز شما میشه.

13.   در محیط آرام و ساکت مطالعه کنید

توی محیط ساکتی درس بخونید طوری که صدای تلویزیون رو نشنوید چون ممکنه خبر یا جمله جذابی از تلویزیون بشنوید و دلتون بخواد برید ببینید بینم چی میگه و ادامه اش چیه. اینجا هم تمرکزتون رو از دست می دهید و هم ممکنه چند دقیقه وقتتون تلف بشه. اگه توی خونتون هر جا برید صدای تلویزیون هست سعی کنید برید کتابخونه ای که ساکت هست درس بخونید و ساعاتی که مجبور هستید خونه درس بخونید مثل شب ها بر سر قضیه صدای تلویزیون با خانواده به توافق برسید.

 جمع آوری: دکتر

14.  در شرایط فیزیکی مناسب درس بخوانید

با لباس راحت درس بخونید. اتاق یا جایی که اونجا مطالعه می کنید نباید خیلی گرم یا سرد و یا خیلی تاریک باشه که تمرکز شما رو به هم بزنه.

15. در مکان ثابتی مطالعه کنید

اگه مکان ثابت و زمان های مشخصی برای مطالعه کردن داشته باشید کم کم شرطی میشین. این کار علاوه بر ایجاد تمرکز برای درمان خیال پردازی در حین مطالعه هم مفیده.

از راهنما استفاده کنید

سعی کنید حین مطالعه از یک راهنما مثل مداد، انگشت اشاره و … استفاده کنید چون باعث روان خوانی، جلوگیری از برگشت دوباره به پاراگراف قبلی، جلوگیری از خستگی چشم و ذهن و باعث تمرکز حواس بیشتر میشه.

16. هدف و حجم مطالعه را قبل از شروع مشخص کنید

اگه قبل از شروع مطالعه یا تست زدن با خودتون قرارداد ببنید که مثلا من باید این چند صفحه دین و زندگی رو در یک ساعت بخونم هدف مشخصی دارید و ذهنتون شما رو وادار میکنه که این یک ساعت روی مطلب تمرکز کنید. اما اگه مشخص نکنید دقیقا چقدر قراره درس بخونید و تا کجا بخونید ذهنتون نمیتونه خوب تشخیص بده کی مطالعه رو متوقف کنه و تا کجا روی مطلب تمرکز کنه، پس هیچ کمکی هم به افزایش تمرکز ذهن شما نمیکنه. بنابرنی اگه دنبال افزایش تمرکز حواس هستید که باید هم باشید حتما قبل از شروع مطالعه حجم مطالعه و مدت زمانی که میخواهید وقت بگذارید رو حداقل به طور تقریبی برای خودتون مشخص کنید.

17. مطالعه فعال

فعال بودن هنگام مطالعه کمک زیادی به شما در حفظ تمرکز می کند. در طول مطالعه زیر مطالب مهم خط بکشید و نکات مهم را یادداشت نمایید اینکار باعث می شود ذهن شما درگیر مطالعه و متمرکز شود. همچنین دنبال کردن خطوط متن کتاب با انگشت یا قلم می تواند در جهت جلوگیری از حواس پرتی به شما کمک کند.

18. تار عنکبوت

تا به حال به تار عنکبوت دست زده اید؟ اگر بار اول به تار عنکبوت دست بزنید تار تکان می خورد و باعث واکنش عنکبوت می شود. کافیست چند بار تکان دادن را تکرار کنید، عنکبوت هیچ واکنشی از خودش نشان نمی دهد. شما هم وقتی در حال مطالعه هستید اگر عامل مزاحمی در محیط وجود دارد (مثلا در با صدای بلند به هم می‌خورد) نباید در مقابل این عامل مزاحم واکنش نشان دهید تا حواستان را پرت شود. از روش عنکبوتی استفاده کنید و در مقابل حواس پرتی تسلیم نشوید.

19. کافئین

مصرف متعادل کافئین به افزایش تمرکز حواس کمک می‌کند. یک فنجان چای، قهوه و کافی میکس یا دیگر نوشیدنی‌های کافئین‌دار می تواند ذهن شما هنگام مطالعه متمرکز تر کند و خستگی را تا حدودی برطرف کند. البته مصرف زیاد کافئین نتیجه عکس دارد، در صورت زیاده روی باعث عدم تمرکز می شود.

20. نیاز به تمرین

موفقیت در حفظ تمرکز و عدم حواس پرتی هنگام مطالعه یک شبه حاصل نمی شود بلکه نیاز دارد تا مدتی مواردی که برای تمرکز حواس گفتیم را اجرا کنید. بنابراین با تمرین روزانه روش هایی که مطرح کردیم لذت مطالعه متمرکز و به دور از حواس پرتی را برای خودتان بیشتر کنید.

