What is a source of fulfillment in your life? Is it work? Or perhaps a non-profit you work with? Or perhaps the family you are raising? Whatever it is, I bet it is something you personally value. Sometimes that comes from our paid work, our careers, and sometimes not.

From my own experience of 20+ years working with or in “corporate” Fortune 500 work and in the research I follow — work satisfaction was nearly obliterated by the pressures of deadlines, of work that went no where, of overwork, of bosses demands that made no sense, of being told what to do without asking what you know that could solve the problem.

So it was through that lens that I watched this recent talk by researcher and professor Dan Ariely. Some of you might know of him — a behavioral economist who has written Predictably Irrational & Others. This talk is on the meaning of work:

Ariely points out that when we think about work, the “usual” thinking about motivation is tied to payment. In other words conventional thinking is that money is why people work.  He shares a series of specific projects he’s been doing that *proves* how much meaning, engagement and ownership change our experience of value creation. It’s a great set of stories about how much we care if someone will use our work, how much we fundamentally care about the thing we’ve made ourselves. Like I said in Social Era, value creation has changed; You don’t have to sell me the thing I helped make. In other words, when people co-create products and services, it disrupts the thinking of traditional strategists and their “value chain”. In the Social Era, value creation derives from commitment, not a transaction where the consumer is at the end of a long supply chain. Meaning, co-creation, overcoming challenges, sense of ownership, relationship to our personal identity, and — of course — pride all matter in how value is derived.

There’s plenty of empirical data to support the strategic direction Ariely talks of. Gallup, the research firm, recently did a meta-analysis across 199 studies covering 152 organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. It showed that high employee engagement brings an uplift of every business performance number. Profitability up 16%, Productivity up 18%, customer loyalty up 12% and quality up an incredible 60%. I wrote about that a few years back, here, in the piece called People are Not Cogs.

Seeing this talk has me thinking and asking:
How do you create your own pride, and motivation at work? Or, with your kids?
Are they one and the same, or different and how?
What is it you measure this value creation by?

Many times over the last few years — since I have moved from running a company to having a portfolio career — I wonder how to measure “success”. I can believe I am purpose aligned but still feel unclear if “success” is happening because I lack a “hard” metric. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. The reason many of us struggle with the meaning / ownership / pride thing is because it’s hard to measure. Which is why I think many  cling to the paycheck as a proxy for value creation measurement.

What do you think? What say you on this thread of how we measure fulfillment at work?

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Nilofer Merchant, Management Thinker, Feature Story of HBR Magazine, April 2013

One of the featured 3,000-word articles is on Leading in the Social Era. It’s entitled, When TED Lost Control of it’s Crowd. In this article, I discuss how “open” does not mean “easy” or “free” and that in the #socialera, you need to get communities working with you, as a key strategic edge. TED did just that, and they are navigating new ground (not easy to do!). I share three practices I see as key to know: “listening loudly,” realigning the community through shared purpose, and being strategic about what part of the organization should be open.

Sarah Green, my very talented editor over at Harvard Business Review worked with me on this piece (along with a big crowd of editors and such) and we are proud of how it came out.  The voice, the story telling, the nuanced lessons were just what we aimed for… and sweated over… because we wanted the idea to shine through. Which is this: Through communities, people create value not because of rank or title or affiliation (or even pay in this case) but because of the way they can create something together. Knowing how to “lead” in that context is something each of us is going to have to learn.

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For example, in charitable work, the success of non-profits is measured in how little money they spend in overhead, limiting who they can recruit, whether they can ask more people to be involved, which means that ultimately their impact is relatively unscalable. As Dan Pallotta an activist best known for creating the multi-day charitable event industry said at TED, “The way we are thinking about charity is dead wrong”.

His talk was one of the most important talks of TED2013. (You’ll see me share the 5 talks I valued as they are released… vs a list of them now. I’ve already shared Amanda Palmer’s with thoughts and implications for the economics of generosity.)

And it points to a larger issue. In business today, there’s a great deal of binary thinking: As in, you are either a capitalist, or a do-gooder. You are either into profits and results, or into people-y stuff. You are either running your own enterprise or working in community.

