Paul's Update Special 6/24

Good Vibrations: The CEO’s Practical Guide to Create and Amplify Energy

Good Vibrations: The CEO’s Practical Guide to Create and Amplify Energy By Roselinde Torres Through energy, leaders can infuse others with purpose, impart meaning, encourage the pursuit of goals, and rece...

The way that CEOs create, convey, and manage energy throughout the organization can mean the difference between delivering high performance and constantly missing targets.

Energy operates as a two-way current that travels throughout an organization. Starting with the CEO, it reaches all the way to the front line—and even beyond, to outside stakeholders—through a series of face-to-face and increasingly viral transmissions. Leaders can use energy to infuse others with purpose, to impart meaning, and to encourage the pursuit of goals. Energy is also the means by which leaders receive feedback from both within and outside the organization. It is the byproduct of connectivity, preparation, and intent.

What’s more, energy is a palpable force. “I have learned over the last 11 years that the energy I brought to any situation was reflected and absorbed by the team,” one CEO said. “I have become more conscious of the power of my energy and more respectful of its effect on other people than I was before.”

CEOs who harness energy accelerate value creation, while those who deplete energy or allow it to dissipate struggle to achieve their goals. 

But despite the importance of managing energy effectively, many leaders have so far focused on only part of the task—the sources of energy rather than its uses. The emphasis has been on working with the CEO to maintain proper health and wellness habits; to set aside time for renewal and recharging; and to apply athletic-training principles to executive development. These aspects of creating and managing energy are all important, but they miss the broader and more powerful application of energy to initiate positive change. “As CEO, there is no such thing as throwing a pebble in the pond; everything you throw in the pond is a boulder,” one top executive told us.

To understand this critical but misunderstood concept, we recently interviewed 50 current and former CEOs of companies as varied as West Coast startups, Fortune 500 members, and nonprofit organizations. We asked them how they generate and transmit energy, as well as how they perceive and shape the overall energy levels of their organizations. Nearly all of them said that managing energy was one of the most critically important aspects of their jobs. Four dimensions of energy emerged from these interviews:

1. Energy is contagious. In every interaction, CEOs send out energy. This energy can be positive or negative—and it doesn’t affect just the immediate recipient. Rather it amplifies across the organization through word of mouth and social media, ultimately rebounding to the CEO. A negative meeting with a CEO, or even a misunderstood hallway conversation, is rarely self-contained. Social media guarantees that past encounters—whether positive or negative—now project into the future.
2. Energy is a force for value creation. Positive energy creates employee engagement, alignment, and agility. It instills self-confidence and a sense of purpose within the organization. Energy unleashes capacity and improves an organization’s ability to execute on strategy by tapping into people’s reserves of discretionary effort.
1. Encouraging Bolder Moves. CEOs can instill confidence in an organization. They can help people transition from fearing failure to taking prudent risks. 
2. Increasing Dynamism and Adaptability. CEOs who can channel their energy, stay in sync with their organization, and employ the right level of energy for the setting can create positive momentum. Organizations will move faster and with greater certainty. 
3. Generating Greater Productivity. Energy is closely related to alignment and employee engagement, the willingness of employees to commit discretionary effort to their jobs. 
4. Expanding Organizational Capacity. Energy can unlock latent capacity in an organization by creating a sense of urgency and expectation and by providing a laser-like focus on the most critical initiatives.
3. Energy is a choreography. Positive energy does not just happen. It is deliberately designed and generated. Many of the CEOs we interviewed homed in on the preparation and thought that goes into critical meetings, conversations, body language, settings, and messages that can amplify across the organization. Here are some practical suggestions that CEOs use to manage their personal as well as their organization’s energy.
1. Review your calendar to identify energy-draining and energy-renewing activities. 
2. Stay curious. Several CEOs mentioned the role of curiosity in refueling and as an antidote to the routine of the job. 
3. Establish limits, especially when traveling. Several CEOs talked about how draining it can be to hold numerous back-to-back meetings. “You don’t want to line up four or five stressful events in a row, if you can avoid it,” a former CEO said. A number of CEOs who told us that they were natural introverts said that they consciously manage their calendars so they do not need to be “on” for long stretches of time.
4. Plan meetings to maximize energy output. 
5. Practice, practice, practice. Successful CEOs leave nothing to chance when they participate in meetings or interactions that can create positive energy, such as town halls or investor presentations.
6. Slay the energy vampires. All organizations have some people who simply suck the energy out of a room. They are the constant naysayers, and they need to be eliminated.
4. Energy needs a gauge. CEOs need to understand whether they are transmitting the right level of energy—too much can be as damaging as too little—and receive feedback about the overall quality and level of energy in the organization. They also need to recognize when to pause and reflect and when to focus outward.

