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culture

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Engaged employees perform best.

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Gallup Organization has been looking at employee engagement for many years. They’ve famously found that only a small percentage of our workforce is actively engaged at their jobs. Often, company discussions about people policies center around employee well-being as an underlying principle driving HR policies. Wellbeing refers to perqs like vacation time, flextime, and so on.

I just read this Gallup research summary that asks: Should a company put effort into employee wellbeing policies, or into employment engagement policies? It turns out to be easy to answer: the greatest driver of wellbeing is employee engagement, not perqs. The research shows that engaged employees perform far better than non-engaged employees, even if those non-engaged employees are given a lot of workplace perqs (e.g. more vacation time, etc.).

Also interesting, though not mentioned in the conclusion, is that flextime is also tremendously important. Having engaged employees and giving them flextime gives the greatest boost to wellbeing.

I know when I’m engaged, my whole life seems better. Next time you’re wondering how to improve workplace morale, instead ask how you can help improve engagement. That answer might change your entire culture.

Internet: mass manipulation tool?

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I’m downloading Trust Me, I’m Lying by Ryan Holiday, about media manipulation on the internet, at the recommendation of a professional journalist friend.

As I read a few of Ryan’s blog articles and PR interviews from the book, I’m struck by how much his experience matches mine. Though I’ve not tried the kind of conscious manipulation he describes, I’ve seen it all over the place and noticed the same lack of basic fact checking in various stories I’ve been involved in.

My most striking example of this was several years ago when a Fortune 500 company revealed to me how easy it is for them to engage in mass manipulation now that the blogosphere lets them leak stories from different sources and have it all build to appear to be a preponderance of independent evidence.

Another Ryan, the amazing and awesome Ryan Allis (founder of iContact, uber-optimist, and serial entrepreneur) and I spoke about this over dinner a few weeks ago. His view is that the internet has evolved to the point where the truth will come out, despite attempts at manipulation. Especially with the rise of social media, manipulation doesn’t stand a chance because the truth will get out via informal networks.

What do you think?

How do you find real community in a wired world?

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I really enjoyed Marina Keegan’s article “The Opposite of Loneliness.” The word I’d use as the opposite of loneliness is “community.” Community has been shown to be an important part of a happy, fulfilling life. Of course, there’s no economic model attached to community, so not only do we not manage it, we disregard it in our calculations and decisions.

It’s something I’ve thought a lot about the last 5-10 years, as it’s become apparent to me that the grown-up world we’ve created doesn’t provide much opportunity for it. Any sense of “we’re in this together” that may have existed in America seems to be long gone. The prevailing question seems to have become “How can I get mine and avoid giving any of it to anyone else?” Of course, if you feel like you’re in a community, getting yours becomes much less important, since you feel like someone’s there to help if you really need it.

The very things that we call “progress” are, I believe, a big part of the problem. Easy transportation and telecomm have made it easier ad easier for us to isolate ourselves in suburbs, with our work lives being played out far away, with people who don’t share our interests, who don’t like us, and who don’t live near us. Seeing someone once a month at a planned dinner out for two hours becomes the new definition of “friendship” (second only to the definition of friendship that involves reading someone’s status updates on social media).

If you have hobbies or interests that naturally lend themselves to seeing others (e.g. team sports), that can be a source of connection. But even there, it’s not clear to me that it’s the kind of connection Keegan is talking about in her article. I recall the feeling she’s discussing, and indeed, college is the last time I felt it.

For all you post-college folk out there, please share! How do YOU find community in your life?

Our Intuitive Knowledge Isn’t Always Right!

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I was recently listening to a lecturer discuss how risk-taking is an integral part of “the entrepreneurial mindset.” He was very inspirational. Unfortunately, he was also flat-out wrong. There has been a lot of research into the psychological qualities of entrepreneurs. What has it concluded? There is no “entrepreneurial mindset”–entrepreneurs are a very diverse group. But especially among lifelong entrepreneurs who have experienced multiple successes, there is no evidence that they are any more risk-taking than anyone else. In fact, they do everything they can to mitigate risk.

My point, however, has nothing to do with entrepreneurs. It has to do with conventional wisdom. We intuitively (or culturally) want to believe that entrepreneurs are a special breed of person. That way, we have an excuse to be an entrepreneur if we deem ourselves “that breed.” Or we have an excuse *not* to be an entrepreneur if we aren’t “that breed.” Either way, we get to shift the responsibility for the decision to our personality type, rather than our decisions and efforts. That makes the very notion of an “entrepreneurial mindset” attractive, as a flexible rationale we can use for all kinds of stuff.