While binary thinking creates an ease of classification, it has a dark side. Binary thinking creates a cultural framework that doesn’t teach us to understand nuance, or celebrate uncertainty. Or to understand how to balance competing tensions.

As I wrote in Social Era, “things we once considered opposing forces—doing right by people and delivering results, collaborating and keeping focus, having a social purpose, and making money—are really not in opposition. They never have been. But we need a more sophisticated approach to understand business models where making a profit doesn’t mean losing purpose, community, and connection. Finding the right balance between them is key. We will find that balance as we shape new constructs for business models, strategies, and leadership. What we can create will be rich in many senses of the word.”

Dan Pallotta, Activist, Speaking at TED2013; Picture by Duncan Davidson

Pallotta’s talk, when combined with Amanda Palmer’s points me to this insight: People deeply want to be in community, but they often have to be asked. Yet, if we limit how we can ask, we limit the outcomes.

How we hold an idea matters. As we ask, “How can both things be true” … we will find a new way to solve big problems.

The post Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

Feed the Eagles. There are only a few things that matter. Know what they are. And place your energy into them. They aren’t always right in front of you so you need to look up and out more. Starve the Turkeys – lots of things are right in front of you … pecking around, making noise, and demanding attention. Because they are right in front of you, it’s easy to pay attention to them most and first. Ignore them. They will actually do fine without you.

(I write about how this has affected the small — as in email — and big — as in family as a priority as examples…)

Then a friend that I’ve met through Twitter (and we’ve since been fortunate to meet IRL) someone I learn from, wrote something I think is worth sharing… (edited only slightly)

So – years ago, in my early twenties, I was on a project with more senior guy. He dropped me off at a potential real estate development site, about 25 acres of open land, in a semi-rural exurb. I had a notebook, a pen, a digital camera, and a cell phone (in the days when cell phones were bricks that didn’t even do email, just texts & phone calls). My assignment: do a full site-walk, looking for and cataloging anything that might constitute evidence of wetlands, perennial and intermittent streams, vernal pools, turtle / salamander habitat, or any sort of exotic or possibly endangered wildlife, anything that might pose a significant problem to the development of this parcel.

So I start my walk.

About an hour in, I’m waaaaay on the back end of this site, that had a mix of open grass, fallow farm plots, forest, shrubs, and high-growing weeds and tall brush. It’s hot, it’s dry, I’m sweating, there ain’t no salamanders or turtles or anything of interest. This is the boringest day in long time, and I’m not even half done. I stop on an open stretch of grass, about 30 feet wide, in between some really high brush / weeds on one side (it looked like what had once been either a corn patch, or oddly enough, a surreptitious reefer plot) and a long, deep thicket of dense undergrowth on the other. I bust into my water bottle and light up a smoke.

Then I hear this weird noise, coming from the undergrowth.

I’ve no idea what the hell it is, although I’m reasonably sure it’s some kind of woodland creature. It’s not a harsh growl or predatory sound, so I’m not worried I’m going to be carried off by coyotes or anything, so I don’t think much of it. I hear the sound again. I’m looking around, I don’t see anything. Then, I hear this utter cacophony erupt from the undergrowth – it sounded like the war cry of some kind of tribe of savages – I and I jump around to see the source. The undergrowth is shaking and twitching and then, from the thicket burst out this cavalry phalanx of charging, screaming, flapping wild turkeys. At least a dozen, probably more. And, in the words of the poet, “they were coming right at me.” Fast. And angry.

Time dilated.

My jaw dropped.

What the heck to do now?

What did I know about wild turkeys? I ran through my internal knowledge base: I knew that the 80 proof kind, with a couple ice cubes, was the beginning of a good Friday night (not germane! next fact!). I knew they traveled in groups (borne out by the evidence! not helpful! next fact!) Also, I knew that wild turkeys were ferocious in their own way, and their main form of attack was to jump about 4 or 5 feet in the air, flap their wings furiously in a semblance of flight to prolong their jump, and then claw the living daylights out of whatever happened to be in their path with these rather sizable, razor sharp claws that they have attached to them (useless trivia, suddenly useful!).Was this how it was going to end? Clawed to death by wild turkeys in some rural Connecticut nowheresville planned retail development? One moment alive and vibrant, the next, a lifeless bleeding pile of shredded former consultant?

