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Social Sector Provocateur, EARN CEO, Lecturer at UCBerkeley Haas School of Business,
Time to Reject the College Admissions Paradigm
May is the month when high school seniors who've applied to college sort through their acceptances, and make their decisions on where to go in the fall. Having worked as an admissions counselor early in my career (at my alma mater, Vassar College), I have vivid memories on how the choices of a college admissions office can shape the futures of young people and their families. I also strongly believe it's time to reject the traditional college admissions paradigm. It distorts the question of how we reward opportunity through an archaic, byzantine system that is easy to game if you're rich and baffling if you're poor or lower income. We need to do better - and we can do so in a framework that still honors achievement and rewards effort with opportunity.
Doing admissions work at a fancy school provides a really compelling lens to consider the deceptively complex questions of what opportunity really means - and who deserves it. At a small school like Vassar, an admissions officer travels to schools around the country, then evaluates the applications from these schools, and makes recommendations to a committee of colleagues for final decisions.
The choices can be brutally hard. You know from the start that there won't be spaces for most of the applicants you assess. I still clearly remember some of the tough decisions I had to make about who deserved a place in the incoming class. Was it the homeless girl from the Bronx, who never knew her father, lost her drug addicted mother and aunt to AIDS, and commuted 2 hours each way from a homeless shelter to an under-performing school (where she was the valedictorian) because the guidance counselor was the only person on the planet she trusted? Her SAT scores were 50% lower than Vassar's average. She wrote poorly, but very powerfully about how her journey prepared her to face anything.
Or, should that spot go to an upper middle class girl from an affluent suburb of NYC with killer SAT scores, performing in the top 5% of her class at a competitive high school? She was on the track team and president of the model United Nations club. She wrote her admissions essay about the night her cat threw up 20 times. (If you're out there, I still remember you).
Would admitting the homeless student to Vassar really translate into a bona fide opportunity, or would I be positioning her to fail? Despite her resiliency, she was 17, and going from a homeless shelter in the Bronx to the gilded halls of an elite college, even if just 80 miles away, is like traveling to the Mars. (Or, further - like maybe to Jupiter). Putting aside the social challenges of a transition like this, the very tough academic requirements would be brutal for someone with her academic preparation in high school. She might have the drive and tenacity to succeed. Or she might not - and instead drop out, with a lot of debt, and a sense of failure that could haunt her and hinder the tremendous drive that got her so far in life already.
Here's the thing - this is a false choice we shouldn't have to make anymore. We can stand on the shoulders of the old paradigm of traditional college-admissions-as-golden-ticket-to-opportunity. Access to high quality education - through Udacity, Coursera and Edx - is booming in ways that will create new paradigms for opportunity. Leaders, thinkers and entrepreneurs need to push the experiments that will teach us how to leverage these powerful new models. Kudos to San Jose State for recently doing just this - expanding their offerings to students online. (All of this, of course, also starts to mitigate the terrible plague of the the student debt problem for future generations.)
Who'll take the next great leap? What should that leap be? I'd love to read your thoughts on the issue.
About Ben Mangan: Ben is President, CEO and Cofounder of EARN, a lecturer at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and a blogger for the Huffington Post.
You may not give your computer screen an embarrassingly gushing smile and you might not write little love notes during your lunch break. But, there are ways to tell if you love your job.
Of course, no job is perfect -- even the best of relationships have their down days. We all have to do things we don’t like. I love working at HubSpot, it's the best job I've ever had. But, even I have “off” days where I'm not spending all my time doing things I absolutely love.
So all of the following may not be the case all of the time… but when you love your job, manyof the following should be the case much of the time:
1. You don’t talk about other people; you talk about the cool things other people are doing.
“I hear Mary is heading up a new project. What are they working on?” “I’d love to know how Mike managed to rescue that customer relationship.” “Sherry developed a new sales channel; is there some way we can leverage that?”
When you love your job you don’t gossip about the personal failings of others. You talk about their successes, because you’re happy for them – and because you’re happy with yourself.
2. You think, “I hope I get to…” instead of, “I hope I don’t have to…”
When you love your job it’s like peeling an onion. There are always more layers to discover and explore.
When you hate your job it’s also like peeling an onion – but all you discover are more tears.
3. You see your internal and external customers not as people to satisfy but simply as people.
They aren't numbers. You think of them as real people who have real needs.
And you gain a real sense of fulfillment and purpose from taking care of those needs.