Skills for managing energy are not easy to acquire. But they are increasingly as critical to the success of CEOs as are the abilities to raise capital, close an M&A deal, or launch a new strategy. The most successful CEOs are aware of the ebb and flow of energy within themselves and their organizations, and they consciously seek to manage it through perception, practice, and policies. As one CEO said, “Energy plays an important role in bringing your best self forward.”

How The “Silo Effect” Is Hurting Cross Team Collaboration - Trello Blog

How The “Silo Effect” Is Hurting Cross Team Collaboration - Trello Blog Research has shown that teams across companies aren't communicating as much as they ought to be. Here's ...

The silo effect occurs when separate departments or teams within an organization don’t communicate effectively with each other – and productivity suffers because of it.

Despite the fact that employees are more technologically interconnected than ever before, the silo effect continues to be a problem in offices of all types. Don’t believe it? Check out these stats:

• 39% of employees within a surveyed group believe that there isn’t enough collaboration between people in their organization.
• 86% of polled executives and employees blame a lack of collaboration or bad communication for team problems and failures.
• Less than 50% of respondents thought their organizations effectively and honestly discussed issues with employees.

While individual employees within different areas might not work together on a day-to-day basis, it’s important that the managers of these separate teams do.

Meaningful creative collaboration between employees with various skill sets is another great way to facilitate long-term communication. Give employees the chance to work closely together on large-scale projects that matter. This will not only lead to excellent work, but will also help create a sense that everyone involved is building something special together – and these types of shared experiences forge real bonds.

It’s 2016, and gone are the days of sending hundreds of Word documents back and forth via an endless email string. Most companies have a chat platform to help them stay connected with colleagues during the day.

There are many tools out there specifically designed to facilitate communication between employees wherever they are. And when you’re trying to open up lines of communication between separated groups, convenience and efficiency are especially important because everyone has to be on the same page.

Differentiation across departments and teams is a good thing, but sometimes it can also be beneficial to create a mashup of skills and duties.

The technology landscape has completely changed our ideas of certain company roles. This means that many professionals have had to venture outside their comfort zones as roles shift along with trends. You can’t have someone on the phone telling people one thing, while another department is tweeting out totally opposing information. In situations like these, cross-team collaboration is an absolute must.

Providing an enjoyable and seamless experience for clients, customers and business partners should be enough motivation to start bringing your employees together a little more.

Want to Be Happier? Science Says Do These 11 Things Every Single Day

Want to Be Happier? Science Says Do These 11 Things Every Single Day Try them. They work. (If you can't trust science, what can you trust?)

1. Smile more
   According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks: "Smiling makes us feel good, which also increases our attentional flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the trees."
   
2. Exercise for seven minutes
   Think exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out this seven-minute workout from The New York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
   
3. Sleep more
   We know that sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.
   
4. Spend more time with friends and family
   Not staying in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying. If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.
   
5. Go outside more often
   In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness: "Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory ... "
   
6. Help other people
   One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.
   
7. Plan a trip (even if you don't ever take it)
   As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation: "In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people."
   
8. Meditate
   Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also useful for improving your happiness: "In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank."
   
9. Move closer to work
   Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less happy.
   
10. Practice gratitude
    This is a seemingly simple strategy, but one I've found to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, or going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.
    
11. And the easiest tip of all: get older
    As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally grow happier. There's still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have a few ideas: "Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less."

Extraordinary Events: Brand Promise... What's Yours?

Extraordinary Events: Brand Promise... What's Yours?

A brand promise is the statement that you make to customers that identifies what they should expect for all interactions with your people, products, services and company. 

I found a few brand promises that we can use as examples. Walmart promises “Save money. Live Better.” BMW promises “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”

Some may say these are advertising slogans, but I think they are more. They are promises that the companies want to deliver. 

