Should You Share A Room On A Business Trip?

May 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Years ago, when I worked at Holt, Rhinehart & Winston Educational and Professional Publishing, my female superior and I attended a national teacher’s conference in San Antonio, and were forced to share a hotel room because of a late booking. What could have been a profoundly awkward experience — my boss! in her pajamas! — turned out to be one that strengthened our relationship, allowing us to get to know each other in a way that can rarely be found in the frenzy of daily work. The kind of bonding that I inadvertently experienced may be more frequent these days as the byproduct of a corporate mindset reshaped by Great Recession-driven austerity practices — among them requiring employees to share rooms. Major corporations such as Pfiizer, Bristol Meyers-Squibb and Microsoft have experimented with the practice. Nimbleness and frugality, after all, remain critical to growth, and it’s been interesting to see that even as the economy slowly recovers, plenty of business travelers voluntarily and even eagerly share hotel rooms with colleagues. AnEmbassy Suites survey of 700 business travelers discovered that “17 percent said they try to share a room with a colleague.”

Fostering an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Seth Goldman, the co-founder and CEO of Coca-Cola-acquired Honest Tea, thinks a policy of sharing rooms during business travel helps preserve the entrepreneurial mindset that infused the founding of his company. “Every manager has a P&L that he or she is responsible for,” he says, “and while we don’t make sharing rooms a hard and fast rule, it’s our sense that when people have their own budgets and ownership for their profits, they’ll continue to operate that way.”

It Can Be Good for Business

In addition to furthering a sense of entrepreneurialism, Goldman notes that “we spend half as much on hotel rooms as

Does it make business sense to share rooms when traveling?

Does it make business sense to share rooms when traveling?

we would if we didn’t share rooms on the road. It makes people think twice about [Read more...]

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Make A Stranger Believe In You

February 25, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Reaching Out To Strangers

Reaching Out To Strangers

I recently received an e-mail sent to my business address that began with the salutation “Dear Ms. Anne,” — the kind of greeting that suggested that the rest of the note would offer me riches from some recently deceased Estonian cousin I didn’t know I had. It continued, “I know you have no idea who I am, however, I will try to keep this as short and to the point as possible” — words destined to cause a further sinking feeling about what was to come. But in the seconds I skimmed the note, a few words jumped out at me and I was intrigued. In three short paragraphs, Zanele Mutepfa, a junior at Portland State University in Oregon, told me that she was an immigrant Zimbabwean-born orphan and youth advocate who aspired to be a television talk show host. With a bravado that might have been off-putting, she said, “I assure you, my dynamic life story will one day hit headlines…but most importantly change lives, it just needs to be shared with the perfect person.” She was coming to New York City — might I have time to meet with her?I had moved from the hinterlands to New York myself, 35 years ago, with virtually no professional contacts, so when she closed her note by saying, “Some may think one of the strangest things to do is believe in a stranger, but if [Read more...]

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What If You Don’t Want to Be a Manager?

February 12, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Imagine that you’ve invested years of blood, sweat and tears at work, and have successfully climbed the corporate ladder, only to wake up one day and realize that you sort of hate what you’re doing. Sure, you used to love it, and the more successful you became, the higher up the ranks of management you went. But now, instead of doing the hands-on work that you loved, you find yourself buried in managerial tasks like budgeting and supervising people that leave you feeling numb at best. You find yourself in the ironic position where all your hard work and [Read more...]

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Creativity Lessons from Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs

January 17, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Creativity is the most essential skill for navigating an increasingly complex world — or so said 1,500 CEOs across 60 countries in a recent survey by IBM. And yet federally funded research and development — creativity, institutionalized — is down 20% as a share of America’s GDP since the late 1980s. Private R&D spending has also tailed off since then, when it brought us breakthrough innovations like laser printing, the Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and the mouse. And that was just from one company’s private R&D engine, Xerox’s PARC. At the same time, experts fret that our public school system doesn’t foster enough creativity in our future workforce. All of which makes it easy to worry that we’ll run out of creative leaders producing creative goods. But I think the declinism is overwrought. And that’s because some of the best paths to encourage innovation are
surprisingly simple.

Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs

Charles Dickens and Steve Jobs Tell Us How To Boost Creativity

Yes, as a society, we do need to remake our educational systems to deliver more young people to what Steve Jobs called “the intersection of technology and the humanities” — to bring American students’ globally below-average math and science fluency up to snuff and keep them immersed in the arts. But each of us as individuals can also work to optimize our innovative capacities. If innovation is stimulated by identifying under-served markets and then figuring out a service or product to fill the void, then here are a few low-to-no-cost suggestions for reinvigoration.

Reduce stress, but don’t relax too much. Stress affects our creativity. A study conducted in 2006 by Christina Ting Fong, an assistant professor at the University of Washington Business School, suggests that the optimal sate for an individual seeking maximum creativity at work is to embrace an in-between emotional state, neither happy-go-luckily complacent nor anxiously stressed out. After asking college students to write about experiences that had made them feel happy, sad, neutral, or ambivalent, she then had them complete something called the Remote Associates Test, a word-association test used to measure creativity. Fong found that those who reported feeling emotionally ambivalent performed significantly better on the creative test — and believes that it was the presence of mixed emotions that increases sensitivity to unusual associations that stimulate unconventional, more creative connections.

By studying people’s “Aha!” moments of insight, Northwestern University psychologist Mark Jung-Beeman found that one’s brain state before addressing a problem can importantly influence the creativity of one’s proposed solution. He discovered that if someone is too focused or too wound up, the scope of their problem-solving is reduced. John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University who partnered with Jung-Beeman in his research, advises people to relax to encourage insight. And one simple way to relax and stimulate your creative juices? Take a walk.

