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Saturday, April 19, 2014

Congrats, Graduates: Now Go Out There and Redefine Success

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We're coming up on one of my favorite times of the year: that time, just after spring breaks out but before summer begins, in which thousands of college graduates are released into the world. And as they go forth we give them advice, lots of advice. The advice varies, sometimes conflicts, but the general idea is: Here is what you need to know in order to succeed in the world. I've given a few of these speeches myself. Indeed,Thrive grew out of a commencement speech I gave last year at Smith College.

This year my book tour is taking me to a lot of colleges, and my first piece of advice is to start by defining success for yourself -- by being clear about what you want, what you value and what you are about. But before we can do that, we need to clear away the noise of the world to be able to truly listen to ourselves. And to do that, we need to abandon, or at least mitigate, some of the worst practices of the adult world that students are already mired in: burnout, sleep deprivation, stress and anxiety. And from that place of greater wisdom and perspective, graduates will be infinitely more effective at all the things they want to master: overcoming fears, taking risks, improving confidence, networking effectively, getting the job they want, getting a higher salary, etc.

This is all the more important because this generation is starting out their adult lives burdened with multiple deficits. To take the most obvious one, the total amount of student loan debt is now $1.2 trillion (greater than the total amount of credit card debt).

Graduating with this kind of burden would be overwhelming even if today's graduates were entering a robust job market, but of course they are not. Indeed, the effective unemployment rate (which factors in those who have given up looking for jobs) for those aged 18 to 29 is nearly 16 percent. For African Americans in that age bracket, it's nearly 24 percent.

It's no wonder that 14 percent of 24- to 34-year-olds are still living with their parents. It's not just because they can't find a job; half of those living with Mom and Dad are employed full-time.

Of course, thriving is about more than just financial and professional success. And there are few signposts for those in college encouraging a culture of well-being and taking care of our human capital.

Among those 18 to 29 years old, nearly half don't get the amount of sleep they need. We know that lack of sleep increases stress, but then stress also makes it hard to sleep. And according to theJournal of Adolescent Health, stress keeps 68 percent of students up at night.

"I sleep only three hours a night, and I can't keep doing it," a student told me at the Harvard School of Public Health last week. "And you are telling me something I had known all along: that it is OK to sleep, that it is OK to give time for the little things in life."

It's a vicious cycle that has made millennials our most stressed demographic, according to the American Psychological Association. And nearly 40 percent of millennials reported their stress increasing in the year before this 2012 study. But only 17 percent said they get "a lot or a great deal" of help in dealing with their stress.

We hear a lot about the dangers of binge drinking on campus (and rightly so), but much less about the effects of stress and sleep deprivation among students -- including the connection between stress and binge drinking and depression. But the evidence is all too visible. Today 44 percent of American college students say they've had symptoms of depression. And a 2011 study from the American College Health Association found that around 30 percent felt "so depressed that it was difficult to function" at some point in the previous year.

And the trend line is going in the wrong direction. According to a study in the journalProfessional Psychology: Research and Practice, the number of college students suffering from depression doubled between 1988 and 2003. Screening for Mental Health found that from 2005 to 2010, depression grew in 18- to 25-year-olds by 17 percent.

Even worse, the likelihood of suicidal thoughts tripled from 1988 to 2003. In fact, we lose more than 1,000 college students to suicide every year, making suicide the second leading cause of death among college students, after accidents (including car accidents and drug overdoses).

These numbers reflect a wider, and very troubling, phenomenon in our culture. Since 1988 the use of antidepressants has gone up almost 400 percent, and they are now the most frequently taken drug by those 18 to 44 years old. More troubling is that between 1993 and 2005 the use of prescription stimulants such as Ritalin and Adderall went up 93 percent among college students, while the use of prescription opioids like Vicodin and Oxycontin jumped a staggering 343 percent.

As any parent knows, what our children see us do has a much bigger impact on them than what we tell them to do. So if the lesson we're teaching them by how we live is that burnout, stress and sleep deprivation are the highway to success -- consequences be damned -- it appears that our college students are dutifully, and dangerously, following in our footsteps.

The good news is that the changes we are seeing in our workplaces -- adopting meditation, yoga and other stress-reduction practices -- are also beginning to be introduced into college life. According to a 2013 study by Robert Youmans of George Mason University and Jared Ramsberg, a graduate student at the University of Illinois, the side-effect-free way to get better grades is to meditate. Testing a random grouping of students, they found that students who meditated before a lecture scored higher on a quiz afterward than those who didn't.

