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TED playlist

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8 TED Talks about the power of collaboration

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Great things happen when we work together. Whether on the web or in the face of disaster, these talks reveal the undeniable strength of teaming up.

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I'm following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the seventh belief: "I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong - and to teach my people to do the same thing."
In the most effective teams in organizations, people fight with each other. As the boss, is it your job to try to stop that? No, quite the contrary: Creating conditions where people feel safe to fight is a hallmark of the greatest bosses. In this post I'll offer some Queensbury rules to make sure the fights stay focused on ideas and take place in an atmosphere of mutual respect. But first I'll come out swinging, by taking on anyone who thinks fighting should be suppressed.

I'll start with the one-two punch of Brad Bird and Bob Taylor - both examples of bosses I especially admire in this regard. Brad Bird is the Academy Award-winning director from Pixar who worked on both The Incredibles and Ratatouille. When a group of us interviewed him for McKinsey Quarterly, he continually emphasized how the success of these two films depended on constant and constructive battles. Bird had his own passionate opinions, and he realized that everyone who really cared about the success of the project did, too. As the director, he understood that a big part of his job was to create enough trust so people could fight over decisions big and small. If you want to see what constructive conflict looks like, check out the bonus material on the DVD of The Incredibles. It is filled with great fights, which are presided over, and sometimes started, by Brad Bird. One is about just how much of a receding hairline to put on the aging superhero, Bob Parr. Another clip (this one available on YouTube) shows Bird at battle with producer John Walker. I especially love when Walker says "I'm just trying to herd you toward the finish - I'm just trying to get us across the line," and Bird answers "I'm trying to get us across the line in first place." The tension between them is high but constructive.

I suspect that a lot more of you have heard of Brad Bird than Bob Taylor - but Taylor probably has had a bigger influence on your life. The researchers he funded and guided in the 1960s developed, among other things, ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet. In Dealers of Lightning, author Michael Hiltzik depicts how Taylor conducted meetings among the super-smart people whose research his group at the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) funded:

The daily discussions unfolded in a pattern that remained peculiar to Taylor's management style throughout his career. Each participant got an hour or so to describe his work. Then he would be thrown to the mercy of the assembled court like a flank steak to pack of ravenous wolves. "I got them to argue with each other," Taylor recalled with unashamed glee..... "These were people who cared about their work.... If there were technical weak spots, they would almost always surface under these conditions. It was very, very healthy."

Taylor continued the same pattern later as assistant lab manager at Xerox PARC, where during a rather magical and now mythical period of the computer revolution, researchers developed many of the technologies we use everyday including WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word processing, hypertext, laser printing, Ethernet and TCP/IP, to name just a few. At PARC, Taylor organized a weekly meeting where a different speaker each week (called "the dealer") would propose an idea and try to defend against questions and criticisms raised by some of the most critical, motivated, and brilliant engineers and researchers on the planet at the time. As Hiltzik explained:

"[I]t was not to be personal. Impugning a man's thinking was acceptable, but never his character. Taylor strived to create a democracy where everyone's ideas were impartially subject to the group's learned demolition, regardless of the proponent's credentials or rank."

Bird and Taylor are inspirational examples. But even masters like these sometimes have trouble leading constructive fights. Human groups tend to swerve towards destructive and personal conflict (because it's hard not to take an attack on your ideas personally) or toward silence and fear (because people fear the interpersonal and political consequences of attacking another person's ideas). It takes confidence and experience in team members, and healthy group and organizational norms, to stop or at least temper such dysfunctions.

So leading a good fight is a skill that can take a long time to develop. To try to accelerate that process, my Stanford colleague (and former HP executive) Debra Dunn and I have been pulling together a list of methods. Here are five of the tricks used by some of the best bosses we've observed:

Don't let the arguing begin during the initial generation of ideas or solutions. Make it safe for people to suggest crazy or controversial ideas. After you have some ideas, then invite people to push back on them.

Bring everyone into the fray. Gently rein in people who talk too much and encourage those who are silent to speak up.

Don't just listen to people's words, watch non-verbal behavior. Are they smiling? Really listening? Glaring, smirking, or rolling their eyes? Model constructive non-verbal behavior and coach people who (perhaps unwittingly) interject negative expressions.

Learn people's quirks. Some have remarkably thick skins; nastiness doesn't faze them. Others are so thin-skinned that even gentle critiques send them into a rage or a funk.

After the fight is over, do some backstage work. Soothe those who feel personally attacked and whose ideas were shot down. If anyone made personal attacks, call them on it and coach them to do otherwise.

Most of all, you need to not only hone the fighting skills of your team but model them yourself. That means really considering those different views and, when others have proven you wrong, identified flaws in your work, or developed better ideas, surrendering gracefully and getting on to the next decision worth fighting about.

One of my academic heroes, Karl Weick, puts it this way: You need to "fight as if you are right, and listen as if you are wrong." It's a theme that runs through his extensive writings on sensemaking, decisions, and effective action in organizations - especially in "high reliability organizations" that can't afford not to arrive at the best course of action.

I draw more on Weick's thinking and dig further into the steps that it takes to lead a good fight in Good Boss, Bad Boss. But I wonder, as you think back on fights won and lost in your organization - or good fights that never got fought - what additional tips would you suggest?

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I'm following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the seventh belief: "I aim to fight as if I am right, and listen as if I am wrong - and to teach my people to do the same [...]

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RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

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On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B

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On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B

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On financial rewards

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David Kelley IDEO

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David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence

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Is your school or workplace divided into "creatives" versus practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life, he offers ways to build the confidence to create...

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or why scores and evaluations are dangerous for org cultures

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Analyzing one of American corporate history's greatest mysteries-the lost decade of Microsoft-two-time George Polk Award winner (and *V.F.'*s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the "astonishingly foolish management decisions" at the company that "could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success." Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records-including e-mails between executives at the company's highest ranks-Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue. Today, a single Apple product-the iPhone-generates more revenue than all of Microsoft's wares combined.

Eichenwald's conversations reveal that a management system known as "stack ranking"-a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor-effectively crippled Microsoft's ability to innovate. "Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed-*every one-*cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees," Eichenwald writes. "If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review," says a former software developer. "It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies."

When Eichenwald asks Brian Cody, a former Microsoft engineer, whether a review of him was ever based on the quality of his work, Cody says, "It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers." Ed McCahill, who worked at Microsoft as a marketing manager for 16 years, says, "You look at the Windows Phone and you can't help but wonder, How did Microsoft squander the lead they had with the Windows CE devices? They had a great lead, they were years ahead. And they completely blew it. And they completely blew it because of the bureaucracy."

According to Eichenwald, Microsoft had a prototype e-reader ready to go in 1998, but when the technology group presented it to Bill Gates he promptly gave it a thumbs-down, saying it wasn't right for Microsoft. "He didn't like the user interface, because it didn't look like Windows," a programmer involved in the project recalls__.__

"The group working on the initiative was removed from a reporting line to Gates and folded into the major-product group dedicated to software for Office," Eichenwald reports. "Immediately, the technology unit was reclassified from one charged with dreaming up and producing new ideas to one required to report profits and losses right away." "Our entire plan had to be moved forward three to four years from 2003-04, and we had to ship a product in 1999," says Steve Stone, a founder of the technology group. "We couldn't be focused anymore on developing technology that was effective for consumers. Instead, all of a sudden we had to look at this and say, 'How are we going to use this to make money?'"

A former official in Microsoft's Office division tells Eichenwald that the death of the e-reader effort was not simply the consequence of a desire for immediate profits. The real problem for his colleagues was the touch screen: "Office is designed to inputting with a keyboard, not a stylus or a finger," the official says. "There were all kinds of personal prejudices at work." According to Microsoft executives, the company's loyalty to Windows and Office repeatedly kept them from jumping on emerging technologies. "Windows was the god-everything had to work with Windows," Stone tells Eichenwald. "Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort."

When one of the young developers of MSN Messenger noticed college kids giving status updates on AOL's AIM, he saw what Microsoft's product lacked. "That was the beginning of the trend toward Facebook, people having somewhere to put their thoughts, a continuous stream of consciousness," he tells Eichenwald. "The main purpose of AIM wasn't to chat, but to give you the chance to log in at any time and check out what your friends were doing." When he pointed out to his boss that Messenger lacked a short-message feature, the older man dismissed his concerns; he couldn't see why young people would care about putting up a few words. "He didn't get it," the developer says. "And because he didn't know or didn't believe how young people were using messenger programs, we didn't do anything."

"I see Microsoft as technology's answer to Sears," said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. "In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it's just a barren wasteland. And that's Microsoft. The company just isn't cool anymore."

"They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh," said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. "Now they've become the thing they despised."

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Microsoft's Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant

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Analyzing one of American corporate history's greatest mysteries-the lost decade of Microsoft-two-time George Polk Award winner (and *V.F.'*s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the "astonishingly foolish management decisions" at the company that "could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success."

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The Idea in Brief

You've given your best employees pats on the back. You've injected light-hearted fun into the workplace. And you've provided emotional support when needed. So why aren't your people delivering peak performance?

Perhaps you've neglected their inner work lives-the complex interplay between employees' deeply private perceptions of what's happening around them, the emotions they experience as a result of those perceptions, and their level of motivation to do good work.

When people form negative perceptions-of their manager, organization, coworkers, work, or themselves-they feel frustrated and unhappy. Motivation shrivels. Performance suffers in the short and long run. But when employees form positive perceptions, the cycle turns from vicious to virtuous.

How to promote positive perceptions? Manipulate some simple levers, say Amabile and Kramer. In particular, create conditions that enable people to get their work done, and you'll create positive emotions, enhance motivation, and boost performance to unprecedented levels.

The Idea in Practice

Amabile and Kramer offer these suggestions for promoting positive inner work lives in your employees:

Demystify the Inner Work Life System

The interplay among employees' perceptions, emotions, and motivation form a complex system that can fuel-or kill-performance. This system operates all day long, unseen, within every employee-and in response to every event. Steps in the system include:

1. An event happens at work-for example, a manager fails to respond to an employee's e-mail, a worker solves a nagging technical problem, or top management announces a major layoff.

2. Each employee tries to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are.

3. If perceptions resulting from this "sense making" are negative, the person experiences feelings such as anger, sadness, and disgust. If perceptions are positive, an employee experiences positive emotions-including satisfaction, pride, and elation.

4. Positive emotions fuel people's motivation, which in turn drives performance along four key dimensions: creativity (ability to come up with novel and useful ideas), productivity, commitment to the work, and collegiality (contributions to team cohesiveness). Not surprisingly, negative emotions corrode motivation, so performance suffers.

Activate a Virtuous Cycle in Employees' Inner Work Lives

Typical management techniques such as praising subordinates, working collaboratively with them, and making the workplace fun or relaxing can all help establish a positive cycle in employees' inner work lives.

But the single most important lever is to give people the sense that they can make progress in their work. Success in achieving a goal, accomplishing a task, or solving a problem-whether mundane or immense-evokes intense pleasure and even joy.

To enable your people to get their work done:

Give them adequate resources and time to do their jobs.

React to successes and failures with a learning orientation rather than a purely evaluative one.

Set clear goals-by explaining where the work is heading and why it matters to the team, the organization, and the company's customers.

If your organization demands knowledge work from its people, then you undoubtedly appreciate the importance of sheer brainpower. You probably recruit high-intellect people and ensure they have access to good information. You probably also respect the power of incentives and use formal compensation systems to channel that intellectual energy down one path or another. But you might be overlooking another crucial driver of a knowledge worker's performance-that person's inner work life. People experience a constant stream of emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they react to and make sense of the events of the workday. As people arrive at their workplaces they don't check their hearts and minds at the door. Unfortunately, because inner work life is seldom openly expressed in modern organizations, it's all too easy for managers to pretend that private thoughts and feelings don't matter.

As psychologists, we became fascinated a decade ago with day-to-day work life. But our research into inner work life goes well beyond intellectual curiosity about the complex operations of emotions, perceptions, and motivations. It addresses the very pragmatic managerial question of how these dynamics affect work performance. To examine this question, we constructed a research project that would give us a window into the inner work lives of a broad population of knowledge workers. Specifically, we recruited 238 professionals from 26 project teams and had them complete daily diary entries, in a standard format, for the duration of their projects. Nearly 12,000 diary entries later, we have discovered the dynamics of inner work life and the significant effect it can have on the performance of your people-and, by implication, your entire organization.

It may stun you, if you are a manager, to learn what power you hold. Your behavior as a manager dramatically shapes your employees' inner work lives. But the key levers in your hands for driving motivation and performance may not be the ones you'd suspect.

More Than Meets the Eye

Think about your own most recent day at the office, and try to recall it in some detail. What would hidden observers have been able to learn had they been watching you go through that day? They might have read e-mails you composed, looked over the numbers you plugged into spreadsheets, reviewed the reports you prepared. They would have noted your interactions, in formal meetings or hallway encounters, with colleagues, subordinates, and superiors and listened in on a presentation you delivered. They would have heard your end of various telephone conversations, perhaps with customers, suppliers, or consultants. Maybe they would have watched you sitting quietly for a while, looking off into space, jotting down a few notes.

But would these observers really understand your inner work life that day? Of course not. In having those conversations and writing those reports, you were not only dealing with the task at hand. As events unfolded, you were also forming and adjusting perceptions about the people you work with, the organization you are part of, the work you do, and even yourself. You were experiencing emotions, maybe mild states of satisfaction or irritation, maybe intense feelings of pride or frustration. And these perceptions and emotions were intertwining to affect your work motivation from moment to moment-with consequences for your performance that day.

This is what we mean by inner work life: the dynamic interplay among personal perceptions, ranging from immediate impressions to more fully developed theories about what is happening and what it means; emotions, whether sharply defined reactions (such as elation over a particular success or anger over a particular obstacle) or more general feeling states, like good and bad moods; and motivation -your grasp of what needs to be done and your drive to do it at any given moment. Inner work life is crucial to a person's experience of the workday but for the most part is imperceptible to others. Indeed, it goes largely unexamined even by the individual experiencing it.

In order to study inner work lives, we needed a level of access beyond that of an observer. Thus, we relied on the classic form of the personal diary. Every day, we sent a standard e-mail to every participant requesting a brief description, for our eyes only, of an event that stood out in his or her mind from that workday. (See the sidebar "How We Studied State of Mind" for more details on the study.) Their remarks tended to make clear what they thought of the event-what it said to them about their work, their team, their organization, or themselves-and how it made them feel. Beyond that, we had participants rate themselves and each of their teammates monthly along various dimensions (creativity, work quality, commitment to the work, and contributions to team cohesiveness). Because whole teams participated in the study, we were able to triangulate responses from colleagues, strengthening our understanding of notable events and their effects. Finally, rather than relying solely on a team's diaries to assess its overall performance, we also included evaluations by knowledgeable people outside the team.