جمع آوری: دکتر

 

 

امیرپویان قریب

مدرس دبیرستان های تهران(علامه طباطبایی، حنان، رازی، فرهیختگان، شاهد ایثار، شاهد خدیجه کبری و .)،  استاد پروازی در شهرستان های اهواز، زاهدان، بندرعباس، مشهد و تبریز)،مدرس مدارس و آموزشگاه های معتبر اطراف تهران، مولف  انتشارات قلم چی، منشور دانش و. ) دارای سابقه ی تدریس در صدا و سیما.

 

سید احسان سجادیان

فارغ التحصیل رشته مهندسی مکانیک صنعتی شریف و دانشجوی مقطع دکتری دانشگاه آزاد اسلامی

 دارنده مدال المپیاد ریاضی. مدرس پر مخاطب ریاضی در دبیرستان های ابوریحان و دانش، استاد پروازی

شهر اهواز  مدرس ریاضی رتبه های دو رقمی و سه رقمی

 

امیر حسین کوچیان فرد

فوق لیسانس شیمی تجزیه، 30 سال سابقه، معلم رسمی آموزش و پرورش منطقه 2، مولف کتاب های کنکور انتشارات فکور، آلما ، همگامان و مدرس در مدارس مهد دانش، ندای زینب، ابوعلی سینا،

مدرس،شهید بهشتی،کوشش ، علوم و . آموزشگاه های مختلف در شهرهای تهران، اراک، بوشهر، اصفهان، اهواز، تاکستان، کرج، رشت و .

سرکار خانم سمیه رجبی

قائم مقام گروه آموزشی راد

کارشناس ارشد فیزیک اتمی از دانشگاه تهران، مدرس پروازی شهرهای اهواز، همدان، شوش و ،

مدرس فیزیک و مشاور کنکور دبیرستانهای مطرح و بنام در تهران دبیرستانهای فرزانگان 5/ابوریحان

شاهد ایثار/نصر/ریحانه النبی/هجرت/کیمیا/ دانش مفید/امام جعفر صادق/شوق پرواز و

 

مشاور کسب و کار بیش از 100 سازمان در ایران و خارج ایران (مپنا، صنایع دفاعی، ایران خودرو، مگاموتور، پتروشیمی ها

 صنایع پزشکی و درمانی، شرکت های خصوصی ( EPC) و

معماری سازمان، طراح استراتژی، مدرس سیستم های مدیریتی، مدل های تعالی، استراتژی، مدل های کسب و کار

مدرس برتر در حوزه شکایت و رضایت مشتری، تدریس بیش از 10.000 ساعت آموزش، ممیز سیستم های مدیریتی، ارزیاب سازمانی

مشاور تحصیلی ( برنامه ریزی، تحلیل برنامه، آزمون، آنالیز آزمون و.) به همراه گروه مجرب

سخنران انگیزشی ( مدارس و سازمان های خصوصی و دولتی)

افزایش تمرکز حواس در مطالعه

(دکتر ، مشاوره تحصیلی و کسب و کار)

 

بسیاری از دانشجویان هنگام تحصیل در تمرکز مشکل دارند. همان طور که خود می دانید، تمرکز حواس در    هر کاری از جمله مطالعه و درس خواندن - از ضروریات است. تمرکز حواس، حالتی ذهنی و روانی است که در   آن حالت، تمام قوای حسی، روانی و فکری انسان روی موضوع خاصی متمرکز می شود و تضمین کننده امر یادگیری و انجام صحیح کارها و رهایی از خطرات احتمالی است.

شاید شما تا به حال خیلی به حواس پرتی فکر کرده باشید و بارها از خود پرسیده باشید که چرا گاهی به هنگام مطالعه، حواس آدم پرت می شود؟ ما نمیدانیم که شما برای این سؤال خود چه جوابی پیدا کرده اید؛ اما پاسخ صحیح این پرسش را به شما می گوییم:
"حواس پرتی، چیزی نیست جز تمایل ذاتی ذهن به درگیری و فعالیت".
ذهن شما، همواره می خواهد درگیر و مشغول باشد؛ بنابراین، اگر آن چه اکنون انجام می دهید، در شما درگیری و مشغولیت ذهنی ایجاد کند، فکر شما دیگر احساس نمی کند که جای دیگری برود و در آن جا درگیر شود؛ اما اگر در انجام این کار، درگیری ذهنی ایجاد نشود، ذهن شما شتابان به جایی می رود تا خود را در آن جا مشغول کند و این، همان حواس پرتی است.

یلی از دانش آموزان به سختی می توانند در طول مطالعه تمرکز کنند. توانایی تمرکز در حالی که مطالعه می کنید برای داشتن عملکرد بهتر در کلاس و آزمون ها ضروری است.
 