4. You enjoy your time at work.
You don't have to put in time at work and then escape to life to be happy. You believe in enjoying life and enjoying work.
When you love your job, it’s a part of your life. You feel alive and joyful not just at home – but also at work.
5. You would recommend working at your company to your best friend…
In fact, you can't stop talking about how cool your company is and the awesome work you're doing even when you're away from work.
6. You enjoy attending meetings.
No, seriously, you enjoy meetings. Why? Because it’s fun to be at the center of thoughtful, challenging discussions that lead to decisions, initiatives, and changes – changes you get to be a part of.
7. You don’t think about surviving. You think about winning.
You don't worry much about losing your job. You're more worried about not achieving your potential. Not being as impactful as you can.
8. You see your manager as a person you work with, not for.
You feel valued. You feel respected.
You feel trusted.
9. You don’t want to let your coworkers down.
Not because you’ll get in trouble or get a bad performance review, but because you admire them – and you want them to admire you.
10. You hardly ever look at the clock.
You’re too busy making things happen. When you do look at the clock, you often find that the time has flown.
11. You view success in terms of fulfillment and gratification – not just promotions and money.
Everyone wants to be promoted. Everyone wants to earn more.
You definitely feel that way too… but somewhere along the way your job has come to mean a lot more to you than just a paycheck. And if you left this job, even if for a lot higher salary… you would still miss it.
A lot.
12. You leave work with items on your to-do list you’re excited about tackling tomorrow.
Many people cross the “fun” tasks off their to-do lists within the first hour or two.
You often have cool stuff – new initiatives, side projects, hunches you want to confirm with data, people you want to talk to – left over when it’s time to go home.
13. You help without thinking.
You like seeing your colleagues succeed, so it’s second nature to help them out. You pitch in automatically.
And they do the same for you.
14. You don’t think about retirement… because retirement sounds boring…
…and a lot less fulfilling.
How many of the above statements apply to you and your job?
If you said:
0-3: You may want to find a new job. Life is too short.
4-6: You don't hate your job... but you don't love it either. What can you do differently?
7-10: You really enjoy your job and the people you work with
11-14: You are deeply, madly in love with your job! (and your friends are jealous!)
About 95 percent of new products fail. The problem often is that their creators are using an ineffective market segmentation mechanism, according to HBS professor Clayton Christensen. It's time for companies to look at products the way customers do: as a way to get a job done.
by Carmen Nobel
When planning new products, companies often start by segmenting their markets and positioning their merchandise accordingly. This segmentation involves either dividing the market into product categories, such as function or price, or dividing the customer base into target demographics, such as age, gender, education, or income level.
Unfortunately, neither way works very well, according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, who notes that each year 30,000 new consumer products are launched—and 95 percent of them fail.
“THE JOBS-TO-BE-DONE POINT OF VIEW CAUSES YOU TO CRAWL INTO THE SKIN OF YOUR CUSTOMER AND GO WITH HER AS SHE GOES ABOUT HER DAY, ALWAYS ASKING THE QUESTION AS SHE DOES SOMETHING: WHY DID SHE DO IT THAT WAY?”
The problem is that consumers usually don't go about their shopping by conforming to particular segments. Rather, they take life as it comes. And when faced with a job that needs doing, they essentially "hire" a product to do that job. To that end, Christensen suggests that companies start segmenting their markets according to "jobs-to-be-done." It's a concept that he has been honing with several colleagues for more than a decade.
"The fact that you're 18 to 35 years old with a college degree does not cause you to buy a product," Christensen says. "It may be correlated with the decision, but it doesn't cause it. We developed this idea because we wanted to understand what causes us to buy a product, not what's correlated with it. We realized that the causal mechanism behind a purchase is, 'Oh, I've got a job to be done.' And it turns out that it's really effective in allowing a company to build products that people want to buy."
Christensen, who is planning to publish a book on the subject of jobs-to-be-done marketing, explains that there's an important difference between determining a product's function and its job. "Looking at the market from the function of a product really originates from your competitors or your own employees deciding what you need," he says. "Whereas the jobs-to-be-done point of view causes you to crawl into the skin of your customer and go with her as she goes about her day, always asking the question as she does something: Why did she do it that way?"
HIRING A MILKSHAKE
In his MBA course, Christensen shares the story of a fast-food restaurant chain that wanted to improve its milkshake sales. The company started by segmenting its market both by product (milkshakes) and by demographics (a marketer's profile of a typical milkshake drinker). Next, the marketing department asked people who fit the demographic to list the characteristics of an ideal milkshake (thick, thin, chunky, smooth, fruity, chocolaty, etc.). The would-be customers answered as honestly as they could, and the company responded to the feedback. But alas, milkshake sales did not improve.