A lot of conventional wisdom is similar. The American myth that CEOs are somehow to credit for the entire performance of their companies, for example, is unsupported by any data whatsoever. W. Edwards Deming, the statistician who created the Total Quality movement, said that no more than 10% of a company’s performance could be attributed statistically to the CEO, and then only in highly unusual cases.

The problem is that our minds aren’t very good at understanding complex things. For 100,000 years, our minds weren’t able to do much beyond farm. Then we invented the scientific method, which was the first time we had a rigorous way to separate our intuitive-but-wrong ideas from the nonintuitive-but-accurate ways the world really works.

There is a lot of poorly-done science in the works. There is also a lot of excellent science, which is why we live 2x as long as our ancestors, in comfort, with electric lights and polar fleece.

Especially in the human potential fields–self-help, business leadership, etc.–there is a substantial body of research about how people and human systems actually work. Much of that research has even been popularized and published in books accessible to everyday people.

Before jumping on the pleasant, inspirational stories propagated in our cultural myths, take the time to read some of the research-based books on the topics. You can even go further and read the studies the books are based on. Some of the science (or the way it is being interpreted) may be ‘iffy,’ but some may be solid. And you may learn how the world *really* works, which will only make it easier for you to create the life you want.

(*) this is what I did for the Get-It-Done Guy episodes on visualizing for results. “The Secret” doesn’t work. They’ve done controlled experiments to find out. But some slight tweaks in the visualization technique *has* been shown to boost results. Not because of a deep spiritual principle, but because the right visualization gets people motivated and moving to make their dreams come true.

Meritocracy: A Fine, But Mythological, Idea

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I love the idea of a meritocracy! It’s a glorious myth that makes a wonderful story. But if you look at how resources, wealth, prestige, etc. get distributed, it’s very hard to make a case for meritocracy.

It’s no surprise we believe in meritocracy. We spend our entire first 18-25 conscious years in school. School is a true meritocracy. The more you work at mastering the material, the more you earn good grades. I don’t know about you, but school was the last meritocracy I had the privilege to enjoy.

At my very first job out of college, I was told, “You do the best job of anyone here, but you’re too young to be making any more money.” Sadly, I persisted in thinking that doing a good job was the way to get what I wanted out of life. I still think that way in my gut, even though I continue to see little evidence of it.

Many very successful people talk a lot about meritocracy and how they just worked hard to succeed. That’s all fine and good, but they’re looking at only their own story. They’re not looking at the vast majority of people in the world who work very, very hard, and don’t get rewarded nearly as well. I’ve also noticed that the people who are highly successful/rewarded/prestigious have a tremendously powerful psychological vested interest in believing in and trumpeting the idea of meritocracy. Otherwise they would have to confront the idea that maybe they don’t deserve all that money/power/fame, and it simply came to them because they were born to the right parents, or were in the right place at the right time.

In capitalism, we give the bulk of the value created by an enterprise to the owners. It’s far better to own 50% of the equity in a successful company that you left 6 months after founding it than to work your ass off for 12 years making that same company a success, but working on salary. What matters as far as material reward isn’t the work/merit, but the capital and ownership structure. (That’s a true story, by the way. The company founder never worked again. The employees, while doing reasonably well, are still working at the same or other companies to earn their daily bread.)

If you want to do a good job, by all means, do it. Personally, I like to be proud of my work, and I strive to do the very best. But don’t confuse that with getting what you want. When you’re designing your life, remember that producing good work may be something you do for the psychic and self-esteem rewards. When you’re going after other rewards, say, money, be as clear-headed as you can about what will help you reach that result. Hard work and skill may not have anything to do with living the kind of life you want.

Why I Like Paper

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A reader wrote in:

I read your suggestion about the 3×5 pad and it sucks! That’s because I hate paper and pen note-taking. I want something that I can carry with me anywhere on my handheld and which will also prompt me, just like a personal assistant, not something which will load me with the extra work of transcribing to a master list! As if I am not burdened enough already! Look, I need something to help me gain lost time each day. Something to boost my productivity and tidily organise my intended activities in a manner that enables me to take action on them!

My reply:

The reason I like paper is that the transcribing *forces me* to confront whether or not a particular task is important enough to copy by hand. If it isn’t, that’s a sign that it probably isn’t important enough to keep on my list. The key to freeing up time, ultimately, is saying “No” to commitments and then vigorously protecting the time you’ve freed up.