در اینجا پیشنهاداتی برای افزایش تمرکز حواس در مطالعه برای شما عنوان می شود:

1.  در یک مکان ساکت که عاری از هرگونه حواس پرتی و وقفه باشد مطالعه کنید. سعی کنید فضایی که منحصراً برای مطالعه طراحی شده باشد را داشته باشید.
2.  برنامه مطالعه ای درست کنید که نشون بده چه وظایفی برای اجرا نیاز دارید و این وظایف چه زمانی باید انجام بشه. این کار شما را برای یک مطالعه موثرتر آماده می کند.
3.  سعی کنید در ساعاتی از روز که عملکرد بهتری دارید مطالعه کنید. بعضی افراد در اوایل صبح بهتر کار می کنند و بعضی در انتهای شب. بفهمید کدام حالت برای شما بهتر است.
4.  مطمئن شوید وقتی می خواهید مطالعه کنید خسته یا گرسنه نباشید. در غیر اینصورت، انرژی لازم برای تمرکز را نخواهید داشت. علاوه بر اینها، آمادگی جسمی تان را حفظ کنید.
5.  سعی نکنید دو کار را همزمان انجام دهید. قادر به تمرکز حتی روی یک مورد هم نخواهید بود. تمرکز به این معنی است که روی یک چیز به استثای بقیه چیزها تمرکز کنید.
6.  وظایف بزرگتر را به مجموعه ای از وظایف کوچکتر که بتوانید هر کدام را در یک زمان مشخص انجام دهید تقسیم کنید. اگر سعی کنید همه ی یک کار بزرگ را در یک زمان انجام دهید، ممکن است احساس دستپاچگی کرده و ممکن است قادر به حفظ تمرکزتان نباشید.
7.  راحت باشید. وقتی ناراحت هستید به سختی می توانید تمرکز کنید. مهم است وقتی روی یک وظیفه که نیاز به تمرکز دارد کار می کنید راحت باشید. ریلکس شدن برای بیشتر دانش آموزان کارسازه.
8.  ذهنتون رو از افکار آزاردهنده خالی کنید. آرامش ذهن برای تمرکز خیلی مهم است. می توانید به واسطه افکار خودتان حواستان پرت شود. افکارتان را نظاره کنید و خودتان را از پیروی از این افکار منع کنید.
9.  در چیزی که مطالعه می کنید به دنبال علایق تان باشید. تلاش کنید چیزهایی که مطالعه می کنید را به زندگی تان برای معنای بیشر مرتبط کنید. این کار میتواند به شما در تمرکز کردن انگیزه دهد.
10.  هر وقت احساس خستگی کردید استراحت کنید. هیچ فرمولی برای اینکه چه وقت استراحت کنید وجود ندارد. شما خودتان متوجه خواهید شد که چه وقت نیاز به استراحت دارید.
11.  قلم و کاغذ عامل افزایش تمرکز حواس

در حین مطالعه یک کاغذ کنارتون داشته باشید تا اگه ذهنتون یکدفعه رفت سمت یه موضوعی غیر از درسی که دارید میخونید مثلا دارید درس میخونید یکدفعه یادتون میاد که باید یک کاری رو انجام بدید. اگه اون کار در همون لحظه بیشتر از دو یا سه دقیقه وقت نمی بره اشکال نداره همون جا انجامش بدید. اما اگه احساس می کنید وقت بیشتری ازتون میگیره روی یک کاغذ بنویسیدش تا ذهنتون از اون کار تخلیه بشه و دوباره تمرکز پیدا کنید. همچنین سعی کنید وقتی درس می خونید یک کاغذ جلوی دستتون باشه و چیز هایی که یاد می گیرید رو روی کاغذ بنویسید چون وقتی که حواس بیشتری رو درگیر می کنید یعنی هم حس لامسه و هم بینایی شما درگیر میشه باعث میشه تمرکزتون بره بالاتر.

12.  اشیای مانع تمرکز حواس را بردارید

چیزهایی که ممکنه حواس شما رو پرت کنه از اطرافتون بردارید. هیچ وقت تبلت یا موبایلتون رو کنار دستتون نزارید مخصوصا وقتی که در حالت آفلاین نیست و یا نت روشن هست و ممکنه هر لحظه براتون پیام جدیدی بیاد. خیلی ها اینجورن که تا پیام جدیدی میاد کنجکاو میشن بخونن ببینن کیه و یا چی گفته. همین حواس شما رو پرت میکنه و علاوه بر اون ممکنه چند دقیقه هم وقت شما رو بگیره که جواب اون پیام رو بدید و یا تا مدتی بعدش تو فکر اون پیام باشید. اینها همه باعث کم شدن تمرکز شما میشه.