Youmans, a practicing Buddhist, makes it clear that other forms of quiet and contemplation are as effective as meditation. "Basically," he says, "becoming just a little bit more mindful about yourself and your place in the world might have a very important, practical benefit -- in this case, doing better in college."

A study by researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara found that a two-week mindfulness training course boosted the working memory of students enough to translate into a 16-percent increase on the GRE (the standardized test required for most graduate schools). "We found reduced mind-wandering in every way we measured it and improved performance on both reading comprehension and working memory capacity," said professor Michael Mrazek. The researchers are now extending the studies to K-12 students.

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In fact, Andrew Jones, a sociology teacher in the UK, wrote in The Guardian that studies have also found that meditation can lower the incidence of aggression in adolescents and children. Jones' own school has initiated quiet times during the day, which allow the students to meditate or simply reflect, and has even launched a lunchtime Zen club.

Back here at home, meditation resulted in higher English scores, higher attendance rates and higher rates of happiness in schools that introduced it in San Francisco, while in New Haven schools used meditation and yoga to reduce stress levels.

And there are an increasing number of organizations devoted to studying and implementing mindfulness programs. For example, MindUp, a program that's part of the Goldie Hawn Foundation, brings neuroscientists, education professionals and mindfulness experts together to help students "learn to self-regulate behavior and mindfully engage in focused concentration required for academic success." And a study at Johns Hopkins University found that the effects of meditation were actually about equal to those of antidepressants.

It's clear that we don't only need to change our workplace; we need to change how we prepare the next generation to enter that workplace. And thanks largely to research by our universities, we know what works. Now it's a matter of putting it into action.
Last week Nicholas Kristof wrote about Marina Keegan, whose first book,The Opposite of Loneliness, was recently published posthumously. Marina was tragically killed in a car crash days after graduating from Yale in 2012. In one of the essays in the book, she laments a transition she saw in her fellow students, from youthful idealism to an acceptance of "success"-driven practicality.

"Students here have passion," she wrote. "Passion for public service and education policy and painting and engineering and entrepreneurialism. Standing outside a freshman dorm, I couldn't find a single student aspiring to be a banker -- but at commencement this May, there's a 50 percent chance I'll be sitting next to one. This strikes me as incredibly sad."

There is nothing wrong with being a banker in itself; Keegan's point was that so many graduates choose professions based on the lure of jobs that fit our traditional notion of success. "Perhaps there won't be fancy popcorn at some other job," wrote Keegan, "but it's about time we started popping it for ourselves."

And for those who do create their own path, and for those who don't, my final bit of wisdom is that the one absolutely certain thing you can expect is that things won't turn out the way you expect. As John Lennon sang, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

I recently came across a remarkable and moving speech given last year by Kathleen Donegan, an English professor at Berkeley. She was tasked with talking about how female academics find life/work balance. She began by noting that when women talk about balance, they often use the practical language of accounting, even making to-do lists complete with charts and columns. "It's not that I don't live by lists and charts and calendars, because I do," she said. "But tonight I want to talk about what might happen if one loses confidence in the accounting and the balance sheets."

She then related a quotation by Eudora Welty that deeply impacted her and guided her desire to be a writer. "Writing fiction," said Welty, "has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, to find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists."

Donegan had charted a clear line for her own story, how she would have three children in graduate school and how they would be scheduled to fit into the timetable of her studies. It didn't work out that way. "In my experience, being willing -- or being forced -- to let go of the story you're following is what brings you closer to that line," she said. "One day after my son Leo was born, he died." She was forced to let go of her charts and calculations and connect with deeper truths.

The ability to accept life's inevitable twists and turns, losses, defeats and surprises plays a profound role in how resilient we are and how we thrive. And to harken back to freshman philosophy class, true happiness can only be found in our own attitudes and inner life, which the outside world cannot control or take away. This is not about indifference or resignation but, rather, a concept very much on the minds of young graduates: freedom. As one of the most famous Stoics, Seneca, said, "once we have driven away all that excites or affrights us, there ensues unbroken tranquility and enduring freedom." So as our new graduates go into this next phase in their lives, I hope they find the freedom to realize their own story in their own way.