There is little doubt that shopping at Walmart will save you money on the large selection of merchandise they have to offer. The “Live Better” part of the promise is open to interpretation, but it would be hard to argue that saving a few dollars wouldn’t make life a little better. BMW promises something a little more abstract. Can they really deliver the ultimate driving machine? There’s plenty of other car manufactures that feel they provide the best in class. It’s subjective. And, subjectivity is what brings us to the point that no matter what you promise, you can’t control what customers think. It is their perception – their reality. You can only hope that what you want them to think syncs up with how they perceive you to be. You can’t argue with measurable promises, unless they don’t measure up. You can argue with abstract and subjective promises like providing the ultimate of anything.

In the end, it doesn’t matter what the company believes its perception to be. For example, we can tell everyone we’re friendly, but if the customer has a different opinion, what you believe doesn’t matter. It’s only the customer’s perception that counts. So, make a promise that intrigues the customer, makes them want to do business with you, and is a promise that you can keep.

Paul's Update Special 6/17

Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy

Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy Scale now trumps differentiation.

Back in 2007 the five major mobile-phone manufacturers—Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG—collectively controlled 90% of the industry’s global profits. That year, Apple’s iPhone burst onto the scene and began gobbling up market share.

By 2015 the iPhone singlehandedly generated 92% of global profits, while all but one of the former incumbents made no profit at all. Apple (along with Google’s competing Android system) overran the incumbents by exploiting the power of platforms and leveraging the new rules of strategy they give rise to. Platform businesses bring together producers and consumers in high-value exchanges. Their chief assets are information and interactions, which together are also the source of the value they create and their competitive advantage.

Understanding this, Apple conceived the iPhone and its operating system as more than a product or a conduit for services. It imagined them as a way to connect participants in two-sided markets—app developers on one side and app users on the other—generating value for both groups. As the number of participants on each side grew, that value increased—a phenomenon called “network effects,” which is central to platform strategy.

Though they come in many varieties, platforms all have an ecosystem with the same basic structure, comprising four types of players. The owners of platforms control their intellectual property and governance. Providers serve as the platforms’ interface with users. Producers create their offerings, and consumers use those offerings.

As Apple demonstrates, firms needn’t be only a pipeline or a platform; they can be both. While plenty of pure pipeline businesses are still highly competitive, when platforms enter the same marketplace, the platforms virtually always win.

The move from pipeline to platform involves three key shifts:

1. From resource control to resource orchestration.

The resource-based view of competition holds that firms gain advantage by controlling scarce and valuable—ideally, inimitable—assets. In a pipeline world, those include tangible assets such as mines and real estate and intangible assets like intellectual property. With platforms, the assets that are hard to copy are the community and the resources its members own and contribute, be they rooms or cars or ideas and information. In other words, the network of producers and consumers is the chief asset.

2. From internal optimization to external interaction.

Pipeline firms organize their internal labor and resources to create value by optimizing an entire chain of product activities, from materials sourcing to sales and service. Platforms create value by facilitating interactions between external producers and consumers. Because of this external orientation, they often shed even variable costs of production. The emphasis shifts from dictating processes to persuading participants, and ecosystem governance becomes an essential skill.

3. From a focus on customer value to a focus on ecosystem value.

Pipelines seek to maximize the lifetime value of individual customers of products and services, who, in effect, sit at the end of a linear process. By contrast, platforms seek to maximize the total value of an expanding ecosystem in a circular, iterative, feedback-driven process. Sometimes that requires subsidizing one type of consumer in order to attract another type.

These three shifts make clear that competition is more complicated and dynamic in a platform world. 

How Platforms Change Strategy

In pipeline businesses, the five forces are relatively defined and stable. If you’re a cement manufacturer or an airline, your customers and competitive set are fairly well understood, and the boundaries separating your suppliers, customers, and competitors are reasonably clear. In platform businesses, those boundaries can shift rapidly.

Forces within the ecosystem.

Platform participants—consumers, producers, and providers—typically create value for a business. But they may defect if they believe their needs can be met better elsewhere. More worrisome, they may turn on the platform and compete directly with it.

Forces exerted by ecosystems.

Managers of pipeline businesses can fail to anticipate platform competition from seemingly unrelated industries. Yet successful platform businesses tend to move aggressively into new terrain and into what were once considered separate industries with little warning.