13.   در محیط آرام و ساکت مطالعه کنید

توی محیط ساکتی درس بخونید طوری که صدای تلویزیون رو نشنوید چون ممکنه خبر یا جمله جذابی از تلویزیون بشنوید و دلتون بخواد برید ببینید بینم چی میگه و ادامه اش چیه. اینجا هم تمرکزتون رو از دست می دهید و هم ممکنه چند دقیقه وقتتون تلف بشه. اگه توی خونتون هر جا برید صدای تلویزیون هست سعی کنید برید کتابخونه ای که ساکت هست درس بخونید و ساعاتی که مجبور هستید خونه درس بخونید مثل شب ها بر سر قضیه صدای تلویزیون با خانواده به توافق برسید.

 جمع آوری: دکتر

14.  در شرایط فیزیکی مناسب درس بخوانید

با لباس راحت درس بخونید. اتاق یا جایی که اونجا مطالعه می کنید نباید خیلی گرم یا سرد و یا خیلی تاریک باشه که تمرکز شما رو به هم بزنه.

15. در مکان ثابتی مطالعه کنید

اگه مکان ثابت و زمان های مشخصی برای مطالعه کردن داشته باشید کم کم شرطی میشین. این کار علاوه بر ایجاد تمرکز برای درمان خیال پردازی در حین مطالعه هم مفیده.

از راهنما استفاده کنید

سعی کنید حین مطالعه از یک راهنما مثل مداد، انگشت اشاره و … استفاده کنید چون باعث روان خوانی، جلوگیری از برگشت دوباره به پاراگراف قبلی، جلوگیری از خستگی چشم و ذهن و باعث تمرکز حواس بیشتر میشه.

16. هدف و حجم مطالعه را قبل از شروع مشخص کنید

اگه قبل از شروع مطالعه یا تست زدن با خودتون قرارداد ببنید که مثلا من باید این چند صفحه دین و زندگی رو در یک ساعت بخونم هدف مشخصی دارید و ذهنتون شما رو وادار میکنه که این یک ساعت روی مطلب تمرکز کنید. اما اگه مشخص نکنید دقیقا چقدر قراره درس بخونید و تا کجا بخونید ذهنتون نمیتونه خوب تشخیص بده کی مطالعه رو متوقف کنه و تا کجا روی مطلب تمرکز کنه، پس هیچ کمکی هم به افزایش تمرکز ذهن شما نمیکنه. بنابرنی اگه دنبال افزایش تمرکز حواس هستید که باید هم باشید حتما قبل از شروع مطالعه حجم مطالعه و مدت زمانی که میخواهید وقت بگذارید رو حداقل به طور تقریبی برای خودتون مشخص کنید.

17. مطالعه فعال

فعال بودن هنگام مطالعه کمک زیادی به شما در حفظ تمرکز می کند. در طول مطالعه زیر مطالب مهم خط بکشید و نکات مهم را یادداشت نمایید اینکار باعث می شود ذهن شما درگیر مطالعه و متمرکز شود. همچنین دنبال کردن خطوط متن کتاب با انگشت یا قلم می تواند در جهت جلوگیری از حواس پرتی به شما کمک کند.

18. تار عنکبوت

تا به حال به تار عنکبوت دست زده اید؟ اگر بار اول به تار عنکبوت دست بزنید تار تکان می خورد و باعث واکنش عنکبوت می شود. کافیست چند بار تکان دادن را تکرار کنید، عنکبوت هیچ واکنشی از خودش نشان نمی دهد. شما هم وقتی در حال مطالعه هستید اگر عامل مزاحمی در محیط وجود دارد (مثلا در با صدای بلند به هم می‌خورد) نباید در مقابل این عامل مزاحم واکنش نشان دهید تا حواستان را پرت شود. از روش عنکبوتی استفاده کنید و در مقابل حواس پرتی تسلیم نشوید.

19. کافئین

مصرف متعادل کافئین به افزایش تمرکز حواس کمک می‌کند. یک فنجان چای، قهوه و کافی میکس یا دیگر نوشیدنی‌های کافئین‌دار می تواند ذهن شما هنگام مطالعه متمرکز تر کند و خستگی را تا حدودی برطرف کند. البته مصرف زیاد کافئین نتیجه عکس دارد، در صورت زیاده روی باعث عدم تمرکز می شود.

20. نیاز به تمرین

موفقیت در حفظ تمرکز و عدم حواس پرتی هنگام مطالعه یک شبه حاصل نمی شود بلکه نیاز دارد تا مدتی مواردی که برای تمرکز حواس گفتیم را اجرا کنید. بنابراین با تمرین روزانه روش هایی که مطرح کردیم لذت مطالعه متمرکز و به دور از حواس پرتی را برای خودتان بیشتر کنید.

جمع آوری: دکتر

 

 

by 

Patty McCord

From the January–February 2014 Issue

 

Netflixorganizationalculture 131001173045-phpapp02 from 

Rose Nolen

People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that Netflix has been really successful: During 2013 alone its stock more than tripled, it won three Emmy awards, and its U.S. subscriber base grew to nearly 29 million. All that aside, the approach is compelling because it derives from common sense. In this article I’ll go beyond the bullet points to describe five ideas that have defined the way Netflix attracts, retains, and manages talent. But first I’ll share two conversations I had with early employees, both of which helped shape our overall philosophy.