The company then enlisted the help of one of Christensen's fellow researchers, who approached the situation by trying to deduce the "job" that customers were "hiring" a milkshake to do. First, he spent a full day in one of the chain's restaurants, carefully documenting who was buying milkshakes, when they bought them, and whether they drank them on the premises. He discovered that 40 percent of the milkshakes were purchased first thing in the morning, by commuters who ordered them to go.
The next morning, he returned to the restaurant and interviewed customers who left with milkshake in hand, asking them what job they had hired the milkshake to do. Christensen details the findings in a recent teaching note, "Integrating Around the Job to be Done."
"Most of them, it turned out, bought [the milkshake] to do a similar job," he writes. "They faced a long, boring commute and needed something to keep that extra hand busy and to make the commute more interesting. They weren't yet hungry, but knew that they'd be hungry by 10 a.m.; they wanted to consume something now that would stave off hunger until noon. And they faced constraints: They were in a hurry, they were wearing work clothes, and they had (at most) one free hand."
The milkshake was hired in lieu of a bagel or doughnut because it was relatively tidy and appetite-quenching, and because trying to suck a thick liquid through a thin straw gave customers something to do with their boring commute. Understanding the job to be done, the company could then respond by creating a morning milkshake that was even thicker (to last through a long commute) and more interesting (with chunks of fruit) than its predecessor. The chain could also respond to a separate job that customers needed milkshakes to do: serve as a special treat for young children—without making the parents wait a half hour as the children tried to work the milkshake through a straw. In that case, a different, thinner milkshake was in order.
PROVEN SUCCESS AND PURPOSE BRANDING
Several major companies that have succeeded with a jobs-to-be-done mechanism: FedEx, for example, fulfills the job of getting a package from here to there as fast as possible. Disney does the job of providing warm, safe, fantasy vacations for families. OnStar provides peace of mind.
Procter & Gamble's product success rate rose dramatically when the company started segmenting its markets according to a product's job, Christensen says. He adds that this marketing paradigm comes with the additional benefit of being difficult to rip off. Nobody, for example, has managed to copy IKEA, which helps its customers do the job of furnishing an apartment right now.
Christensen also cites the importance of "purpose branding"—building an entire brand around a particular job-to-be-done. Quite simply, purpose branding involves naming the product after the purpose it serves.
Kodak, for example, has seen great success with its FunSaver brand of single-use cameras, which performs the job of preserving fun memories. Milwaukee Electric Tool Corp. has cornered the market on reciprocating saws with its trademarked Sawzall, which does the job of helping consumers safely saw through pretty much anything. Its Hole-Hawg drills, which make big holes between studs and joists, are also quite popular. The company's other tools, which rely on the Milwaukee brand, are not nearly as celebrated.
"The word 'Milwaukee' doesn't give you any market whatsoever," Christensen says.
So, if jobs-to-be-done market segmentation is so effective, why aren't more companies designing their products accordingly? For one thing, future product planning usually involves analyzing existing data, and most existing data is organized by customer demographics or product category.
"I've got a list of mistakes that God made in creating the world, and one of them is, dang it, he only made data available about the past!" Christensen says. "All the data is organized by product category or customer category because that's easy to get. To go out and get data about a job is really hard. But there are a lot of people who hire consultants to tell them how big the market is. And because the data is organized in the wrong way, you start to believe that's how the market should be organized."
Furthermore, it's difficult for product developers to break the mold when many of their customers organize their store shelves around traditional marketing metrics. Christensen gives the example of a company that developed a novel tool designed to help carpenters with the daunting task of installing a door in a doorframe, a job that usually took several tools to do. But a major home goods store refused to sell the tool because its shelves were organized by product category—and there was no shelf in the store dedicated to the singular job of hanging a door.
"Most organizations are already organized around product categories or customer categories," Christensen says, "and therefore people only see opportunities within this little frame that they've stuck you in. So you have to think inside of a category as opposed to getting out. You've just got to make the decision to divorce yourself from the constraints that are arbitrarily created by the design of the old org chart."
Diagnosing the ‘Flutie Effect’ on College Marketing
by Sean Silverthorne
Boston College, after one of the most dramatic plays in collegiate football history, benefitted with a dramatic upswing in applications. Other colleges have experienced similar upswings from sports success. In a new study,Doug J. Chung demonstrates the reality behind the "Flutie Effect," named after BC quarterback Doug Flutie.