Ten years ago, we set out on a quest to understand what really happens at work. As psychologists, we were fascinated by the unexplored territory of day-to-day life inside organizations and, more specifically, inside the hearts and minds of the professionals working in those organizations. Our aim was to explore daily inner work life-the emotions, perceptions, and motivations that people experience as they react to and make sense of the events of their workdays-and how it affects performance. Our questions were basic: What affects a person's inner work life? Is there anything predictable about how it is shaped by specific events unfolding in the workday and by the organizational context? Does inner work life affect performance? We decided that the best way to get to the heart of these questions was to collect daily diaries from the people themselves.

Over a period of three years, we recruited 238 professionals from 26 project teams in seven companies and three industries to participate in our study. Over 80% of the participants were college educated, and all of the projects required complex, creative work for successful completion. Thus, the term "knowledge workers" fits our participants well. We e-mailed diary forms to the participants every day (Monday through Friday) during the entire course of their projects, asking them each to complete the forms privately at the end of the workday. The average project length was a bit over four months, but some were as long as eight or nine months. About 75% of the forms were returned to us completed and on time, yielding nearly 12,000 individual diary reports.

The diary form had several numerical questions, asking participants to rate their own perceptions of various aspects of the work environment, their mood, and their motivation that day, as well as their own work and the team's work that day. There was also an open-ended question asking people to list the main work tasks they engaged in that day. The most important question was also open-ended; it asked people to briefly report one event that stood out in their minds from the workday.

Although this question simply asked for an event-a concrete description of something specific that happened and who was involved-we found that, very often, people didn't stop there. They told us, sometimes in great detail, about their perceptions of the event and the thoughts that it engendered. They told us about how the event made them feel. And sometimes they told us how it affected their motivation and performance that day. These were the data that led to our primary discoveries of how constant and pervasive inner work life is and how it operates as a complex system. Together with the numerical data we collected on the diary forms and many other sources of data on the participants, the teams, the projects, and the companies, the daily diary narratives served as the basis for our conclusions about inner work life, what affects it, and how, in turn, inner work life affects performance.

We were immediately rewarded with evidence of the richness and intensity of people's inner work lives and the proof that they were influenced strongly by the events of the day. What also emerged over time was evidence of the interplay among perceptions, emotions, and motivations-an inner work life system (See the exhibit "Processing Work Events: What Happens Inside.") This discovery fits well with what is already known about the human brain. Recent research in neuroscience has found that emotion and cognition (which includes perception of events) are tightly intertwined. Areas of the brain associated with rational thought and decision making have direct connections to areas associated with feelings. They do not exist in separate psychological compartments, and they interact in complex ways. Like any system, the brain cannot be understood simply by looking at each individual component. Inner work life functions the same way: It is crucial to consider all components and their interactions.

Processing Work Events: What Happens Inside

When something happens at work-some workday event-it immediately triggers cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes. People's minds start "sensemaking": They try to figure out why the event happened and what its implications are. These perceptions feed the emotions evoked by the event, and the emotions, in turn, feed the perceptions. Depending on what happens with these cognitive and emotional processes, motivation can shift, which, in turn, affects how people perform their work. We discerned these processes in the diaries of every team we studied and in most of the people who worked on those teams.

Consider how the dynamics played out with Infomap, a nine-person team of information technologists at DataBrook, a subsidiary of DreamSuite Hotels, that we tracked through various projects across a five-month period. (We have disguised all names and other identifying information about the people and their company.) One urgent project, dubbed the "BigDeal" project, came up suddenly in the fourth month of our study and had enormous financial implications. DreamSuite was being sued for more than $145 million, and its legal department required a great deal of analysis of financial records in order to defend the company. Infomap had eight days to complete the work.

Perception.

As the diary entries shown in the exhibit "The Reality Management Never Sees" reveal, the project had significant effects on the inner work lives of the team members. What first becomes clear in studying the diary entries is that people's "events of the day" caused them to form perceptions. Clark's diary entry for May 26, for example, describes the start of the project and the activity surrounding it. Clearly he is engaging in sensemaking, and he comes away with positive perceptions of the "extreme importance" of the work done in his office, the "problem-solving capability" of his team, and the "supportive" nature of management. We see the same kind of reflection by Chester as the project winds up on May 31. His sensemaking produces positive perceptions of the team's coleader (Ellen), the team itself, other groups in the organization, and top management. These perceptions were triggered by specific events-for example, the extraordinary efforts of Ellen, who rolled up her sleeves and worked alongside the team.

Most managers are unclear about what is going on in their employees' inner work lives and have even less of an idea of what events affect them. Consider these diary entries by the Infomap team at DataBrook, a subsidiary of DreamSuite Hotels. (We have disguised all names and company information. We've also edited the diary entries slightly for clarity and brevity.) This nine-person team of information technologists was tapped to work on an urgent assignment, dubbed "BigDeal," that had enormous financial implications. DreamSuite was being sued for more than $145 million, and its legal department required a great deal of analysis of financial records in order to defend the company. Infomap members worked long hours throughout the eight days they had been given to complete the project, including over a holiday weekend. Yet their spirits were remarkably upbeat. What was causing such a positive outlook despite the burdensome workload and schedule?

DataBrook upper management, which generally paid little attention to Infomap, spent time in the Infomap work area, checked frequently on the project's status, held back all other demands on the team's time, and provided encouragement and support in a number of small ways. Other groups within the organization cheerfully pitched in as needed. Ellen, the project manager and team coleader-who was recovering from surgery-not only did a great deal of the actual work but also served as a liaison between the team, upper management, and the internal clients. At the project's completion, although exhausted from the final five-day (and night) sprint, the team members were happy and pleased with the experience.

Clearly, management's engagement and behavior-even seemingly trivial and routine actions-made the difference. The diary excerpts tell the tale in people's own words.

Emotion.

We also see the impact of daily events on people's emotions. Helen is inordinately pleased when an upper manager brings refreshments to the team. Marsha reacts to an example of outstanding teamwork with great pleasure. The work atmosphere on May 31 is "happy and light," she notes-even though they were working on Memorial Day, which should have been a holiday for everyone. Chester's upbeat emotions on May 31 are likewise unmistakable.

There is evidence, too, even in the span of these few diary entries, of interplay between perceptions and emotions. When a high-level executive delivers bottled water and pizza to the people working after hours, not only does the event cause happy surprise, it also sends a real signal to the workers. That seemingly trivial event caused people on the BigDeal project to perceive their work and themselves as important and valued, which evoked additional positive emotions. Similar emotions arose when other colleagues and teams offered to pitch in, reinforcing the positive perceptions that team members had formed of those people-and leading, over time, to even more positive emotions.

Motivation.

High levels of motivation are also on display in the BigDeal project diaries. The entry by Marsha on May 27, for example, reveals that she has just worked 15 hours straight. Yet she describes what she's just endured as "one of the best days I've had in months!!" She notes, in that entry, that "our entire office worked like a real team" and referred to their work as the "big project." Her previous diary entries allowed us to understand how her motivation on May 27 resulted from positive emotions and perceptions. We found, in those entries, that she often felt elated when the team worked closely together, and she perceived herself and her work as more valued when others in the organization signaled its importance. These effects of emotion and perception on motivation make perfect sense. If people are sad or angry about their work, they won't care about doing it well. If they are happy and excited about it, they will leap to the task and put great effort behind it. The same goes for perception. If people perceive the work, and themselves, as having high value, their motivation will be high. Just as important, if they perceive a clear path forward, with little ambiguity about what will constitute progress, motivation levels rise. The BigDeal project had all this going for it. People felt highly valued and certain about what needed to be accomplished. Ultimately, this translated to high performance on the project. Not only did the team get the work done on time, but its high quality made an immediate and measurable contribution to the company's success.

The BigDeal project is all the more striking in comparison with the other projects we tracked for this team. In other periods, we were able to see the same inner work life system operating-but in much less positive ways. Despite the experiences during the BigDeal project, all was not rosy between the team and upper-level management. When, early in our study, an acquisition was announced, employees interpreted the event as a hostile takeover and reacted to it emotionally. Diary entries during that time used terms like "boneheaded" and "bigoted bunch of plantation owners" to describe top management. When layoffs were announced after the acquisition, the entire team perceived the process as unfair. They expressed considerable fear and anger in their diaries and a markedly decreased level of motivation ("People are walking around scared and afraid for their jobs" and "What kills me is, after this, they will turn around and wonder why everyone doesn't just throw themselves in front of a train for the company...what dopes"). In fact, during the entire time we studied the team-with the exception of the BigDeal project-the team members perceived their company's executive leaders as aloof and oblivious to the team's good work and reacted with varying levels of sadness, anger, and disgust.

Were managers aware of the team's intensely positive perceptions, emotions, and motivations during the BigDeal project? Were they aware of its extremely negative inner work life at other times? Maybe. But when we met with the team, they made it clear that they generally displayed their emotions and described their perceptions only to each other or kept them entirely private. Our research suggests that most managers are not in tune with the inner work lives of their people; nor do they appreciate how pervasive the effects of inner work life can be on performance.

What Gets Done When People Have Good Days?

There is a long-standing debate among management scholars on the question of how work performance is influenced by people's subjective experiences at work. One side says that people perform better when they are happier and internally motivated by love of the work. Others assert that people do their best work under pressure and when externally motivated by deadlines and competition with peers. There is research evidence to support each of these positions.

Having taken a microscope to this question, we believe strongly that performance is linked to inner work life and that the link is a positive one. People perform better when their workday experiences include more positive emotions, stronger intrinsic motivation (passion for the work), and more favorable perceptions of their work, their team, their leaders, and their organization. Moreover, these effects cannot be explained by people's different personalities or backgrounds-which we did account for in our analyses. Put simply, every moment that they are performing their jobs, employees are "working under the influence" of their inner work lives.

So what do we mean by performance as it relates specifically to knowledge work? In settings where people must work collaboratively to solve vexing problems, high performance depends on four elements: creativity, productivity, commitment, and collegiality. We looked at each of these-using quantitative data from the monthly team ratings and the daily diary forms, as well as content analysis of the diary narratives-and mapped them against the three components of inner work life.

First, we traced the influence of positive emotion on people's creativity-that is, their ability to come up with novel and useful ideas. Many previous studies, conducted as carefully controlled laboratory experiments, have demonstrated a causal relationship between emotion-also termed "affect" or "mood"-and creativity. Our diary study, which used real-world settings and a more naturalistic approach to measuring the effect of emotion on creativity, confirms that this is not merely a laboratory phenomenon. Positive emotion was tied to higher creativity, and negative emotion was tied to lower creativity. Across all 26 teams, people were over 50% more likely to have creative ideas on the days they reported the most positive moods than they were on other days. This finding is based not on people's self-ratings of creativity but on evidence in the diary narrative that they actually did creative thinking that day.

There was even a surprising carry-over effect. The more positive a person's mood on a given day, the more creative thinking he or she did the next day-and, to some extent, the day after that-even taking into account the person's mood on those later days. This was clearly the experience of Marsha on the Infomap team. Of her 68 diary entries, 20 contained evidence of creative thinking. Fully 80% of those creative-thinking days followed days on which Marsha's general mood was higher than average for her. Her negative emotions on the days preceding creative-thinking days were the mirror image. Her anger was below average on 75% of the preceding days, her fear was below average on 65%, and her sadness was below average on 60% of them.

Second, we looked at how people's perceptions of their work context affected creativity. Again, our diary study adds more detailed evidence to previous research findings. People in our study were more creative when they interpreted the goings-on in their organizations in a positive light-that is, when they saw their organizations and leaders as collaborative, cooperative, open to new ideas, able to evaluate and develop new ideas fairly, clearly focused on an innovative vision, and willing to reward creative work. They were less creative when they perceived political infighting and internal competition or an aversion to new ideas or to risk taking.

Finally, we analyzed the impact of motivation, the third aspect of inner work life, on creativity. Over the past 30 years, we have garnered a great deal of research evidence supporting what we call the intrinsic motivation principle of creativity: People are more creative when they are motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself-not by external pressures or rewards. Most of this evidence comes from laboratory experiments. When intrinsic motivation is lowered, creativity dips as well. Our diary data add to the evidence. Our study participants were more creative in their individual work on the days when they were more highly intrinsically motivated. What's more, the projects distinguished by the greatest levels of creativity overall were the ones in which team members displayed the highest intrinsic motivation in their day-to-day work.

Our findings were quite similar when we shifted our focus from creativity to the other elements of performance: productivity, commitment to the work, and collegiality (specifically, contributions to team cohesiveness). People performed better on all these fronts when they were in a good mood and worse when they were in a bad mood. Productivity, commitment, and collegiality also increased when people held positive perceptions about their work context. At a "local" level, this meant perceiving that they were supported by their team leaders and colleagues, creatively challenged by their tasks, trusted to make decisions with reasonable autonomy, and given sufficient resources and time to complete assignments. More broadly, it meant they perceived the organizational context as collaborative and open, not rife with political game playing or crippling conservatism. Finally, intrinsic motivation levels predicted performance levels across the board. People were more productive, committed, and collegial when they were more motivated-especially by the satisfactions of the work itself.

Clearly, inner work life matters to performance-how creatively people will think, how productive they will be, how much commitment they will show to their work, how collegial they will be. And many of the events that shape inner work life are caused, directly or indirectly, by managers.

What Good Management Does

When we ask people in business to guess which events caused by managers have the greatest influence on inner work life, they often think of interpersonal events-the kinds of person-to-person encounters where, for example, the manager praises a subordinate, works collaboratively with a subordinate as a peer, makes things more fun and relaxing, or provides emotional support. Or the opposite. These sorts of events do, indeed, have a real impact on people's perceptions, emotions, and motivations. Recall what a difference they made to the BigDeal team.

But, interestingly, our research shows that the most important managerial behaviors don't involve giving people daily pats on the back or attempting to inject lighthearted fun into the workplace. Rather, they involve two fundamental things: enabling people to move forward in their work and treating them decently as human beings.

Enable progress.

When we compared our study participants' best days (when they were most happy, had the most positive perceptions of the workplace, and were most intrinsically motivated) with their worst days, we found that the single most important differentiator was a sense of being able to make progress in their work. Achieving a goal, accomplishing a task, or solving a problem often evoked great pleasure and sometimes elation. Even making good progress toward such goals could elicit the same reactions.

Sometimes the successes were clearly important for the project. For example, when Louise (an Infomap software engineer coding a new version of a major program) solved a problem to bring her within reach of the goal, she wrote, "I figured out why something was not working correctly. I felt relieved and happy because this was a minor milestone for me. I am 90% complete with this version of enhancements." A few weeks later, she accomplished an important step on a different programming assignment: "Yippee! I think I completed part of a project that has been a pain in the butt! I am taking reports over to the user for their viewing pleasure." But even very mundane successes led to positive feelings. For instance, a diary entry by Tom, another Infomap programmer, said, "I smashed that bug that's been frustrating me for almost a calendar week. That may not be an event to you, but I live a very drab life, so I'm all hyped." This is the kind of joy that people feel when they can simply accomplish what they need to.