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Arianna Huffington

BY: ARRIANA HUFFINGTON


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Burnout: Time to Abandon a Very Costly Collective Delusion

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As I've been out on the road talking about Thrive, it's been inspiring meeting people and hearing their stories about how they're trying to navigate our culture of overwork and burnout. "I don't remember the last time I was not tired," one young woman told me after my conversation with Sheryl Sandberg at the San Francisco Symphony Hall. And many others -- men and women, young and old -- echo that same sentiment. Especially among the young ones, there is one question that has been coming up again and again, which is some variation of "hey, it's OK for you to say 'you don't need to burnout' now that you're already successful, but what about those of us just starting out who want to succeed?"

It's a good question -- and it seems like a logical one. I say it seems logical because its premise is actually flawed in a number of ways. First, there's the assumption that professional success and a successful life are one and the same. Defining success in that limited way is a result of using the flawed (and limited) metrics that Thrive is an attempt to get us to move beyond.

Because we are more than our jobs. Who we are at work isn't the totality of who we are. And confusing the two will -- sooner or later -- lead to choices that are antithetical to thriving. Our world is full of the casualties of this confusion -- hyper-successful people are depressed, addicted or suffering from stress-related diseases.

The second way the question is flawed is the dangerous assumption it makes that overwork and burnout are the only path to professional success. Even if professional success is the most important thing to you, depriving yourself of sleep, never letting yourself recharge, never disconnecting, not allowing any time for quiet reflection and for those you love -- is not a sustainable career strategy. Not only are quantity of work and quality of work two very different things, at some point -- more quickly than you think -- they become inversely related.

But it's amazing how deeply ingrained this myth is. When I was talking with Oprah about the book for her Super Soul Sunday program (the conversation will air on Mother's Day), she told me how, in the early years of her Oprah show, she'd work so late that she'd get home and collapse on to her bed without even having the energy to change her clothes. Of course, you might be inclined to attribute her enormous success to that level of overwork, but as we discuss on the show, that's clearly not the case. Oprah didn't become Oprah because she worked so much she didn't even have the strength at night to change out of her clothes. She became a success -- both professionally and personally -- because of her phenomenal talents, her deep capacity for empathy, her gift for telling stories and touching hearts, and for urging people to live their best lives. Oprah wasn't successful because of working so late she had to sleep in her clothes (and, no doubt, many other manifestations of overwork), she was successful in spite of that.

Similarly, I'm reminded of Erin Callan, who recounted in the New York Times last year her story of rising to be the CFO of Lehman Brothers and resigning just before the entire company collapsed. She recounted how her job always came first, even at the cost of her marriage. After leaving the company, she was devastated and had trouble recovering. "I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did," she wrote. "What I did was who I was."

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Now, having had time to reflect, she realizes she was more than her job:

"Until recently, I thought my singular focus on my career was the most powerful ingredient in my success. But I am beginning to realize that I sold myself short. I was talented, intelligent and energetic. It didn't have to be so extreme. Besides, there were diminishing returns to that kind of labor."
She concluded: "I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life."

And that's the point: The need to get rid of the perilous belief that overwork is an essential precondition of high performance and effectiveness. Far from it.

As Bill Clinton once said, "every important mistake I've made in my life, I've made because I was too tired." Sun Tzu's Chinese military treaty The Art of War is one of the most popular books among CEOs and business executives. We'd all be better off if CEOs read instead The Giving Tree or Make Way for Ducklings. Empathy and collaboration are more valuable tools for career progress in our modern interconnected economy than the idea that "all war is based on deception." As Wharton professor Adam Grant makes clear in his best-selling book Give and Take, those who give their time and effort to others end up achieving more success than those who don't. Salespeople with the highest annual revenue are those who are the most motivated to help their customers and coworkers; the engineers with the highest productivity and fewest errors are those who do more favors for colleagues than they receive. Grant also cites research indicating that companies led by CEOs who are "takers" end up having more fluctuating, volatile returns.

And in Thrive, I quote a large number of scientific studies that confirm the profound negative effects that overwork, burnout, and sleep deprivation have on practically every part of our mental and physical health and performance. As the Harvard Medical School's Division of Sleep Medicine explains, sleep deprivation played a critical role in the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez spill and the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion: "Sleep deprivation negatively impacts our mood, our ability to focus, and our ability to access higher-level cognitive functions." And for anybody wanting professional success, higher-level cognitive functions come in pretty handy.