Boston College's greatest marketing campaign lasted about six seconds.
It's called the "Flutie Effect." In a 1984 game against the University of Miami, BC quarterback Doug Flutie threw a last-second "Hail Mary" pass 48 yards that was miraculously caught for a game-winning touchdown—a climactic capper on one of the most exciting college football games ever.
The play put BC on the map for college aspirants. In two years, applications had shot up 30 percent.
Ever since, marketing experts and school deans have acknowledged the power of the Flutie Effect's ability to transfer a successful collegiate athletic program into a hot ticket for admission. Georgetown University applications multiplied 45 percent between 1983 and 1986 following a surge of basketball success. Northwestern University applications advanced 21 percent after winning the Big Ten Championship in football.
“I AM HESITANT TO SAY SCHOOLS CHOOSE TO INVEST IN ATHLETICS JUST BECAUSE OF THE SPILLOVER EFFECT INTO ACADEMICS”
"The primary form of mass media advertising by academic institutions in the United States is, arguably, through their athletic programs," says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor of marketing Doug J. Chung.
Oddly, little academic research has been done on the subject. And even some BC administrators would rather credit educational excellence than a gridiron miracle for its popularity among high-school graduates.
Enter Chung, whose recent research paper, The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics, shows how on-field heroics can benefit schools by increasing both the quantity and the quality of students they can expect to attract. The paper has been accepted for publication by the journal Marketing Science.
His findings include:
When a school rises from mediocre to great on the gridiron, applications increase by 17.7 percent.
To attain similar effects, a school has to either lower tuition by 3.8 percent or increase the quality of its education by recruiting higher-quality faculty, who are paid 5.1 percent more than their average peers in the academic labor market.
Students with lower-than-average SAT scores tended to have a stronger preference for schools known for athletic success, while students with higher SAT scores preferred institutions with greater academic quality. Also, students with lower academic prowess valued the success of intercollegiate athletics for longer periods of time than the high SAT achievers.
Even students with high SAT scores are significantly affected by athletic success—one of the biggest surprises from the research, Chung says.
Schools become more academically selective with athletic success.
Although a boost in applications is a good outcome, there are a variety of other reasons why schools invest in sports. A primary reason, says Chung, is to further the NCAA's commitment to diversity and morale. Schools also build sports programs because it can be financially beneficial to do so—intercollegiate sporting events generated an estimated $2 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit in 2010. Winning programs prosper in diverse ways including ticket and product sales, alumni donations, and TV contracts. Chung is currently studying the effect of winning on revenues.
The rise in application interest, the subject of the current research, is probably the tertiary reason. "I am hesitant to say schools choose to invest in athletics just because of the spillover effect into academics," Chung says.
Why would sports success spark greater admissions interest, even among academically superior students? Although not part of the study, Chung guesses that a school's fame in athletics increases general awareness of those institutions—brand advertising, if you will. Another reason: sports-heavy American culture. Prospective students might find it appealing to be part of a college's social whirl around a winning program.
Chung was naturally attracted to the research because the Flutie game was the first American football game he'd ever watched. "I saw this game live on TV with my father when I was growing up in Kansas," he says, "and have been a big fan ever since."