Exactly unlike any movie hero ever, I dropped to the ground, covered my head, went fetal, and made peace with my god. In seconds, thankfully, the raging turkey torrent passed me by, gobbling and clucking and flapping and squawking and then…they were gone. Into the high weeds. Silence. No evidence that it ever happened.

It was a Hunter S. Thompson moment – lying on the ground, wet from spilled water bottle, half a cigarette in my mouth, saying…jesus, did that *really* just happen?!

Needless to say, the rest of that day (week, and month) were uneventful by comparison, and not worthy of recounting. But I did spend a lot of time thinking about the ramifications of this experience, and what it might teach me about the universe and my place in it.

Some key lessons I drew from this affair, which I think actually apply nicely to the turkeys in your context:

1. The turkeys will come out of nowhere, when you least expect them
2. Turkeys travel in large packs, and when in the pack, they are angry, and vicious, and know no fear or remorse
3. The turkeys tend to follow a very big turkey – the largest, usually, probably also the meanest
4. One person alone is no match for a pack of turkeys in full-on aggro-mode
5. Being in between a pack of aggro wild turkeys and where they want to go is not a good place to be
6. One would be wise to learn to detect “turkey-sign” and avoid areas where you see it – the best defense is to not be where they are
7. Do not meddle in the affairs of turkeys
8. When caught in a turkey-charge, the best thing to do may very well be to put your head down and hope the turkeys pass you by
9. Turkeys will do what they will do. You will not stop them from being turkeys or convince them of anything they don’t want to be convinced of
10. Watching for eagles is important, but it’s always a good idea to keep a weather-eye on the underbrush, too.

That’s from Seth Cargiuolo, a digital strategist, and clearly someone whose faced his set of turkeys in his life. (I hope it made you laugh, as it did me.)

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3 Reasons Men Should Read LeanIn

You might have noticed that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has a new book out. Lean In builds on her TED talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” which has been seen over 2,000,000 times and launched a national conversation among women.

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 28JAN11 – Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook, USA; Young Global Leader are captured during the session ‘Handling Hyper-connectivity’ at the Annual Meeting 2011 of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 28, 2011. Copyright by World Economic Forum swiss-image.ch/Photo by Jolanda Flubacher (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No doubt, her book will be devoured and discussed by women. But if that’s all that happens, it will be a disservice to our organizations.

The truth is, men still hold the lion’s share of power. Sandberg shares stats that many women know almost by heart — but men may not. Women hold just 20% of seats in parliaments globally, 18% in the US Congress. Women have been at least 50% of college graduates in the US since the early 1980′s, yet the percentage of women at the top of corporate America has barely budged over the past decade. Just 21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women, a measly 4%. Women hold just 16% of board seats, and women of color hold a tiny 3% of board seats.

Sandberg could have also mentioned that women represent less than 20% of speaker and panel spots that help confer recognition as experts in their field, or that women receive less than 3% of venture capital funding. Or that even in movie crowd scenes meant to depict “the general population”, the film industry shows only 17% of crowds as female, compared with the 51% that they actually are. Women are seemingly invisible. Without visibility, consideration is absent, opportunity is lost, and access is denied.

When I ask men how to solve this gender imbalance, they often say that the problem will take care of itself when there are more qualified candidates. But this view often hides a circular argument. How will we know when more women are qualified? When more women hold those roles! Or when those men know of more women who can hold the role. This logic might work if one could magically ensure that gender selection bias does not exist. But there is ample evidence for precisely the opposite. Gender bias exists, and both men and women are affected by it (yes, you read that right, even women can be sexist!). We are not talking about equality of outcomes here; the results show bias thwarts equality of opportunity.

I see three major reasons every manager, whether male or female, should read Lean In, and this is the first: increasing your awareness of the paradoxes facing women. One of the most illuminating sections of Sandberg’s book is her discussion of the famous Heidi / Howard study done at Harvard Business School. Professors asked students to read a case based on Heidi Roizen, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley (disclosure: she’s a friend). They assigned half of the students to read the story of Heidi, half to read a version of the case where the name had been changed to Howard. Students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since their accomplishments were identical. But they regarded Howard as a more appealing colleague while seeing Heidi as selfish and “not the type of person you’d want to hire or work for.” This points to one of six common binds women face, which is that women are either perceived as either competent or liked, but not both. Similarly, a few years ago, Clay Shirky wrote a piece called “A Rant Against Women” in which he claimed that women were not being pushy enough to get his attention. Yet research shows that women who sing their own praises get penalized in society by both men and women and that women are culturally discouraged from self-promotion. When we know the research, we start to eliminate these kinds of Catch-22s from our thinking.

