Occasional posts on business books, their authors and publishers, tidbits from my book and article research, quotes from interviews with experts and executives, and hopefully, not too much self-promotional bushwa.
Identifying an industry ripe for platform disruption: If you really want to create value, forget about burning platforms and start building them. A platform, explain Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne (professors at Tulane and Boston University associated with the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy), and Sangeet Choudary, founder and CEO of Platform Strategy Labs, in Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You, is a “business model that uses technology to connect people, organizations, and resources in an interactive ecosystem.”
They contend that the ranks of today’s most valuable companies are increasing populated with those that successfully build and control platforms. Think Apple with iTunes, John Deere with its My John Deere Operations Center, and a host of other platform-based companies as diverse as McCormick Foods, Amazon, and Uber.
The problem with platforms is context. The authors think platform-based businesses eventually will come to dominate every industry, but they caution readers that the window of opportunity for launching a successful platform will vary according to the characteristics of a specific industry.
How do you know if and when your industry is ripe for platform disruption? As this excerpt from the forthcoming book (reprinted with permission) details, the emergence of platform businesses is most likely in highly-fragmented industries with non-scalable gatekeepers in which information is both a significant source of value and extremely asymmetrical. The emergence of platform disruption is less likely in resource-intensive industries that are subject to high levels of regulatory control and high failure costs...read the rest here
Did you hear the one about the senior executive who didn’t think much of the external consultants hired for a project at his Fortune 100 company? He called them “insultants” in meetings in which they were present. Unsurprisingly, his staff picked up and echoed his attitude. The project failed.
Jon Younger and Norm Smallwood, respectively partner emeritus and president of RBL Group, a human resources consulting and development firm, tell this story in their new book, Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). Agile Talent is a book of particular interest to me for two reasons. First, I am one tiny drop in the ever-swelling ocean of external talent used by companies around the world. Second, on occasion, I have worked for corporate clients who seem hell-bent on getting less than what they are paying me for. This may sound improbable, but it’s happened often enough over the past 25 years that I now try to proactively identify such clients and avoid the lose-lose propositions they present — in my case, writing and editing assignments in which the client will not get full value and I will get agita.
Business leaders should care about these issues. For whether or not they think the economy of tomorrow will be a gig-driven one in which everyone is a freelancer, the corporate use of external talent across sectors and geographies is more common than ever. Younger and Smallwood tick off the reasons why: External talent can provide companies with access to new capabilities and technologies; it can enable faster and more agile response to markets; it can be used to test new opportunities before making major investments; it can be used to respond to demand peaks and to attain scale quickly; and, perhaps most commonly, it can reduce costs.
The problem, to which I can attest, is that most companies don’t have a system in place to ensure that they are optimizing their return on external talent. Instead, they treat external talent with the same narrow “you work, we pay you” mind-set that they abandoned long ago with their own full-time employees because of its negative effects on productivity, loyalty and retention, and quality and customer experience.
The solution, which Younger and Smallwood lay out in rather dry, academic terms in Agile Talent, requires applying many of the same kinds of recruiting and development programs most companies have in place for their internal talent to their external talent: strategic resourcing analysis; onboarding programs; development opportunities; etc. It seems to me that the authors get a little carried away in this regard, transforming the management of external talent into a full-blown functional silo. They suggest, for example, that companies consider appointing a “chief external talent officer.” But then, much of the prescriptive content in this book is aimed at senior human resource professionals in big companies that are using lots of external talent to attain strategic goals. If that describes you and your company, the authors’ advice may be entirely appropriate.
If, however, your company uses external talent to a lesser degree, Agile Talent will pose a bit more of a challenge. You may have to decipher the professional jargon and apply it on a smaller scale. But that would be well worth the effort, because any manager charged with overseeing external talent could improve the return on the company’s investment by adopting some simple practices based on Younger and Smallwood’s thinking.
One such practice would be to devote a bit of time to ensuring that the external talent working in your company understands the strategic context of the tasks they have been hired to conduct. Another would be to break down the “us versus them” wall that too often exists between employees and external talent. A third would be the provision of ongoing performance appraisals.
Regardless of the approach, companies should be taking a fresh look at how they manage external talent. Outsourcing should not mean out of sight and out of mind.
When to hire a robot: Robotics have reached their tipping point, according to International Data Corp. In a newly-released research report, the firm forecasts a near doubling of the worldwide robotics market over the next 4 years — from $71 billion in 2015 to $135.4 billion in 2019. Almost simultaneously, President Obama sent The Annual Report of the Council of Economic Advisors to Congress. It says advances in robotics technology are “presaging the rise of a potentially paradigm-shifting innovation in the productivity process.”