Writing in Forbes last week, Michael Thomsen notes the widespread adoption of the culture of extreme burnout in Silicon Valley and among tech startups, three-quarters of which are failing. "Could it be," he asks, "that the myth of the obsessive careerist whose dedication to work follows him to bed every night is actually a grand farce of worst practices and general dysfunction?"

A grand farce of worst practices and general dysfunction indeed! That is the collective delusion we have all been laboring under at tremendous cost to our health, our relationships, our productivity, our creativity and our planet.

Good ideas are much more valuable to a successful business than exhausted employees. They are the lightning in a bottle everyone is trying to capture. And we know for a fact that nothing kills creativity, intuition and originality faster than sleep deprivation and burnout. "It may be," writes Thomsen, "that accepting the normalcy of non-stop work is encouraging a culture of unusually bad thinking, painstakingly propped up by those charged with turning thought into real product." He concludes by asking, "How can any work ethic connected to such dimming of cognitive function produce anything worth having?"

And while burnout dims our cognitive function, mindfulness tools like meditation increase it. In one scientific study, researchers at Leiden University found that various meditation techniques can boost both "divergent thinking," which allows us to come up with many different ideas, and "convergent thinking," which helps us produce one specific solution to one particular problem.

Fortunately, word is finally starting to get out. The list of CEOs coming out as meditators is getting longer each year. There's Mark Bertolini of Aetna, Ray Dalio of Bridgewater and Marc Benioff of Salesforce to name just a few. They're all testifying to the truth that recharging and renewing ourselves and performance at work are not exclusive, but in fact deeply and necessarily connected.

Instead of role models being held up for "working 24/7," we should be selecting role models based on how well they work. Such a gallery would include Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco, a $43 billion company. Warrior meditates daily and goes on regular weekend digital detoxes. In an interview last year she explained her approach:

The important thing to remember is it's not about balance, it's about integration... The important thing that I would like to add to the conversation is to really focus on making sure you're integrating all four aspects -- your work, your family, your community and yourself. And it's not about trying to spend equal amounts of time every single day on each of these things, but making sure you're paying attention to all the things that make us up as a whole human being.

We all have to find our own way. There are many different paths, but we have to start by discarding pre-Copernican calculations based on the faulty belief that overwork and constant busyness are the center of the universe.


But, to circle back, even though it's clear that taking care of our human capital will actually help our careers, we should remember that our careers do not define us. The goal is to thrive, not advance up the corporate ladder.

I'm not saying don't have big dreams and don't try to excel at your job. I'm simply saying that we shouldn't allow professional success to define us. We're more than our to-do lists. And we don't have to wait until we get a corner office for our lives to have value and meaning. We can thrive wherever we find ourselves right now, and being exactly who we already are.

Arianna Huffington

BY: ARRIANA HUFFINGTON

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The Obsession with CEO Pay Won't Help the Middle Class

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Last weekend the New York Times published its annual list of executive compensation, with Oracle’s Larry Ellison topping the charts at $78.4 million (and Disney’s Bob Iger in a distant second, at $34.3 million). Pay packages have increased by an average of 9 percent since 2012, continuing a steady and spectacular rise even as average wages in the United States and throughout much of the developed world have stagnated.

These figures are often presented as evidence in an ongoing debate that assumes a direct link between the accumulation of wealth at the top of the income pyramid and the stagnation of income for the vast middle and bottom. The Times article quotes the current leading critic of the inequities of global capitalism, Capital in the Twenty-First Century author Thomas Piketty: “The system is pretty much out of control in many ways.”

That may be true. Business school professors who study the effect of excessive executive compensation are resoundingly convinced that too much comp hurts the overall performance of companies. Fifty years ago the ratio of average CEO comp to average salaries was 24-to-1; now it is 204-to-1. Many business scholars believe tying so much of CEO comp to stock and the performance of a company’s shares incentivizes CEOs to make quarterly earnings look good whether or not it benefits the company’s long-term health.