Get out of the office and into unfamiliar environments. Let’s imagine you’re an executive in charge of overseeing the development of a new product — a television show, a medical device, a beverage, whatever — and you spend your working hours hermetically sealed, going from office to conference room attending meetings, never leaving a car between appointments out of the office. That narrow input will result in a correspondingly narrow output. A piece in The New Yorker exploring the flaws inherent in the groupthink of brainstorming sessions, cited research into the process of free association by psychology professor Charlan Nemeth of the University of California at Berekely. Nemeth has “demonstrated that exposure to unfamiliar perspectives can foster creativity.”

I’ve often suggested that people walk to work, take public transportation, and in general, wander about to see how real people, consumers, are behaving and spending their time. If you never take the time to fill your creative well, you’ll having nothing to contribute. Wandering around — observing, talking to strangers, taking pictures, inhaling the rich diversity of unfamiliar life, may feel unproductive or even wasteful. But innovation needs to be informed and sometimes provoked by the unpredictable hurly-burly of messy, surprising real life. Suntae Kim, Evan Polman and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, researchers from New York Univsersity, have found that students who were allowed to walk freely, rather than along a fixed path, were able to generate 25% more creative uses for various objects.

In a recent essay, Verlyn Klinkenborg connected Charles Dickens’s extraordinary creative output to his nightly walking. “He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism,” he wrote, “calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, ‘I should just explode and perish.’ Under the pseudonym Boz, Dickens wrote, ‘There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy, walking through London as though ‘the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.’”

Steve Jobs and Charles Dickens were of one mind. In a 1995 Wired piece, Jobs put it this way: “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things… A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Creativity requires both divergent thinking (the generation of lots of fresh ideas) combined with convergent thinking (channeling those ideas into a practical solution). The tension of toggling between right-field thinking and pragmatism leads to the greatest creative insights.

Let your mind wander. It does no good to get out of the office or reduce stress if you don’t let your mind do any roaming. Yet a different study led by Kalina Christoff of the University of British Columbia, suggests that our “default” and “executive” brain functions, “two systems that so far have been assumed to work in opposition” might, in fact, be encouraged to work in cooperation by the unique mental state stimulated by day dreaming.

When we’re younger, the road to success is all about learning habits of discipline and rigor and focus. And those habits are crucial. But once we can take those habits for granted, we need to build in new disciplines — call it the discipline of being undisciplined — of breaking away and wandering, physically and intellectually, to see new things and connect dots in new ways. Otherwise, we risk becoming reliable but uncreative drones. Remember the fable about the super-prudent ant and the devil-may-care grasshopper? At their best and most innovative, we are not one or the other — but both.

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Why Big Bird Remains Powerfully — and Globally — Significant

October 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Big Bird has had a big presence in the collective conversation lately, thanks to mentions in the first two presidential debates. The outpouring of support for the giant yellow puppet that followed the first debate is a testament to his and Sesame Street’s continued relevance in people’s lives. Sesame Street, in fact, is a great case study of a brand that has managed to remain powerful over decades and across cultures.

In the 1980s, I was part of the team that sold Sesame Street around the world — either licensed and broadcast in English or in locally adapted indigenous-language co-productions. Long before “think global, act local” was the conventional wisdom for how corporations should operate in

the international interconnected marketplace, we at Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), as it was known then, pioneered the development of a flexible global brand. Our approach to programming was to maintain the values, look and feel of the parent company and its main product, Sesame Street — carefully crafted live-action and animation and puppetry segments, woven together with a curriculum designed by educators, writers, producers and artists to help pre-school kids learn basic cognitive skills, to appreciate cultural diversity, and to achieve broader goals, like learning how to handle conflict. At the same time, we wanted to enable our co-producing partners to work with local educators, writers, and producers to craft the specific early childhood educational goals unique to their own countries. For example, in those early co-productions, the North American urban street of the original series was replaced by a plaza in Latin America, a strassa in Germany, or a rue in France. And those international stageset streets were populated by original puppet characters — parrots, hedgehogs, bears, and camels characteristic of the region and created by local producers.

Today — 44 years into Sesame Street’s run — the program airs in 146 countries, with 23 co-productions in places as politically and culturally complex as South Africa and Afghanistan. I was curious to see how Sesame Workshop had continued to grow its operations over the years while remaining true to its mission to improve the lives of kids. I called Shari Rosenfeld, Vice President in Sesame Workshop’s Global Education department. As a case study, she pointed to a venture launched in India in 2006 — Galli Galli Sim Sim — to identify a few of the key drivers for how they’ve remained a relevant, dynamic global brand:

Identifying The Country-Specific Critical Needs First
“According to the McKinsey Global Institute’s “bird of gold” index, India is entering a period of sustained, but unequal, economic growth with 161.1 million (or 67% of its population) gaining access to mass media. That leaves 33% of the country with limited access to mass media and educational opportunities. And while school enrollment is at an all-time high, UNICEF has reported that the educational system is “inadequately developed.” “The scale of this underserved market, coupled with Sesame Workshop’s 40 years of expertise in partnering with local educational and programming experts, created an important opportunity,” said, Rosenfeld, “for us to meet critical needs on an unprecedented scale, while at the same time building toward a future that would allow our work in India to be financially sustainable.”

Being Willing To Try New Operating Models
According to Rosenfeld, “unlike most of the other markets in which we co-produce, Sesame Streethad never been broadcast in India. The fact that our audience had zero prior exposure to the brand created both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge was that we couldn’t trade on our global brand equity and iconic characters; at the same time, the lack of familiarity with the brand gave us greater latitude in creating a local interpretation of the Sesame experiences. That, combined with the enormous potential for large-scale impact, was a key driver in thinking through a new operational model in India. As always, we built a strong coalition of partners including broadcasters, educators, production companies, foundations, and corporations, but rather than manage the operation from New York, we decided to embark on a new path that would evolve our approach from ‘project management’ to ‘social entrepreneurship,’ by building a new 30-person organization from the ground up.”