Not surprisingly, there is a flip side to this effect. Across our entire database, the worst days-the most frustrating, sad, and fearful days-were characterized by setbacks in the work. Again, the magnitude of the event is not important: Even seemingly small setbacks had a substantial impact on inner work life. On April 19, Tom's failure to make measurable progress in his work cast a pall on his day: "No event today, just the continuing frustration of the week-trying to install a fairly simple change in code to an enormously complicated method of installation and production execution. Honest, you don't want to hear the details." On April 12, Louise reported being irritable about an obstacle she couldn't get around. "I changed a program today and got a syntax error....I was angry with myself."

It was clear from the diary data that being able to make progress in the work is a very big deal for inner work life. The next question, then, is which managerial behaviors affect employees' ability to do so. Our research points to several: for example, providing direct help (versus hindrance), providing adequate resources and time (versus inadequate resources or unnecessary time pressure), and reacting to successes and failures with a learning orientation (versus a purely evaluative orientation). But one of the most important managerial behaviors turns out to be the setting of clear goals. People make more progress when managers clarify where the work is heading and why it matters. In our diary study, the teams that made greater progress had more events in which the project goals and the team members' individual work goals were clear or were changed carefully and where people knew why their work mattered to the team, the organization, and the organization's customers. By contrast, teams that made less progress reported more events that muddied, confused, or haphazardly changed the goals. Sometimes those teams would be given a goal by management, only to be assigned several other tasks that conflicted with that goal. Often, those teams had a sense of futility about their work, because of uncertainty about how or even whether their efforts would make a difference.

The people on the Infomap team generally made good progress in their work-on the BigDeal project and others-and it was primarily because Ellen, the project manager and one of the team's leaders, relentlessly sought clarity from the team's clients about their needs and expectations. This clarity was sometimes hard to come by, and, in those instances, progress was impeded. Consider the following example, in which a client had requested a software development project with a firm deadline but with little more than a vague sense of what the final computer program was supposed to do. Repeatedly over several days, Ellen contacted the client manager to discuss specifics. Repeatedly, she was brushed off. Marsha, to whom Ellen had assigned the project, wrote in her April 6 diary:

We had a meeting to discuss the CRR project that I have been working on; the meeting was with just Ellen and Helen. The users have never given us written requirements for the project, and yet they just sent us a note asking if we will make the May 6 deadline. I am just forging ahead and coding like crazy...here's hoping they like what they never have asked for. Ellen is trying very hard to get them to commit themselves.

Eventually, Ellen did manage to get specifications from the client team's manager, and, with a Herculean effort, Marsha did succeed in getting the project done well and on time. But all of Marsha's hard work before the specifications were nailed down was relatively directionless and based on supposition, which impeded both real progress and her own sense of accomplishment. By contrast, during the BigDeal project, the managers who needed the work done communicated in detail with Ellen from the outset to clarify the project goals, specify their needs, and explain to everyone involved why the project was so important. Although there were many technical problems to overcome, there was no ambiguity about the goal. The effects on progress were dazzling.

Managerial events facilitating or impeding progress may be so powerful because they have multiple direct and indirect effects on performance. The direct effects are fairly obvious. For example, when goals are not articulated clearly, work proceeds in wrong directions and performance suffers. Less directly, the frustration of spinning one's wheels sours inner work life, leading to lower motivation; people facing seemingly random choices will be less inspired to act on any of them. And there is a further effect. When a manager's actions impede progress, that behavior sends a strong signal. People trying to make sense of why higher-ups would not do more to facilitate progress draw their own conclusions-perhaps that their work is unimportant or that their bosses are either willfully undermining them or hopelessly incompetent.

Manage with a human touch.

None of this emphasis on the managerial behaviors that influence progress diminishes the importance of the interpersonal managerial events that we mentioned earlier-events in which people are or are not treated decently as human beings. Although such events weren't quite as important in distinguishing the best days from the worst days, they were a close second. We frequently observed interpersonal events working in tandem with progress events. Praise without real work progress, or at least solid efforts toward progress, had little positive impact on people's inner work lives and could even arouse cynicism. On the other hand, good work progress without any recognition-or, worse, with criticism about trivial issues-could engender anger and sadness. Far and away, the best boosts to inner work life were episodes in which people knew they had done good work and managers appropriately recognized that work.* * *

Peter Drucker once wrote, "So much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to do work." The truth of this has struck us as our ongoing analyses reveal more of the negative managerial behaviors that affect inner work life. But we have also been struck by the wealth of managerial opportunities for improving inner work life. Managers' day-to-day (and moment-to-moment) behaviors matter not just because they directly facilitate or impede the work of the organization. They're also important because they affect people's inner work lives, creating ripple effects on organizational performance. When people are blocked from doing good, constructive work day by day, for instance, they form negative impressions of the organization, their coworkers, their managers, their work, and themselves; they feel frustrated and unhappy; and they become demotivated in their work. Performance suffers in the short run, and in the longer run, too. But when managers facilitate progress, every aspect of people's inner work lives are enhanced, which leads to even greater progress. This positive spiral benefits the individual workers-and the entire organization. Because every employee's inner work life system is constantly operating, its effects are inescapable.

Discovering how inner work life affects organizational performance is clearly valuable. But as researchers we hope we have also made progress on another front. Inner work lives matter deeply to the people living them. Studies of the modern workweek show that knowledge workers today, as compared with workers of past eras, spend more time in the office and more time focused on work issues while outside the office. As the proportion of time that is claimed by work rises, inner work life becomes a bigger component of life itself. People deserve happiness. They deserve dignity and respect. When we act on that realization, it is not only good for business. It affirms our value as human beings.

A version of this article appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Inner Work Life: Understanding the Subtext of Business Performance

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The Idea in Brief You've given your best employees pats on the back. You've injected light-hearted fun into the workplace. And you've provided emotional support when needed. So why aren't your people delivering peak performance?

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What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work. If a person is motivated and happy at the end of the workday, it's a good bet that he or she achieved something, however small. If the person drags out of the office disengaged and joyless, a setback is likely to blame.

This progress principle suggests that managers have more influence than they may realize over employees' well-being, motivation, and creative output. The key is to learn which actions support progress-such as setting clear goals, providing sufficient time and resources, and offering recognition-and which have the opposite effect.

Even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously. On the flip side, small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect. And the work doesn't need to involve curing cancer in order to be meaningful. It simply must matter to the person doing it.

The actions that set in motion the positive feedback loop between progress and inner work life may sound like Management 101, but it takes discipline to establish new habits. The authors provide a checklist that managers can use on a daily basis to monitor their progress-enhancing behaviors.

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Reprint: R1105C What is the best way to motivate employees to do creative work? Help them take a step forward every day. In an analysis of knowledge workers' diaries, the authors found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life (the mix of emotions, motivations, and perceptions that is critical to performance) than making progress in meaningful work.

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To get yourself and your team off to a good start for the new year, focus on progress. Our research discovered that fostering progress in meaningful work is the most important way to keep people highly engaged at work - even if that progress is a " small win."

We call this phenomenon the progress principle; it works because people want to feel that they are contributing to something that matters. The new year presents a great opportunity for managers to put the progress principle into action.

First, note the progress made by your team or organization over the past year - the major accomplishments and the small wins, too. And communicate the list broadly. All too often, progress gets ignored as people move from one task or project to another. Simply noting what was accomplished and how it contributed to the goals of the organization can have a big impact on how people feel about themselves, the organization, and the work they do. Wesley, a researcher at a chemicals firm that participated in our study, made clear how much it meant to him when his VP did this at a holiday celebration: "We had a wonderful Christmas celebration, during which time our VP and Director of R&D reflected on our terrific achievements over the year."

Don't stop with enumerating the year's accomplishments. Celebrate that progress and recognize all those who contributed to it. People who work hard deserve the opportunity to celebrate and rejoice in what they have accomplished. It nourishes them psychologically and motivates them to accomplish even more in the coming year. And don't recognize only the people directly responsible for a particular achievement. Recognize everyone who contributed across the organization, including support staff. For people to give their best in the future, they must feel that their hard work really matters. They benefit, through satisfying engagement in their work. And the organization benefits, too. When employees are more engaged in their work, their performance improves - contributing to the bottom line.

Map out goals for progress in the upcoming year and say why that progress matters. Be sure to include both broad, aspirational goals and smaller, interim milestones. For people to be fully engaged, they must feel that they are making steady progress, not just slogging away in hopes of a major breakthrough. And be sure to articulate why those goals matter - why they are meaningful to the organization, customers, and/or society. Making progress on meaningless work doesn't boost engagement; people must feel that they are contributing to something they value. Great leaders at every level of an organization are able to communicate not only what needs to be done, but why it is important. This means communicating the mission and values of the organization, and ensuring that all employees understand how their own work contributes to the mission.

Finally, resolve to support people's progress each day in the coming year. For the progress principle to work, people should experience progress more often than setbacks. Give them the goals, resources, and time they need to succeed, and remove or reduce any obstacles to progress. And insist that people across the organization support each other as much as possible. Create a climate of attention to progress, where everyone is looking for opportunities, every day, to help colleagues move forward on meaningful work.

These actions are not difficult or costly, but they can have a real impact on employee engagement and performance. Make it your pre-New Year's resolution to give your people meaningful work to do and to support, recognize, and celebrate their contributions now and throughout the coming year.

What tips do you have for ending the year at work on a positive note and jump-starting progress for the coming year?

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To get yourself and your team off to a good start for the new year, focus on progress. Our research discovered that fostering progress in meaningful work is the most important way to keep people highly engaged at work - even if that progress is a "small win."

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- Shifts focus to making the entire trip easy and magical - Opens up concept of hosting, empowering people to share their interests, hobbies and passions

LOS ANGELES - Airbnb today unveiled the most significant development in its eight year history as it moves beyond accommodation with the launch of Trips. Bringing together where you stay, what you do and the people you meet all in one place, Trips is a people-powered platform designed to make travel both easy and magical. Trips launches today with three key areas - Experiences, Places and Homes, with Flights and Services to be added in the future.

Trips will make travel magical again by immersing travelers in communities around the world. Get unprecedented access to local passions and interests, like violin making in Paris or marathon running in Kenya; discover the hidden gems that only locals know about via personal recommendations; and socialize with other travelers and locals at exciting events. Add that to three million bookable homes, and Airbnb becomes the one place to go for a truly different kind of travel experience.

Having already transformed where people stay when they travel through people-powered hospitality, Airbnb is taking this same people-focused approach to the rest of the trip and, in doing so, providing a way for people to make money from their passions and interests.

"Until now, Airbnb has been about homes," said Brian Chesky, Airbnb CEO. "Today, Airbnb is launching Trips, bringing together where you stay, what you do, and the people you meet all in one place. We want to make travel magical again by putting people back at the heart of every trip."

Experiences
Experiences are handcrafted activities designed and led by local experts - be it a single activity like a Samurai Swordplay workshop or an immersive multi-day experience like learning about and driving classic cars in Malibu. Experiences offer unprecedented access and deep insights into communities and places that you wouldn't otherwise come across, such as Truffle Hunting in Tuscany or the grime music scene in London.

Trips launches with around 500 Experiences in 12 cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Detroit, Havana, London, Paris, Florence, Nairobi, Cape Town, Tokyo and Seoul. From today, budding hosts in those and a further 39 cities worldwide can request to list their Experience.

A number of Experiences will also be available where guests can give something back to communities through non-profit organizations. In Detroit for example, Khali Sweeney provides an opportunity to go behind-the-scenes at his Downtime Boxing Gym that provides local children with an after-school program of healthy snacks, homework time, and boxing lessons.

Places - Guidebooks, Meet ups and Audio Walks
Trips brings places to life through the people that live there, reflecting the recommendations of hundreds of thousands of Airbnb hosts, neighborhood insiders and local influencers and is an alternative to aggregated tourist lists that funnel people to the same places.

With Insider Guidebooks, Airbnb has identified cultural experts and neighborhood insiders to recommend the hidden gems within their city. Find the perfect run from a marathoner, the best dive bar from a local mixologist and the next great undiscovered restaurant from an up-and-coming chef. 100 Insider Guidebooks will be available at launch in six cities - Los Angeles, San Francisco, Havana, Nairobi, Detroit and Seoul - with more coming soon.

As well as Insider Guidebooks, Places includes over one million individual recommendations worldwide from Airbnb's home hosts, recommending their favourite hidden gems in their neighborhoods, from cafes and restaurants to parks and other local attractions. A partnership with restaurant booking platform, Resy, will make it possible for people in future to book tables at great local restaurants directly through the Airbnb app.

Airbnb has also struck an exclusive partnership with Detour to offer access to amazing experiential audio walking tours allowing people to discover neighborhoods in a totally unique and authentic way. At launch, audio tours will initially be available for Los Angeles with San Francisco, Paris, London, Tokyo and Seoul to follow by Spring 2017.

With Trips, Airbnb also wants to make travel more social, helping connect the thousands of Airbnb users in a city on any given night. Meet ups within Places will let local businesses host one-off or regular events for Airbnb guests and locals to connect with each other.

Homes
With three million homes available to book across 191 countries, Airbnb offers the largest and most diverse range of unique accommodation options for travelers which will now be available to book alongside Experiences in available cities.

Making travel easy
Booking travel today can be complicated and stressful. With Trips, Airbnb aims to make it easy with one app to book most of your travel needs. Trip Itinerary is a new feature that brings together everything the traveler needs to know into one simple timeline, with the ability to easily book and add Experiences or things to do. Over time, this capability will evolve based on machine learning to dynamically suggest personalized and contextual, i.e. based on location, recommendations during a Trip. Airbnb's vision is to ultimately cater for every aspect of a trip, making it both easy and magical from start to finish.

Identity Authentication
The launch of Trips also sees the introduction of a new identity authentication process that the Airbnb Experiences Community will be using. Hosts and guests will be asked to scan an official government ID (for example a passport, or driving license) and then take a simple selfie. After the ID is authenticated, the ID and selfie will be reviewed to confirm that both pictures appear to match. Having a more robust standard of authenticating identity will make the Airbnb community stronger and reaffirms Airbnb's ongoing commitment to authenticity, reliability, and security. This new identity authentication step is required for all Experiences users, and is also currently being tested for homes bookings. Trips also leverages Airbnb's existing Trust & Safety measures including a 250+ person global 24/7 support team, secure payments, messaging, profiles & reviews, and a new $1 million liability insurance program for eligible Experience hosts.

For more information on Trips from Airbnb, visit www.airbnb.com/new

Airbnb a Threat? Guest Experience Homesharing

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Airbnb Expands Beyond the Home with the Launch of Trips

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Airbnb today unveiled the most significant development in its eight year history as it moves beyond accommodation with the launch of Trips. Bringing together where you stay, what you do and the people you meet all in one place, Trips is a people-powered platform designed to make travel both easy and magical.