THE CHALLENGE Twelve years ago, one of us was sitting with a senior executive at a telecommunications equipment manufacturer. The firm had been a high flier with demand driven by the global explosion in wireless networks and the Internet bubble. But demand had dropped rapidly, and this firm, along with most of its peers, faced rapid contraction. The executive looked out at a stalled turnaround effort and wondered why none of her plans to address the issue had been implemented. “I told everyone what they had to do,” she said. “Why didn’t they do it?” Essentially, she was asking how leaders get followers to follow. No matter how well constructed a leader’s plans, they count for naught if they are not enacted. Consider the experience of a global supply chain and logistics company. A few years ago this organization needed to deploy operational enhancements quickly to meet competitive challenges. The problem this posed to the organization’s leadership can be put simply: How do you get large numbers of people to act in a coordinated, sustainable fashion while leading a global company that has grown through acquisitions that have not been fully integrated? This simple question masks a tall order for leadership. As a global company, its workforce was geographically dispersed and highly diverse. What exists, other than gut instinct, to inform leaders’ decisions around organizational engagement? For several years, we have been studying this issue: first by analyzing research data on organizational success and failure, then through research carried out in cooperation with global companies facing this challenge. Our project has sought answers to that telecommunications executive’s implied next question: What should I have done as the leader of this organization? In focusing on strategy execution and large-scale changes that depend on large numbers of people working together,1 we have identified three factors that are present when organizations achieve their goals. At least one of these factors is missing when organizations in the study struggled. Further, we have observed that as leaders learn to use analytically verified models that shape effective decisions, they tend to attain greater degrees of success in coordinating the efforts of their workforce toward a defined goal. APPROACH The As One project began as a research effort, focused on studying collaboration in organizations. The project started with three fundamental assumptions: Collaboration among large groups of people is a requirement for meeting many organizational challenges. There are multiple paths to organizational success based on the nature of the organization and on its goals. There is no one “right” type of organization. The project findings should be based on rigorous data analytics. It is easy to look to charismatic leadership and willpower as explanations for collaboration done well, but ultimately neither is verifiable or especially useful as an input to constructing a model for improved collaboration. The project developed a series of case studies of organizational success and failure.2 The cases were selected to represent every continent and many industries as well as government and nonprofit groups. Organizational collaboration is an inherently broad topic, and it was not immediately apparent how to approach it through quantitative methods. Initially, team members tried to categorize case studies based on personal judgment, but these assessments were subjective and therefore unreliable. People who read a case would place it in different categories. For example, was a top-down structure with few layers the same as a top-down structure in which directives were passed through many layers of a hierarchy? To be more objective, the project team collected numerous organization assessment instruments and scored the cases on 87 variables. A substantial effort went into establishing inter-rater reliability. This process allowed statistical techniques to be applied to the data generating an analytics-based view of collaboration, a view whose results were then used to develop measures of the conditions that underlie collaboration in organizations. Our intention was that an understanding of those conditions would afford insights that would assist business leaders in unraveling the collaboration riddle in larger organizations. THREE CONDITIONS While there are many things to consider in looking at an organization, three conditions emerged consistently in our study among organizations where large numbers of people collaborate effectively. One (or more) of these three conditions was absent in every case of organizational failure in the study. These conditions are: Belong: People collaborate on behalf of organizations they feel connected to. Believe: People collaborate when they commit to carrying out specific actions. Behave: People collaborate when they share a common understanding of how things are done. Belong While employee engagement measures are widely used to assess connections to the organization as a whole, collaboration depended to a large degree on which parts of an organization people feel connected to. This notion of parts helps capture the complexity of modern organizations. People might feel most attached to their local work group or their product line, their function, their geography, or even the organization as a whole. Matrix structures increase this complexity by asking people to hold two or more loyalties. BELONG: WHO WILL PEOPLE LISTEN TO? Brambles, a large supply chain and information management organization, was embarking on a new global strategy to bring together its dispersed business units to achieve the benefits of being part of the whole. The challenge they faced was that their people identified more strongly to the business units and countries they were part of and did not identify strongly with the organization as a whole. As a consequence, the pace of execution on organization-wide initiatives was going slower than expected. According to one senior executive: “The people element in the ‘how’ component of the new strategies was critical to our achievement of goals.” Based on knowledge of where their people felt they “belonged,” Brambles changed the way they communicated with employees, shifting from an organization-wide approach to one that involved greater focus on communicating specific organization-wide messages at the country and team level. Brambles has seen their organization-wide initiatives gain great traction, they have increased people‘s commitment levels to group initiatives and this has translated into strong business results. They have also seen an increase in the level of belonging people have to the organization as a whole. By understanding where the strongest levels of belonging were and having