Embracing New And Multiple Means Of Distribution
The limited access to broadcast technology (among the targeted 33% underserved target population) has spurred the Galli Galli Sim Sim team to learn from the market, improving and evolving content to maximize distribution. Rosenfeld says they’ve piloted the delivery of content through mobile phones, including teacher-training videos which are on pre-loaded sim cards. SWI has created community radio with call in from parents and educators, and “Radiophone,” which delivers radio episodes via mobile phones. Outreach materials in 9 local languages on topics as diverse as health, nutrition, financial literacy and school readiness have been distributed to millions of children throughout India. And more than 200 television episodes have been broadcast on India’s national broadcaster, Doordarshan, and on Pogo and Cartoon Channel, India’s destination channels for young kids.

Propagating Lessons Learned Internally
The Sesame Workshop India (SWI) enterprise has created a hub for the exchange of ideas and expertise for the region. Rosenfeld describes how members of the Afghanistan and Indonesian teams have attended content and production workshops conducted by the Galli Galli Sim Sim team in conjunction with select personnel from Sesame in New York. “Sesame Workshop India’s outreach team has worked on location in Nigeria and Indonesia, supporting local efforts to develop outreach initiatives and explore new business models; having our partners recognize the value of each other’s expertise and share their original content keeps all of us more nimble and engaged,” she says. The benefit of this shared learning is invaluable across all of their efforts — encouraging a kind of permeable membrane of growth and innovation throughout the entire organization — domestic and international.

Taking The Long View
“With SWI, Rosenfeld adds, “Sesame Workshop has extended the horizon line for success by creating long-term development plans that are building toward a base of diversified revenue sources, forging mass distribution through government-run preschools and cultivating a culture of innovation that pilots new content that reaches children across socio-economic and the urban/rural divide. The entrepreneurial spirit that characterizes SWI is born from the latitude to develop new enterprises, like launching a pre-school [classroom] business through a new franchise model, that will not only deliver on core educational objectives, but will also serve as a critical revenue stream necessary to cross-subsidize other work.”

* * *

The creators and distributors of Sesame Street were successfully pursuing an aggressive global strategy 30 years ago, before “globalization” was a common concept or phrase in America. It has done so by being clear and steadfast about its essential brand values while also seeking to understand deeply and flexibly adapt to local conditions and norms. It is an important model for 21st century companies as they seek to be relevant in an international marketplace, where being a successful American brand is not in and of itself a guarantee of global success.

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Mindy Kaling on Chronicling the American Workplace

September 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Mindy Kaling is a funny, fabulous actor, but she’s also an important chronicler of the 21st century American workplace. As a writer of 24 episodes of The Office — the equivalent of more than an entire season — she tapped into the unspoken truths that lurk in the underbelly of office culture, and she spun those insights into sitcom gold. The Office is arguably one of the most incisive sitcoms about work life ever created. Now, as the creator, producer, writer and star of a new Fox series called The Mindy Project, the fictional workplace she’s invented and inhabits has gone from a realm in which she had no first-hand exposure (paper manufacturing?) to something a little closer to home. Her character, Mindy Lahiri, struggles (as we all do) to craft some kind of work/life balance, all while building her career as an OB/GYN — a premise based in part on observing her (real) OB/GYN mother’s juggling act.

In a recent phone conversation, I asked her
what she’d learned about real work from inventing fictional workplaces. Here’s what she had to say:

On Work/Life Balance

Nothing makes people preemptively yawn more than hearing a show about ‘balancing professional and personal life’. Also, so many shows that tell women-centric stories sacrifice edginess and comedy for softness, and viewers get bored of that. But there is a reason why these stories keep getting told — because they are relatable. My strategy for a fresh take is simple: write honest and original observations about something that I am going through.

On Speaking Your Mind at Work

My character is impulsive, opinionated, and outspoken. She gets to do and say things on the show that I wish I could, but don’t have the nerve to do. (I think smartly-executed wish-fulfillment is a great form of entertainment.) That comes from a kind of innate confidence that gets her into trouble, but is also very admirable. I hope people watching envy Mindy’s confidence.

On Her Character’s Busy Professional Life:

I chose to make my character an OB/GYN because I grew up with a mother who was an OB/GYN, which was essentially 33 years of research on the ins and outs of the lifestyle of an incredibly busy professional. Workplaces are a great thing to write about because even with our high unemployment rate, a whopping majority of people go to work everyday and have funny stories to tell about it.

On Her Own Busy Professional Life:

You wouldn’t think that being an OB/GYN has much in common with being a network show-runner, but there are plenty of similarities between my work life and my character’s work life. For instance, while my mother and I had very different jobs, our professional lifestyles have been very similar. I could call her from L.A. at 11 PM PST and she would be at the hospital in Boston waiting for a patient to give birth at 2 AM EST. Both jobs paid well and didn’t give either of us very much free time, but we loved them. Neither is the kind of job you can do unless you really, really love it.

On Doing Her Market Research

Twitter is helpful, not so much for people sharing stories about their jobs, but for feedback — both positive and negative — about story lines they love. People use Twitter to quote lines they love, so it’s the single easiest way to identify the funniest lines of a show.

On Being a Boss

At the risk of sounding like Michael Scott, I think I am a pretty damn good boss. I was a little worried about it at the beginning, because my inclination is to want everyone to like me. That always seems to get me into trouble, because I make promises I can’t keep just to please everyone. But now there is simply no time for any of that. Because I am doing so much more on this show than at The Office, I have learned a cheerfully direct way of talking. I’m incredibly impatient, and while that’s been a detriment in the past, it’s an advantage as a boss, because it keeps things moving quickly. I recommend it to any leader: be impatient. By quickly and nicely shutting down lines of argument, and being decisive, I save the entire production hours and hours of work and money.