Tongue-twisting alliteration aside, this feeds fears that robots may eventually replace most employees (a thesis argued persuasively by Mark Ford in his award-winning book, Rise of the Robots). But how should your company use robotics between now and then? One answer, highlighted in two recent stories, is to hire robots for supporting, rather than primary, roles.
Mercedes-Benz came to this conclusion in a backward sort of way. As the company expanded the number of models and options it offers, it discovered that its existing assembly-line robots could not be adapted quickly and economically enough. So it’s hiring people to replace some of its robots, report Elisabeth Behrmann and Christoph Rauwald inBloombergBusiness, and equipping them “with an array of little machines,” a solution that the car maker calls “robot farming.”
Mark Rolston, the cofounder and chief creative officer of argodesign, sees the design industry following a similar strategy. “It’s easy to see how an AI-infused computer algorithm such as the future Netflix — after a human has completed the initial design and programming — could do the hard work of improving and evolving to accommodate user preferences largely on its own,” he writes in Fast Company’s Co.Design. “Moreover, 90% of product design today happens in the ‘fat middle ground’ between purely aesthetic and purely technical — incrementally tweaking designs, optimizing column widths, and experimenting with color schemes. These tasks are bread and butter for much of the design industry, and they are progressively being automated.” ...read the rest here
Wearables at work: It’s hard to believe that it’s nearly three years since the much-discussed and often-derided beta version of Google Glass was released. Since then, the Apple watch has made the cover of Time and there’s been a lot of hype about the future of wearable computing. But how — and where — are wearables actually being used in the workplace?
Mary Pratt offers three examples in a ComputerWorld article. DHL is conducting a pilot program in a Netherlands warehouse, where employees are wearing smart glasses to pick orders — with a 25% improvement in efficiency. After a successful pilot, Lee Company, in the commercial building services space, is in the midst of a full rollout of smart glasses that connect its on-site plumbing and electrical tradespeople to senior techs back in its triage center. And, energy utility Southern Co. is using head-mounted and wrist-mounted devices to record work as a means of ensuring and enhancing employee compliance with procedures in plants and in the field...read the rest here
When you talk business, starting with Peter Drucker is always a smart move. In Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Drucker defined the work of business leaders by its three principal tasks: to deliver financial results, to make work and workers productive, and to manage a company’s social impacts and responsibilities. That’s all, and of course, that’s a lot.
There’s been a lot of change since Druckers’s magnum opus was published in 1974. Technological advances, especially digitization, have transformed — and continue to transform — the world in myriad ways large and small. But new technology hasn’t fundamentally changed Drucker’s tasks. Instead, it is giving rise to new and better ways and means of executing and achieving them. This new MIT SMR column aims to help you identify big ideas and new tactics at the intersection of technology and management.
The mobile method to uncovering abuse in the supply chain: The good news about global supply chains is that they offer competitive and cost advantages that were unthinkable when Ford built the first moving assembly line in 1913. The bad news is that the financial and reputational risks associated with such supply chains have increased exponentially. Ignorance is a flimsy defense when a garment factory collapse in Bangladesh kills and injures thousands of people or it is revealed that slave-workers are harvesting seafood in Thailand.
How can a company gain an unvarnished view of what’s happening in far-flung supply chains? One way is to connect with everyone working in the supply chain by tapping into the extraordinarily high penetration of mobile phones globally. That’s what a nonprofit named Good World Solutions is doing with a program that it calls Labor Link, reports associate editor Bouree Lam in The Atlantic. Labor Link allows companies to conduct surveys over the mobile phones of employees in their own and suppliers’ facilities. They can question employees about their workplaces and working conditions directly, and employees can respond without fear of reprisals...read the rest here
Legal scholars rarely attract much attention in the business world. But Cass R. Sunstein is a notable exception to the rule. That’s because the Robert Walmsley University Professor and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School has long explored the intersection of behavioral economics, cognitive psychology, and public policy — three disciplines that have many implications for corporations.
Sunstein is best known among businesspeople as the coauthor, with University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler, of Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Yale University Press, 2008). In it, the duo describe how choice architecture — the way in which options are presented — affects how people make decisions. They advocate for embedding unobtrusive, non-mandatory “nudges” in choice architectures to encourage people to make healthier, more financially sound decisions. Subsequent concerns about the potential misuse of nudges (as a tool for manipulation and marketing) prompted Sunstein to launch new explorations into the ways and means of choice architecture. He presented those findings in two more recent books: Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism (Yale University Press, 2014) and Choosing Not to Choose: Understanding the Value of Choice (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Concurrently, Sunstein teamed up with University of Chicago psychologistReid Hastie to explore another topic of perennial interest to corporate leaders. In Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), they delved deep into the various errors that can arise in group-based decision-making and offered techniques and tactics for avoiding them.