local leaders become the initiatives’ primary drivers they have achieved their goals. Collaboration works notably well among people who feel loyal to the same parts of an organization. Our research indicates that those who are loyal to different entities with separate agendas struggle to collaborate. Additionally, it shows how a sense of belonging influences organization change. Most initiatives involve shifting the parts of an organization that matter most to people: encouraging functions to collaborate more effectively, merging two or more separate entities, or asking people in independent organizations to adopt shared processes or data definitions. These change efforts often founder when the need to shift where people’s loyalties currently lie is not considered. Rank and file employees in the more than 100 projects studied tended to feel most connected to local work groups, whereas more senior people tended to be more connected to the larger structures of the organization. In organizations where the senior leaders resembled the rank and file in being locally focused, the organization usually found it hard to achieve broad goals. As organizations adopt more virtual and global forms, creating a sense of belonging becomes all the more challenging. SPECIFIC TAKEAWAYS ABOUT THE BELONG DIMENSION: Importance: A group of people will work together well when they feel they are part of the same organization. Warning signs: The groups whose performance is measured are not the groups that leadership wants to make the focus of people’s efforts. Which group evaluates performance, sets compensation, decides promotions? People often lack connection to others whom they are expected to collaborate with. What can be done: Either connect changes to the groups people care about or raise the importance of groups by changing organizational structure, measurements, responsibilities, structures, or effective team building. Lack of a shared sense of belonging is often a problem in postmerger integration situations, as people move slowly to shift their sense of belonging from their prior company to the new entity they have joined, but this issue is much broader. We see numerous initiatives around the world with “One” in their title, usually “One Company” or “One Unit”. Leaders often call for these initiatives to achieve economies of scale, to make their organization easier to do business with by being more consistent and/or simpler in how it goes to market, or to promote more cross-selling. Repeatedly this sort of initiative runs afoul of what essentially is the tribalism that persists in our globalized world. That sense of the local team being the one that matters, often reinforced by the local team holding its members’ performance reviews and compensation, is a persistent barrier to “One” initiatives that are often more compelling logically than emotionally. SPECIFIC TAKEAWAYS ABOUT THE BELIEVE DIMENSION: Importance: Defining the behaviors that people have to commit to helps to drive collaboration and sometimes highlights weaknesses in strategies and plans. Warning signs: You are communicating, but things are not happening. People are sitting on the fence, unengaged by organizational goals. What can be done: Ask whether people know what is expected of them. If they do, are they motivated? If motivated, are they encountering barriers to new behavior: inadequate processes; unavailable data; measurement systems or organization structures misaligned with goals? In the Brambles example, the issue of connectedness was addressed by aligning who was communicating with people’s loyalties. Other ways to address “Belong” issues include changing organization structures so that people who need to collaborate belong to the same organization, as well as changing where both profit and loss and individual performance are measured to the parts of the organization that the leaders want employees to give their loyalty to. Believe Woody Allen once quipped that “80 percent of success is showing up.” Perhaps that should be amended to “showing up and doing something.” Collaboration requires action, doing things that sometimes are challenging. The more successful cases we observed were marked by people taking action, and analysis of patterns of action and inaction suggested a new approach to thinking about change readiness—assessing the propensity of people to act in new ways. Change readiness has typically been operationalized as people’s attitude toward changing behavior, measured on a scale that runs from favorable to opposed. This approach has at least two shortcomings. First, individual attitudes are poor predictors of behavior.3, 4 People hold many attitudes and are subject to numerous other influences, so frequently the influence of any one attitude is weak. For example, one may aspire to provide a creative solution but also to deliver on time, deliver within budget constraints, and deliver a solution that is less risky than something novel, and so aspiration to be creative may be overwhelmed. An improved assessment approach addresses this by measuring intention to carry out actions, rather than attitudes toward actions. This was suggested by the observation of Kurt Lewin, the seminal social psychologist, that intention is a much more effective predictor of behavior than attitude.5 The notion that people either overtly favor or oppose an action is often inconsistent with what one sees in contemporary organizations. Opposition is more often passive than active, expressed as inaction rather than as vocal opposition. People publically state a strategy is wrong, but they can be slow to take action or they leave the work to be done by others. Attitude measures are not designed to capture the possibility of passive resistance. There are five ways people respond to behaviors that can achieve goals, as shown in figure 1. FIGURE 1. THE BELIEVE SCALE This approach provides a more conservative assessment of an organization’s ability to act than traditional change readiness because “supportive” people are no longer counted as proponents of action. These five categories help identify what interventions should be deployed to change behavior. If the majority of people are “undecided,” this is usually a problem in credibility; people need to be convinced that the need to act is not going away. Many of us will recognize “initiative fatigue”—the cynical but all-too-often realistic assessment that organizations have carried out numerous change initiatives that have petered out, and hence sitting on the fence for a while is a rational response. Early adopters are usually a minority compared to those who wait and see. If the majority of people are “supportive,” that often suggests people do not recognize a way to take action from their own