On Being a Female Boss

One thing I have noticed — and this is really the first time I’ve noticed how being a woman has affected my job — is that sometimes, after I’ve made a decision about something, there’s a level of discussion that people think I am willing to entertain that probably wouldn’t happen if I were a man. I have learned that when I make a decision, sometimes I just need to leave the room.

Follow the conversation at Harvard Business Review.

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The Rise of Coworking Office Spaces

September 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

“Coworking” office spaces, leasable by the day or month (think RocketSpace in San Francisco or The Hive in Denver) are multiplying in cities all over the country. Demand is predicted to expand by as much as 40% in 2013. And for good reason.

It’s no secret that the efficiency-driven modern office is a joyless and at best neutral venue in most people’s lives. (Think: boxy cubicles that don’t enable privacy or community, lack of natural light, incoherent design, etc.) And experiments to improve office spaces are nothing new. From the “college campus” envisioned by legendary adman Jay Chiat, where employees came to the office to gather information and then work wherever they wanted within the building, to Steve Jobs’ Pixar campus, fluid, open plans have been touted as environments that lead to greater collegiality and productivity. But the 21st century workforce, increasingly telecommuting and/or bouncing from job to job and city to city, is making those “modern” late-20th-century office concepts feel quaint.

To better understand what’s going on, I spent time at Grind in New York City, an invitation-only co-working space. For $35 a day or $500 a month, 60 to 120 people populate Grind’s 7,500 square feet at any given time. Benjamin Dyett, one of Grind’s three founders, describes their members as “free radicals,” or people who “network endlessly and collaborate constantly. They choose when and how they do what they do, on their own terms. They don’t want job security, they want career fluidity.”

It’s a setup that clearly seems to be working for a growing number of people, and represents a cultural shift that is a corollary to (but extends beyond) the out-sourcing and employee churn of a top-down flexible labor force. Like cousins of the Chiat or Jobs workspaces, where full-time employees devote themselves to a single cult-like institution in groovy architecture that encourages playful collaboration, the new co-working spaces thrive on a constantly changing cast of characters — all with different skills, experience and business goals, where members are creating and running many different kinds of enterprises.

What makes these co-working spaces so attractive? (And what, in turn, can more traditional offices learn from them?)

1. They offer collaborative networks, built-in resources, and a dynamic ecosystem

While getting out of the house to work for free in the quasi-community of a coffee shop might feel like a no-strings, easily-accessible kind of co-working environment, don’t be fooled. Free wifi places are fine as social gathering spots [Read more...]

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What I Learned From the “Homeless Hotspots” Twitter Furor

September 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

When Emma Cookson, the Chairman of the New York branch of Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), an award-winning ad agency, and her team concocted an innovative marketing program called Homeless Hotspots, they genuinely had no sense of the furor that they’d be facing when the project launched.

The Homeless Hotspots program was meant to serve the needs of the super digerati who attend the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas. Inspired by the established model of homeless people earning money by selling homelessness-focused newspapers, BBH’s idea was for homeless people, wearing T-shirts printed with their names and identifying themselves as 4G hotspots, to sell connectivity (an issue for conference attendees) by means of small handheld Wi-Fi routers.

Bad early-March weather kept the program mostly invisible until the third day of SXSW, when appalled commentary began to roil the Twitterverse. Cookson found herself in the unexpected position of having to react to a media tsunami — fast.

I sat down with her to explore what she learned from the experience, which she was able to distill into five lessons:

# 1. Comment Precedes Knowledge

As Cookson was putting her kids to bed the evening of Sunday, March 11 in her Brooklyn home, her Tweetdeck started “blinking very loudly,” with her team on the ground in Austin alerting her that something alarming was going on. Individuals had begun negative tweets about Hotspots that cascaded into a cycle of news stories (See articles from ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times and Wired) and what started out as a small brush fire suddenly scaled up to a full-blown firestorm. The speed at which it all happened was unprecedented, given that it was generated by the tech community gathered at SXSW, and not some other big gathering.

With the event now solidly in her rearview mirror, what does Cookson understand about the situation that she didn’t [Read more...]

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How One CEO Grows Her Business with Feeling

February 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

What do you think causes millions of people to miss work and school in developing economies? Illness? Lack of childcare? Minimal professional training? Insufficient infrastructure? While all of those certainly play a role, I’m guessing that what Elizabeth Scharpf stumbled across as a critical factor in absenteeism wasn’t on your radar. While interning in Mozambique in 2005 for the one-person (!) private-sector development division of the World Bank — studying how small and medium-sized businesses can play a role in developing economies — Scharpf, now a 34 year-old graduate of Harvard’s graduate schools of business and government, happened to overhear a local colleague complaining that her employees often missed work because they were menstruating. Seriously? Perplexed and intrigued, Scharpf thought this might represent a business opportunity, and decided to dig deeper.

A study fielded by the Council on Foreign Relations, “Addressing the Special Needs of Girls,” underscores why missing school matters in a big, long-term way. The research found that each extra year of secondary education increases a woman’s potential earnings by 25% on average. In South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, another long-term study found that “more equal education between men and women could have led to nearly 1 percent higher annual per capita GDP growth” in each country. Beyond the humiliating difficulties for millions of impoverished individual women trying to improve themselves and support their families, this is a global issue with significant consequences for the economies of developing countries.