In addition to building an impressive academic career and a list of published works that includes more than 40 books, Sunstein also served in the Obama administration as head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012. In that position, he oversaw the approval of new federal regulations and was charged with confirming that they would do more good than harm.
When I asked Sunstein to share the books that most influenced his thinking on choice architectures and decision making, he offered the following titles and summaries of their contribution.
Quasi Rational Economics,by Richard H. Thaler (Russell Sage Foundation, 1991). “This collects many of Thaler’s greatest hits, in their original form: People dislike losses more than they like corresponding gains; they use separate mental accounts for money (vacation money, retirement money, spending money, savings); they care about fairness. The book contains the foundations of behavioral economics, along with a clear understanding of how people deviate from economic rationality. It's an eye-opener, and Thaler is a funny, brilliant, and terrific writer.”
Why Wages Don't Fall During a Recession,by Truman F. Bewley (Harvard University Press, 1999). “Bewley went into the field during and after the recession of the early 1990s to get to the bottom of wage rigidity. He discovered through hundreds of interviews with recruiters and leaders in business and labor that wages don’t fall in lockstep with falling demand, because people want to be treated fairly and they’ll punish their bosses and employers if they feel mistreated. That’s a major finding, which bears on economic behavior in general: Fairness matters. This is a thick book, but it is full of wisdom, and humanity to boot.”
Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2d ed.,by Irving L. Janis (Houghton Mifflin, 1982). “This is the seminal work on group decision making, with one of the best titles ever. It’s all about conformity and deference to leaders, and why such deference is bad for organizations. In some ways it’s more like a set of short stories than social science, but they’re terrific stories — the Bay of Pigs, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the Watergate coverup among them. The book is a warning to all leaders, along with prescriptions for doing better.”
Thinking, Fast and Slow,byDaniel Kahneman(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). “Already a classic — I think it’s one of the great books of the past 100 years. Somehow Kahneman manages to make every page a pleasure, and there is at least one ‘wow’ every two pages. If there’s one book to read on decision making, and about human foibles, this is it.”
I like being happy. I like it so much that I’ve made more than a few difficult career decisions in order to avoid things that make me unhappy — things like working with people who treat me badly, long days trotting after carrots that always seem to hang just out of reach, and countless hours on planes, trains, and buses. Each “I would prefer not to” came at a professional and financial cost. But, hey, I figured, I’ve only got one life.
Unlike much of the literature about happiness at work, The Happiness Track doesn’t approach its subject from an organizational perspective. There are no free lunches on offer. Instead, Seppälä focuses on six personal “strategies for attaining happiness and fulfillment [that] may, in fact, be the key to thriving professionally.” If you’re familiar with the discipline of Positive Psychology, it’s likely that you’ll have run across these ideas before: be in the moment; nurture your resilience; manage your energy; access your creativity; be good to yourself; be compassionate.
Seppälä taps a variety of research to explain and illuminate the six strategies and the challenges that adopting them can entail. One of the studies she cites to support her contention that doing nothing isn’t so easy sent me scurrying in disbelief to the source. Timothy Wilson, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, put subjects in a room alone and gave them the option of doing nothing at all or pushing a button to give themselves an electric shock. All the subjects said they would pay to avoid the shock. And yet 67 percent of the men and 25 percent of women chose to shock themselves rather than be alone with their thoughts, even after receiving a sample shock.
Seppälä offers a set of simple tactics for practicing the pursuit of happiness. Several of them, such as the breathing, meditation, and active listening techniques, are recommended more than once. Seppälä also cites some of the creativity-enhancing tactics that Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire described in Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. But as with that book, practices that are intended to foster different mental states sometimes contradict one another. For example, you should immerse yourself in an experience to be fully in the present moment. At the same time, you must divorce yourself from the moment to be objective and calm. It seems one secret to happiness is knowing which strategy to pursue in a given situation.
Although I don’t doubt that you’ll be happier at work if you follow Seppälä’s advice, I don’t find her thesis — that happiness accelerates career success — convincing. “Decades of research have shown that happiness is not theoutcome of success,” she declares, “but rather its precursor.” That sounds definitive, but I wonder if the relationship between happiness and professional success is more akin to the relationship between happiness and longevity. In December 2015, The Lancet reported the results of a long-term study that included more than 700,000 women aged 50–69 in the U.K. It found no correlation between the subjects’ happiness and the length of their lives. Would a similar study of CEOs reveal that there is no correlation between happiness and professional success? Don’t we all know highly successful people who are desperately unhappy?