But does the widening gap between the pay of those at the top of the wealth heap and the rest actually harm those who are struggling or sinking? The underlying assumption tends to be an unequivocal yes. It’s one of Piketty’s claims—in sync with his overall view that capital benefits capital while chronically undermining wages and labor. Studies by University of California scholar Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman have been used as Exhibit A in the case for the pernicious influence of wealth inequality. These studies have been the subject of dozens of articles in the past month alone and are part of the corpus of evidence that accumulation of wealth is harming the middle class. Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz has made similar arguments.

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But as New York Times economics writer Eduardo Porter noted recently, claiming that wealth inequality is unambiguously harmful is more about ideology than evidence. He cites the struggles of Harvard scholar Christopher Jencks, a leading chronicler of the middle class, to complete a planned book on income inequality. After years of research, Jencks was convinced that the only true statement about whether and how income inequality harms society is “It’s hard to tell.” Progressive economist Jared Bernstein has also found that we can’t prove the assumption that inequality leads to slower growth, given available evidence. It may be true, Bernstein wrote, but we do not have enough concrete proof.

The work of Jencks and Bernstein complicates the neat narrative of robber barons and a new Gilded Age harming the middle class. Because those views lack black-and-white simplicity, however, they tend to receive less attention. Which is a shame, because they’re probably closer to the truth.

The assumption of a causal link between excessive pay at the top and low growth and stagnant incomes fuels the drive to reframe the tax code toward greater redistribution. There is a strong moral case for that, especially insofar as massive gaps between the rich and the rest can be so insurmountable as to severely dent the idea of equality enshrined in the founding of the U.S. That said, even aggressive redistribution will not fundamentally solve what now ails us.

First, this is not an American phenomenon. Capital everywhere—from the corporate CEO in the U.S. to industrial titans in India to party leaders in China—is reaping the greatest rewards of global economic growth. Altering CEO pay structures would do little to alter that trajectory.

The top 100 CEOs in the survey took home a total of $1.5 billion. That’s rather nice for them, but redistributing, say, $1 billion of that would do almost nothing to help the 100 million people at the bottom of the economic pyramid in the U.S. Even if you included upper management and got to, let’s say, $100 billion, the extra income distributed across American society would barely improve living standards. Boards could mandate that, say, Larry Ellison of Oracle should be less wealthy so that Oracle employees could be more wealthy, but Oracle employees are already on the winning side of the global economic equation. They are not the ones who need help.

Let’s say then that you created an inequality tax, as Robert Shiller of Yale has proposed. That could certainly generate some extra billions, which could then be redistributed. But even there, the super-rich would only become slightly less super-rich, while those whose incomes are stagnating or those tens of millions underemployed and caught in a web of structural unemployment would see marginal improvement at best. In short, measures to reduce inequality might be modestly helpful, but they wouldn’t solve much.

No matter what redistributive measures we took, we’d still be faced with an economic system in dramatic flux based on the erosion of traditional wage industries in the developed world over the past decades. It is not inequality that has caused the middle class to lag and suffer. Inequality rather is a symptom of a system that reached the limit of what it could provide wage earners performing jobs tied to 20th-century manufacturing.

Ballooning CEO pay is in turn a product of the globalization of capital, labor, and business (as Piketty highlights) without a commensurate evolution of some sort of global government and tax regime. Almost all of the companies that employ the top-paid CEOs are increasingly multinational and answer to no single government. That is a dramatic structural shift of the past two decades, driven by an emerging global middle class.

The focus on compensation has the virtue of a neat explanation for a real challenge. CEOs are paid egregiously; many, many people barely earn enough. But no amount of tweaking executive compensation will generate a vibrant, innovative economy. No amount of redistribution will reinvigorate the American dream or preserve the European system. Only if such tweaking goes hand in hand with a new growth engine—or a rethinking of the necessity of relentless growth—could it be constructive. Obsessing over executive compensation does nothing to contribute toward the hard work of making a generational transition away from the industrial economy that was and toward the information economy that will be.

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Zachary Karabell

BY: ZACHARY KARABELL


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Your Company’s Future Depends on High Performers — Here’s How to Keep Them

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There is a global shortage of high-skill, high-will workers that is only going to get worse. Some estimates indicate the shortage of knowledge workers will exceed 40 million professionals by 2020.

A number of major forces are driving this scarcity. Select factors include emerging-market demand, an aging workforce, and rapid growth in knowledge-intensive industries. Because of this trend, organizations — especially those dominated by knowledge workers — are under increasing pressure to attract and retain critical talent. The single most important factor in retaining key talent is the ability to sustain employee engagement and corresponding motivation.