Scharpf was passionately determined to find a solution, tackling the problem the way she always does — by talking with people. “And when you talk to people,” she says, “you discover what’s missing. It’s that simple.” Those conversations revealed that it was the economy, stupid. A study found that 18% of school age girls in Rwanda, for instance, miss school because menstrual pads are too expensive. In countries like Mozambique and Rwanda, where the per capita GDP is under $1,000, the average annual cost of $33 (12 months x 5 days x 5 pad/day x .11/pad) for the cheapest imported sanitary pad can often be simply unaffordable. Because the “unmentionable” subject of menstruation is taboo, the market failure — supplying cheaper pads — had never received the attention it deserved.

Scharpf found that absorbent wood pulp was the biggest raw material manufacturing expense for pads, and wondered if cheaper indigenous materials could be used for local production, and if also coupled with a more efficient distribution network, there might be a real business opportunity given the huge underserved populations.

Successful Social Entrepreneurship Combines Mind and Heart

Scharpf did all the traditional MBA number-crunching and analyses, but recognized that tapping into emotion — the incredulity, outrage and fellow-feeling aroused in industrialized countries by the discovery that 21st century working women are routinely reduced to sometimes using ineffective rags, or even bark or mud in rural areas, for feminine hygiene — would be essential if a fledging enterprise were to succeed. “I have empathy with these women,” she told me, “because I don’t think where you are born should be the biggest indicator of your potential for health, wealth and happiness. I want to change that dynamic.”

Rwanda was a good place for Scharpf to launch her first initiative because local female entrepreneurs had already established their integral role to the economic renewal of the country in the years since the genocidal 1994 civil war. In 2009, with $60,000 in seed money from the not-for-profit VC organization Echoing Green, and with the Harvard Business School’s first social entrepreneur fellowship, Scharpf founded Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE).

Instead of simply raising charity cash to import finished pads, Scharpf and her organization are inventing a whole new system of community-based education, business training, manufacture and distribution from locally-sourced banana fiber — that is, solving this serious problem and creating a sustainable regional business. SHE has created a franchise model — providing business skill training, technical expertise, and co-investment — to partner with women in Rwanda and other developing-country communities to distribute and ultimately manufacture and launch their own SHE LaunchPads franchises. As product is sold, some of the initial working capital that SHE puts up is paid back, with the entrepreneurs eventually owning their local franchises. In turn, SHE reinvests its profits in new geographies or other disruptive enterprises.

Emotion Creates a Common Language

Scharpf says her challenge in dealing with scientists, academics, businesspeople, community activists and policy wonks “is always, ‘How do I speak in the same language to each of these different constituencies each with their unique language and objectives?’”

Scharpf and the SHE team, for example, first identified in banana-plants a local agro-waste fiber, and after experimenting, concluded that it had the potential to be an absorbent, cheap, safe material. They then approached MIT to partner on enhancing the process to make it more absorbent. She didn’t initiate the conversations by tugging on the professors’ heartstrings, highlighting SHE’s efforts to improve girl’s and women’s lives, but rather by challenging the scientists to help her solve a complicated new chemical engineering problem. But she realizes that it was the practical need to pioneer new materials technology under strict cost constraints in tandem with improving lives that really accelerated the innovation process. “I’ve found,” says Scharpf, “that the common language is the one of emotion.”

Emotion Attracts Good People

Scharpf told me she recently ran an ad for SHE’s first job opening in New York. “If you read the job description,” she said, “beside the intro and stuff about the need to financially analyze the potential to grow a business in x y and z ways, it was very dry stuff, but when we added the emotional elements around that factual description — that we are trying to basically change the paradigm of how international development is done, that we’re trying to work with communities to help improve lives, that we want to be disruptors — all those good things — well, the response was overwhelming.”

Scharpf has experienced firsthand that what inspires people — a mission to improve lives — is also good for business. This elusive component is something that behavioral economists are beginning to document. As Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath reported in a recent issue of HBR, for organizations to prosper today, their employees need to feel as if they are “engaged in creating the future — the company’s and their own.” Research is also demonstrating that basing performance purely on beating the competition or making money can actually decrease employees’ intrinsic motivations to pursue a goal. In her book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher cited a study in which “college students who were paid to do a puzzle were significantly less motivated than those who worked for free.”

Emotion Inspires Ongoing Development and Builds Community

Scharpf intends for Rwanda to be just a phase-one proving ground. “We’re looking at Costa Rica and India to explore how we can technologically and operationally increase distribution either through new natural fiber based lines and/or by distributing other sorts of products via our network.” She was recently contacted by entrepreneurs from Zambia and Zimbabwe who were interested in starting SHE franchises. While doing a typical needs assessment, the first question Scharpf asks is “who is the person and what is driving them” — and then she explores the local raw materials and local business conditions. Scharpf ardently believes that SHE’s performance is influenced not only by the through-put of their machines and the efficiency of their distribution network, but by their ability to align people’s interests and passions with their roles.

Managing Emotion Effectively Keeps Business On Track

Scharpf says being attuned to the emotional aspect of work keeps her sensitive to issues that otherwise might not be immediately obvious — allowing her to pre-emptively deal with challenges before they grow disruptive. “The biggest challenges I have on a daily basis are with regard to human emotions,” she says. “They should have a psychology class at the business school because I am finding I am most effective when I understand what drives people to do what they do, whether it’s what they are passionate about, or what makes them feel insecure, or what makes them feel good about themselves, or what makes them have confidence, or what they can be proud of — keeping in mind all of those things.”

The bottom line is that empathy without rigorous, rational analysis solves no important problems — but rationality without empathy simply misses plenty of important and soluble problems. To be a responsible human and to be a successful entrepreneur requires both, working in tandem.