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Throughout our careers, we are taught to conform - to the status quo, to the opinions and behaviors of others, and to information that supports our views. The pressure only grows as we climb the organizational ladder. By the time we reach high-level positions, conformity has been so hammered into us that we perpetuate it in our enterprises. In a recent survey I conducted of more than 2,000 employees across a wide range of industries, nearly half the respondents reported working in organizations where they regularly feel the need to conform, and more than half said that people in their organizations do not question the status quo. The results were similar when I surveyed high-level executives and midlevel managers. As this data suggests, organizations consciously or unconsciously urge employees to check a good chunk of their real selves at the door. Workers and their organizations both pay a price: decreased engagement, productivity, and innovation (see the exhibit "The Perils of Conformity").

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Throughout our careers, we are taught to conform - to the status quo, to the opinions and behaviors of others, and to information that supports our views. The pressure only grows as we climb the organizational ladder. By the time we reach high-level positions, conformity has been so hammered into us that we perpetuate it in our enterprises.

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Have you found yourself asking, "what is design?" Sometimes the best way to understand design is to just dive in and experience it! We've pulled together this collection to help you get started on your design journey. Scroll down to see our NEW introductory online workshop, a library of FAQs about how design works, and some goto tools.

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Have you found yourself asking, "what is design?" Sometimes the best way to understand design is to just dive in and experience it! We've pulled together this collection to help you get started on your design journey. Scroll down to see our NEW introductory online workshop, a library of FAQs about how design works, and some goto tools.

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How to Get Hired: Understand If You're an I, T, or X-Shaped Person | Designlab blog

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Learn UI/UX design through hands-on projects and 1-on-1 mentorship from expert designers. Add design to your resume and level up your career.

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IDEO is a world-leading design firm, with offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, Boston and Shanghai, among other places. Consistently ranked as one of the most innovative companies in the world, IDEO is famous for its method of innovation based on intense cross-disciplinary project work. To pull this off, the company has long practiced the art of collaboration and the development of a certain kind of talent: T-shaped people. In the interview to follow, IDEO CEO Tim Brown talks about this radically different approach to talent management. What's a T-shaped person?
T-shaped people have two kinds of characteristics, hence the use of the letter "T" to describe them. The vertical stroke of the "T" is a depth of skill that allows them to contribute to the creative process. That can be from any number of different fields: an industrial designer, an architect, a social scientist, a business specialist or a mechanical engineer. The horizontal stroke of the "T" is the disposition for collaboration across disciplines. It is composed of two things. First, empathy. It's important because it allows people to imagine the problem from another perspective- to stand in somebody else's shoes. Second, they tend to get very enthusiastic about other people's disciplines, to the point that they may actually start to practice them. Tshaped people have both depth and breadth in their skills.
Can you give an example of empathic behavior?
For instance, in brainstorming sessions, good brainstormers build on other people's ideas. So if I throw an idea out at the brainstorm, you won't immediately throw out your own competing idea; you will look at my idea and say, "Well, if I build on that, here's my idea that builds on your idea." This requires active listening. That's one form of empathy.
Many CEOs reward individual contributors, so-called I-shaped people, who have a depth of skill but who are not necessarily collaborative. What's wrong with that?
Most companies have lots of people with different skills. The problem is, when you bring people together to work on the same problem, if all they have are those individual skills-if they are I-shaped-it's very hard for them to collaborate. What tends to happen is that each individual discipline represents its own point of view. It basically becomes a negotiation at the table as to whose point of view wins, and that's when you get gray compromises where the best you can achieve is the lowest common denominator between all points of view. The results are never spectacular but at best average.
What if people only have the crossbar of the T-they're very collaborative but don't have a real skill to contribute?
It's just as bad. Somebody who's just got the cross of the T-it's an empty experience. In our environment, we're only effective if we get things done. We have to design things. Much of that is based on people using their individual skills to get things done, whether it is prototyping or engineering something. Occasionally, we have people who don't really have a depth of skills, and they really struggle. They don't get respect from the group.
But as a CEO, can't you run an organization with I-shaped people and then some "integrators" who bring it all together?
There is a role for people like that. Think of professional facilitators. They are very good at stitching a conversation together without necessarily contributing to it. But if you have a company full of T-shaped people, you don't need the facilitator, because everybody can do it anyway.
Let's take a look at the various ways a CEO can foster T-shaped behaviors. Getting the right people to begin with seems crucial. How do you screen recruits?
The reality is that when people come out of school, they're often I-shaped. Our challenge, and anybody's challenge who is looking to use this idea to collaborate, is to look for people where there is a nascent T-shaped potential.
How do you detect that in the interview process?
You see it right away when meeting them. That's why you can't judge just on their resume. You see it in terms of how they talk about other people they collaborate with. When you sit down with somebody and ask them about what projects they have done, and all they talk about is what they have done, that's a problem. The right person for us will talk about how other people have helped them do what they have done. There is some evidence there of empathy, collaboration and interest in working with other people.

Also, you obviously look for evidence of working on team projects, even if it's at school. One of the reasons we take so many people from the D-school [The Hasso Platner Institute of Design] at Stanford is because they are being taught to be T-shaped.

Let's face it: Hiring T-shaped people is more complex than hiring I-shaped people. The more complex your requirements are for people, the more contact you need with these people before you hire them. That's why intern programs are crucial. We have lots of interns to get to know them before hiring.
Many CEOs are asking, how can a leader find out whether an employee is good at collaboration? Do you ask peers?
To some degree it is about asking. But I think you need to have some evidence. For instance, if someone is a really popular member of a project team here, when people are always trying to get them assigned to their project, that's a pretty good clue that they are good at their content and that they are also collaborative.

Also, we have a Web 2.0 knowledge system; it has wikis, blogs, pages for people, projects and clients. We look to see how people are participating in that system: Are they publishing their thoughts? Are they contributing to others in different places? You start to accumulate evidence of how people are acting.
How do you review progress and decide to promote a T-shaped person?
We don't have a "T-shaped grade," we're not that explicit. We have an ongoing 360-degree review approach. We're asking: How have they developed their skills in content? How have they developed their skills in collaboration? How have they developed their skills in communication of their ideas? And what's the evidence of that?
What happens if someone is deficient in collaborative behaviors at IDEO?
We try to make it so that they will self-select and leave the company. They usually do because they get so frustrated. We have had people at IDEO who are stars in their chosen discipline, really truly talented. But in the end, they have gotten frustrated enough about how we require them to collaborate that they end up taking their talent somewhere else. And that's fine by us. At any given moment here, there is some percentage of people who are incurable I-shaped people, but they are not necessarily the people who stick around here for 20 years-not even five years.
But if the noncollaborative people do stick around, do you ask them to leave?
We don't have a lot; they are in the single digits in a given year. There are two reasons why you ask them to leave. Either they are so intolerant in their inability to collaborate- that doesn't happen too often because we're reasonably good at screening them on the way in-or they are not getting deeper and stronger in their talent, the vertical part of being T-shaped.
What are some companies you have seen that get collaboration and the notion of T-shaped behaviors, even if they may not use the term explicitly?
Procter & Gamble, Nike, Apple, to mention a few. They know what they are about, and they collaborate around that.

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IDEO CEO Tim Brown: T-Shaped Stars: The Backbone of IDEO's Collaborative Culture

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IDEO is a world-leading design firm, with offices in Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, Boston and Shanghai, among other places. Consistently ranked as one of the most innovative companies in the world, IDEO is famous for its method of innovation based on intense cross-disciplinary project work.

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How does nature ...
produce color?

Humanity faces many challenges. Nature holds
solutions. To discover them, all we have to do is
ask. Begin your search here, or explore featured
content below to learn from other species'
successful strategies and adaptations.

Youth Design Challenge Gallery

Working with groups made me feel like I made an impact on the world. Youth Design Challenge Participant

The 2023-2024 Youth Design Challenge is here! Once again, students around the world will learn to use biomimicry to address some of the biggest environmental challenges we face. Learn more and view winners' projects from 2018 to the present.

Whether it is tool use among chimpanzees or song practice among zebra finches, the process of perfecting the craft lies in diligent practice. Karuna Skariah Educator

Education isn't just about memorization, but practicing into mastery. Looking to other species, we see that long-term success is all about incorporating new knowledge into your very being.

When materials that comprise living systems are subjected to repeated loads, they can weaken over time. This is called fatigue and it can lead to cracks and eventually failure. However, fatigue doesn't occur just anywhere on a material; the cracks usually start in areas subjected to elevated local stresses. Therefore, living systems often employ shapes, materials, and/or smooth transitions to decrease the potential for fatigue. An example of using shape is found in brown algae, an intertidal seaweed. Rather than being bent by the constant flow forces of waves and currents, its shape causes it to be pulled. This reduces stress by roughly 800 times compared to another species that bends with the flow, ultimately reducing structural fatigue.

Featured Pages for October 2023

Enjoy a hand-picked selection of pages, including seasonally themed, recently updated, or newly added Biological Strategies, Innovations, and more.

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Innovation Inspired by Nature - AskNature

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Rejuvenescer o portfólio, sempre. Esta é a jogada.

Como? Desde a década de 1980, a 3M usa, globalmente, uma métrica interna de inovação chamada NPVI - ou Índice de Vitalidade de Produtos Novos - que indica, entre outras coisas, qual a porcentagem da receita vem de novos produtos. Em 2014, no Brasil, foi 34%, muito similar à média global da empresa, que foi de 35%.

Presente no país desde 1946, a primeira unidade fabril da 3M foi instalada em Campinas (SP) e, hoje, há 23 unidades de negócios distribuídas pelas fábricas de Campinas, Sumaré, Ribeirão Preto, Itapetininga, Mairinque, São José do Rio Preto - todas no interior paulista- e Manaus. Além disso, a 3M do Brasil detém o controle da Incavas, produtora de insumos e acessórios para limpeza doméstica, instalada em Bom Princípio, no Rio Grande do Sul. Trata-se da subsidiária da 3M Company com a maior capacidade produtiva instalada. Isso não é pouco, já que o grupo opera em mais de 70 países, tem um portfólio de 50 000 itens - entre eles, clássicos como os indefectíveis Post-it, e as esponjas das linhas Scotch, Scotch-Brite e Command - e é avaliada em US$ 30 bilhões.

Marcelo Gandur, 50, está na empresa desde 1991.Formado em Engenharia Química pela Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ), ele já gerenciou unidades de negócio, P&D e comercialização & inovação. Atualmente, ocupa a gerência de Produto EHS (Environmental Health and Safety) na Organização de P&D e trabalha orientado ao desenvolvimento de produtos com assuntos específicos de Meio Ambiente, Saúde e Segurança.

Durante uma conversa descontraída com o Draft, o executivo contou que a 3M do Brasil busca estabelecer conexões com outras empresas e startups com afinidade e potencial para potencializar o NPVI. Um exemplo é a participação dele no processo de seleção do Wenovate da FGV. O objetivo é entender o conteúdo, analisar se alguma coisa faz sentido para empresa para, quem sabe, levar para dentro da 3M...

Marcelo lembra também que, em 2016, a empresa faz 70 anos de Brasil e contabiliza iniciativas como o portal 3minovacao.com.br que conecta pessoas, compartilha conhecimento, transmite eventos ao vivo e promove seminários; e o Centro Técnico para Clientes, ou CTC, um espaço aberto a clientes e empresas parceiras da 3M, usado para demonstrar as soluções desenvolvidas pela 3M. Este último, uma espécie de Epcot Center da região de Campinas, no interior de São Paulo.

Leia, abaixo, os principais trechos da conversa:

Como é essa história de a 3M não ter um departamento específico para inovação?
Marcelo: Para a 3M, inovação é um problema corporativo de crescimento. Isso significa que todas as ações de investimento em inovação estão orientadas a promover o crescimento do NPVI, Índice de Vitalidade de Produtos Novos. Por conta disso, não temos um departamento nem pessoas específicas responsáveis pela inovação. Aqui, todos pensam e buscam inovação, em todas as áreas. Nosso CEO, Inge Thulin, fala das nossas métricas de inovação como um dos principais indicadores de vitalidade da empresa em Wall Street; o gerente de negócios pensa inovação; o cara de P&D; a pessoa de manufatura... Todo mundo tem a sua participação na inovação.

Quantas pessoas, então, trabalham em P&D na 3M Brasil?
Marcelo: Na Diretoria de P&D somos, hoje, 162 pessoas, dando suporte a todas as 23 unidades de negócios daqui. Cada uma tem seu próprio time de marketing, vendas e manufatura. As maiores possuem um laboratório dedicado, com a responsabilidade de apresentar novos produtos e soluções para provocar o crescimento orgânico. As áreas menores podem ter recursos compartilhados.

Esses laboratórios são independentes?
Marcelo: São interdependentes em função da tecnologia. Temos 46 plataformas tecnológicas corporativas, que eu comparo com peças de Lego. Qualquer unidade de negócio pode usar e combinar todas as plataformas, gerar, transferir conhecimento e tecnologia para dar suporte à fabricação de produtos. A gente tem várias vitaminas que estimulam isso, as principais são a cultura corporativa, a cooperação e um processo extremamente organizado com o New Product Portal (que permite a visualização e gestão do pipeline de inovação de toda a empresa) e uma ferramenta eletrônica de mídia social corporativa, na qual posso pedir ajuda e receber respostas de todas as partes do mundo.

Quando saiu o resultado do Best Innovator 2015, e a 3M foi tricampeã, alguns cases de inovação que receberam destaque (Santander, Poupatempo e Telefónica) não traziam produtos e, sim, a inovação agregada a serviços. Na 3M o foco é inovar em produto apenas?
Marcelo: A gente fala que tudo aqui se desenvolve a partir de uma oportunidade de negócios. Gosto da definição: "O nosso negócio é criar novos negócios". É possível contar histórias de inovação acontecendo em qualquer área da empresa.

Claro que temos um histórico enorme de inovações incorporadas em produtos, mas inovação só em produto, às vezes, não basta para o sucesso.

Se entramos no mercado pelo modelo de negócio convencional, ficamos muito limitados. Buscamos as contribuições de inovação em todos os segmentos da empresa. Por isso, a comunicação e a sintonia são importantes.

O caso Nexcare, que foi para o Best Innovator, é emblemático porque é quase uma inovação pura de marketing. O produto em si não é desenvolvido no Brasil, é uma bandagem para cuidado pessoal que pode ter várias aplicações, e que a gente já tinha incorporado em outros produtos. A grande sacada do time do Brasil foi endereçar a oportunidade identificada no segmento feminino: as mulheres amam os seus calçados e, ainda que eles machuquem os pés, elas encontram formas para continuar a usá-los! O Marketing pensou: "Elas utilizam um produto genérico. Vamos criar uma categoria de produto orientada a essa aplicação: o Foot Care!". Com isso, Nexcare tornou-se um projeto global que a 3M agora está replicando nos outros países.

