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HBR’s 2011 Agenda
With insights from A.G. Lafley, Dan Ariely, Bob Sutton, Daniel Pink, and more.
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Featuring: Dan Ariely, A.G. Lafley, Lynda Gratton, Peter Cappelli, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Charlene Li, Tim Brown, Bob Sutton, Herminia Ibarra, Ed Schein, Jean-Francois Manzoni, and Daniel Pink. For more projects from thought leaders, check out the 2011 HBR Agenda. Also, the full HBR Agenda 2011 is available for free on the iPad when you download our new app, HBR Reads: http://s.hbr.org/HBRReads. To tell us what’s topping your agenda for next year, join the conversation here.
SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review, I’m Sarah Green. As part of our January/Feburary double issue we present our annual HBR agenda. These are short essays from two dozen thought leaders about what they’re working on the coming year. For this week’s IdeaCast you’ll be hearing directly from about a dozen of these thought leaders. I hope that while you listen, you’ll not only be inspired, but you’ll think about what new projects you could take on in 2011.
DAN ARIELY: Hi, my name is Dan Ariely. I’m a professor of psychology and behavior economics at Duke University. And I’m interested in general about all kinds of things that people do that is not necessarily in their best interest. And the way I usually hit on topics is that I have discussions with people and they tell me what’s bothering them. And then I try to figure it out. And recently I had a discussion with a physician friend who told me that he has lots of patients who are not taking their medications on time. And it is of course not a new problem. But what he also told me was at that the same patient seems to be taking lots of herbal supplements and vitamins. And all kinds of other things on time and with much more regularity. And it’s puzzled him. And I think it’s puzzling in general. And it brings the question of, what gets people to want to be more compliant with medications? And what gets people to want less?
So I started thinking about this and doing a little bit of research. And here is what I currently understand. The moment people think about the medication as being natural, they think that it fits with their body better. They don’t think necessarily it works more efficiently, but they think it has less unintended consequences. And because of that they’re more likely to take it. So I call this the caveman theory. And you can envision the human body as a big clock with lots of wheels, before digital clocks were around. And what seems to happen is that people think that modern synthetic medication and herbal, natural medication seems to be working on the main problem in a similar efficacy. But they think that the herbal, natural medication seems to not have a harmful effect down the road to some of the small wheels and connectors. While the chemical, synthetic medications have these negative effects.
Now the curious thing is that lots of those things are just a question of framing. Insulin, natural or not natural? Interferon, natural or not natural? In lots of the cases the medication that we take– we just don’t know what the ingredients are. And when it actually makes it difference in terms compliance, if we only told people what those things have or how that we’ve represented this information. So I’m hoping to study this not only the medical compliance, but more generally. In home remedies and what do we do with genetically engineered foods. What the cases and what are the limits to when we think something is going to work well with our bodies, and when do we think it’s going to fail, and therefore we don’t want it that much.
A.G. LAFLEY: I’m A.G. Lafley, former CEO Procter & Gamble, and I am passionate about leadership. As I look at the world around us I see accelerating change, volatility, complexity, competitiveness on a scale that I’ve never seen before in my life. And competitiveness in a world that is global, and getting smaller and moving faster. In that world we are going to need stronger leadership more than ever. That’s why I’ve been focusing this past year on leadership development, and specifically, on CEO succession.
Frankly, the track record of major corporations on CEO succession really hasn’t been very good. Board members say they’re dissatisfied with process. CEO tenures are shortening. In fact they’ve more than halved in the past decade. The average tenure for a CEO is now around four years. And it’s quite clear that in too many cases the process is broken.
LYNDA GRATTON: Hi, I’m Lynda Gratton, and the professor of management practice at the London Business School. I’m really excited about the next couple of years. My number one topic of interest is the future of work. My study actually involves 45 companies from all over the world, and I have 200 executives working together on a very exciting process of co-creation. We are looking at big issues, like what does this mean for open innovation? What does it mean for the future leadership? What does it means for ecosystems? And we’re learning from each other using a portal that I and my colleagues have designed. We use monthly webinars. And I’m blogging every week. And so it’s a very exciting next couple of years. And I think that at the end of that we’ll have a very good idea, not just about how the future of work is going to develop, but also what we, both as individuals and as organizations need to do to be sure that we’re future-proofed.
PETER CAPPELLI: Hi, my name is Peter Cappelli. I’m the George W. Taylor professor of management the Wharton School. I also direct our center for human resources. And the project I’m working on this year has to do with careers, and understanding the modern career. That’s individual jobs and how they are put together to form a life of work for somebody. There are two reasons why I’m interested in this. One is, for society, it makes a lot of difference how careers work. Whether people stay in the same organizations for a long period of time. The 30 year mortgage, for example, was built around that assumption that you would live that way at your work life. And advance in the same community, same organization. Or is it the case that people physically are moving as well as they are having to change employers along the way.