Filed Under: Harvard Business Review, work Tagged With: , , , , ,

Workers, Take Off Your Headphones

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Technology, for a free-lancer like me, creates a powerful and not entirely mad illusion that we work in a peopled environment of rich diversity and experience. As I sit to write each morning, I draw upon the vast network of people (many in active chat windows) with whom I’ve worked in the trenches over the course of a 35-year career, while also having the benefit of opinions and insight by expert strangers a click away. I sometimes even wear earplugs that allow me to immerse more deeply into my subject matter, creating a bubble that blunts distractions and sharpens my focus. For me, it’s the best of both worlds. Alone, and yet truly interacting with people, even if they are across town or in a different country.

But what about younger people just entering a traditional office environment? The necessary and artful tango between inner-directed and outward-focused, first chronicled in David Reisman’s landmark 1950 book The Lonely Crowd, has been problematically transformed by technology. There’s a new lonely crowd in the workplace.

My informal survey of a dozen people I know under the age of 35, working in a range of desk jobs, all in the U.S. — law firms, big entertainment companies, small start-ups, publishing houses — revealed that whatever the design of their office spaces, most younger people in our increasingly post-telephonic office world wear headphones about half of the time they’re working. And all but one of those I interviewed said that they had at least one G-chat or Skype window open throughout the day, every day — some of them checking in with as many as five non-work friends or family members every hour. And the majority of these young workers said that they felt far more connected moment to moment with people outside their workplaces than with any co-workers — the nearby colleagues, including bosses, with whom they communicate primarily through e-mails or chat programs.

This is very much a new world with myriad legal and security issues for both employer and employees, which are beyond the scope of this post. My focus, rather, is on the profound impact these new 21st century forms of divided attentions and isolation have on the psychology of individuals and company cultures, how they make people more than ever all alone among a group of nominal comrades.

Missing out on opportunities to contribute and advance

One person with whom I spoke told me that “wearing headphones actually makes me feel anxious a lot of the time, because I’m always worried that someone might ask me a question or say something to me and I’ll miss it.” This person is right to be concerned. Over the course of my earlier professional incarnations I worked in mission-driven organizations with more or less open office plans — Sesame Street, SPY magazine, Nickelodeon — where much of our successes were driven by the invisible but powerful sense of shared purpose generated by the news and information that was simply overheard. If I’d had headphones on, exclusively aware of the work in front of me, I would have missed out on important details, let alone the collective high that was experienced when a good piece of news rippled through. The more I participated in the ambient, informal life of the office, the more committed I became to the work of the company. A company spirit formed and evolved, and I shared in it unconsciously and consciously.

These days, by contrast, as one young interviewee put it, “usually whoever is talking to me will make sure they get my attention if I didn’t seem to hear the first time. I’ve never missed something urgent, usually just part of a conversation that was going on in the office.” Precisely. It’s just that kind of loss of daily osmotic information exchange and collaborative bonding that ought to concern 21st century employees and employers. It’s about information exchange, resource exchange, idea generation and on and on. If an employee is glued to her desk with headphones on, immersed in music and G-chatting with her best buddy, she is missing the opportunity to create relationships with people on the job who might be launching a project for which she’d be perfect, or who’s kicking around the idea to launch a new firm that needs precisely her talents. It’s a huge and real loss in terms of career development.

Companies also lose some of the opportunity to have employees contribute new ideas that might be percolating within the larger culture but under the radar of the organization. Because actionable cultural knowledge is now so diffuse, to remain competitive companies need all employees to bring fresh thinking into the workplace. Imagine an employee who happened, say, to be the roommate of someone launching a startup in 2010, and missed out on overhearing a colleague ask if “anyone knows anything about this new app that colorizes photographs so they look old-fashioned” — extreme, yes, but even short of missing out on an early partnership with Instagram, every company must be configured to into tap a workforce’s collective informal knowledge base as much as possible.

Eroding employee loyalty

The image of legions of headphone-wearing employees sitting silently at their workstations, oblivious to the flesh-and-blood community around them but actively engaged with a virtual world, seems like a dystopian future envisioned in movies like Minority Report. But that future is here. A Wall Street Journal piece on the “officeless office” had a sidebar with six new rules for office etiquette which included #1, no sneaking up; #5, limit chit-chat; and #6 use headphones. That may increase a certain kind of productivity, but at what cost?

Management professors Sigal Barsade at Wharton and Hakan Ozcelik at Cal State Sacramento are among the pioneers in studying how employee isolation correlates with organizational outcomes. In a recent study, they found “because they feel more estranged and less connected to coworkers, lonelier employees will be more likely to experience a lack of belongingness at work, thus decreasing their affective commitment to their organizations.” Something to think about before you decide to limit social chit-chat or put those headphones back on.

A drain on innovation

Isaac Kohane, co-director of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, has studied if and how scientists benefit from close physical adjacencies at work.

Even though scientific research obviously has been enhanced by internet connectedness (the web, after all, began 23 years ago as a vehicle for scientific collaboration), Kohane and his researchers found “striking evidence for the role of physical proximity as a predictor of the impact of collaborations.” As Kyungjoon Lee, a research assistant on the study put it, “science is all about communicating your ideas so others can build on them.” It seems obvious to me that not just science but most professional pursuits significantly benefit from this kind of perpetual accidental physical-world collaboration. But as my interviews revealed, when we put on our headphones and fire up our messenger client of choice, we effectively make ourselves remote telecommuters even when we are physically present.

Is there an upside?

Headphones can operate as a visual “do not disturb, I’m working” signal for employees who, in open-plan offices, need solitude in order to execute their work. As one interviewee told me, her headphones “put me in a ‘get stuff done’ frame of mind” and others reported that headphones made them “more focused” and that work was “more fun.” Being able to achieve that sense of solitude when necessary is clearly important.