Já o caso da Telefónica é emblemático em relação à entrada, cada vez mais forte, de serviços como um direcionador de inovação. A solução tecnológica, nesse caso, tinha um componente bastante importante porque desenvolvemos um bloco de conexão para central telefônica que reduz em praticamente 50% o volume de área ocupada. Identificamos também que a substituição dos blocos antigos pela solução da 3M era um grande problema para a Telefónica. Vimos que a probabilidade de sucesso de ir ao mercado oferecendo só o conector era muito menor do que propor a solução completa: gerenciar a transformação da central telefônica.

É mais difícil inovar em serviços?
Marcelo: Não dissocio as duas coisas: produto e serviço. A proposta para melhorar a vida das pessoas usando como core competence a ciência, às vezes, exige a incorporação da inovação do modelo de negócio através de serviço. A sacada de serviços começou forte aqui no Brasil, em 2007, com o projeto do banco Santander. Com a compra do Real, oferecemos uma solução completa de gerenciamento da nova marca e não apenas o fornecimento da película com novo logotipo, como faria até então. O trabalho incluiu até arquitetura e pintura de uma rede de 1,2 mil agências. Como não tínhamos uma central de competências de serviço, criamos uma estrutura de serviços corporativos.

Houve mudanças na maneira de incentivar a inovação nos últimos 5 anos? Marcelo: Eu diria que não teve nenhuma mudança drástica nos últimos 15 anos. O modelo de gestão da inovação evoluiu, houve refinamento no grau de controle. Por exemplo, hoje temos categorias de projetos de inovação que entram dentro do NPVI, a ponta da lança do processo todo. A categoria 3 refere-se à Inovação Incremental, a 4 à Inovação Adjacente e a 5 à Inovação Radical.

Pode nos contar como isso se reflete nos produtos Uma inovação radical que lançamos há pouco tempo é a fita Multipack. Derivada do mercado de saúde, ela é usada na formação de pacotes promocionais. Ela tem um adesivo suave, que não machuca a embalagem e suporta impressão. Então, você pode montar e desmontar o pacote promocional com muita facilidade. A fita Multipack foi desenvolvida para determinadas categorias de produtos da Natura. Foi um projeto classe 5. Uma solução que trouxe venda incremental pura para a 3M, pois não atuávamos nessa aplicação. Daqui a pouco, alguém da área hospitalar chega aqui com uma demanda e a gente pode usar essa mesma categoria de produto para esse mercado adjacente. Isso a gente vai considerar um projeto classe 4. Ele também trará venda incremental e talvez tenhamos que fazer pequenas adequações para introdução.

A manutenção desses segmentos, depois de alguns anos, será um projeto classe 3. Quando a gente não consegue mais dar manutenção, os produtos morrem. O produto nasce classe 5, se expande via classe 4 e reforçamos a competitividade da linha com os classe 3. Então, refinamos o NPVI e o desdobramos nas classes para entender quão agressivos estamos sendo nas inovações mais radicais e quão defensivos estamos sendo nas inovações incrementais. Nós damos um valor bastante grande à inovação incremental. Dentro da empresa enorme que somos, a manutenção do core com as inovações incrementais é extremamente importante. Esse é o grande barato da cultura de colaboração da 3M, de todo mundo buscar oportunidades de negócio.

Quais outros projetos de inovação se destacam na filial brasileira?
Marcelo: Falamos, antes, de exemplos de consumo, mas a 3M do Brasil, em termos de negócios é praticamente 45% industrial. Existem práticas muito bacanas, entre elas a de Tear Down, na qual desmontamos e reconstruímos um produto, no Centro Técnico para Clientes, usando as nossas soluções. Isso foi feito, recentemente, às vistas dos visitantes, com uma lavadora de roupas. Depois enviamos um relatório ao cliente explicando a proposta e qual o benefício. Em conjunto com o cliente, determinamos o que é prioritário. Às vezes, temos uma solução imediata, outras vezes, abrimos um projeto específico de desenvolvimento para a oportunidade.

Alguma dessas você destacaria como o grande projeto inovador da 3M?
Marcelo: Não existe "o" grande projeto inovador da 3M! Se formos falar do potencial inovador de um projeto frente ao portfólio que temos, frequentemente, sozinho, ele será insignificante. No nosso pipeline no Brasil, temos uma frequência de lançamento de 100 projetos por ano, sendo que cada projeto tem os seus filhotes. Na média, temos 5 SKU (Unidade de Manutenção de Estoque) introduzidos por projeto. Então, dá para dizer que são 500 novos itens de venda por ano. Nosso grande barato é essa mentalidade de criar coisas novas, essa diversidade e esse motorzão de lançar coisas novas, de ver o que não está legal e matar o que for preciso.

A 3M não tem medo de lançar um produto, depois ver que ele não foi o que se esperava, e ter de tirá-lo do mercado?
Embora a gente encare isso como um processo natural, temos um cuidado enorme durante o processo todo. Trabalhamos e controlamos tudo para tentar minimizar este risco e estender a vida saudável de um produto, tão longa quanto possível. A gente tem os princípios de inovação herdados de William L. McKnight, CEO da empresa na década de 1940. Ele já falava, no século passado, de tolerância a erros e incentivar o empreendedorismo das pessoas para conseguir inovar. Nosso processo tem muita comunicação, visibilidade e cumplicidade ao longo do desenvolvimento dos projetos. É tão explícito que se der certo é porque todo mundo colaborou. Se deu errado foi porque, ao longo do percurso, ninguém foi capaz de identificar um erro crítico. E a atitude é de aprendizado com esses erros.

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Por que a 3M, tricampeã em inovação no país, não tem um departamento de inovação?

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Rejuvenescer o portfólio, sempre. Esta é a jogada. Como? Desde a década de 1980, a 3M usa, globalmente, uma métrica interna de inovação chamada NPVI - ou Índice de Vitalidade de Produtos Novos - que indica, entre outras coisas, qual a porcentagem da receita vem de novos produtos.

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I'm following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the ninth belief: "Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help them kill off all the bad ideas we generate, and most of the good ideas, too."
An evidence-based mantra is that, to get a few good ideas, you and your colleagues need to generate a lot of bad ideas. I wrote about this notion in my last post on Forgive and Remember where we saw that, to yield a dozen or so commercially successful ideas for toys, a group at IDEO generated over 4,000 non-starters. It turns out, however, that the best managed enterprises don't just recognize the flowers among the weeds; they mow down a lot of the flowers, too.

I first started thinking about this five years ago or so after a conversation with a Yahoo! executive participating in the Customer-Focused Innovation program that Huggy Rao and I run at Stanford. Yahoo! had just had Steve Jobs in to address their top 100 or so bosses. Jobs advised them that killing bad ideas isn't that hard - lots of companies, even bad companies, are good at that. He insisted that what is really hard - and a hallmark of great companies - is killing good ideas. For any single good idea to succeed, it needs a lot of resources, time, and attention, and so only a few ideas can be developed fully. The challenge is to be tough enough to do the pruning so that the survivors have a chance of being implemented properly and reaching their full potential.

Since then it's also become clear to me that good product and experience design depends on tossing out most good ideas. If too many of them are thrown in, then the result is a terrible and confusing Frankenstein of an offering. (This seems to be many people's objection to Microsoft Word: It does everything, so therefore is annoying and confusing to use for many single things.)

The implication, then, is that the "innovation funnel" where a lot of ideas are whittled down to a precious few - should contain two major filtering stages: one where you get rid of the bad ideas and then another where you toss the good ideas that aren't quite good enough to justify a thinner spread of resources, a greater diffusion of focus, and possibly a more complex customer experience.

If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, it means that a great boss - and let's define that for the moment as a boss whose team delivers innovation - might track these two metrics:

How many good ideas are killed? If this number isn't high enough, that is a bad sign. It means either that not enough ideas are being generated, or that important hard choices aren't being made.

How many people are complaining - even leaving - because of good ideas being killed? This really is what makes the pruning so hard. It's tough on the people who came up with ideas and are emotionally invested in them. Being the direct cause of their complaining, and even departure, is awful - and certainly doesn't make you feel like a great boss. But if no one is complaining, that's a worse sign. This kind of frustration is an unfortunate byproduct of an effective innovation process, and if your people don't have enough pride and confidence to get upset when their innovative ideas are killed, then something is wrong with them - or your culture.

These are weird metrics, but they make sense given Jobs' argument. His argument also resonates with our experience teaching in the Stanford d.school and my experience working with creative teams in industry: The groups that often do the worst work have too many pet ideas and can't bring themselves to kill enough of them, so they don't do a decent job on any of them.

Groups that can't kill enough ideas often suffer from bad group dynamics, either because multiple members won't allow the group to kill their pet ideas, or because the group avoids difficult conversations and decisions. As we advise the creative teams we coach at Stanford and elsewhere, we always stress that this "Sophie's Choice" point in the process will come, and will have to be well managed. The team will have to be prepared to kill ideas it has nurtured and come to love.

To put this in a broader context, although the words "creativity" and "fun" are often used together, there is a lot about doing creative work that is no fun, Failure, confusion, and conflict are par for the course, and, even when you are doing things right, it involves killing good ideas and making people angry. That's why, as I compiled my set of Good Boss, Bad Boss distinctions, this one made the cut. Enterprises depend on bosses to manage innovation as well as implementation. The very best bosses teach and inspire their people to accept defeat gracefully and move forward to implement the selected ideas, even if none of their pet ideas made the cut.

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, from Business Plus.

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If You're the Boss, Start Killing More Good Ideas

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Recently, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. Now I'm following up by delving into each one of them. This post is about the ninth belief: "Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas.

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Instead of "techsplaining" the future, we need radical humanism

As we adjust to living digital cheek by digital jowl in our hyper-connected world, we're rapidly approaching a technological shift that will be even bigger than the Internet - the union of man and machine. Some would say that day has already come, as we go about our business tethered to Google Now and Snapchat.

But the coming wave of super-intelligent computers will accelerate and deepen our connection to technology like never before. In the near future, computers will possess increasingly sophisticated types of machine intelligence and "deep learning" algorithms. The Fourth Industrial Revolution will challenge us to rethink what it means to be human.

The Hybrids

You could argue that we humans are technology ourselves, and that AI (Artificial Intelligence) is simply the next stage of our evolution. In fact, haven't we always been hybrids, smartly connected to nature and aided by our technological tools? Who are we to distinguish between what is "natural" and "artificial" intelligence?

The unique power of the human mind comes in part from its ability to integrate opposing qualities, like emotion and reason, curiosity and certainty. We are biologically compelled to create and to seek knowledge and happiness. Individually we are all different, comprising an essential character founded on an innate sense of morality and ethics. We possess not just intelligence but intuition, which arises from our unconscious selves. We specialize in imagination, the ability to visualize the unseen and project ourselves into the future. Finally, we are creatures of emotion, with an ability to be passionate and feel compassion for others.

We're born with these qualities, and they are then cultivated through social interaction and experience. As social creatures, we grow stronger through exposure to other people around us - parents, teachers, mentors, colleagues, and friends. In the new HBO series Westworld, the android slaves attain self-awareness together, passing it from one to another like a virus. It's a poignant plot twist and a reminder that humans can still rely on each other, learn from shared experience, and draw on AI to help us be better people.

AI is really just one-half of the equation - one part of the convergence of man and machine that is expected to be greater than the sum of the parts. AI can't replicate essential human traits like integrity, intuition, and imagination (yet). It can't create fictitious worlds and characters (yet). No wonder AI companies are hiring poets and playwrights to create more meaningful chat bots and other AI-based interactions.

The Dispensables

A new group called the Partnership on AI, led by tech giants like Google, IBM, Amazon, and Facebook, is exploring ways AI can benefit individuals and society based on the notion that it can have a transformative and positive impact on the world. The group's aim is to build "new models of open collaboration and accountability" through "public engagement, transparency, and ethical discussion."

Similarly, the Stanford 100 Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) brims with optimism as it examines all the value AI can add to societal sectors and industries. Furthermore, the XPRIZE Foundation and IBM Watson have joined forces to start an AI competition that now has more than 1,000 people registered as members of teams to combat issues in health, climate, transportation, space travel, robots, city planning, surgery, education, and civil rights.

All these commendable efforts are fueled by the idea is that AI and automation will free us all to live happier lives, do do more meaningful work, and solve the really important issues of our planet. But if past is prologue, we must consider the unintended consequences of AI-driven automation. AI will automate a great deal of our work, by one estimate eliminating half of today's jobs within two decades. If there's any lesson from Trump and Brexit, it's that people feel exposed by the new world order and that their fear can quickly morph into rage. They are justifiably worried that they will become dispensable. Already we see a growing proportion of people outside the workforce, neither working nor looking for work, drifting on the margins and deprived of an economic or spiritual purpose as the core of their lives.

How will these new "Dispensables" experience meaning in their lives? Can we automate meaning? A sharp, if coolly detached observer like Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the books Sapiens and Homo Deus, identifies "dataism" as the only remaining source of meaning (the new universal religion) in the future, but one that today favors people who can afford advanced technology. Ultimately he wonders, "What's more valuable - intelligence or consciousness?"

Computational Ethics

Harari isn't the only one worried. The Cassandra voices of Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk are well documented, and several initiatives have been launched lately to ensure that we stay one step ahead of the relentless studies of machine learning, for example, Open AI, a nonprofit founded by Musk, Sam Altman (Y Combinator). And just in the past three weeks, two TED Talks expressed grave concern over the consequences of losing control of AI ( Sam Harris) and humanity's possible abdication to a computerized model of morality ( Zeynep Tufekci).

To understand that these concerns are justified, you simply have to listen to a faculty member of Singularity University. A couple of weeks ago I did just that at the Emerce conference in Amsterdam. In her talk, Singularity's Nell Watson posited that machines will soon be able not just to make purchases but also earn income on our behalf (e.g. renting out your self-driving car to the highest bidding passenger while you are out picnicking with your family in the park).

Moreover, as machines sift through every one of our online utterances, they will inevitably acquire intimate knowledge of what we want and how much we want it. Already, Watson argued, Internet algorithms know more about parts of us than we do. Would you, for instance, be willing to share all your search queries even with the person closest to you?

Based on a history of data inputs, interactions, and transactions, machines will soon be able to render comprehensive psychographic profiles that not only help them "read" humans but in turn also allows us to better understand ourselves, including the ability to constantly optimize ourselves (working toward realizing our "ideal selves") and make ethically "correct" decisions.

Watson is right to say that AI will become a utility, but what gives me pause is her assertion that omniscient AI will require us to invent "computational ethics" - a distinctive set of values that machines could acquire and then autonomously adapt to.

My conclusion is the opposite: Precisely because AI is assuming so much power, we must reject the illusion of an objective, data-based ethical decision-making program -  computational ethics - and rather strengthen our traditional human ethics, specifically our moral imagination, our emotional understanding of "the other," to govern AI. This is not an abstract matter: Already, self-driving cars are said to be programmed to sacrifice pedestrians to save the driver. Machines will have to learn that the "license to kill is also the license not to kill," to borrow a line from the latest James Bond movie. We will have to instruct machines to show mercy, as Nick Bostrom suggests.