positions. Sometimes they are right; but often the high-level goals of an organization need to be translated into specific actions that people may not be willing or able to develop on their own. Consider a consumer products company in South America that had experienced several failed process improvement initiatives. What it found was that passive resistance increased dramatically among managers with more than four years’ experience. The managers’ sense of belonging with the company as a whole also dropped. The effect showed up when analyzing demographic details of the Believe scale’s passive resistance measures. This was not something that was identified when the company compared who favored and who “opposed” initiatives. What became clear was that a large group of managers were blocking the company’s initiatives. The company responded by putting a program in place to work to reengage these people. We hypothesized that “opposed” would be a very small category in modern organizations, and the data have borne that out. The studies found that active opposition is seldom expressed by more than 10 percent of an organization’s members, while the various forms of passive resistance are much more widespread. Behave Contemporary observers of organizations see a shift underway from command and control structures that had been a historical hallmark of the Industrial Age to networked structures that take advantage of the global and virtual possibilities of modern work.6, 7 While this may be true, there are several extensions to this view suggested by analysis of organizations in our study: While networked structures are emerging, they are not replacing command and control, which often continues to work well. While “command and control” and “networked” are useful terms, they can mask a great deal of variability within each category. No one organizational type was superior; many different types worked well in different circumstances and in pursuit of different goals. What stands out in cases of effective organizations is that there is a high degree of agreement across an organization on what type of organization is in place. Absence of agreement can undermine organizational effectiveness. SPECIFIC TAKEAWAYS ABOUT THE BEHAVE DIMENSION: Importance: There are a lot of ways for people to work. People who agree on “how things get done around here” spend more time doing those things rather than tripping over inconsistent expectations and approaches. Warning signs: Is critical work getting done? Done well? Decisions made? Decisions implemented? What can be done: Drive to clarity. Agree on governance processes and decision rights. Agree on what work will be done in a consistent way and what will be done in independent ways. Reconcile the differing models of leaders and followers. If two organizations with different models need to collaborate or merge, spend time to resolve their differences. The organizations in our case studies were compared using an analytics technique—the Self-Organizing Map (SOM). The SOM extracts patterns from complex data. The SOM solution that identified eight types of organization in the data provided an effective balance of complexity and clarity. Each organization type was assigned the name of a leader-follower pair. The resulting set of patterns is shown in figure 2. FIGURE 2. THE “BEHAVE” MODELS The models are arranged on two dimensions. The vertical dimension describes how power is exercised: from top-down forms such as Landlord and Tenants organizations to Community Organizer and Volunteers organizations where the power resides with the members. This dimension conveys variations in the degree of top-down control. The horizontal dimension conveys how work is carried out: from the Conductor and Orchestra organizations at the left, whose work is scripted and repetitive, to the Producer and Creative Team organizations at right, in which individual practitioners act in distinct ways. Again, the dimension as a whole conveys gradations from scripted to creatively emergent. Four organizational types occupy the end points of these two scales, and four more represent hybrids that combine characteristics of the organizations at the end points. Thinking of this as a clock face, the three organizations from 9 to 12 represent varieties of Command and Control while the other five organizations are varieties of Networked organization. Each of these eight models can be a path to success. One observation from comparing success with failure is that organizational success can be more a function of agreement on the model in use than of which model is in place. Data from client diagnostics bears this out: Organizations with lower agreement on the model they use have lower Believe and Belong scores. Disagreements on the model can arise between leaders and followers or between separate parts of an organization whose models reflect their tasks or that have come together in a merger from different backgrounds. These disagreements often are hard for people who experience them to describe; putting them in the structure shown in figure 2 allows models to be compared in detail and processes to be put in place to reduce areas of disagreement. Each of the eight organization types has distinguishing characteristics that enable it to achieve its goals. By understanding what type of organization is pursuing a goal, customized approaches can be generated for that particular organization. Consider the experience of a large commercial bank in Europe that was struggling with the results from several acquisitions it was forced to take on during the 2008 global financial crisis. The senior leaders of the bank saw the organization as one of Community Organizers and Volunteers; their approach was to allow individual entrepreneurs to develop books of business, with the most profitable efforts ostensibly leading to personal success in the organization. However, the junior staff were not seizing such opportunities, and this was reflected in poor operational results. Essentially, they wanted leadership to show them the way, while the leaders were saying: “Figure it out yourself.” Given the need for a rapid response, it was more effective to convince half a dozen senior leaders to become more directive in addressing the staff than to convince thousands of staff members to accept their leaders’ view of how they should become independent, empowered actors. But what emerged in our project was that the most important aspect was to establish agreement so leaders and followers could work together effectively. Thinking back to the beleaguered telecommunications executive at the start of this article, this perspective might have helped. There are plenty of organizations that will be responsive to top-down leadership—“I told them what