Organizational psychologists such as K. Anders Ericsson at Florida State and Adrian Furnham at University College London have studied the phenomenon. “If you have talented and motivated people,” Furnham says, “they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

And instant messaging at work can have its uses. As my editor at HBR says, “I instant-message with colleagues who sit next to me. It seems the best way to brainstorm headlines.” IM can also cut down on the number of time-consuming emails sent and received, and help employees who are actually physically remote communicate more easily with people in the office.

But organizations need to develop protocols that avoid making isolation the universal default office norm, and that encourage face-to-face interaction. Some personal-bubbledom is necessary. But too much creates a lonely crowd.

How can you find the right balance? Accept the reality of our electronically networked workplaces and private digital media consumption. The new workforce, raised on perpetual multi-screen multi-tasking, would not be able to function well in a closed, 20th-century-style environment. Rather than creating unenforceable rules, employees and organizations should be helped to understand what’s being lost in the process of mindless, unplanned mass capitulation to the machines. Create working environments that encourage physical interaction; have small lunches that cut across hierarchical levels; include people who tend to shy away from group activities to participate in the softball team or fantasy football or Oscar pools. And keep managing by walking around, even though text-messaging and email seem to make real-world encounters unnecessary. As Rachel Silverman and Robin Sidel reported in their piece on the officeless office, GlaxoSmithKline, which has saved $10 million in annual real estate costs by shifting 1,200 employees at one New Jersey site to unassigned seating, found that decision-making among their staff had risen by 25% primarily because e-mail exchanges had been replaced by good old-fashioned face-to-face conversations — conversations that never would’ve happened had all their employees been wearing headphones.

Filed Under: Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review, work Tagged With: , , ,

A Female-Dominated Workplace Won’t Fix Everything

October 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

From the Harvard Business Review

Men on the job must feel besieged. Two seismic shifts are underway that are irrevocably changing the ways in which we’ve believed work works.

On the one hand, new technologies have enabled neuroscience to discover that men and women tend to be wired differently in ways that incline men — can it be? — to behave more emotionally and irrationally in certain work situations, exploding the myth that women are the only emotional creatures in the workplace. Recent research, like that led by Cambridge University neuroscientist John Coates, suggests that surges in male financial traders’ testosterone produce states of euphoria that cause them to understate risk, thus contributing to the overleveraged global financial crash. Since men naturally produce ten times as much testosterone as women, it’s being suggested that a more gender-balanced financial workforce could be stabilizing for firms and for the system as a whole.

On the other hand, the metrics of 21st century female professional and economic empowerment have become a tide. As of the last two years, more American workers are female than male, and the postindustrial occupations in which women predominate — health and education, among others — are the growth sectors. Women today account for 57% of college undergraduates, 62% of graduate students, and majorities of those graduating from medical and law schools. Despite the continuing rarity of women at the very tops of large corporations (which will inexorably shift as the cohort of overwhelmingly male CEOs retires during the next decade) and in finance, a 2004 study by the women’s group Catalyst, The Bottom Line: Connecting Corporate Performance and Gender Diversity, concluded that companies with the highest percentages of women in their executive ranks achieved 35% higher returns on average. What’s more, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research, women today own 40% of the private businesses in the United States and a study released last year found that (the relatively few) high-tech start-ups led by women fail less frequently than those led by men. After 40 years of feminist-era dues paying, women’s moment has come. Hear us roar.

As a woman who came of age in the late 1970s and who has worked in sometimes unproductively male-dominated workplaces, I’m with the program so far. Two-income families are the new normal. Economic parity for women is a good thing. But I don’t think we should rush into simplistically thinking that a female-dominated workplace will change everything and overnight make the world perfect. The bigger opportunity, and indeed an essential rethink if we are to reboot our economy, is finally to move beyond circa-1970s gender-centric ideology into a larger, more constructive conversation about how to reinvent workplace norms.

We humans, women and men alike, are hobbled by a gigantic evolutionary time lag. We have no clue how to handle 21st century cognitive threats, real life in the modern workplace. We evolved, survived, through our ability to respond to physical threat — is that a snake on the trail or a stick? Our bodies’ stress hormones, adrenaline, cortisol and testosterone, among others, which raise blood pressure and send more blood to our muscles, historically made us more alert in preparation to fight or flee imminent physical threats. Whether I’m fleeing a charging lion or cowering before a screaming boss, the amygdala responds, on a basic level, in a very similar way. Deep inside we are all irredeemably super-old-school. But the reality is that emotion is far more complicated in a modern work setting than it was for our prehistoric ancestors on the savanna. Is the person in the next cubicle gunning for my job? How will I get my work done when the babysitter calls in sick? And this disconnect — this evolutionary delay in the development of more emotionally nuanced or sophisticated responses to psychological challenges — is a huge contributor to what makes navigating modern work/life so incredibly hard.

In a 2008 paper on gender differences, five psychologists — Kateri McRae and James Gross of Stanford, Kevin Ochsner of Columbia, Iris Mauss of the University of Denver, and John Gabrieli of MIT — reported that while men and women don’t really differ in their basic “reactivity” to emotional provocation, they are quite different in the ways in which they respond. Based on both subsequent questioning and neural responses to aversive photos as measured by fMRI brain scans, the authors discovered no significant differences between the genders in the speed of their reactions to stimuli. But there are gender-based distinctions in how men and women were able to regulate and manage their emotional response to these stimuli. The amygdala was less activated in men’s brains than in women’s, and portions of the women’s prefrontal cortex, the cognitive control center, were more active than those of the men. The relatively new science of emotion is beginning to pinpoint precisely the neurochemical differences between the ways women and men tend to approach and deal with emotion, and it is important neither to let PC feminist ideology or neo-Victorian “Ooh, ick” squeamishness blind us to the findings. A too-reductive men-are-from-mars-women-are-from-venus perspective serves no one.