Organizations dominated by knowledge workers face a challenge in ensuring engagement and motivation. Oftentimes, the complexity of the work, varied perspectives and skills, as well as employment options exacerbate this difficulty. Knowledge workers tend to be focused on executing non-routine, complex tasks and deliverables. These professionals tend to have relatively lower attachment to employers, highly differentiated interests, and numerous alternatives.

High-performing knowledge workers tend to be self-motivated by intrinsic factors, adding to the difficulty of an employer to directly motivate them. Moreover, the complex nature of their work and output limits the ability to directly measure productivity. Simply keeping knowledge workers “satisfied” won’t suffice. In order to retain and sustain high levels of engagement, companies need an explicit strategy and cannot rely upon historical sources of motivation. Traditional sources of motivation like pay, work conditions, and benefits are simply not enough.

Most high-performing, knowledge-intensive organizations exhibit a consistent talent distribution. Typically, 20% of workers are characterized as critical high-skill, high-will performers. Firms striving to achieve and sustain high performance must not only focus on retaining the 20%, but also increasing the mix of high performers through engagement and motivation. To provide a robust foundation of engagement and motivation, companies must first address demotivation, which can severely impact overall organization performance.

Here are three elements that can reduce levels of demotivation among knowledge workers:

  • Meaningful relationships: A collaborative culture characterized by strong relationships, communication, and cooperation through all levels of an organization.
  • Flexibility: Adaptive administration, policies, and working conditions to support work-life elasticity.
  • Incentives: Adequate compensation and benefits that attract high-skill, high-will employees versus getting the “wrong people to do the right thing.”

Addressing demotivation does not directly lead to an engaged and motivated workforce. Eliminating demotivation is the minimum required to produce a satisfied workforce. However, to be truly engaged and motivated, an employee must feel a sense of impact, relevance, and recognition. Key factors that can lead to sustained levels of engagement and motivation include:

  • Challenging work: High performers achieve optimal productivity when they are involved in meaningful, relevant, value-added work.
  • Recognition and accountability: High performers need to be regularly recognized for contribution and be held accountable to high standards of output and productivity.
  • Performance measures: High performers need to be part of meritocracies that recognize contribution, which in turn is used as a basis for promotion and compensation.

Clearly, for most organizations, people are the most important asset. The current and worsening shortage of high-skill, high-will workers requires organizations to adapt and extend traditional talent approaches. Organizations striving to sustain high performance must have an explicit strategy that attracts talent as well as ensures retention, engagement, and motivation.

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BY: BILL PIERONI


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Thursday, April 10, 2014

Where Are The Jobs?

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Last week, Maria Bartiromo interviewed me about employment and the 192,000 new jobs added in March in the U.S.

 In that interview, which you can see here, we discussed the ebbs and flows of executive hiring demand by industry which we track at Korn Ferry.

 It matters because executive hiring can be a leading indicator of overall hiring. In fact, for every new executive job created, often five or more support jobs will be created and filled.

 So, with that in mind – here is how we see the labor market now.