I’d say more important is what this means for individuals who are trying to figure out if they begin careers or they’re in the middle of them how to get ahead. How to get where you’d like to be. For example if you start out in finance, we know that people change employers frequently, but suppose you want to get out of finance, what you have to do to do it? Is it possible or do you get pigeonholed early in your life so that your first job is absolutely crucial to you. We really don’t have a good idea about how these decisions are playing out now. And so part of what I want to do is to help figure that out.
CLAUDIO FERNANDEZ-ARAOZ: My name is Claudio Fernandez-Araoz. I am a senior adviser at the executive search firm Egon Zehnder International, and the author of Great People Decisions. For 2011 I will be focusing on cracking the code for making great people decisions. The reasons why I’m focusing on this are related to the new global environment we live in. First, we live in a world, as I like to put it, even the past has become unpredictable. In this environment you really need the right leadership at the top more than ever. You just can’t afford mistakes when you’re flying into a storm or navigating uncharted waters. In this new global environment, also, demographics and the globalization are making top talent increasingly scarce. Just over a six year period companies plan to double the proportion of revenues from emerging markets. While demographics are reducing the number of young candidates in developed countries by 35% over that same period. So you really need to become much better at identifying, attracting, and retaining those scarce stars. Finally, in the new global environment, I’m convinced that great people decisions are not only badly at the company level, but also at national levels. While we see major nations facing unprecedented deficits and even major crisis, those who master great people decisions are doing better than ever. And we should learn from them.
CHARLENE LI: Hello my name is Charlene Li. I’m the author of Open Leadership and the founding partner of Altimeter Group. My two things that I’m looking at in 2011, is first of all, how are businesses creating a social strategy? In particular, more and more companies realize that the social web isn’t going away. So they’re trying to figure out how do I think about this on a strategic level? How is it going to benefit my business. And in particular thinking at a higher level than just simply having a Facebook page or a Twitter page. How is all going to roll up together and have real business impact. So a lot of the things I’m looking at and working with companies about is how do you create that strategy. Who is involved? What do you do first, second, third? And also what don’t you do. Again the best strategy is one where you know what you will do and also what you won’t do.
TIM BROWN: Hi I’m Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO. And the idea that I’ve been talking about in this issue is what what I call permission to innovate. As we think about innovation we tend to focus on the individual innovations, and the individual things and the impact they have on the world. But it becomes more and more apparent that for companies to succeed through innovation they have create portfolios. You have to invest in innovation in lots of different ways. And that’s an idea that we’ve been used to for a while. But it occurs to me that there are benefits of thinking about innovation at a portfolio level that can accrue the companies in really interesting ways. I’ve noticed by watching certain companies who’ve focused intensely on innovation for long periods of time that they’ve built something around their brand that I call permission to innovate. That allows them to do so many things now that their competitors can’t do. For instance, it allows them to fail and learn from failing without taking a hit in the market. It allows them to lower the cost of marketing. It allows them to have all of their partners and stakeholders aligned around innovation constantly. Lots and lots of benefits.
So this feels like a pretty big idea to me. And something that applies not only the kinds of companies that we work with at IDEO out in the world, but even to our own innovation as we think in the future as we want to become more resilient, more able to deal with the ups and downs of the world. Then I want to figure out how, similarly, we might create high permission to innovate within a company like IDEO. So that’s why I’m focused on it now. Not only because our clients are asking for it, but because I think it’s an important thing to think about now for our own company if we’re going to be successful as we look to the future.
BOB SUTTON: My name is Bob Sutton and I’m a professor at Stanford University and author of Good Boss, Bad Boss. My latest project, which I hope to finish in 2011, is on scaling. My colleague Hayagreeva Rao, also called Huggy Rao, and I are interested in how behaviors spread across social systems of all kinds. So within organizations, across networks of organizations, and also across markets. And we’re especially interested in what propels this process. And if there is a main idea we’ve been futzing with, it’s the notion that when you see ideas spread across networks you tend to have a one-two punch. Where first there is a cause.
So just for example in one of the cases we’re looking at, it’s the 100,000 Lives Campaign. And the cause was to stop needless deaths in American hospitals. And then following that emotion is sort of harnessed to a bunch of cool and usable solutions that are relatively cognitively and emotionally easy for people to use. So just for example in the 100,000 Lives Campaign, the people who came up with this, it was called The Institute For Health Improvement in Boston. They came up with six relatively simple evidence-based things that people in hospitals could do, such as elevating the bed 45 degrees when people were on a respirator to reduce the probability of pneumonia. And also related to that, they focused on people who would actually have the time and motivation to do this sort of stuff. So they focus on nurses not doctors. And apparently, if you look at the evidence, it appears that they did save 100,000 lives. So we are hoping to finish this by the end of the calendar year 2011. But these projects are always uncertain. But we’re very excited about it and doing all sorts of cases and reading all sorts of academic literature.