Focus.

Managers of pipeline businesses focus on growing sales. For them, goods and services delivered (and the revenues and profits from them) are the units of analysis. For platforms, the focus shifts to interactions—exchanges of value between producers and consumers on the platform. The unit of exchange (say, a view of a video or a thumbs-up on a post) can be so small that little or no money changes hands. Nevertheless, the number of interactions and the associated network effects are the ultimate source of competitive advantage.

Access and governance.

In a pipeline world, strategy revolves around erecting barriers. With platforms, while guarding against threats remains critical, the focus of strategy shifts to eliminating barriers to production and consumption in order to maximize value creation. To that end, platform executives must make smart choices about access (whom to let onto the platform) and governance (or “control”—what consumers, producers, providers, and even competitors are allowed to do there).

Platforms consist of rules and architecture. Their owners need to decide how open both should be. An open architecture allows players to access platform resources, such as app developer tools, and create new sources of value. Open governance allows players other than the owner to shape the rules of trade and reward sharing on the platform. Regardless of who sets the rules, a fair reward system is key. If managers open the architecture but do not share the rewards, potential platform participants (such as app developers) have the ability to engage but no incentives. If managers open the rules and rewards but keep the architecture relatively closed, potential participants have incentives to engage but not the ability.

Platforms often launch with a fairly closed architecture and governance and then open up as they introduce new types of interactions and sources of value. But every platform must induce producers and consumers to interact and share their ideas and resources. Some platforms encourage producers to create high-value offerings on them by establishing a policy of “permissionless innovation.” They let producers invent things for the platform without approval but guarantee the producers will share in the value created. However, unfettered access can destroy value by creating “noise”—misbehavior or excess or low-quality content that inhibits interaction. Most successful platforms similarly manage openness to maximize positive network effects. 

Metrics.

Leaders of pipeline enterprises have long focused on a narrow set of metrics that capture the health of their businesses. For example, pipelines grow by optimizing processes and opening bottlenecks; one standard metric, inventory turnover, tracks the flow of goods and services through them. Push enough goods through and get margins high enough, and you’ll see a reasonable rate of return.

As pipelines launch platforms, however, the numbers to watch change. Monitoring and boosting the performance of core interactions becomes critical. Here are new metrics managers need to track:

• Interaction failure. If a traveler opens the Lyft app and sees “no cars available,” the platform has failed to match an intent to consume with supply. Failures like these directly diminish network effects.
• Engagement. Healthy platforms track the participation of ecosystem members that enhances network effects—activities such as content sharing and repeat visits.
• Match quality. Poor matches between the needs of users and producers weaken network effects. 
• Negative network effects. Badly managed platforms often suffer from other kinds of problems that create negative feedback loops and reduce value. 
• Finally, platforms must understand the financial value of their communities and their network effects.

Because platforms require new approaches to strategy, they also demand new leadership styles. The skills it takes to tightly control internal resources just don’t apply to the job of nurturing external ecosystems.

The failure to transition to a new approach explains the precarious situation that traditional businesses—from hotels to health care providers to taxis—find themselves in. For pipeline firms, the writing is on the wall: Learn the new rules of strategy for a platform world, or begin planning your exit.

The 4 Habits Every Great Leader Needs To Practice

The 4 Habits Every Great Leader Needs To Practice By John Rampton "Presence" isn't a persona or an aura of authority. It's what you do, day in and day out.

These are the four habits that I've found helpful for building my leadership presence in a way that's meaningful, effective, and consistent.

1. SPENDING TIME IN THE TRENCHES

 I like to know what everyone else is doing and thinking and what they're working on—without turning into a micromanager. I've discovered that wanting to know those things is all about being interested in the individual as a person, not as an employee. And that simple habit can serve leaders well whether they're managing remote teams for employees who are right there in front of them. Your own sense of your presence as a leader won't mean much if your employees find you inaccessible. 

2. BEING "ALL THERE"—AUTHENTICALLY

Being engaged means letting the other person know that I’m actively listening and interested. I try to ask questions and offer encouraging words when I see they've really delivered on something. Being "all there" isn't just something to focus on when discussing work projects, though. I go to lunch with my employees, plan some fun days outside the office, or just join them on their walks during breaks. It's in these informal situations that I often feel I can connect most authentically.