If time is getting lost, you need to stop doing the things that you define as “losing” it. Smartphones are often big time losers. Yes, the phone is a fun toy, and yes it can do cool stuff, but measured *in terms of my getting my important work done* (as opposed to my unimportant, imagined work), it’s probably doesn’t make me that much more productive.

The problem is that it speeds up some things, but it slows down others. For example, I type about 1/3 the speed on my smartphone as I do on my desktop. I may find it convenient to respond to email on my smartphone, but it’s actually making me *less* productive. And even if I could answer email at the same rate, the moment I click on a link and spend 5 minutes web browsing or playing a game, any email productivity gains get lost as I waste time goofing off.

If you’re brave enough, try keeping a log for a couple of days. Note what you get done on your smartphone and what you get done at your desk, and how much time each takes. You may find your smartphone boosts your productivity. Or you may find it doesn’t. For looking up phone numbers and addresses, my smartphone is awesome. But does it really save time? I used to clip someone’s business card into my rolodex and I’d memorize it after 2-3 calls. Now I have to retype or scan-plus-double-check each card to get it into my address book (or pay someone to do it, which means earning the money to pay them). And then I *always* have to look them up, because I no longer memorize.

Assuming I make 5-6 calls a day, am I really more productive with an electronic address book when you take all that into account? I suspect yes, but I probably save a few minutes a month, *not* hours.

In short, I like paper because it forces me to think. I like technology because it’s fun and sometimes convenient. But I never assume that paper is automatically bad, nor do I assume technology is good. Like any tool, test it out and be careful that adopting a new, faster tool in one area doesn’t slow you down in another.

Use Social Media to Trumpet Your *Real* Awesomeness!

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“Thousands of people just like you are sharing, right now!” says a social media site. Then, I suppose, my sharing would be utterly redundant. And my following their streams would be an exercise in narcissistic boredom. Is this *really* the pinnacle of human technological achievement?

I share a lot on social media because it’s part of my job. I have a very popular podcast that offers what I hope is a unique perspective with content that ranges from heard-it-a-thousand-time-before to novel and new. I work very hard to provoke thought, either by refuting some conventional wisdom I believe is wrong, or by asking provocative questions that stimulate a conversation.

If “thousands of people just like [me] are sharing,” then my sharing adds nothing, so why bother? A far better message is, “go get off social media and do something fascinating, intriguing, exciting, and wild! Then come back and share when you have something unique to share.”

Let me pose a challenge: if you spend time on social media sharing the book you’re reading, or which ice cream parlor you’ve stopped at for a cone, stop it. Use that same time to daydream a challenge to undertake, a mystery to solve, or an adventure to create. Then go do it. And then share that on social media. Not only will you attract a larger audience, but you’ll have a life worth broadcasting as a role model.

Should we take personal responsibility for business’s impact?

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Many businesses do things that are legal, are in fact good business practice, but which are shown later to have bad effects for society. In some cases, these effects are huge. For example, the contribution of fast food cooking and recipe practices to obesity and heart disease only came to light 40 years after the founding of the fast food industry. And tobacco was only shown to cause cancer hundreds of years into its trade.

If these had caused immediate obesity or cancer, they probably wouldn’t have succeeded in the market. But human beings have an odd quirk: if the effects of something don’t happen quickly, we discount them in favor of immediate gratification. Our compulsion to eat that extra cookie (like I did last night) is immediate, and we act on it much more than we act on the hypothetical, imaginary future world in which we have added a few inches to our waistline.

Then we came up with science and started uncovering these longer-term cause and effects. If a new product were to be introduced that was known to have such negative health effects by triggering short-term gratification impulses, I’d like to think we wouldn’t rush to embrace it.

But even if we’ve gotten smarter (debatable), there’s an even trickier question: some things are fine when done individually, but disastrous when everyone does them. Skipping college is a great example. We’re living in a moment in history where our college costs, educational outcomes, and job prospects are such that it makes very little economic sense for most people to go to college. There’s just no way they can get a job that can pay back their tuition, and we don’t provide enough national educational assistance or reimbursement to encourage people to go unless it has a direct effect on their future income. (Let’s leave out for a moment the recent studies that show that many 4-year colleges are nothing but an extended party and don’t seem to teach very much.) For any one person this makes sense. When an entire generation does it, 20 years later we’ll have a workforce unsuited for anything but manual labor and jobs as check-out clerks. Bad check-out clerks, I might add.