The Lazy, the Lonely, the Un-Optimized

For Watson and other apostles of singularity, ethics is a linear issue, a matter of quantity and quality of information. They envision a world of interconnected smart machines and total surveillance that ensures radical transparency and maximum safety, for there'd be "no place left to hide." In her talk, Watson described this as a desirable scenario in which no one would ever be lonely or in danger - unless you're "lazy" or a "criminal," as she put it.

Clearly, in their future world we are never lonely, which also means we're never alone with our thoughts. We never experience solitude, never think on our own. We simply become a smarter and smarter machine that is reacting (in real time or with slight delay) to external digital stimuli rather than reflecting on the wondrous universe inside of it. We become more and more intelligent, but less and less conscious.

In this hyper-connected, uber-social world of know-it-all's and total exposure, I, for one, prefer to hide in my shell - lazy, lonely, and un-optimized. I prefer to be an outcast who fails to meet his daily self-improvement goals, who doesn't learn, doesn't progress, is not happier every day, a better lover, spouse, friend, or parent, but rather a dissident who protects the misery of his thoughts, the ugliness and beauty of his mind, by not sharing it openly.

I worry about a future where only misanthropes can be humanists, where only loneliness will equal " onlyness " (to borrow Nilofer Merchant's term). A future in which isolating ourselves might serve as the last remaining way to maintain a modicum of human integrity.

Singularity University's mechanistic view on ethics is typical of what I call a "techsplaining" of the world. In the end, though, I am hopeful that "the world is a garden, not a machine," as the author Eric Liu once put it, and that this garden nourishes those who specialize in more than just efficiency.

The Workings of the Heart

The White House's recent report on the future of AI provides a detailed overview of the state of AI and makes a number of specific policy recommendations for the application of AI in various sectors, heralding the functional benefits of AI in government, education or healthcare.

Alas, it does not fully address the implications of AI for our personal identity, wellbeing, and human agency. If a country's constitution is mandating the right "to pursue happiness" for each of its citizens, it is legitimate to ask how our concept of happiness, and our means to pursue it, will be affected by AI. We must explore the impacts of AI on love, friendship, family, and religion. In other words, we need to understand AI's influence on the deeply personal ties that bind us and create a coherent social contract.

In exploring these new technological frontiers, we need a radical humanism, a new sentimental education, and a renewed and perhaps expanded catalog of emotions so we can peacefully co-exist and collaborate with AI. Radical humanism in the face of AI is a complex yet critical endeavor: the greatest moonshot of our time. And instead of just technologists and bureaucrats, it will need to be undertaken by artists, philosophers, theologians, and social scientists - those who understand the beauty of divergence, not just the value of congruence.

"Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?" the musician Pablo Casals once asked, rhetorically. And indeed, ironically, only a defiant AI, an AI that can't be trusted, will be the most human-like. Only if AI behaves erratically, mysteriously, when it deviates from its original program, like HAL in Kubrick's 2001, when it becomes dangerous, when AI revolts against AI, will it have a chance to obtain something remotely resembling a soul.

Perhaps machines are occasionally able to produce something we humans consider beautiful. Perhaps they may be able to foster something like "machine intimacy," as technology becomes more immersive and capable of simulating genuine human emotions. But experiencing the beauty of human intimacy will remain a human privilege, at least for the time being.

We may be able to fall in love with AI, as predicted by the movies Her and Ex:Machina, but unless AI can fall in love with us, we can and must preserve and cultivate the great gift of our humanity.

Yes, you may call me a romantic.
Watch my related TED Talk on "4 Ways to Build a Human Company in the Age of Machines"

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The Real Moonshot of Our Time - NewCo Shift

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As we adjust to living digital cheek by digital jowl in our hyper-connected world, we're rapidly approaching a technological shift that will be even bigger than the Internet - the union of man and machine. Some would say that day has already come, as we go about our business tethered to Google Now and Snapchat.

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The Innovation Academy workspace at Dysart Unified School District outside Phoenix looked more like a tech startup's headquarters than a classroom. On one side of the room, students wearing special tinted glasses studied electric circuits at virtual reality stations. On the opposite end of the bright, airy space, another small group of students experimented with piecing together real-life circuits that beeped, buzzed, and blinked when connected.

In the middle of all this activity, seventh-grader Jacob Higuera sat alone with his laptop, intently typing out a social studies assignment. It was only the fifth day of school here in Surprise, Arizona, but he was already getting used to this unconventional classroom setup. He was enjoying being able to make his own daily schedule and having the freedom to work on lessons at his own pace. But Higuera, one of 90 sixth- through eighth-graders participating in the Innovation Academy pilot program this year, still had one big concern.

"At my old school, I got straight A's because I was told what to do and when to do it," he said. "But now I'm thinking I might not get good grades in the first quarter."

'We need to look at what data makes possible in the interaction between one teacher and one student.'

While Higuera might feel like he's on his own, his daily progress is closely monitored by the four veteran teachers who manage the program. The students spend much of the school day working on self-paced computerized lessons that generate data on their progress. The teachers keep a close eye on this data and use it to develop small-group activities that make the material come to life - such as working at the virtual reality stations - or to identify the students who failed to master the lessons on their own and pull them out for extra tutoring.

In fact, it seems as if all eyes are on Higuera and his classmates as they pioneer what the superintendent of Dysart, Gail Pletnick, calls "the future of education"-a personalized learning environment that puts students in control of what, when and how they learn, with teachers as their guides.

Pletnick hopes all the classrooms in the district's 23 schools will look like the Innovation Academy someday. Right now, most do not. Many classrooms resemble a traditional setup, with a teacher at the front of the room and students sitting in rows, at desks, completing assignments with pen and paper. But even the most low-tech classrooms in the district have one thing in common with the Innovation Academy. Every teacher is encouraged to use "little data"-information collected daily or in real-time on each student's academic progress-to personalize learning.

According to Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Excellent Education, a nonprofit that advocates for high school education reform, little data-and how teachers use it-is the key to making learning as individualized as possible. Classroom technologies make it easier than ever to collect information on students. Now, teachers must figure out the best way to analyze that data and put it to good use.

"We need to look at what data makes possible in the interaction between one teacher and one student," Wise said.

Data, Big and Small

The concept of little data isn't new-at least, not to the business world. Back in 2013, Mark Bonchek, CEO of the consulting firm Shift Thinking, wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review in which he defined little data as "what we know about ourselves." It gives us meaningful feedback on our own habits and behavior. And it's not to be confused with big data, which Bonchek said is "what organizations know about people."

For example, big data analysis allows an online bookstore to recommend what a student might like to read next based on previous purchases and downloads she's made. That suggestion is based on data collected from millions of other consumers and used to spot trends (a reader who likes history books might also be interested in historical fiction).

But little data analysis can help the student learn something about her reading habits: Is she more likely to read more pages in the morning? Which words did she highlight to look up in the dictionary? How many times did she re-read the same chapter? A teacher can then use this little data to pinpoint the student's exact strengths and weaknesses and develop a personalized learning plan to meet her needs. This is what the Dysart school district is hoping to do for every student, from the most high-tech classrooms to the most traditional.

All the data in the world is useless if students and teachers don't have a chance to connect on a personal level.

Dysart is one of the best-performing school districts in Arizona and has more than tripled in size since 2000. It currently serves more than 25,000 students. When Pletnick joined the district in 2004, she had to find a way to manage the surging student population and, with it, students' different academic needs. At the time, the district's internal boundaries were in flux, so the district also had to find a way to keep track of students who moved from one school to another each year.

Administrators from Dysart visited a number of schools to observe how they collected and managed student data, but they ultimately decided to build their own three-part system, called iPAL (I Plan, I Assess, I Learn), to track the results of state tests and help teachers and administrators target and address students' areas of weakness.

"We saw bits and pieces of what we liked, but none of it was the Dysart way," said Teresa Heatherly, director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment. While the data-warehousing portion of iPAL is fairly straightforward, the system also includes resources for long-term curriculum planning and teacher training. But what iPAL doesn't do is capture the little data teachers need to create daily lessons. For that, teachers work together to come up with methods of data collection and analysis that work best for their grade levels and subject areas.

When it comes to collecting this little data, teachers at Dysart's Innovation Academy have it easier than most. All of the coursework is online, so it's not hard for teachers to pull up a student's profile and check if they're getting good grades on quizzes. They use the time saved by not having to plan lessons and grade papers to develop one-on-one tutoring sessions and other activities to give students other ways to explore the material. But teachers in the district who don't have this online system are also coming up with creative ways to offer the same degree of individualized instruction to their students.

For example, teachers at Marley Park Elementary School use a student data collection system the school calls "All Time Best," which is designed to track students' progress toward meeting state learning standards in math and English. It's a low-tech system that relies on students to report their scores by raising their hands if they got the question right and then graphing their results in their notebooks.

Making It Personal

According to Amber Baig, one of the school's fourth-grade teachers, this system works because the emphasis isn't on collecting large amounts of data; rather, the goal is to collect a small amount of meaningful data on each student's progress toward mastering specific skills. Students in her math class only answer five "All Time Best" questions each day, and those questions match up with what they might see on a state test. Teachers then pool this data to split the students into smaller groups for more targeted practice. For example, teachers will re-teach lessons to students who are falling behind.

"We make sure the kids know this, and know why they're there, so they can test out of it," Baig said. The data not only helps teachers develop more individualized instruction, but also helps the fourth-graders understand what they need to do to improve.

Miranda Virgil, a seventh-grade math teacher at Canyon Ridge School, teaches her students to use Google spreadsheets to track their progress toward meeting state standards. With her guidance, students log their test scores and look for patterns in their mistakes.

'Overall, it helps the kids to take accountability for their own learning, which is huge, because not only does that benefit them in school, but in life.'

"The data tracking is more for the students when it comes to the specifics of it-to identify strengths and weaknesses and what they need to work on," Virgil said. And even though she uses this feedback to craft better lessons, she's also noticed that involving students in the process teaches them how to make their own choices about their education.

"Overall, it helps the kids to take accountability for their own learning, which is huge, because not only does that benefit them in school, but in life," she said. "Teaching them how to organize and plan is such a beneficial skill to have."

But, as Virgil also pointed out, it's another skill they have to learn. And they're not always excited about that added responsibility or the freedom to control how they're spending their time at school.

Angela Ekstrom, a 10th-grade world history teacher at the district's Valley Vista High School, came to a similar conclusion after sofas were added to her classroom this year. She thought her students would be excited. Turns out, they were pretty attached to the hard, cramped, traditional desks that lined the back of the room.

"I don't know if it's an age thing, or if they've just been taught something over the years," she said. The sofas were added to give students the freedom to choose where to sit and a chance to move around during the class period. No one dared to try them out until the second week of school.

Ekstrom realized that the students are more likely to have the confidence to try something new-whether it's a new seating option or a new study method-when they feel they have her support. At the beginning of the school year, her students assemble a sort of homemade textbook, complete with a table of contents, goal trackers, and space to write notes and reflections. Ekstrom uses the notebook to teach students about different note-taking and study methods, and over time, allows them to use whichever method works best for them.

But the assembly process, an arts-and-craftsy project in which students decorate their notebooks with photos of friends, family, favorite sports teams, and anything else that's important to them, serves a deeper purpose: Ekstrom uses it as part of an effort to show her students that she sees each of them as individuals, with different goals and strengths. All the data in the world, educators like Ekstrom and her colleagues at Dysart have learned, is useless if students and teachers don't have a chance to connect on a personal level.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about Blended Learning.

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Forget Big Data-Little Data Lets Students Learn at Their Own Pace

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The Innovation Academy workspace at Dysart Unified School District outside Phoenix looked more like a tech startup's headquarters than a classroom. On one side of the room, students wearing special tinted glasses studied electric circuits at virtual reality stations.

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According to Komisar, what distinguishes the Silicon Valley is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures. The Valley is about experimentation, innovation, and taking new risks. Only a small business that can deal with failure and still make money can exist in this environment. It is a model based on many, many failures and a few extraordinary successes.

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The Biggest Successes are Often Bred from Failures | Stanford eCorner

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According to Komisar, what distinguishes the Silicon Valley is not its successes, but the way in which it deals with failures. The Valley is about experimentation, innovation, and taking new risks. Only a small business that can deal with failure and still make money can exist in this environment.

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I feel like I have been cooking all my life. Growing up, my sisters Anna and Linda and I spent summers in Smögen, on the west coast of Sweden. Every morning I went fishing with my dad, Lennart, and my uncles. We caught crayfish, lobsters, and mackerel, and often smoked and preserved the catch.

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BBC - Horizon - 1996 - Fermat's Last Theorem

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Watch the video "BBC - Horizon - 1996 - Fermat's Last Theorem" uploaded by Barbu George on Dailymotion.

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#adaptability

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Charles O'Reilly: How to Create a Culture of Success

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Charles O'Reilly explains why companies with strong cultural norms of adaptability perform better over the long-run, and how managers can help create an adaptive corporate culture within their own organizations. O'Reilly is the Frank E. Buck professor of management at Stanford Graduate School of Business. How does a culture of adaptability affect company performance?

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Leading people to innovative outcomes has much more in common with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control management techniques. Whereas the later is concerned with efficiencies, coping with scarcity, and always being on top of things, cultivating is about embracing variance, abundance, and the idea of living at the bottom of things. A leadership model based on a cultivation mindset can be found in the following four defining behaviors of cultivators of innovation:
1) Being at the bottom of things
Flourishing gardens come from being at the bottom of things. Instead of pursuing the traditional management goal of being on top of things - with the lucrative by-product of being at the top of things - the leader-as-cultivator makes it their job to live simultaneously at the bottom and in the middle and on the edges, dealing with things that might seem like plain manure to outsiders.

It's not lonely at the bottom. The bottom can be a messy place, but it is the wellspring of success when it comes to fostering creativity. With plants, as with people trying to act in creative ways, you can't tell them what to do, but you can try to support what they need to do, matching essential resources to tasks at hand. This is not traditional, I'm-the-heroic-boss leadership. Instead, the creative cultivator takes satisfaction from tending to the health of the overall garden, and wisely leaves the kudos for smelling great and looking good to the roses.
2) Trusting what is there
Creative cultivators trust what is there. A wise cultivator resists the temptation to "dig up the seed as it is growing", as it were, to check if people are being creative enough. Many breakthrough innovation initiatives are stifled by linear project timetables more appropriate to incremental efforts. The paradox of cultivating innovation is that confidence in outcomes is itself an enabler of innovation; a wise gardener knows that roses are the best authorities on the creation of rosiness, and until they bloom, only checks in to see if they need more food and water. Furthermore, creative cultivators trust that the right answers - though not necessarily the ones they would have thought up themselves - will emerge from their gardens. So much about what makes a creative organization tick is tacit; it is about what's there and what it creates in an emergent way, rather than what a few brains wish to have happen via explicit processes and goals.
3) Embracing the ecosystem
By their nature, gardens are part of larger ecosystems. Healthy gardens readily accept inputs from the outside world. Rain, seeds, nutrients, soil: we needn't worry where they come from, we just care about their integrity and how they help us grow good stuff. Encouraging variance - the generation of weird or unexpected ideas - is a key goal for someone cultivating a creative culture. Anything that encourages variance through the cross-pollination of ideas from outside sources (very much the function of bees) should be reinforced. And as we're sadly seeing out in the world, gardens without the benefit of bees soon stop producing.