HERMINIA IBARRA: My name is Herminia Ibarra and I’m professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD business school. I’m also the author of Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing your Career. What inspired me to get into the research project that I will tell you more about really came out of participating in a couple of panels at the World Economic Forum’s meetings in Davos a couple years ago in the heat of the economic crisis. And there is a contrast in the discussion that really struck me. On the one hand, there was a really clear consensus by opinion leaders that the old leadership models were no longer working. And that the world today really called for a much more distributed, inclusive, sustainable form of leadership. And people pretty much agreed on that. Although it wans’t really clear what that meant. And on the other hand in the panels that I was moderating, people were also clearly saying that they felt leadership was situational and that a crisis essentially required command and control leadership. And I thought, hm, this is interesting. We sort of know where we want to go. We can see the trends. But it’s really not clear to people how to make that work in the context of a large, complex organization facing the kind of pressures that they were facing, and still are facing today. So I though, hmm, here’s an interesting research question. At the same time, with my colleague Morton Hanson, and we were working on a study of CEO performance. And really trying to take a much more long-term look at CEO performance. In our case, looking at how well CEOs perform over the course of their tenure.
And we came up with a pretty interesting database and some comprehensive metrics. And once we were thinking about where do we go next with this, it became pretty clear that among those top performers there were some real pioneers in terms of models of new leadership that also deliver bottom line results. So that’s where we’re going. Is we’re going to really shine a spotlight into those role models in those companies that are doing new and interesting things with regard to their leadership model. With with regard to their business model, with regard to their workplace. As a way of expanding the base of role models, examples, best practices, that other people can learn from.
ED SCHEIN: Hello, this Ed Schein. I’m a professor emeritus from the Sloan School. And in recent years have focused more on the process of how to be a good consultant. Which has migrated into how to be a good helper. And why this focus? I think as I look at the world, the complexity of occupations, the multiculturalism, information technologies that destroy the boundaries of organizations, all of which tells me that teams of the future and leaders will have to be much, much more skillful at– particularly receiving help. Asking for and knowing how to accept help. As well as what has traditionally been a skill, which is to give help. And we really have to learn how to be better at it. Particularly people who lead interdependent teams, where you can think of a team as being basically a situation where the members have to be in a perpetual, mutual, helping relationship with each other. And where you can think of the leader as being someone who will not know enough to just make decisions, but will have to learn how to ask for help and provide it to his group. So this is what I see the future going, and I wish everyone the best of luck with it, because it’s going to be complicated.
JEAN-FRANCOIS MANZONI: Hi I’m Jean-Francois Manzoni. I’m professor of management practice and chaired professor of leadership and organizational development at INSEAD. The name of my project is Getting Relationships Right: Overcoming Labels Biases, and Misconceptions at Work. Long title, it has to do really with the damages created by first impressions. And of course executives know this. When they know you well they will say something like, look Jean-Fancois I know I’m not supposed to rely on first impressions, but the reality shows that in fact my first impressions end up being right 95% of the time. It’s not my fault, I just happen to be right. And so what I’m studying is why, in fact, in reality, your success rate is not 95%. Now it looks like it’s 95%, but it’s not. In part, your confirmatory biases attract your attention to the times that you’re right, and not to the times that you’re wrong. And also in part, particularly with respect to negative labels, your negative labels end up being self-fulfilling. So you made yourself right through the way you deal with people. So that’s what I’m studying, and that’s what I’ve been studying for a number of years. First in the context of performance labels, performance based first impressions. But now more generally about first impressions beyond performance based attributions.
DANIEL PINK: My is Daniel Pink, I’m the author of Drive and A Whole New Mind. There’s a palpable sense out there that the old rules have become a little bit dodgy. That the old ways of doing things have reached some of their limits. And I think as we turn a page, open a new chapter, which I think we do inevitably at the beginning of a new year. But I think it’s also true in this case because we’re beginning what seems to be a new era. I think it offers us some really cool, interesting opportunities to ask some fundamental questions and reevaluate some of our most basic processes. And begin to build workplaces that I think are a little bit more fulfilling. And companies that do better by their workers, by their customers, and by the world.
And I wonder whether this desire to increase profits is sufficiently motivating for people to do really extraordinary work. And I’m wondering whether an excess of focus on the profit motive, and excess of focus on shareholder returns is one reason for the widespread disengagement in the workplace. And as I look at other companies that are doing well, many of them, not all of them, but many of them stand for something to contribute to the world. And I think what we’re seeing out there is the emergence of a purpose motive. And that when you twin the purpose motive and the profit motive, that ends up being the recipe for an effective organization today. And I’m curious about whether that is actually correct.
SARAH GREEN: You’ve been listening to contributors to the HBR Agenda, appearing online and in our January/Feburary double issue. I’m Sarah Green for Harvard Business Review. Next year I’ll be focused on finding the best ideas in management and bringing them to you. I hope you’ll let us know what’s on your agenda for next year by going to our editors blog and taking part in the conversation on HBR.org.