The first took place in late 2001. Netflix had been growing quickly: We’d reached about 120 employees and had been planning an IPO. But after the dot-com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks occurred, things changed. It became clear that we needed to put the IPO on hold and lay off a third of our employees. It was brutal. Then, a bit unexpectedly, DVD players became the hot gift that Christmas. By early 2002 our DVD-by-mail subscription business was growing like crazy. Suddenly we had far more work to do, with 30% fewer employees.

One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I’ll call John. Before the layoffs, he’d managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. There’s no rush—I’m happier now,” he said. It turned out that the engineers we’d laid off weren’t spectacular—they were merely adequate. John realized that he’d spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. I’ve learned that I’d rather work by myself than with subpar performers,” he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.

So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I’d braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well: She was sad to be leaving but recognized that the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path. This incident helped us create the other vital element of our talent management philosophy: If we wanted only A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.

With these two overarching principles in mind, we shaped our approach to talent using the five tenets below.

Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.

Adultlike behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently sted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.

Let me offer two examples.

When Netflix launched, we had a standard paid-time-off policy: People got 10 vacation days, 10 holidays, and a few sick days. We used an honor system—employees kept track of the days they took off and let their managers know when they’d be out. After we went public, our auditors freaked. They said Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that we account for time off. We considered instituting a formal tracking system. But then Reed asked, Are companies required to give time off? If not, can’t we just handle it informally and skip the accounting rigmarole?” I did some research and found that, indeed, no California law governed vacation time.

So instead of shifting to a formal system, we went in the opposite direction: Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate. Bosses and employees were asked to work it out with one another. (Hourly workers in call centers and warehouses were given a more structured policy.) We did provide some guidance. If you worked in accounting or finance, you shouldn’t plan to be out during the beginning or the end of a quarter, because those were busy times. If you wanted 30 days off in a row, you needed to meet with HR. Senior leaders were urged to take vacations and to let people know about them—they were role models for the policy. (Most were happy to comply.) Some people worried about whether the system would be inconsistent—whether some bosses would allow tons of time off while others would be stingy. In general, I worried more about fairness than consistency, because the reality is that in any organization, the highest-performing and most valuable employees get more leeway.

The company’s expense policy is five words long: Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

We also departed from a formal travel and expense policy and decided to simply require adultlike behavior there, too. The company’s expense policy is five words long: Act in Netflix’s best interests.” In talking that through with employees, we said we expected them to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs. It also reduced costs: Many large companies still use travel agents (and pay their fees) to book trips, as a way to enforce travel policies. They could save money by letting employees book their own trips online. Like most Netflix managers, I had to have conversations periodically with employees who ate at lavish restaurants (meals that would have been fine for sales or recruiting, but not for eating alone or with a Netflix colleague). We kept an eye on our IT guys, who were prone to buying a lot of gadgets. But overall we found that expense accounts are another area where if you create a clear expectation of responsible behavior, most employees will comply.

Tell the Truth About Performance

Many years ago we eliminated formal reviews. We had held them for a while but came to realize they didn’t make sense—they were too ritualistic and too infrequent. So we asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work. In many functions—sales, engineering, product development—it’s fairly obvious how well people are doing. (As companies develop better analytics to measure performance, this becomes even truer.) Building a bureaucracy and elaborate rituals around measuring performance usually doesn’t improve it.

Traditional corporate performance reviews are driven largely by fear of litigation. The theory is that if you want to get rid of someone, you need a paper trail documenting a history of poor achievement. At many companies, low performers are placed on Performance Improvement Plans.” I detest PIPs. I think they’re fundamentally dishonest: They never accomplish what their name implies.

One Netflix manager requested a PIP for a quality assurance engineer named Maria, who had been hired to help develop our streaming service. The technology was new, and it was evolving very quickly. Maria’s job was to find bugs. She was fast, intuitive, and hardworking. But in time we figured out how to automate the QA tests. Maria didn’t like automation and wasn’t particularly good at it. Her new boss (brought in to create a world-class automation tools team) told me he wanted to start a PIP with her.

I replied, Why bother? We know how this will play out. You’ll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can’t, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you’ll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won’t sleep on Tuesday nights, because you’ll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you’ll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she’s been consistently rewarded for being great at her job—a job that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

Instead, let’s just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria’s skills no longer apply. This won’t be a surprise to her: She’s been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.” In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they’re told the truth—and this proved to be the case with Maria.

When we stopped doing formal performance reviews, we instituted informal 360-degree reviews. We kept them fairly simple: People were asked to identify things that colleagues should stop, start, or continue. In the beginning we used an anonymous software system, but over time we shifted to signed feedback, and many teams held their 360s face-to-face.