Big Picture Labor Market
The macro economic market has not changed in a few years – and we are not seeing real job growth – in fact, don't expect it, this is no longer the “new normal,” it is just “normal.”
Normal equates to "Slow Growth. Fast Change." By that we mean that overall economic growth is slow, yet changes in business are fast. Fast means that industry business cycles are shorter and the way we do business changes quickly. For example, five years ago, only a few businesses had major operations in the cloud – today every business does. This = “Fast Change.”
Where are the Jobs?
  • Financial Services continues to grow. This is telling because it indicates that the investment economy is climbing back.
  • Consumer industries are steady and still in a bit of a recovery from a lackluster holiday retail season. Look at leisure, which is down. The conspicuous consumer left the economy amid the Great Recession (Slow Growth) – he or she is still not back and buying. In fact, when we talk to executives, consumer spending, by far is the one factor that would lead to more hiring.
  • Life Sciences continue to grow. Pharma and Biotech continue to be up. Healthcare is still a hot area.
  • Industrial. While most sectors are up, Industrial hiring is slowing a touch overall. The reason? Energy is a strong portion of the business – hiring was at a fever pitch for the last year and only now is taking a breath and leveling off.
  • Technology is still in growth mode across the board. Convergence (carriers of voice, data, video) while slowing has been at a break-neck pace and only now has cooled off. It is growing, just not at the same clip.
One More Note on Hiring
We can tell you that all areas are hiring – yet all hiring is spotty and strategic. In a slow growth, fast change market – employers pick their opportune spots.
Great Employers Hire Using the Three As
Hiring and talent management has become a strategic weapon – if companies do it right, "The 3 As of Talent Management" become their guide.
a. Access. Employers access their business strategy
b. Align. Employers align a people strategy with the business strategy
c. Adapt. Employers seek to find the people that can adapt and execute
Tip: Before you walk into a job interview, or any conversation with an employer find out about the employer’s business strategy.
If you can’t find out, ask about their business strategy. Then explain how you have contributed to achieving business goals in your previous work.
Have Learning Agility? – Will Get Hired
For employers, finding people who can simply execute is not enough – the new effective worker or executive must have learning agility.
This means he or she can adapt to a changing environment in real time.
Today, you need execute and adapt on the fly. It’s like building or rebuilding the plane while it is in the air – in a fast change environment, you can’t afford to land.
You need to be quick on your feet and show employers why you are agile – how you have adapted on the fly – and why you have the capacity to continue to learn.
If you do – you’ll get hired.
Now go out there and be agile. Learning agile.

BY: Gary  Burnison

Gary Burnison

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What Airline Safety Videos Can Teach us about Changing Customer Behavior.

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Customers taking things for granted is the enemy of all Marketers. How do you get your people to change their behavior and pay attention to your message?

I have recently seen a great example of this in airlines safety videos. If you fly a lot like I do, you probably ignore the safety presentation. Whether it’s the stewardess doing it live in the aisle or playing on the screen, you are likely ignoring it, playing Flappy Bird on your phone (in airplane mode, of course).

That’s because we know what they are going to say or show us. We know how to buckle a seatbelt, how to put on the oxygen mask or use our seat as a flotation device.

The familiarity of the safety video is an excellent example of familiarity in marketing or a customer experience. The good news is that I know what they were trying to communicate in the video. Thebad news is that I completely ignore it now.

This same concept of familiarity applies to marketing. If you have seen the ad or the commercial or website banner enough, you don’t see it anymore. It becomes a familiar image that your brain notices but doesn’t process. That is, until it changes.


Delta made a few funny changes to their safety video:



Now the video is really entertaining, particularly if you remember all these things from the 80s, like I do. But it is also Delta’s way of making sure that their passengers have a little bit better experience. Instead of just ignoring the video like they usually do, they changed it a little bit to make it better for the passengers, so they will notice it again.

My post, “The Yin and Yang of Familiarity in Marketing” talks about the pros and cons of familiarity. On the one hand, it’s familiar so it’s comfortable. Like your favorite chair, it makes you feel safe. On the other hand, familiarity breeds contempt. It’s too predictable and boring, so you don’t always notice the familiar. If you consider this, you can certainly understand why so many marriages fail. It’s because the couple may have just grown bored of each other. Unfortunately, this can happen in your customer experience as well.

So when we advise our clients’ in customer experience design, we tell them they need to spice it up a little to keep their customers’ interest. Stimulate the good emotions in a new way that keeps improving the experience for them. Even little good changes make a customer take notice. If you don’t believe me, try making the experience just a little bit worse and see how much they notice!


One airline that knows how to spice things up and keep it stimulating is Air New Zealand. Consider their new video:



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It’s a regulation that the safety features of the aircraft are explained to passengers before the flight. That’s every single flight…and the same safety features. Both airlines recognize that the safety video is familiar enough to most passengers that they have a little bit of wiggle room to be creative with how they meet this regulation. By changing the familiar, they improve the experience for their passengers. Some videos more than others.


What? I was talking about the 80’s video! Geez!
So when it comes to your customer experience, you need to look for the safety videos in your experience. If your whole experience is as familiar and boring as the typical safety video, it may be time for an overhaul of the whole thing. But if you have an experience that is overall pretty good, maybe you can find a new way to keep it interesting and make it better for your customers.
What are the safety video moments in your experience and how can you use them to make it a little better for your customers? I’d be interested to hear your answers in the comments below.
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Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging keynote speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below. If you would like to follow Beyond Philosophy click here
Follow Colin Shaw on Twitter @ColinShaw_CX



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