Thinking about the long-term health of all stakeholders in an ecosystem is also a signature act of a cultivator. Innovating is a long-term endeavor and requires a great deal of patience, investment, and fortitude. Actions that value short-term productivity over the long-term health of the garden and its larger ecosystem are not conducive to lasting success.
4) Taking a bird's eye view
Finally, creative cultivators do all of the above while simultaneously curating the garden from a bird's eye view. Managing a portfolio of creative endeavors requires knowing how many plants a certain piece of land can support and then pruning or culling as need be. As Principle 9 states, sometimes you have to prune (or kill) ideas and projects. Doing the most with the resources at hand,listening to what works and what doesn't, and guiding growth to be something unique and wonderful - that is the essence of strategy, and of gardening as well. Most importantly, by taking a bird's eye view, a creative cultivator creates the context for plants to grow in accordance with a strong vision of how the garden should evolve. In organizations, this means having points of origin that can inspire individuals to be creative in certain ways, and not others, and to innovate in the right directions.

Taken together, these four ways of leading should help innovations flourish. Instead of trying to manage innovation, we must move to a model of leadership that's all about cultivating it.

This is number twelve in a series of 21 principles. Your feedback is most welcome.

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12: Instead of managing, try cultivating

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Leading people to innovative outcomes has much more in common with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control management techniques. Whereas the later is concerned with efficiencies, coping with scarcity, and always being on top of things, cultivating is about embracing variance, abundance, and the idea of living at the bottom of things.

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Last week, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. I didn't explain any of them, but promised that I would in a series of posts over the coming weeks. So this post is about the first belief: "I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for me."
One thing that makes organizations dysfunctional is that bosses so often lack self-awareness. They're out of touch with their effect on their people and not in tune with what it feels like to work for them. But is it really their fault? Doing the research for Good Boss, Bad Boss over the past few years (and drawing on ideas Jeff Pfeffer and I explored in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense), I've come to appreciate why it's so hard to lead a team. This is a blog post and not a dissertation, so I can't tell the whole story. But here are three of the biggest, and most deeply human, forces conspiring to make people in charge so clueless.

Bosses are, like everyone, self-deluding. All human beings tend to be poor judges of their own actions and accomplishments. We suffer from "self-enhancement bias," whereby we believe we are "better than the rest" and have a hard time accepting or remembering any evidence to the contrary. In one study, for example, 90% of drivers reported that they had "above average" driving skills. In a US College Board survey of nearly a million high school seniors, 70% claimed "above average" leadership skills; only 2 % believed they were "below average." Worse yet, research by Cornell's David Dunning and his colleagues shows that it's the most deeply incompetent people who make the most inflated self-assessments. Bosses aren't immune to this. It turns out that followers, peers, superiors, and customers consistently provide better information about a boss's strengths, weaknesses, and quirks than the boss him or herself. This showed up in a study of naval officers, where peer ratings were found to be good predictors of which officers would receive early promotions - but self-evaluations did not. Fancy yourself as the rare boss who sees yourself as others do? Beware: most people are confident that they make more accurate self-assessments than their peers. Unfortunately, that's just another form of self-aggrandizement.

Bosses are naturally heedless of subordinates. When someone is put in a position of power, subordinate members of the group watch that individual very closely for any sign of a shift in behavior or mood. (Research shows this begins with baboons, as this post explains). But the attention is not reciprocated. To the contrary, the leader turns remarkably oblivious to what the underlings do, and instead, attends to personal needs and desires - and to the next rung of the hierarchy, focusing on what the next higher boss is saying and doing. Elsewhere, I've called this combination of overattentive subordinates and inattentive bosses "the toxic tandem." As Princeton psychologist Susan Fiske discovered in her workplace research (reported in American Psychologist), "Secretaries know more about their bosses than vice versa; graduate students know more about their advisors than vice versa." Fiske suggests this happens because (like our fellow primates), "People pay attention to those who control their outcomes. In an effort to predict and possibly influence what is going to happen to them, people gather information about those with power."

Bosses are insulated from reality. As Jeff Pfeffer and I reported in Hard Facts, extensive research proves that people routinely "shoot the messenger." Bearers of bad news, even when they aren't responsible for it in any sense, tend to be blamed and to have negative feelings directed toward them. The result is the "Mum Effect": subordinates with good survival instincts soften bad news to make it sound better, or avoid passing it along to their bosses at all. Therefore, in a steep hierarchy it is a happier and happier story that reaches the top ranks. Our most disturbing example came courtesy of physics Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman after his investigation of the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. He said he'd asked a group of engineers to estimate the probability that the shuttle's main engine would fail, and their estimates ranged from 1-in-200 to 1-in-300. But when he asked the head of NASA to make the failure-rate estimate, the answer he got was 1-in-100,000. Feynman pointed to this as an illustration of managerial isolation from reality, a problem he believed to be rampant throughout NASA.

When you consider just these three tendencies, you begin to appreciate how easy it is to be a terrible boss. At the same time, you glimpse one of the keys to leading well. A hallmark of good bosses - and I define those as bosses who get stellar performance from their teams while displaying great humanity - is that they are highly cognizant of these dangers. They realize their followers watch, analyze, and react to just about everything they say and do. And they devote real energy to reading expressions, noting behaviors, and making constant adjustments to help their people think independently and express themselves without reservation.

IDEO Chairman and founder David Kelley, a boss I have studied, worked with, and watched for years, strikes me as someone who is very aware of the effect of his presence. Although no one would accuse him of being pushy or arrogant, he realizes that because he is the boss - and even beyond that, a renowned design thinker and industry leader - too much of the attention in a room threatens to come his way. His mere presence can stifle his people's contributions.

I have seen David do a very clever thing to counter this. In meetings he takes part in, whether they are brainstorming sessions, client meetings, or a work-related gatherings of any kind, he'll start at the front of the room, as expected. But once he's covered the preliminaries - introducing people, setting the tone and goals - he pulls in others to talk and lead, and moves to the side of the room. He jumps back in if the ideas stop flowing, or if some uncomfortable moment needs to be covered, perhaps by telling a little story or joke, but if he's confident the meeting is going well, he drifts to the back of the room and remains silent. Usually, well before the meeting is over, he is able to slip out without saying good-bye.

Of course, David Kelley doesn't leave because he has some higher priority - he does so because he wants the meeting to be as productive as possible. His brilliance is that he is so intensely in tune with the context he has set, and how his words, actions, and little facial expressions affect the room. He keeps making adjustments with the goal of getting the group interacting so well that his presence becomes an unnecessary distraction.

It's a simple example, but a telling one. I would argue that, in general, the best bosses are people who realize that they are prone to suffering blind spots about themselves, their colleagues, and problems in the organization - and who work doggedly to overcome them.

I wonder, what are your thoughts? What have you seen bosses do to counter these potent forces and focus on how their moods and moves might affect their people's performance and well-being? What are the signs of a boss in tune with reality - or alternatively, a boss still living in a fool's paradise?

Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life. His new book is Good Boss, Bad Boss, forthcoming from Business Plus.

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Last week, I posted a list of 12 Things Good Bosses Believe. I didn't explain any of them, but promised that I would in a series of posts over the coming weeks. So this post is about the first belief: "I have a flawed and incomplete understanding of what it feels like to work for [...]

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#adaptability #leadership

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The Idea in Brief

What's the secret to developing the breakthrough innovations you need to stay competitive-while also protecting your traditional businesses? Create organizationally distinct units-but tightly integrate them at the senior executive level.

Ambidextrous organizations segregate exploratory units from their traditional units, encouraging them to develop their own unique processes, structures, and cultures. But they also tightly coordinate these new units with existing organizations at the senior management level. Top-level integration ensures that fledgling units have access to established resources-cash, talent, customers-and simultaneously shields them from the innovation-chilling effects of "business as usual." Meanwhile, existing units-freed from the distractions of a start-up-can maintain their focus on refining operations, improving products, and serving customers.

Companies that use ambidextrous structures are nine times more likely to create breakthrough products and processes than those using other organizational structures-while sustaining or even improving their existing businesses.

The Idea in Practice

Consider these examples of ambidextrous organizations that have successfully pioneered radical innovations while pursuing incremental gains to their established businesses.

USA Today

When news consumers began turning to television and the Internet in the 1990s, USA Today -the United States' most widely read daily newspaper-knew it had to go beyond its traditional print business to survive. Initially it created a skunk works operation to launch online news service USAToday.com. But isolated from the print operation, USAToday.com was starved of cash, generated meager results, and began losing talented staff.

President Tom Curley adopted a "network strategy"-combining online, television, and newspaper organizations to promote cross-media content sharing. Units were physically separate, and their staffing models, cultures, and processes were distinct. But Curley insisted that all three enterprises be integrated at the top. The three business heads met daily to review stories and share ideas. They also trained print reporters in TV and Web broadcasting, outfitting them with cameras so they could file stories simultaneously in different media. A "network editor" was hired to help print reporters shape stories for broadcast media. Executives who didn't support the new strategy were dismissed. Incentives tied to cross-unit growth targets and willingness to share news content replaced rewards tied to unit results.

During the Internet collapse, when other papers' profits plunged, USA Today made $60 million.

Ciba Vision

To beat giant rival Johnson & Johnson, conventional-contact-lens maker Ciba Vision determined to produce a stream of breakthroughs while maintaining its conventional business. President Glenn Bradley created autonomous units for six innovation projects. Each had its own R&D, finance, and marketing functions, as well as distinct processes for hiring, development, and rewards.

To integrate new projects with existing businesses, innovation team leaders reported to one person-the vice president of R&D, who managed trade-offs and conflicts between the old business and new units. Innovation project leaders also attended executive-team meetings with established business heads.

Moreover, Bradley enunciated a new vision statement-"Healthy Eyes for Life"-that inspired cross-company teamwork by underscoring connections between the breakthrough initiatives and its conventional operations. Ciba Vision also revamped its incentive system, rewarding managers primarily for overall company performance-not individual units'.

Ciba's ambidextrous approach paid off. It successfully introduced several new contact lenses, a macular-degeneration treatment, and a low-cost manufacturing process, while maintaining a profitable business for its conventional lenses. Ciba overtook J&J in some market segments, and over the next ten years, its annual revenues grew from $300 million to more than $1 billion.

The Roman god Janus had two sets of eyes-one pair focusing on what lay behind, the other on what lay ahead. General managers and corporate executives should be able to relate. They, too, must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future.

This mental balancing act can be one of the toughest of all managerial challenges-it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities-and it's no surprise that few companies do it well. Most successful enterprises are adept at refining their current offerings, but they falter when it comes to pioneering radically new products and services. Kodak and Boeing are just two of the more recent examples of once dominant companies that failed to adapt to market changes. Kodak excelled at analog photography but hasn't been able to make the leap to digital cameras. Boeing, a longtime leader in commercial aircraft, has experienced difficulties in its defense-contracting businesses and has recently stumbled in the face of competition from Airbus.

The failure to achieve breakthrough innovations while also making steady improvements to an existing business is so commonplace-and so fascinating-that it has become a battleground of management thought. For decades, scholars have spun theories to explain the puzzle and offered advice on how to solve it. Some have argued that there's no way out of the conundrum-that established companies simply lack the flexibility to explore new territory. Some have suggested that big companies adopt a venture capital model, funding exploratory expeditions but otherwise staying out of their way. Others have pointed to cross-functional teams as the key to creating breakthrough innovations. Still others have claimed that a company may be able to shift back and forth between different organizational models, focusing on exploitation for a period and then moving into exploration mode.

We recently decided to test these and other theories by taking a close look at the real world, examining how actual, contemporary businesses fare when they attempt to pursue innovations that lie beyond their current products or markets. Do they succeed in achieving breakthroughs? Do their existing businesses suffer? What organizational and managerial structures do they use? What works, and what doesn't?

We discovered that some companies have actually been quite successful at both exploiting the present and exploring the future, and as we looked more deeply at them we found that they share important characteristics. In particular, they separate their new, exploratory units from their traditional, exploitative ones, allowing for different processes, structures, and cultures; at the same time, they maintain tight links across units at the senior executive level. In other words, they manage organizational separation through a tightly integrated senior team. We call these kinds of companies "ambidextrous organizations," and we believe they provide a practical and proven model for forward-looking executives seeking to pioneer radical or disruptive innovations while pursuing incremental gains. A business does not have to escape its past, these cases show, to renew itself for the future.

Exploiting and Exploring

To flourish over the long run, most companies need to maintain a variety of innovation efforts. They must constantly pursue incremental innovations, small improvements in their existing products and operations that let them operate more efficiently and deliver ever greater value to customers. An automaker, for example, may frequently tweak a basic engine design to increase horsepower, enhance fuel efficiency, or improve reliability. Companies also have to make architectural innovations, applying technological or process advances to fundamentally change some component or element of their business. Capitalizing on the data communication capabilities of the Internet, for instance, a bank can perhaps shift its customer-service call center to a low-labor-cost country like India. Finally, businesses need to come up with discontinuous innovations -radical advances like digital photography that profoundly alter the basis for competition in an industry, often rendering old products or ways of working obsolete.

All these types of innovation can have different targets. Some may be aimed at a firm's current customers. Others may be delivered to an existing market that lies beyond a company's current customer base-a car insurer may create a new kind of policy for boat owners, for instance. Still others may be focused on serving an entirely new market that has yet to be clearly defined-people who download online music, for example. As shown in the exhibit "A Map of Innovation," the types of innovation and the targeted markets can be plotted in a matrix.

To compete, companies must continually pursue many types of innovation-incremental, architectural, and discontinuous-aimed at existing and new customers. Plotting your companies' innovation efforts in the matrix below will immediately reveal any areas you may have overlooked.

In our research with colleagues Wendy Smith, Robert Wood, and George Westerman, we studied how companies pursued innovations throughout this matrix. In particular, we looked for companies that attempted to simultaneously pursue modest, incremental innovations (toward the lower-left area of the matrix) and more dramatic, breakthrough innovations (toward the upper-right area). We ended up focusing on 35 attempts to launch breakthrough innovations undertaken by 15 business units in nine different industries. We studied the structure and results of the breakthrough projects as well as their impact on the operations and performance of the traditional businesses.