3. MASTERING THE ARTS OF CONVERSATION AND STORYTELLING

Being enthusiastically conversational comes naturally. But I'm a talker—and the art of conversation takes more than just dominating the discussion. Instead, it means listening and asking questions without interrupting. I've had to learn more about the value of body language—not only my own, but also being able to tun into what others' postures, expressions, and gestures are subtly telling me. These easy-to-miss conversational cues can often tell you more accurately what somebody's really thinking.

4. SHOWING YOU CARE WITHOUT BEING SHOWY

Leaders who are truly present don't keep their emotional distance. If anything, this diminishes any sense of presence by preventing a real, human connection from taking place. I’ve found it's especially important for me to convey warmth and concern to those who don't see me interact with others in the office everyday—those only communicate with me by phone, Skype, or chat.

None of these leadership skills can be developed overnight. I've struggled with all of them. It's taken me considerable practice and testing to see what actions are best received by my employees. Plus, once I’ve established these behaviors, it's never meant I could switch on autopilot from that point forward.

Because presence isn't about your persona or your bearing. It's about what you do each day. And actions need to be taken—repeatedly, deliberately, and with a constant eye to their results. Presence, in other words, takes practice.

5 Essential Skills You Need To Keep Your Job In The Next 10 Years

5 Essential Skills You Need To Keep Your Job In The Next 10 Years By Gwen Moran Automation may affect half of jobs. Here are five areas to develop to keep yourself employed.

By some estimates, roughly half of U.S. jobs will be potentially affected by automation in the near future. So what are the skills we need to build now to remain employable over the next decade?While specific abilities and knowledge will certainly vary from industry to industry, there are some overarching trends that will affect most of us says workplace futurist Jeanne Meister, a partner at Future Workplace, a New York workplace consultancy. Here are five skills to start building now to maintain your marketability over the next decade.

TRENDSPOTTING

With the workplace changing so quickly, it’s essential to develop systems to not only monitor those changes, but to distill the information and training you’ll need to keep up with them. That means staying abreast of industry developments, taking classes, attending trade events, and following thought leaders who are talking about your sector. It also means being observant about the day-to-day tasks and functions that matter and how they’re changing, separating anomalies from trends.

COLLABORATING IN NEW WAYS

Two trends are converging that will force us to get comfortable collaborating in new ways. First, companies are using more freelancers and soloist services—the so-called "gig economy"—so it’s important to be able to work effectively with disparate teams. In addition, employees can spend more than quarter of their workdays reading, writing and responding to email. Any process that time-consuming is ripe for disruption.

And it’s happening. Platforms like Yammer and Slack cut down on the flow of messages in your inbox and keep project versions, information, and updates in one central, searchable location, she says. She says companies will increase their use videoconferencing.

BUILDING BRANDS—EVEN AS EMPLOYEES

Knowledge workers and others whose employment recruitment has an online component need to show their expertise through participation on sites like Quora or industry-related sites where they can share their thinking on key issues. "Those things have become more relevant in terms of when people try to assess how good you are at something," Bala Iyer, information technology professor at Babson College says.

Brand-building and other entrepreneurial skills will also be important as more workers shift to the gig economy and freelance work. To compete on a regular basis for the next job, you have to have a body of work and online capital to back up your pitch.

LEARNING NEXT-LEVEL TECHNOLOGY

Whether it’s a wearable device that can help you do your job from the road, learning how to interact with machines equipped with artificial intelligence, or the onset of automation in your office or other workplace, remaining employable will require embracing rather than eschewing tech changes. Pay attention to what’s happening in the most advanced workplaces in your field and prepare. That way, you’ll be ahead of the game when the changes come to you.

DEVELOPING YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

It sounds trite, but the one thing machines will have a tough time doing is building relationships. Developing emotional intelligence—empathy, embracing vulnerability, building strong connections your co-workers and your network—will go a long way to keeping you highly marketable, says Jacob Morgan, author of The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization, and cofounder of The Future of Work Community, an online membership organization exploring how the workplace will change.

Looking for the next changes and remaining ahead of the curve in learning about them will be essential to remaining among the most marketable employees. Finally, paying attention to the human side of work—the area that machines will be most challenged in replicating, can be the ultimate way to keep your job opportunities strong.