Regardless of the correlation, to me, there is no one more pitiful than someone who has attained all the trappings of success and is miserable nonetheless. Striving not to be one of those people is the best reason to read The Happiness Track.
Purpose is Aaron Hurst’s purpose. His career has been devoted to helping people gain more meaning and fulfillment from their work. Furthermore, he believes the quest for purpose among an ever-increasing number of people and organizations is a driving force behind several notable economic developments, including the rising number of tech startups, the maker and local movements, and the sharing and gig economies.
In 2001, Hurst harnessed the growing desire and demand for purpose by founding the Taproot Foundation. Since then, the online marketplace, which connects nonprofit organizations to professionals in a wide variety of fields, has facilitated the delivery of more than $150 million in pro bono services. In 2008, Hurst was instrumental in the conception of the White House– sponsored initiative A Billion Change, which enrolled more than 50 companies and pledges of more than $1 billion in pro bono services in its first year.
I asked Hurst which books he found most inspirational and informative on the subject of purpose. He recommended the following three titles.
Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl (Verlag Jugend & Volk, 1946). Frankl transformed his horrific experience as an inmate and forced laborer at the Auschwitz concentration camp into one of the most inspiring and influential books of the last century. It is a book that in its very existence powerfully conveys one of the most important lessons we can learn about purpose: Purpose isn’t a luxury — it is a choice.
Frankl believed that meaning — a synonym for purpose — is present in every moment of our lives, and we need only let it in to tap its power. While the conditions in which we work and live affect our well-being, freedom ultimately isn’t dependent on our environment. Instead, it flows from how we inhabit and react to each moment. Even in suffering and death, the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist concluded, we can find meaning and purpose.
In Western culture, we tend to look to our employers and jobs for meaning. While our work is an important source of meaning, leaders should read and periodically reread Frankl to remind themselves and their teams that, at the end of the day, meaning comes from within each of us and therefore is primarily an individual responsibility.
Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose,by Rajendra S. Sisodia, David B. Wolfe, and Jagdish N. Sheth (Wharton School Publishing, 2007). Now in its second edition, Firms of Endearment studies a group of companies that have reported extremely high growth rates. Their competitive advantage, according to marketing experts Sisodia, Wolfe, and Sheth: passion and purpose.
Firms of Endearment empowers CEOs who are purpose-oriented with the business rationale and practices needed to act on their values and transform their organizations into purpose-driven success stories. The case studies are particularly diverse, covering various industries and stages in the corporate life cycle. If you need to make a compelling case for purpose to your board, investors, or team, this book is an indispensable reference.
Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, by Adam Grant (Viking, 2013). In Give and Take, Wharton prof Adam Grant makes the case for embracing a purpose orientation in your own career. He shares the eye-opening results of his research on people who focus on giving versus taking at work, which proves that putting the needs of others ahead of your own is the foundation for success. That’s because when we serve others, we build strong, trusting relationships that drive results.
As it turns out, a mind-set of giving is also a primary characteristic of people who are purpose-oriented. Thus, Give and Take provides a model that we can all study and embrace if we want to act with greater purpose, enhance our performance at work, and achieve greater fulfillment in our careers and higher levels of well-being. This book is the basis for how we should be developing ourselves, hiring talent, and raising our kids.
There’s a great cartoon by Sidney Harris that sums up every book I’ve read about creativity. Two scientists are standing in front of a blackboard looking at a mathematical equation. In the middle of the equation are the words, “Then a miracle occurs.” One scientist says to the other, “I think you should be more explicit here in Step Two.” As in that equation, there seems to be an essential and impenetrable mystery to the creative process.
In this regard, the most recent addition to the groaning shelf of creativity books, Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (Perigee, 2015), by Scott Barry Kaufmanand Carolyn Gregoire, is not much different than its predecessors. Kaufman and Gregoire are something of a dream team for such a book: He is the scientific director of the Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is a senior writer at the Huffington Post who specializes in the human mind. Nevertheless, this dynamic duo is unable to fully explain the creation of Picasso’s Guernica, much less Shigeru Miyamoto’s Super Mario Bros.