HR people can’t believe that a company the size of Netflix doesn’t hold annual reviews. Are you making this up just to upset us?” they ask. I’m not. If you talk simply and honestly about performance on a regular basis, you can get good results—probably better ones than a company that grades everyone on a five-point scale.

Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

Discussing the military’s performance during the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, once famously said, You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” When I talk to managers about creating great teams, I tell them to approach the process in exactly the opposite way.

In my consulting work, I ask managers to imagine a documentary about what their team is accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do they see? How is the work different from what the team is doing today? Next I ask them to think about the skills needed to make the images in the movie become reality. Nowhere in the early stages of the process do I advise them to think about the team they actually have. Only after they’ve done the work of envisioning the ideal outcome and the skill set necessary to achieve it should they analyze how well their existing team matches what they need.

If you’re in a fast-changing business environment, you’re probably looking at a lot of mismatches. In that case, you need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a place where their skills are a better fit. You also need to recruit people with the right skills.

We faced the latter challenge at Netflix in a fairly dramatic way as we began to shift from DVDs by mail to a streaming service. We had to store massive volumes of files in the cloud and figure out how huge numbers of people could reliably access them. (By some estimates, up to a third of peak residential internet traffic in the U.S. comes from customers streaming Netflix movies.) So we needed to find people deeply experienced with cloud services who worked for companies that operate on a giant scale—companies like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook, which aren’t the easiest places to hire someone away from.

Our compensation philosophy helped a lot. Most of its principles stem from ideals described earlier: Be honest, and treat people like adults. For instance, during my tenure Netflix didn’t pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they’re unnecessary if you hire the right people. If your employees are fully formed adults who put the company first, an annual bonus won’t make them work harder or smarter. We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent. Many HR people dislike it when employees talk to recruiters, but I always told employees to take the call, ask how much, and send me the number—it’s valuable information.

In addition, we used equity compensation much differently from the way most companies do. Instead of larding stock options on top of a competitive salary, we let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity. If employees wanted stock options, we reduced their salaries accordingly. We believed that they were sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs, judge their personal tolerance for risk, and decide what was best for them and their families. We distributed options every month, at a slight discount from the market price. We had no vesting period—the options could be cashed in immediately. Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as golden handcuffs” to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you’ve earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don’t want to hold you hostage.

We continually told managers that building a great team was their most important task. We didn’t measure them on whether they were excellent coaches or mentors or got their paperwork done on time. Great teams accomplish great work, and recruiting the right team was the top priority.

Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture

After I left Netflix and began consulting, I visited a hot start-up in San Francisco. It had 60 employees in an open loft-style office with a foosball table, two pool tables, and a kitchen, where a chef cooked lunch for the entire staff. As the CEO showed me around, he talked about creating a fun atmosphere. At one point I asked him what the most important value for his company was. He replied, Efficiency.”

OK,” I said. Imagine that I work here, and it’s 2:58 PM. I’m playing an intense game of pool, and I’m winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?”

You should finish the game,” he insisted. I wasn’t surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality. Wait a second,” I said. You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It’s not efficient to delay a meeting and keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn’t there a mismatch between the values you’re talking up and the behaviors you’re modeling and encouraging?”

When I advise leaders about molding a corporate culture, I tend to see three issues that need attention. This type of mismatch is one. It’s a particular problem at start-ups, where there’s a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create. I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

The second issue has to do with making sure employees understand the levers that drive the business. I recently visited a Texas start-up whose employees were mostly engineers in their twenties. I bet half the people in this room have never read a P&L,” I said to the CFO. He replied, It’s true—they’re not financially savvy or business savvy, and our biggest challenge is teaching them how the business works.” Even if you’ve hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success. At Netflix, for instance, employees used to focus too heavily on subscriber growth, without much awareness that our expenses often ran ahead of it: We were spending huge amounts buying DVDs, setting up distribution centers, and ordering original programming, all before we’d collected a cent from our new subscribers. Our employees needed to learn that even though revenue was growing, managing expenses really mattered.

The third issue is something I call the split personality start-up. At tech companies this usually manifests itself as a schism between the engineers and the sales team, but it can take other forms. At Netflix, for instance, I sometimes had to remind people that there were big differences between the salaried professional staff at headquarters and the hourly workers in the call centers. At one point our finance team wanted to shift the whole company to direct-deposit paychecks, and I had to point out that some of our hourly workers didn’t have bank accounts. That’s a small example, but it speaks to a larger point: As leaders build a company culture, they need to be aware of subcultures that might require different management.

Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Throughout most of my career I’ve belonged to professional associations of human resources executives. Although I like the people in these groups personally, I often find myself disagreeing with them. Too many devote time to morale improvement initiatives. At some places entire teams focus on getting their firm onto lists of Best Places to Work” (which, when you dig into the methodologies, are really based just on perks and benefits). At a recent conference I met someone from a company that had appointed a chief happiness officer”—a concept that makes me slightly sick.