Knowing the research can help us acknowledge that all people have subconscious biases. Once you acknowledge that, you enable yourself to begin consciously filtering in more women, rather than unconsciously filtering them out — the second reason all leaders should read this book. You reduce the impact of your own biases by consciously changing what you expose yourself to. Whether you are a man or a woman, the odds are that you give credence to men more than women. That’s not because smart expert women don’t exist as leaders, business experts, or board members. But we tend to follow the people we already know, the ones we’re already comfortable with, and especially those already proven “worthy” — which as the data above suggests, is incredibly slanted towards men. But by being intentional about including women, (beyond the few you know by first name — Caterina, Sheryl, Marissa, Ann-Marie, Hillary, etc.) you will naturally start seeing a fuller set of ideas, and considering more women as leaders, speakers, board members, and so on.

The truth is this: There are tons of qualified women for whatever position you’re trying to fill. They’re just invisible to you right now. For example, recently an HBR blogger posted “11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read” — a list that did not include a single work by a woman. I’m sure he did not intentionally exclude women like Linda Hill, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ellen Langer, or Carol Dweck. But he did. So as a follow-up, Whitney Johnson countered with a more diverse list. It’s not a question of lowering standards — the books on Whitney’s list were all equally well-regarded — just having the consciousness to notice that you’ve inadvertently ignored half the talent.

So here’s one immediate action item: Go on Twitter, and ask others, “Point me to 5 thinkers (who happen to be women) who I should be paying attention to. I want to #changetheratio”. Don’t assume talented women for any role don’t exist; assume they do — and get help finding them.

This brings me to the third reason I think all managers need to hear the message in Lean In. While I certainly see the value in helping women understand how to raise their own visibility by “leaning in,” we won’t unlock the economic potential of female talent and ideas until we change our systems. If your system of finding people to hire, speakers for your stage, or members for your board depends on having them step forward and ask, you’ve effectively institutionalized a bias. Knowing key facts, such as those Sandberg lays out, may help. For example: Research shows that men apply for jobs for which they have 60% of the stated qualifications while women demur unless they have 100%. Sure, we can ask women to have more chutzpah. But we can also redesign our hiring approach. The most famous example of this is probably the shift to blind auditions for new symphony musicians. In the 1970s and 1980s, most orchestras began to place a screen in front of candidates during the audition, so that judges would not know the gender of the musician. (Some savvy women also removed their high heels to avoid the telling “clickety clack” of female footwear.) As a result, while some bias still exists, women went from being 5% of all players in 1970 to being 25% of the orchestra by 1997. This result wasn’t because female musicians “leaned in,” but because hiring managers — many of them male — changed the system to prevent qualified candidates from being filtered out.

I’d like to leave you with this call to action: make this your problem. Don’t leave it to women to create change all by themselves. We needed white people to help pass civil rights laws that helped blacks; we need straights to help fight for rights for gays. And we need men to help fight for equal opportunities for women. Find a way to act. For example, pledge to phase out all-male panels at conferences. Or, if you see boards made up of only men, speak up — because companies with more than one woman on their board have performed 26% better than those with no female directors.

Women will not be able to undo debilitating, ingrained cultural biases on their own. And there’s no reason why they should have to. This isn’t just their problem. This is an economic problem. We need the talent of all our people — to bring that which only they can bring — to solve old problems with new ideas or, to come up with entirely new solutions. This will not happen if we leave a huge swath of talent out of the boardroom — and out of our benefit.

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You can contribute to this article and the comments (I’m sure it’ll be wild) here: on in long form: http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/three_reasons_men_should_read.html#disqus_thread

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 Why Did Sandberg’s Book Rile So Many Women?