Unlike most creativity authors, however, Kaufman and Gregoire admit that prying open this particular black box may be beyond our ken. They repeatedly call out creativity’s contradictory nuances. For instance, they tell us thatmindfulness, as championed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, is both an important ingredient of creativity and an obstacle in its path. Mindfulness helps when it enables us to be more attentive and observant; it is a hindrance when it interrupts our ability to attain the state of flow, which psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has championed. “Creative observation is a skill that requires a balance of paying attention to the world around us and of tuning into our own inner landscape — a balance of mindfulness, a focused, nonjudgmental awareness on the present moment, and mind wandering,” explain Kaufman and Gregoire.
A call to embrace the messy business of creativity can sometimes make for a bewildering mix of advice. But it also enables the authors to avoid the kind of step-by-step prescriptions that transform the creative process into a rote and often fruitless exercise. Indeed, they say, “this delicate, and sometimes extreme, dance of contradictions may be precisely what gives rise to the intense inner drive to create.”
Instead of a detailed process, Wired to Create includes ten “habits of mind.” They are labelled: imaginative play, passion, daydreaming, solitude, intuition, openness to experience, mindfulness, sensitivity, turning adversity to advantage, and thinking differently. It’s less about doing and more about being. The habits support and foster the “fundamental thought processes, creative problem-solving skills, and ways of being” that the authors claim underlay every kind of creativity.
The habits, Kaufman and Gregoire tell us, are derived from scouring scientific research over the past hundred years and also extracting “common themes from within the minds and lives of eminent creators throughout the course of human history.” In other words, if you’ve read other books on creativity and the human mind, you’ve probably seen some of this stuff before.
It would be nice to report that Wired to Create is the uber-text on creativity. At the start of the book, when the authors devote a chapter to describing the evolutionary development of creativity theory and process, it seems like they might be going for it. But while they also include a bit of practical advice for getting your creative juices flowing for each of the habits of mind (or operationalizing them, if you prefer), they don’t fully deliver on an all-enveloping theory. In the end, Kaufman and Gregoire concede, “Creativity works in mysterious and often paradoxical ways. We human beings are messy creatures, to be sure, and creativity is a process that that reflects our fundamentally and chaotic and multifaceted nature. It is both deliberate and uncontrollable, mindful and mindless, work and play.”
Patrick lost everything in the brutal, decades-long civil war in northern Uganda. After his village was attacked, he fled south with his younger brother, ending up near Uganda’s border with Kenya. One morning, destitute and wondering whether he would eat that day, Patrick realized that the solution to his predicament lay beneath him. He could make bricks from the clay-laced soil and sell them.
When Jessica Jackley met the brick maker in 2004, his business was thriving. He had hired several employees and was living in a new brick home of his own. Patrick is one of the many boot-strapping entrepreneurs whose stories the Stanford Graduate School of Business alumna tells in her new book, Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least.
Jackley says Patrick is one of the people in East Africa who inspired her to tap into her inner entrepreneur. In 2005, she cofounded Kiva, a pioneering nonprofit that enabled individuals to lend small amounts of money — as little as $25 — directly to people who needed a few hundred dollars to start or grow their own businesses around the world. In the decade since, Kiva has facilitated more than $775 million in microloans by more than 1.3 million lenders to almost 1.8 million borrowers in 83 countries.
The more elite of a community that you’re in, the more resources on hand, the more you start to hold yourself to standards that are too high.
Jessica Jackley
Jackley left Kiva and, in 2009, cofounded a for-profit venture, ProFounder, a low-cost, securities-based crowd-funding site for small businesses. The company shut down after three years, when it became clear that it faced insurmountable obstacles in the legal landscape, Jackley said. Currently, she is working on her third new venture — a social media business, which she says is in stealth mode prior to an anticipated launch in July 2016.
In the following edited interview, Jackley, who received her MBA from Stanford GSB in 2007, talks about her book and the entrepreneurial journey that it charts.
You clearly have a lifelong desire to help people in need. How did you come to focus on entrepreneurship as a means of realizing that desire?
I was dissatisfied with the mechanisms in traditional philanthropy that seemed to turn my desire to help others into a transaction between haves and have-nots as opposed to a relationship between people. Then, in my first job out of college, as a temp at theCenter for Social Innovation at Stanford, I heard Dr. Muhammad Yunus speak about microfinance. It was funny, because even though I was in this very entrepreneurial place, maybe the entrepreneurial capital of the world, I was slow to understand how entrepreneurship could solve social problems. After that, it really clicked when I went to East Africa and met entrepreneurs whose lives had been changed by microlending. I understood that the people who I so longed to help could themselves be entrepreneurs.
Aren’t entrepreneurs a small subset of people, with a select set of skills?