During 30 years in business I’ve never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company’s products aren’t perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain—and they’ll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

Instead of cheerleading, people in my profession should think of themselves as businesspeople. What’s good for the company? How do we communicate that to employees? How can we help every worker understand what we mean by high performance?

Here’s a simple test: If your company has a performance bonus plan, go up to a random employee and ask, Do you know specifically what you should be doing right now to increase your bonus?” If he or she can’t answer, the HR team isn’t making things as clear as they need to be.

At Netflix I worked with colleagues who were changing the way people consume filmed entertainment, which is an incredibly innovative pursuit—yet when I started there, the expectation was that I would default to mimicking other companies’ best practices (many of them antiquated), which is how almost everyone seems to approach HR. I rejected those constraints. There’s no reason the HR team can’t be innovative too.

A version of this article appeared in the 

January–February 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Patty McCord was the chief talent officer at Netflix from 1998 to 2012 and now advises start-ups and entrepreneurs. She is the author of Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility (Silicon Guild, 2018).

From: HBR.ORG

ppt about this article:

How Netflix Reinvented HR

 

How to Actually Encourage Employee Accountability

by 

Ron Carucci

from HBR.org

 

Summary.   

Companies have been struggling to define and improve accountability processes —from annual performance appraisals to routine check-ins with the boss — for decades, and most employees still dread the conversations. Most of these processes usually result in forced categorizations in the form of numbers or labels, which can make employees feel threatened, demeaned, and insignificant. Even leaders who are beholden to flawed formal accountability processes can ensure that their employees feel their work is honored while simultaneously embracing opportunities to improve. In order to do so, dignity, fairness, and restoration must form the backbone of ongoing performance-related conversations

 

Fewer words in corporate vernacular induce a tighter wince than accountability,” and for good reason. Companies and leaders have grappled with what it is and how to achieve it effectively for decades. Ask anyone if they look forward to their performance evaluation or periodic check-in with their boss, and most will give an emphatic no.”

Data shows that 82% of managers acknowledge they have limited to no” ability to hold others accountable successfully, and 91% of employees would say that effectively holding others accountable” is one of their company’s top leadership-development needs. Research also confirms how insignificant today’s accountability systems make employees feel. 

Gallup found that only 14% of employees feel their performance is managed in a way that motives them, 26% get feedback less than once per year, 21% feel their performance metrics are within their control, and 40% feel as if their manager holds them accountable for goals they set. Add to that the fact that 

70% of employees feel their managers aren’t objective in how they evaluate their performance, and it comes as no surprise that 

69% of employees don’t feel they’re living up to their potential at work.

The fundamental problem with accountability is that it now involves little more than the process of accounting. The scorekeeping nature of this process yields a built-in 

negativity bias, where leaders reflexively hunt for shortfalls, and the tallying usually ends with a forced categorization — a rating system of numbers or labels, sometimes stack-ranking employees against their peers. I recently spoke with a leader at a client organization just after his performance review, and he was infuriated. How could he rate me a 3? I’ve always been a 4. My whole career, I’ve been rated at the top! Now, suddenly I’m a 3, just because he’s only allowed to give out a certain number of 4s?” Listen to the painful conclusions this leader is drawing about himself and his boss. What should have been a productive conversation left him obsessed with a number and resentful of the person who consigned him to it. And he’s not alone. A recent

 neuroscientific study revealed that we respond to being categorically rated with a sense of being threatened — we literally feel unsafe when someone puts us in a box in this way.

Accountability processes are the formal and informal ways that leaders talk about, assess, and affirm the contributions of those they lead and the improvements they can make to strengthen those contributions. They include everything from annual performance appraisals to routine check-ins with your boss. Even in the face of deeply flawed formal processes, leaders can ensure that their employees feel their work is honored while simultaneously embracing opportunities to improve. To make that experience commonplace, mere tweaks to the tallying processes of accountability won’t move the needle. Companies must dramatically redefine what it means for leaders to create a culture of accountability. Based on my 30 years of observing leaders who do this well and through my research on accountability, I’ve identified three major shifts leaders need to make to ensure that the accountability experience dignifies employees’ work and challenges them to make greater achievements — without making them feel demeaned or insignificant.

Make Dignity the Foundation

Managers must understand the weight of their own judgments. 

A recent study of the brain shows how other people’s opinions of us influence our sense of self-efficacy. When leaders believe their role is to create conditions in which people make their best contributions — and genuinely enjoy doing so — the following core foundations of accountability improve:

Connections between leaders and direct reports deepen. Instead of obligatory monthly or quarterly check-ins during which employees provide rote updates, conversations should be undergirded by a sense of purpose. Questions like, What did you learn this month?” or What do you feel most proud of?” stir employees’ eagerness to tell their stories of achievement and struggle.