To the women who have “leaned in” all our lives, Sheryl Sandberg’s book riles us. The chatter goes something like this: we already raise hand at opportunities, understand our worth (and negotiate for it), and strive for equality with our partners…and so asking any of us to “lean in” more seems like you’re just asking us to do the impossible: work harder.

I’m not sure how much of my personal story you know. So a quick narrative of it: I had to leave my family in order to get an education because of my gender. That led to 2^nd tier schools based I worked to fund college. My first job at Apple was as an admin, later doing research and then pricing. I raised my hand at nearly every opportunity, finding creative solutions to problems other people deemed impossible. One project I took on (when no one else wanted it, I later learned) led to the creation of a channel program that grew a nascent business at Apple from $2M to $180M, with 50% profitability, in 18 months. That led to a startup opportunity, in the early days of the web, that Adobe acquired. Shortly thereafter, I was running a major part of a Fortune 500 by age 29. From there, I’ve started my own business and bootstrapped it because financing to women is less than 3% of all venture funding.  Nonetheless, even without any outside capital, the business did amazingly well, growing to be a multi-million dollar and well-respected enterprise that got me, then CEO, featured in the Wall Street Journal. Nowadays, I lecture at some amazing institutions, my latest book was published by Harvard and became a best seller, and am getting more recognized for my talent to have a business thrive in the Social Era. My first marriage failed miserably, but I certainly do consider my 2^nd (and last) husband to be a great partner. I would not be where I am without him. While I still have some unattained professional goals — I would like to be on 1 or 2 Fortune 500 Boards given my expertise in business strategy, reinvention, and complex organizations — it has not happened, yet. In the meantime, I serve on both (smaller) public and private boards today, loving it.

In short… In spite of many professional and personal challenges, I didn’t give up, or using Sandberg’s terminology, I have leaned in, hard.

Yet, when I heard of Sandberg’s book, I didn’t want to read it; I didn’t want to support it. I thought it was demanding women to do more. It brought up guilt by some who look back at their own career-navigating mistakes with regret. I personally thought if I lean in anymore, I’m gonna crack wide open, from the force field pressure. The CEO of Get Satisfaction – a business that helps enterprises handle customer support through social interaction – Wendy Lea apparently felt the same way. On her FB page, she wrote, “If I lean in anymore, I’ll just fall over. I’m not kidding.”
The worry was that we were being asked to do more than just work harder. We thought that we were being blamed – that we alone are responsible for things we cannot control, and somehow it’s up to us to address societal and cultural issues that limit women not because of who we uniquely are, but by what we are not (men).

But the worries were unfounded. Early reviews of the book in the NYT and so on were certainly headline-worthy getting but not reflecting the full range of this book’s content. This book is not about blame or asking any of us to simply do more. Just today, I’ve published a researched piece over at Harvard on why I think this book should be ready by both women, and men.

Sandberg has written an incredibly thoughtful and well researched book that addresses social and policy barriers that stop women’s advancement. Now the key is to get people to read it. Really read it. And understand what role everyone one of us –men and women can do to address this. Sure, women need to lean-in. And I will personally buy it for many. If I could go back in time, I’d have it stapled to my 20-year-old forehead. It advances the cause of gender equity in two ways: By asking women to step into their fullest selves and not hold back because of the fear that they’ll be rejected. More importantly, it also will help us have a more valid debate about creating real viable change — by sharing facts that can help us have a different conversation about what is limiting our workforce, and specifically limiting our ability to have everyone count in a meaningful way.

This gender equity issue is more than a woman problem. This is an economic problem. We need the talent of all our people – to bring that which only they can bring – to solve old problems with new ideas or to come up with entirely new solutions. This will not happen until we collectively decide we will lean into this issue.

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You can comment on this more personal take over here, in my Linked In column area

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As always, I welcome your take/opinion/action plans. I’ll be offline very shortly and so I might not get to it till end of week but hopefully this is the start of an interesting conversation… and change. Much needed change.

The post Thoughts (personal and professional) on Sandberg’s New Book, Lean In appeared first on Nilofer Merchant.

Since sharing the press that came right out of the event, 3 new bits worth sharing.

First, Howie Mandel said “sitting is the new smoking” and then did a #walkntalk on the Ellen DeGeneres show. He just wouldn’t sit down…