Harvard professor Howard Stevenson said that entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources. I think that living entrepreneurially, thinking entrepreneurially, using the best qualities of entrepreneurship is something that is available to all of us. It’s not exactly mind over matter, it’s more like the decision to move forward, despite what you might lack.
You started Kiva with $3,500, which you loaned to seven East African entrepreneurs. What did starting in such a small way teach you?
Had I been through business school already, I probably would have thought that we couldn’t start Kiva at all. I hope it’s old-school thinking, but there’s this idea that you need a very polished business plan, with projections that reach five, ten years out — that it’s not even worth doing something unless it’s a billion-dollar opportunity. Ridiculous.
The more elite of a community that you’re in, the more resources on hand, the more you start to hold yourself to standards that are too high — especially in the beginning. Entrepreneurship is never about what we have. It’s about what we do.
Clay Water Brick is written as a series of lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs. One of them is rooted in the discovery that one of Kiva’s valued field partners was stealing loan money. What did you learn from that?
One of the biggest lessons was to let people in, to not get embarrassed and wall them out and try to fix the problem behind closed doors. For us, that meant not just our board, not just our advisors, but our lenders, our whole community. Letting everyone in not only showed them that we were being transparent, but it also got us lots of ideas and suggestions to help us get out of trouble. It was really pretty magical to watch how people gave us a lot of grace.
It was a lesson for me in terms of personal struggles, too. I learned that you shouldn’t put on a strong face and go through life not asking for help and not being genuine about what you’re experiencing. That’s a recipe for a very unhappy life.
Did that come into play when you faced the decision to close down ProFounder, too?
The book would have been done a lot sooner had I really come to terms with, and understood, that chapter in my life earlier. It would have been possible to keep ProFounder going, but I don’t think it would have been the responsible thing to do.
Entrepreneurs are supposed to go hard at all costs — just keep plowing forward and leave the disasters in their wake. But having been through a divorce, I felt like, “OK, I know what disaster is like, and I know who bears the brunt of that.” I wanted to make sure I was always, at all costs, protecting my wellness and my family.
In the book’s acknowledgements, you thank MBA Admissions Director Derrick Bolton for rejecting your first application to Stanford GSB. Why are you thankful for that?
One, that was the year that Kiva was born. I don’t know if Kiva would have happened on some other timeline, but I highly doubt it because I would have been sitting in classrooms instead of tromping around Uganda.
Two is more personal. I’d been a staffer at the business school for three years, and although it hurt not to get in, when I did get in the next year, I felt like I really earned it.
Three, it taught me this amazing lesson about the importance of holding things with an open hand and knowing where I want to go, regardless of the things I can’t control. A lot of people look at a milestone, like getting into business school, and think that they can’t make the next step in their lives without it. I learned that I was still the same person — I still had the same dreams and still went forward to the same destination.
We’re often told that entrepreneurship and innovation are the keys to social and organizational prosperity. But how do you nurture those qualities on a large scale? This is a question that Krisztina “Z” Holly is seeking to answer.
Instead of propounding theories and conducting studies, Holly has turned her career into something of experiment in entrepreneurship and innovation. In the 1990s, Holly, who holds two engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, worked at a number of high-tech startups. She cofounded Stylus Innovation, which brought the first Microsoft Windows-based telephony development tool to market and was acquired by Artisoft in 1996.
In the 2000s, Holly explored the role of academia in entrepreneurship and innovation. She served as the founding executive director of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT and then as vice provost for innovation at University of Southern California and the founding executive director of its Stevens Center for Innovation.
Most recently, Holly has been exploring the role of government in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation. She served as an advisor to the Obama administration and chair of the Global Agenda Council on Fostering Entrepreneurship for the World Economic Forum. Currently, she is an inaugural entrepreneur-in-residence for the City of Los Angeles Mayor’s Office, with a mandate to identify ways the city can help entrepreneurs start businesses and create jobs.
I asked Holly about the books that she has found most helpful in her career. She called out three titles, all from outside the business genre, that highlight the importance of reaching beyond boundaries, understanding psychology and social dynamics, and inspiring others in the quest to stimulate organizational entrepreneurship and innovation.
A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change,by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown (CreateSpace, 2011). “If you are trying to innovate, this book is valuable for many reasons. It shows how to create an environment that maximizes learning, thrives on change, and instills iteration, experimentation, and collaboration as organizational values. It explains the importance of tapping into the full spectrum of knowledge both inside and outside the organization, through techniques such as peer-to-peer learning and customer engagement. And it emphasizes the need for leaders to establish a shared vision to shape and direct innovation without stifling it. Some of the specific tools described in the book have become dated since its publication in 2011, but this only reinforces the authors’ point: When technological change is fast-paced, your learning paradigm becomes crucial.”
Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,by Keith Johnstone (Faber & Faber, 1979). “Reading this canonical book on improvisation reveals a deep-thinking author who is seemingly unfettered by social convention. A book about teaching actors might seem pretty far removed from the business world, but any leader can benefit from applying the techniques and the insights into social dynamics that Johnstone used to unleash the confidence, imagination, and spontaneity of his students. He’s really preaching a leadership mind-set that is wide open to new ideas and to encouraging other people to open up, too. Achieving that attitude involves being true to ourselves and helping the whole team get past fears about judgment and failure. For instance, Johnstone says people need ‘a guru to give permission to allow forbidden thoughts into their consciousness.’ And then he shows how leaders giving voice to their own weird and crazy ideas can give a voice to others. That is the real value of this book: It helps you become a leader who can harness human nature and unlock the creative potential of other people.”
Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage,by Alfred Lansing (McGraw-Hill, 1959). “This is the definitive book on Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition to Antarctica in 1914 and my favorite adventure story. You may remember the 18-month saga that began when Shackleton’s ship got trapped in the ice. After a brutal winter, it broke up and sank. Shackleton and his men set up camp on the ice. When the ice broke up, they sailed more than 300 miles in lifeboats to an uninhabited island. Then Shackleton took a small crew, sailed another 800 miles to South Georgia Island, and marched 36 hours nonstop across ice-covered mountains to a whaling station. And then, most amazingly, without any hesitation or recuperation time, he immediately enlisted help and set off into the teeth of the approaching winter to rescue the rest of the members of the expedition. It was a miracle of perseverance and motivation, and a powerful example of how people respond when their leaders build a sense of deep trust and actually step up and make personal sacrifices. The fact that this failed expedition came to be celebrated as a magnificent victory also illustrates how our greatest accomplishments sometimes come after we are forced to give up our original goal.”
A seasoned business writer and editor, I work with leading consultants, corporations and non-profits, across sectors and geographies, to craft compelling content.
The kinds of writing and editing that I do:
• Books. I have played an instrumental role in the creation of more than 20 business books, as a named author, ghostwriter or editor.
• White papers and reports. I’ve ghostwritten and edited more than 100 white papers and reports.
• Articles, op-eds and reviews. I’ve written, ghostwritten and edited hundreds of pieces for business magazines, newspapers, blogs and web sites.
"And by this time his financial morality had become special and local in its character. He did not think it was wise for any one to steal anything from anybody where the act of taking or profiting was directly and plainly considered stealing. That was unwise — dangerous — hence wrong. There were so many situations wherein what one might do in the way of taking or profiting was open to discussion and doubt. Morality varied, in his mind at least, with conditions, if not climates." --Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912)
"Had not a long, practical struggle with life taught him that sentiment in business was folly?" --Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy (1925)
"Be nice to incompetents and they'll be nice back. Be nasty and they'll still be incompetent, so what do you gain by making an enemy?" --John Burdett, Bangkok 8 (2003)
"The world has no pity on a man who can't do or produce something it thinks worth money." --George Gissing, New Grub Street (1891)
"Even the building was creepy: long windowless corridors and flights of stairs that stripped your sense of direction to nothing, tepid canned air with too little oxygen, a low witless hum of computers and suppressed voices, huge tracts of cubicles like a mad scientist's rat mazes." --Tana French, In The Woods (2007)
"Only a lunatic would fail to distinguish between himself and his representative self. This banal distinction may be most obvious in the workplace, where invariably one must avail oneself of an even-tempered, abnormally-industrious dummy stand-in, who, precisely because it is a dummy, makes life easier for all others, who are themselves present, which is to say, represented, by dummies of their own." -- Joseph O'Neill, The Dog (2014)
He had indeed conversed so entirely with money, that it may be almost doubted whether he imagined there was any other thing really existing in the world; this at least may be certainly averred, that he firmly believed nothing else to have any real value." -- Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
"You invariably find among CEOs that life is business. There is an operative cruelty which is seen as an entitlement." -- E.L. Doctorow, City of God (2000)
"Employers are like horses. They require management." --P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves (1925)
"SECRETS ARE LIES CARING IS SHARING PRIVACY IS THEFT"--Dave Eggers, The Circle (2013)
"I can well imagine forms of servitude worse than our own, because more insidious, whether they transform men into stupid, complacent machines, who believe themselves free just when they are most subjugated, or whether to the exclusion of leisure and other pleasures essential to man they develop a passion for work as violent as the passion for war among barbarous races." -- Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian(1963)
"Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia, as we appear to have established that you do, then sooner or later, you must work for yourself. The fruits of labor are delicious, but individually they're not particularly fattening. So don't share yours, and munch on those of others whenever you can." -- Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, (2013)
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind. So I left 'em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind." -- Rudyard Kipling, The Mary Gloster(1894)
"The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is you're a salesman, and you don't know that." -- Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman
(1949)
"Every exercise of power incorporates a faint, almost imperceptible, element of contempt for those over whom the power is exercised." -- Sandor Marai, Embers (1942)
"Go to a tea shop anywhere along the Ganga, sir, and look at the men working in that tea shop--men, I say, but better to call them human spiders that go crawling in between and under the tables with rags in their hands, crushed humans in crushed uniforms, sluggish, unshaven, in their thirties or forties but still 'boys.' But that is your fate if you do your job well--with honesty, dedication, and sincerity, the way Gandhi would have done it, no doubt.