The quality of feedback and learning increases. When dignity, not surveillance, is the goal of accountability, the quality of evaluative feedback improves. When employees believe their bosses are genuinely interested in their success, they feel less guarded and less inclined to hide their underperformance. When bosses are committed to their employees’ success and are less focused on documentation, they feel comfortable offering feedback and coaching about underperformance.

One of the simplest ways to dignify those you lead is to ask for the story of their work. Instead of offering a perfunctory good job” after somebody has finished a project, ask for details (I’m sure it took more to get here than I can see. Can you talk to me about how you did it?”). As they tell their story, watch how animated they become as they tell you where they struggled and what they felt proud of.

Focus on Fairness

As I’ve written about before, when accountability systems are seen as fair, people are four times more likely to be honest (especially about their mistakes), act fairly toward others, and serve the organization’s purpose instead of their own interests. Our accountability systems have painfully confused sameness with fairness and have been designed largely to avoid litigation and reduce a manager’s biases. In practice, they’ve done more to stunt individuality, and that’s exactly what makes them unfair.

Prioritizing fairness in our accountability processes allows two very important things to change. First, it reestablishes the connection between contribution and contributor. For decades, in an attempt at creating fairness, conventional thinking has kept the evaluation of work separate from the evaluation of people. This made sense when people were producing large volumes of the same output. But in a knowledge economy, people’s ideas, creativity, and analysis are direct reflections of who they are — the nature of today’s work makes accountability personal. It becomes fair when managers acknowledge contributions as the fruit of the unique talents of their employees. Efforts to force contribution and contributor apart are experienced as invalidating and unfair.

Second, focusing on fairness exposes biases within accountability systems. Plenty of 

research shows that organizations privilege certain groups via implicit biases within their accountability systems. Viewing these systems through the lens of fairness prompts honest questions about how to change them. Who has access to prized opportunities? What are the existing expectations about who will or won’t excel? Whose voices and ideas get included? Questions like these reveal whether there’s equitable opportunity to succeed, regardless of one’s level of ability, and enable leaders to open up opportunities for people to shine with whatever talents they have. For example, a leader might broaden who gets to speak and present at meetings, or take a new approach to acknowledging traditionally privileged roles (like engineers at tech companies or marketers at branding companies) that levels the playing field for other types of contributions.

I spoke with Hubert Joly, a former CEO of Best Buy, whose acclaimed turnaround of the retailer is well known. Key to that transformation was a new focus on helping individuals be themselves, to be human.” As Joly told me:

When I first started as CEO, and they showed me the forms to fill out about my team’s performance, and they wanted me to put numbers in boxes, I thought, Why would anyone do this? I decided to simply ask people, How do you feel things went?” — and they would often be harder on themselves than I would have. I would ask, What do you need from me?” — and they would tell me. It seemed like a much more human approach to holding people accountable.

Joly applied that message to the organization as a whole.What does it look like when we are at our best?,” store associates were asked during the process of setting standards for the company’s new brand. Allowing employees to help define the standards to which they will be held, Joly recognized, leads to better systems of accountability. When people help set the bar, they are far more motivated to reach it, and often exceed it.

To demonstrate your commitment to fairness, ask those on your team — preferably anonymously — if they feel the playing field in your group is level, if they see some roles or people as privileged, or if they view you as you having favorites.” Even if your intentions are good, people may still feel like they don’t have an equitable chance for success.

Make Restoration, Not Blame, the Goal

People dread accountability in their organizations. Why? Because when consequences are levied, they often feel shaming and harsh, despite corporate rhetoric about learning from failures. The reflexive response is to hide mistakes or point fingers elsewhere.

If leaders believed that falling short of a goal still had merit, it could radically alter how people treat their own — and others’ — mistakes. As Kathleen Hogan, Microsoft’s Chief People Officer, told me:

In a culture where people struggle to admit they don’t know something, calculating risk can be tricky. Being open about failure helps us balance a growth mindset with accountability. We are learning to not just reward success, but also reward people who fell short while getting us closer. We want it to be acceptable to say, I don’t know, but I will find out.” Learning from our mistakes gets us closer to our desired results — that’s a new form of accountability for us.

To treat mistakes restoratively, leaders need humility, grace, and patience. They must see any person’s arc of professional success as more than the sum total of any single assignment. Leaders also need the humility to acknowledge their contribution to people’s failures. Did the person have the resources, skills, team support, and realistic timelines to be successful?

We have a long way to go before accountability within organizations becomes a welcomed process that yields fair, actionable feedback and encourages employees to embrace the opportunity to improve their performance and expand their contributions. Making dignity, fairness, and restoration foundational components of accountability systems is a powerful place to start.

Ron Carucci is co-founder and managing partner at 

Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He is the best-selling author of eight books, including the recent Amazon #1 

Rising to Power. Connect with him on Twitter at 

@RonCarucci; download his free e-book on 

Leading Transformation.