Outsourcing is another place where the individual benefit leads to bad things societally. Any one company can be more profitable through outsourcing. When all companies start doing this, however, it leads to higher domestic unemployment and the gradual deskilling of our workforce. Why would anyone put in the time and effort to develop a skill when they can’t compete with $3/day people of similar skill overseas?

Our economic system is clearly set up to reward the individual, short-term decisions. Sometimes that produces the larger good outcomes, and sometimes it doesn’t. If we as businesspeople are concerned about our larger societal outcomes, how can/should/could we change the system to deal with (a) profitable short-term gratification businesses that have long-term negative effects, and (b) individual incentives that lead to rational individual behavior, but when everyone does them, larger Very Bad Problems?

Do we have any responsibility to address those two flaws in the system? If so, how? If not, then how should we handle the very real societal problems that result?

If you want to reward your customers, reward them!

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I went shopping at RITE-AID today and saw one of my favorite products advertised as: “Buy 2, get $2 off your next purchase.” I grabbed two bottles and made my way to the register … where the clerk informed me that I could only get the deal if I had their frequent buyer card. To join the program, however, I had to give them personally identifiable information. I declined both the membership and the purchase.

There’s no reason a frequent buyer program needs to have my personally identifiable information. As long as all my purchases get charged to card #4234, they can print the offer coupons for card #4234 based on the purchase history of #4234. There is never any need to get my personally identifiable information unless they plan to sell it or cross-index it against other databases to find out more about me.

This seems like RITE-AID wanting to reward me as a frequent customer by giving me future deals that will encourage me to shop there more. In that, we’re aligned. I want to let them do that. But I’m not interested in giving them personally identifiable information that they can sell or use in ways other than encouraging me to shop there more.

If you want to reward your customers, find ways to reward them that does not infringe on them. Most people, if they like you as a merchant or service provider, will be happy to accept and respond to incentives. If you want fanatically loyal customers who rave about you, make it possible for people to have a great experience without stepping beyond the bounds where they stop being comfortable with the relationship. Otherwise, you end up with people like me blogging about your intrusion into their lives, instead of praising you for giving you such a great deal.

Know the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

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When that lone customer arrives at your restaurant on a busy night, it’s tempting to make him or her wait, in favor of the party of 12 that’s sure to rack up a huge bill. But it just might not be wise.

When you’re deciding how to structure your business, who to give service to, and when to go the extra mile for a customer, don’t just consider the transaction you’re in the middle of dealing with. Consider the total lifetime of interaction with your customer. The “lifetime value” of a customer is how much you expect that customer to spend over the course of their association with you. That lifetime value is what you want to take into account when deciding how far out of your way to go. I’ve recently had a few run-ins with companies that have taken a short view, much to their detriment.

I eat lunch 5 times a week at the same deli. They discontinued my favorite kind of hot pepper, leaving no condiments that I enjoyed. I asked them to please bring them back, and they refused. I offered to buy my own jar for them to use. They refused. And I stopped eating there. Five days a week, times 50 weeks a year, times $7 per lunch is $1,750 of income a year they were happy to forgo to avoid dealing with the hassle of keeping a jar of peppers around. My new deli is part of a franchise. They are only supposed to serve their approved condiments. I spoke to the owner and he happily kept a special jar of peppers just for me. In the 3 years I’ve been eating there, they’ve made $5,000 and my previous deli has gone out of business.

My friend passes through Reno every year on the way back from the Burning Man festival. He stayed in Harrah’s because they gave him a free upgrade if they had rooms available. He then spent the money he saved in the Harrah’s restaurant and spent even more in the casino. They stopped giving free upgrades, and he changed hotels. It would cost them nothing to give him the upgrade, and instead, they’ve lost year-after-year of restaurant and casino business. Let’s not even consider how much Harrah’s would make on all the referral business my friend would bring. Smooth move, Harrah’s.

To return to the original example, while it may make sense on any given night to forgo seating one person in favor of the party of 12, if that one person dines at your restaurant three times a week, in the course of a year, they’ll outspend the entire party of 12. As unintuitive as it may seem, treating the solo customer well may be a better business decision than handling the occasional bachelorette party. And believe me—the cleanup’s a lot easier, too.

When you make decisions about your customers, do you consider their requests as separate events, or do you consider the lifetime value of each customer before deciding how much to commit to their happiness?