Rather than stigmatize the characteristic emotional biologies of one gender or the other, it should be the goal of any person or organization to allow all emotion at work, in all of its gendered nuances, its full due. Understanding the truths that neuroscience is revealing will allow us greater awareness and thus control of the emotions that shape our decisions and behavior at work. Learning and paying attention to the emotions that motivate and/or hobble us and in what measure — anger, anxiety, fear, joy — can help us learn to manage and use those emotions more effectively. I’d like to think that today, with U.S. women irrevocably at work and the economy in such dire straits, that we can safely raise all kinds of questions without endangering progress. When it comes to emotions and work, we should start being more unflinchingly analytical and empirical than ever before. As science discovers, confirms, and refines new understandings of gender-based aspects of emotion, let’s try not to react to them too emotionally.

Filed Under: Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review, plan C Tagged With: , , ,

Why You Really Shouldn’t Curse at Work (Much)

June 27, 2011 By 1 Comment

The media brouhaha over Carol Bartz’s coarse language in the wake of her firing was telling. Rather than responsibly assessing her merits as the chief executive of Yahoo!, the conversation instantly devolved into what kind of woman swears on the job. That, to me, is so twentieth century. When we’ve reached a point in our anything-goes culture that the anchors of the most important newscasts (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert) curse nightly, and public figures like prime-time teenage role model Lea Michele, the actress who plays a goody-goody(ish) character on Glee, talks (as we used to say) like a stevedore in interviews, it strikes me that managers and executives need to seriously rethink the words they choose to communicate displeasure.

In fact, we’re now so inured to vulgarity that it takes something really over-the-top — say, the baby doll being sold this holiday season that apparently curses — to make us stop and take notice. Taboo words, with a couple of true taboo exceptions, have always been used sparingly to communicate powerful emotions, but when swearing becomes simply reflexive and ubiquitous — as it is today — those words cease to have much power or meaning. And when crude words do shock, the language deflects our focus from the serious issues at hand.

Take, for instance, the internal Goldman Sachs e-mail that Senator Carl Levin read aloud last year during a Congressional hearing: “Boy, that Timberwolf was one shitty deal.’” Hard to tell without more context whether the guy who wrote that e-mail (now a Bank of America division president) was proud of the group for pulling the wool over the public’s eyes, or just candidly stating the facts. But one thing became clear pretty quickly — to the American public, the language made what looked like double-dealing cynicism more memorably rotten. And the immediate consequence? Rather than suggest to their employees that they not sell bad deals to their clients, Goldman Sachs chose to focus on the language and its potential for embarrassment, instructing their employees to stop using profanity in e-mails.

The emotionally laden words that communicate our more powerful feelings are particularly slippery at work, where we spend the majority of our waking hours and where our livelihoods hang in the balance. How we choose to interpret hyper-charged no-longer-taboo words changes from moment to moment and office to hallway, according to permutations of status, gender, ethnicity, education, age and the particular setting — one person’s obscenity is another’s spicy punctuation.

“In-house” language is often at odds with public norms. I was talking with a female partner in a New York corporate communications company that advises companies on critical communications challenges. “I think of swearing,” she told me, “the way I think of Yiddish. It’s very expressive.” But she also asked to be quoted anonymously, perhaps anxious that her cheerful acceptance of workplace swearing might be seen as an endorsement — and might offend clients, current or prospective.

And yet many of the people I spoke with about this subject, men as well as women, suggested that swearing was a strategic part of the lexicon they developed to be taken seriously as potential alphas of their organizations. I can relate. My first jobs were in banking and then media sales — businesses at the time completely dominated by men and fueled by a backslapping, crude-joke-telling camaraderie. Swearing definitely helped me come across as one of the guys, and thereby granted me access to the kind of casual gossiping and information-trading upon which deals are sometimes built. “Swearing,” as one senior female attorney told me, “gives others, men and women, reciprocal permission to let their hair down and feel comfortable sharing revelations.” This approach — swearing as an effective social tool that can enhance work relationships and allow women in particular to present an equal-to-men or even crypto-masculine identity — has been documented by psychology and linguistics researchers.

But not all swearing is equal. Take swearing in anger. Swearing is positively correlated with extraversion and Type A hostility and many scholarly studies (Jennifer Coates, 1993, Vivian de Klerk, 1991, 1997) identify swearing as intrinsically aggressive. Take Dick Cheney’s unapologetic snarling at Senator Patrick Leahy on the Senate floor, or Serena Williams’s outburst to a ref about a foot-fault call. Their curses were meant to take charge, to intimidate.

And swearing men and swearing women are perceived differently. De Klerk discovered that women risk being viewed more negatively than men when using obscenities. Elizabeth Gordon, who studies speech and gender stereotypes at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has found in her research that women who were “non-standard” speakers — that is, foul-mouthed — were judged to be of lower social and moral strata. We’ve seen this play out in public. Cheney refused to apologize for his f-bomb and reported that he felt “better” after his exchange with Senator Leahy, whereas at Serena Williams’s next press conference, she was subdued and entirely contrite.

These days, it’s practically meaningless and way too easy to say something “sucks,” or (much) worse. And the rough waters in which we all now work makes it increasingly important to be clear and precise about what is going on emotionally inside and around us — not to be milquetoasty, but to be calibrated. As a person who allowed (and, I confess, still occasionally allows) herself to resort to default swearing, it seems to me that in this laissez faire age, and as we start a new year with new intentions, that it’s a good idea — indeed, a damn fine notion — for business leaders to get more truly creative about their language and use the various linguistic bombs only sparingly.

Filed Under: Emotion and Work, Harvard Business Review, work Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,