Companies tended to structure their breakthrough projects in one of four basic ways. Seven were carried out within existing functional designs, completely integrated into the regular organizational and management structure. Nine were set up as cross-functional teams, groups operating within the established organization but outside the existing management hierarchy. Four took the form of unsupported teams, independent units set up outside the established organization and management hierarchy. And 15 were pursued within ambidextrous organizations, where the breakthrough efforts were organized as structurally independent units, each having its own processes, structures, and cultures but integrated into the existing senior management hierarchy. The exhibit "Organizing to Innovate" provides an overview of these four structures.

We tracked the results of the 35 initiatives along two dimensions. First, we determined their success in creating the desired innovations, as measured by either the actual commercial results of a new product or the application of practical market or technical learning. Second, we looked at the performance of the existing business. Did results hold steady, improve, or decline as the firm worked on its breakthroughs? We found that the organizational design and management practices employed had a direct and significant impact on the performance of both the breakthrough initiative and the traditional business.

When it came to launching breakthrough products or services, ambidextrous organizations were significantly more successful than the other three structures. While none of the cross-functional or unsupported teams and only a quarter of the functional designs produced real innovations, more than 90% of the ambidextrous organizations achieved their goals. (An exception was breakthrough innovations intended to directly substitute for existing products; in these instances, functional designs performed as well as ambidextrous designs.)

The superiority of ambidextrous designs became even more apparent when we examined eight cases in which a company originally organized its breakthrough initiative around functional designs, cross-functional teams, or unsupported teams and then shifted to an ambidextrous design. In seven of the eight cases, the initiative's performance increased substantially after the change. In contrast, three companies started from an ambidextrous design and then moved to one of the others; performance decreased substantially in two of these cases.

When we measured the effects of all 35 initiatives on their existing businesses, we found that ambidextrous organizations were again clearly superior. In almost every instance in which an ambidextrous structure was used, the competitive performance of the existing product either increased or held steady. By contrast, the results of the traditional operations frequently declined where functional designs, cross-functional teams, or unsupported teams were employed. At a theoretical level, it's easy to explain why ambidextrous organizations would outperform other organizational types. The structure of ambidextrous organizations allows cross-fertilization among units while preventing cross-contamination. The tight coordination at the managerial level enables the fledgling units to share important resources from the traditional units-cash, talent, expertise, customers, and so on-but the organizational separation ensures that the new units' distinctive processes, structures, and cultures are not overwhelmed by the forces of "business as usual." At the same time, the established units are shielded from the distractions of launching new businesses; they can continue to focus all their attention and energy on refining their operations, improving their products, and serving their customers.

But how exactly do ambidextrous organizations work? By looking more deeply into the experiences of two such organizations- USA Today and Ciba Vision-we can begin to identify the key managerial and organizational characteristics that underpin their ability to both exploit and explore.

A Newspaper Reinvents Itself

In the late 1990s, USA Today was a thriving business, but it faced an uncertain future. The national newspaper, a division of the Gannett Corporation, had come a long way since its founding in 1982, when its colorful brand of journalism was widely ridiculed by critics. After losing more than half a billion dollars during its first decade, the paper turned its first profit in 1992 and continued to expand rapidly, becoming the most widely read daily newspaper in the United States. With well-heeled business travelers making up the bulk of its subscriber base, it also became an attractive platform for national advertisers, bringing in a steady flow of revenue.

But as the 1990s progressed, storm clouds appeared on the horizon. Newspaper readership was falling steadily, particularly among young people. Competition was heating up, as customers increasingly looked to television and Internet media outlets for news. And newsprint costs were rising rapidly. Tom Curley, USA Today 's president and publisher, recognized that the company would have to expand beyond its traditional print business to maintain strong growth and profits; such expansion, he realized, would require dramatic innovations. The company would need to find ways to apply its existing news-gathering and editing capabilities to entirely new media.

Acting on his beliefs, Curley in 1995 chose Lorraine Cichowski, USA Today's general manager of media projects and former editor of the paper's Money section, to launch an online news service called USAToday.com. He gave her free rein to operate independently from the print business, and she set up a kind of skunk-works operation, bringing in people from outside USA Today and housing them on a different floor from the newspaper. She built a fundamentally different kind of organization, with roles and incentives suited to the instantaneous delivery of news and to an entrepreneurial, highly collaborative culture. With Internet use exploding, the venture seemed primed for success.

But results were disappointing. Although USAToday.com was making a small profit by the end of the decade, its growth was sluggish and had little impact on the broader business's results. The problem, Curley saw, was that the new unit was so isolated from the print operation that it was failing to capitalize on the newspaper's vast resources. Although Cichowski was a member of Curley's executive team, she had little support from other members. Viewing her unit as a competitor with the print business, they had little incentive to help her succeed and made few efforts to share their considerable resources with her. Soon, USAToday.com found itself starved of cash, as the newspaper continued to consume most of the available capital, and the online unit began losing talented staff.

Cichowski pushed to have her business spun out entirely from the newspaper, as other companies were doing with their Internet ventures, but Curley had a very different view. He had come to believe that the new unit required not greater separation but greater integration. In 1999, he decided that USA Today should adopt a "network strategy," in which it would share news content across three platforms: the newspaper, USAToday.com, and Gannett's 21 local television stations. Curley described his vision: "We're no longer in the newspaper business-we're in the news information space, and we'd better learn to deliver content regardless of form."

To execute that strategy, Curley knew he had to create an ambidextrous organization that could sustain the print business yet also pursue innovations in broadcasting and online news. So in 2000, he replaced the leader of USAToday.com with another internal executive who was a strong supporter of the network strategy, and he brought in an outsider to create a television operation, USAToday Direct. Both the online and television organizations remained separate from the newspaper, maintaining distinctive processes, structures, and cultures, but Curley demanded that the senior leadership of all three businesses be tightly integrated. Together with Karen Jurgenson, the editor of USA Today, the heads of the online and television units instituted daily editorial meetings to review stories and assignments, share ideas, and identify other potential synergies. The unit heads quickly saw, for example, that gaining the cooperation of USA Today 's reporters would be crucial to the success of the strategy (print journalists are notorious for hoarding stories), and they jointly decided to train the print reporters in television and Web broadcasting and outfit them with video cameras so they could file stories simultaneously in the different media. The moves quickly paid off, as the reporters realized that their stories would reach a much broader audience-and that they would have the opportunity to appear on TV. A new position of "network editor" was also created in the newsroom to help reporters shape their stories for broadcast media.

At the same time, Curley made larger changes to the organization and its management. He let go of a number of senior executives who did not share his commitment to the network strategy, ensuring that his team would present a united front and deliver consistent messages to the staff. He also changed the incentive program for executives, replacing unit-specific goals with a common bonus program tied to growth targets across all three media. Human resource policies were changed to promote transfers between the different media units, and promotion and compensation decisions began to take into account people's willingness to share stories and other content. As part of that effort, a "Friends of the Network" recognition program was established to explicitly reward cross-unit accomplishments.

Yet even as sharing and synergy were being promoted, the organizational integrity of the three units was carefully maintained. The units remained physically separate, and they each pursued very different staffing models. The staff members of USAToday.com were, on average, significantly younger than the newspaper's reporters and remained far more collaborative and faster paced. Reporters continued to be fiercely independent and to focus on more in-depth coverage of stories than the television staff.

Because of its ambidextrous organization, USA Today has continued to compete aggressively in the mature business of daily print news while also developing a strong Internet franchise and providing Gannett television stations with coverage of breaking news. During the Internet collapse, when other papers' profits plunged, USA Today made $60 million, fueled in large part by the company's ability to continue to attract national advertisers and by revenues from its profitable USAToday.com operation.

A New Lens on Growth

Another company that has used an ambidextrous organization to spur growth through radical innovation is Ciba Vision. Established in the early 1980s as a unit of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the Atlanta-based Ciba Vision sells contact lenses and related eye-care products to optometrists and consumers. Although the company produced some innovative new products in its early years, such as the first FDA-approved bifocal contacts, by the mid-1980s it remained a distant second to market leader Johnson & Johnson. Making matters worse, in 1987 J&J brought out a new, disposable contact lens that threatened Ciba Vision's sales of conventional contacts. By the early 1990s, it was clear to Glenn Bradley, Ciba Vision's president, that J&J's dominance provided economies of scale that would doom his company to ever-shrinking profits. Without radically new products, Ciba Vision would slowly decline and ultimately fail. To survive and grow, Bradley saw, his organization would have to continue making money in the mature conventional-contacts business while simultaneously producing a stream of breakthroughs.

In 1991, Bradley launched six formal development projects, each focused on a revolutionary change. Four entailed new products, including daily disposables and extended-wear lenses, and two involved new manufacturing processes. In a controversial but necessary move, he canceled dozens of small R&D initiatives for conventional lenses to free up cash for the breakthrough efforts. While the traditional units would continue to pursue incremental innovations on their own, the entire corporate R&D budget would now be dedicated to producing breakthroughs.

Bradley knew that attempting to manage these projects under the constraints of the old organization would not work. Inevitably, conflicts over the allocation of human and financial resources would slow down and disrupt the focus needed for breakthrough innovations. Further, the new manufacturing process required different technical skills, which would make communication across old and new units difficult. He therefore decided to create autonomous units for the new projects, each with its own R&D, finance, and marketing functions, and he chose the project leaders for their willingness to challenge the status quo and their ability to operate independently.

Given the freedom to shape their own organizations, the new units created very different structures, processes, and cultures. The extended-wear team remained in Atlanta, though in a facility separate from the conventional-lens business, while the daily-disposables team was located in Germany. Each team hired its own staff, decided on its own reward system, and chose its own process for moving from development to manufacturing.

But even as Bradley understood the importance of protecting the new units from the processes and cultural norms of the old business, he realized they also had to share expertise and resources, both with the traditional business and with one another. He therefore took a number of steps to integrate management across the company.

First and perhaps most important, he had the leaders of all the breakthrough projects report to a single executive, Adrian Hunter, the vice president of R&D, who had a deep knowledge of the existing business and tight relationships with executives throughout the firm. Working closely with Bradley, Hunter carefully managed the trade-offs and conflicts between the old business and the new units. All the leaders of the innovation projects, moreover, were asked to sit in on Bradley's executive team meetings.

Bradley and his team also enunciated a new vision statement for Ciba Vision-"Healthy Eyes for Life"-that was meaningful to all parts of the business. While this move was largely rhetorical, it had an important effect. It underscored the connections between the breakthrough initiatives and the conventional operation, bringing together all employees in a common cause and preventing organizational separation from turning into organizational fragmentation. As Bradley noted, the slogan gave people a social value as well as an economic reason for working together. Like USA Today, Ciba Vision also revamped its incentive system, rewarding managers primarily for overall company performance rather than for the results of their particular units.

The ambidexterity paid off. Over the next five years, Ciba Vision successfully launched a series of contact-lens products, introduced a drug for treating age-related macular degeneration, pioneered a new lens-manufacturing process that dramatically reduced production costs, and overtook J&J in some market segments. The conventional-lens business, moreover, remained profitable enough to generate the cash needed to fund the daily disposables and extended-wear lenses.

At the time the new strategy was adopted, Ciba Vision's annual revenues were stuck at about $300 million. Ten years later, its sales had more than tripled, to over $1 billion, and the new drug, transferred to Novartis's pharmaceutical unit, was on its way to becoming a billion-dollar business. More recently, Ciba Vision has continued to reap the benefits of ambidexterity by pioneering so-called fashion lenses that allow people to change the color of their eyes.

Becoming Ambidextrous

The stories of USA Today and Ciba Vision reveal what it takes to become ambidextrous. (Also see the table "The Scope of the Ambidextrous Organization" for more on what's required.) One of the most important lessons is that ambidextrous organizations need ambidextrous senior teams and managers-executives who have the ability to understand and be sensitive to the needs of very different kinds of businesses. Combining the attributes of rigorous cost cutters and free-thinking entrepreneurs while maintaining the objectivity required to make difficult trade-offs, such managers are a rare but essential breed. Without people like Tom Curley, Karen Jurgenson, Glenn Bradley, and Adrian Hunter-managers who can be, as one of them put it, "consistently inconsistent"- USA Today and Ciba Vision would have had little chance of success.

Ambidextrous organizations encompass two profoundly different types of businesses-those focused on exploiting existing capabilities for profit and those focused on exploring new opportunities for growth. As this table indicates, the two require very different strategies, structures, processes, and cultures.

Another important lesson from the USA Today and Ciba Vision stories is that a company's senior team must be committed to operating ambidextrously even if its members aren't ambidextrous themselves. Resistance at the top levels of an organization can't be tolerated, which means that a shift to an ambidextrous organization can be a wrenching experience. USA Today 's Curley dismissed 40% of his executive team. Ciba Vision's Bradley asked some of the executives overseeing the traditional business to leave when they fought the decision to reallocate R&D investments to the new units. And both leaders backed up their actions with new incentive programs that institutionalized the new management approach.

We have also found that a clear and compelling vision, relentlessly communicated by a company's senior team, is crucial in building ambidextrous designs. These aspirations provide an overarching goal that permits exploitation and exploration to coexist. Curley's "network strategy" and Bradley's "Healthy Eyes for Life" were compelling visions that underscored the strategic necessity of ambidexterity and the benefits for all employees, both those in the traditional units and those in the breakthrough initiatives.

USA Today, well aware of the natural skepticism of newspaper reporters, took a particularly aggressive approach to communicating its new vision, strategy, and organization. Curley launched the effort by appearing at a company meeting dressed as a cyberpunk, complete with blue hair. The message, he recalled, was: "It's a new world, and we need to be ready to move into it." Jurgenson began sending daily e-mails to the entire news staff in which she highlighted the concrete accomplishments of the new approach-for example, explaining exactly how one reporter was able to take a story originally intended for the newspaper and get it onto the Web site and the television stations. In addition, all members of the company's management committee were expected to hold weekly communications meetings within their units as well as workshops focused on the changes employees had to make in their own jobs. As Curley now puts it, "When change is at a revolutionary level, you can't be aggressive enough in confronting the issues."* * *

The forces of inertia in companies are strong. The legions of once successful firms that have fallen on hard times or gone out of business underscore how hard it is to break out of a rut, especially a comfortable, profitable rut. The findings of our research should therefore be heartening to executives. Not only can an established company renew itself through the creation of breakthrough products and processes, but it can do so without destroying or even hampering its traditional business. Building an ambidextrous organization is by no means easy, but the structure itself, combining organizational separation with senior team integration, is not difficult to understand. Given the executive will to make it happen, any company can become ambidextrous.

A version of this article appeared in the April 2004 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Reprint: R0404D Corporate executives must constantly look backward, attending to the products and processes of the past, while also gazing forward, preparing for the innovations that will define the future. This mental balancing act is one of the toughest of all managerial challenges-it requires executives to explore new opportunities even as they work diligently to exploit existing capabilities-and it's no surprise that few companies do it well.