to do”—but effective engineering cultures often have strong strains of Producer and Creative Team in them, and Creative Teams want the authority to solve problems on their own rather than being told the solution. The executive’s approach of “I told them what to do” probably planted the seeds of failure. What if she had laid out a set of measurable goals and then encouraged empowered teams to generate solutions? Most of our research on organizational failure found substantial lack of clarity in the organizational model. In what has emerged as something of a modern classic case study, the lack of clear decision-making authority in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina immobilized ample assets that might have been focused on the situation sooner and to much greater effect. Even a somewhat tongue-in-cheek analysis of the breakup of the Beatles pointed out that their successful period had been under the leadership of a landlord manager (Brian Epstein) but that after his death the band’s inability to agree on a governance approach undermined their unity.8 These organizational models build up over time and are part of the organization’s culture. While the thought of moving to a different model may seem attractive, it is not as simple as swapping out one program for another in a computer’s memory. A full-scale change in model is generally a multiyear effort, requiring consideration of the structures and processes that support the current model and how those need to be changed. This only can be undertaken by a leadership team with a long view. As a consequence, as in the bank example above, organizations often adopt the quick solution of having leaders work in the mode their followers want. Alternatively, there are times when leaders want an organization to work in a model different than the one it uses. A frequently seen example is regulatory compliance on part of the work of a group of Builders or Citizens who generally set their own work routines. This requires “organizational judo,” essentially techniques for getting people who are in one model to act in accord with another model. Akin to martial arts, organizations usually fail if they try to dictate such changes; it is far more effective to try to channel the actions of employees in the directions the organization needs. For instance, Citizens want to make their own decisions, and while that can be respected, the judo approach can constrain decision making by introducing requirements, reporting obligations, and deadlines. LEVERS TO PULL W e developed the As One model to encompass the implications of three factors that enable people to work together effectively: Belong: As organizations grow in complexity, that complexity can either encourage or discourage action. Action tends to be taken on behalf of those elements of an organization that people feel strongly about. A simple call to action may not exert influence unless it represents or comes from a part of the organization that people belong to. Believe: In considering how to encourage people to act, consider the several ways people respond, including passive resistance, rather than a single dimension that runs from support to opposition. Behave: Many organizations pick an organizational model that is appropriate to their culture and the tasks they have to accomplish. Organizations seldom struggle from having implemented the wrong model but rather because they have not made a decision about what their model is or they contain groups that hold to different ways of working together. Understanding the ways organizations operate enables tailoring approaches to strategy deployment and change that reflect the organization itself rather than applying a universal model. While these three factors do not in themselves amount to an answer key to the complex problem of collaboration across large organizations, they provide a basis for charting a course in what is typically a journey of ambiguity. Consider a products and services company that wanted to improve its revenue and profit in global markets. The company had gone to market primarily by business unit and, in an informed strategic shift, had announced a greater focus on going to market by country. Even on the surface this looked to be an ambitious change in direction. An assessment of the Believe dimension found that 50 percent or fewer of the company’s managers were committed to collaborating in ways that would drive the new strategy. Many of those managers were undecided fence-sitters who expressed concern that the new strategy was “not in their organization’s interest.” An important goal became to generate more commitment and less fence-sitting; but to be done effectively, this would require more than exhorting people to do the right thing. As assessment of the Belong dimension shed light on managers’ concern about “the organization’s best interest.” In this company, function and work group command higher loyalty than business unit or country. The results suggested strongly that managers have pursued their function’s interests above those of the business unit, especially since individual results are measured by function. This in turn suggested that the issues that have hindered going to market by business unit will have a comparable impact on going to market by country. A concerted effort may be needed to make country more important, perhaps by putting more emphasis on country results, perhaps through leadership exercised by country leaders. The assessment of the Behave dimension further suggested what is needed to achieve this. The organization has a strong preference for one model—Architect and Builders. When this model works well, top-down leaders create blueprints of inspiring goals that followers work on in creative ways. In this instance though, there are major issues to resolve. Is there a single global Architect of the strategy, or is each country leader an Architect? If you decide on the latter approach, how do you manage the variability in country leader capability? How do you create engaging projects for each country, and how do you manage the unequal distribution of Builder talent across countries? These are anything but straightforward questions, but the recognition of Architect and Builder provides a framework for crafting an appropriate solution. Building an effective organization, as in this example, is a work in progress. Solutions may solve particular problems but do not make an organization permanently capable of resolving all challenges. However, the notion that there are three variables to address with levers to pull to address them is a step toward moving what is often seen as the “soft stuff” of organization effectiveness to an analytical and rigorous plane where measurable progress can be achieved.