I did my job with near total dishonesty, lack of dedication, and insincerity--and so the tea shop was a profoundly enriching experience." -- Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)
"'Alex. Are you still buying advertising space?' 'For as long as the job doesn't require one to have a brain.' 'It's always nice to talk to a man who enjoys his work.' 'Fortunately I enjoy the money a whole lot better.'" -- Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal (1990)
"'Oilmen are gamblers, most of them, and they'd rather take a little chance than spend a lot of money. Or wait for the technology to catch up.' He added after a moment, 'They're not the only gamblers. We're all in the game. We all drive cars, and we're all hooked on oil. The question is how we can get unhooked before we drown in the stuff'" -- Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty (1973)
"I'm tempted to point out that our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessmen. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but it's the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgmental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy." -- Joseph O'Neill, Netherland (2008)
"I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all." -- Ogden Nash, Song of the Open Road, Happy Days (1933)
"When I go into the back entrance to our business, I smell the beans and the roasters and antiseptic-lacquered-with-fruit smell of the floor cleanser, and then, even more faintly, the strange bleary artificiality in the air, characteristic of enclosed shopping malls. The ion content in the oxygen has been tampered with by people trying to save money by giving you less oxygen to breathe. You get light-headed and desperate to shop. The air smells machine-manufactured, and the light looks manufactured or maybe recycled from previous light." -- Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love (2000)
"Some of us loved killing an hour of the company's time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was a cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until the layoffs came." -- Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To The End (2007)
"The last line was so far away that the men were specks-bobbing bug-like fixtures, moving in what seemed to be a rainbow-haze of reds and yellows and blues. Those were the spray-painters, Simpson explained, and some of them made as much as seven dollars a day. He did not explain that they had no teeth after six months, little eyesight after a year, and that their occupational expectancy was about three years. In all likelihood he was not acquainted with these facts, and he would have been annoyed at their recital. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn't any law compelling a man to be a spray-painter." -- Jim Thompson, Heed the Thunder (1946)
"Since those birds were up around the top, the top numbers in one of the three biggest agencies in the country, with corner rooms at least twenty by twenty and incomes in the six figures, it had of course been years since any of them had personally dialed a number in an office. To expect them to would be against all reason" -- Rex Stout, Before Midnight (1955)
"What I'm getting at, Bobby, is you may notice, over time, as you study and learn, a certain amount of chicanery in this business of ours. But don't let that dismay you. It's just the nature of the business we're in, part and parcel of the good old capitalist system that's gonna make us both rich men before we die." -- Clancy Martin, How to Sell (2009)
"I'm a bookkeeper, and, the way I see it, there's nothing to life but bookkeeping...One rule is this: that if the risk of a transaction is very great it should not be considered at all, no matter what profit it offers if it is successful. That's one of the basic rules that should never be broken. You apply that rule to the idea of committing a murder and what do you get? There's too much risk, so you don't do it. The idea is no good. It's all a matter of debit and credit..." -- Rex Stout, Prisoner's Base (1952)
"I must look Ralph up and question him. He'll be in hiding by now, of course, but he's worth hunting out. He always has the most consistently logical and creditable reasons for having done the most idiotic things. He is" - as if that explained it - "an advertising man." -- Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse (1929)
Addresses a big problem: the inability of companies to get full value from external talent. Academic-style read. The solutions are aimed at big companies that hire a lot of outside help.
Adding Hallberg to my authors to watch list. Ambitious and mostly terrific novel set in NYC in late 70s. Could have been cut by a third, but the characters and story-telling pulled me thru.
