From religious leaders to politicians; corporate titans to everyday folks; glitterati to moguls; intelligentsia to idiots; there seems to be no action that elicits societal condemnation, let alone punishment, for anyone except getting caught.

That’s right, getting caught.

If a societal no-no, first vehemently deny it and/or claim you didn’t realize anybody actually minded. If that doesn’t work, apologize profusely using language that changes the focus from what you did and who you hurt to you, i.e., how sad you are for them and how your big sister broke your GI Joe when you were a kid, so it’s not really your fault.

Another approach is to buy their silence, but if that doesn’t work, you can claim that the devil led you astray, you were weak, but you’ve preyed a lot, God forgave you and so should those you mislead/hurt.

Enterprise and Internet companies emote about how important user privacy is and how hard they try to protect it every time they’re hacked or their hands are caught in the cookie jar.

Worse, repercussions of serious criminal actions, especially murder, are relativity easy to avoid as long as you’re white and well-healed — or in law enforcement.

It used to be that people talked of someone having a “strong moral compass.” I suppose many still do, but that’s not worth much when “true north” is portable, shifting with the trends on social media and shoved around by rigid ideologies.

Image credit: Tim Cigelske

What does a company like PwC do when it faces “crisis-level attrition” combined with little-to-no interest from new grads — their workforce lifeblood?

Run a study, of course. What else would a consultant do first?

Millennials, they found, did not object to long hours outright. They were as committed to their work as older colleagues. But they were also more willing to question long-held assumptions about how that work should be done. Given the abundance of connectivity, why was it necessary to be in the same physical building for 15 hours (on a good day) to get a job done? Why couldn’t they work from home when a project allowed?

No surprise there; the surprise came from a different segment of the 44,000 strong global workforce.

But here was the real surprise: Non-millennial employees wanted exactly the same thing. Virtually identical percentages of millennial employees and non-millennial workers said they would prefer to be able to shift their work hours to schedules that could accommodate both their personal and professional obligations—heading home early for family dinner, for example, in exchange for an early start or signing back on once the kids were in bed.

The only difference was that millennials were willing to speak up about their dissatisfaction, and to opt out when problems couldn’t be resolved. Over and over again, the results of the survey made clear: work was important, but a personal life was, too.

Duh. That “surprise” isn’t exactly rocket science.

For a company that makes its living from its intelligent counsel and problem solving skills, they really blew it. Beyond that, they seemed to ignore others’ research.

Research has found that productivity drops significantly after about 50 hours per week of work. Long hours come at a cost to employee health (paywall), which in turn leads to absenteeism, loss of productivity, and higher insurance costs for employers. It’s a game no one wins.

Every list I’ve seen, since millennials started working, describing what they wanted in the workplace more or less duplicated what I’d heard from other candidates for more than 30 years.

Millennial workers were just the first generation to call the game out as bullshit, in numbers large enough to force the rules to change.

Big mouths and a willingness to walk got McKenzie management’s attention, but the difference between McKenzie and other companies with similar cultures is that McKenzie admitted the problem, found the cause, crafted solutions and followed-through implementing them.

There are plenty of others still in denial.

A recent Vanity Fair profile of Goldman Sachs’s president and probable next CEO David Solomon praised his commitment to “healthy work-life balance.” At Goldman this means working no more than 70 hours per week—so long as no pressing deals are in the works.

And forget law firms.

Industries that bill by the hour have no financial interest in adopting a leaner workweek. “Many people will say, ‘Diminished returns are better than no returns’.”

I think that, too, will change as Generation Z follows the Millennials with even more willingness to walk — if they even choose that path in the first place.

Image credit: PwC

Way back in 2007 I described what I call the number one best motivator.

Over the years, I’ve found vested self-interest (VSI) to be not only the most powerful people motivator around (…) And the idea must have merit when you consider that a Sudanese cell phone billionaire is using it to incentivize African heads of State to act responsibly.

So, instead of hiring for diversity and the social good, why not hire for greed, pure and simple.

You won’t even need to rationalize your decision, since the data makes it a no-brainer.

Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and George Washington University calculated that going from an all-male or all-female team to one with equal representation of men and women correlated with a revenue gain of 41%.

41%! That ain’t chicken feed.

Moreover, the phenomenon is global.

A study of 1,000 companies across 12 countries by McKinsey & Co. showed that those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 21% more likely to have above-average profitability than companies at the bottom of the pile. If companies had a greater balance in ethnicities at work, they would on average perform 33% better than those that don’t. Other studies that McKinsey did in previous years (paywall) yielded similar conclusions.

It seems obvious that women would understand women customers better than men do, but if you doubt it Home Depot is an excellent case study.

Trish Mueller joined HD and became CMO a few years later. She recognized that the data collection showing most purchasers were male was incorrect and the company set out to disversify their market.

In 2013, the Home Depot’s core executive team had a strategy meeting about how the brand could appeal to more customers and markets—like women—and expand their product range. There were two women executives in the room: Mueller and Cara Kinzey (Senior Vice President, Technology). Trish and Cara suggested that the brand’s product range should be as wide as its name. Home Depot included the word “home,” after all, and could expand into product categories like cookware, small appliances, and kitchen accessories.

“Cara and I came at it from a women’s perspective,” Trish says, “without it being that overt.”

They decided to test their ideas on the next Black Friday sale.

They gave their merchants a broad mandate: “If it’s something you can conceive of using in your home, let’s have a conversation about it.”

Some of the home appliances and cookware options they tested proved so successful that they’re now kept long-term inside every store. The Home Depot also had some rather unexpected hits during their Black Friday sales, like a giant fluffy teddy bear that sold for $29.99. “Who would’ve ever thought to see that at Home Depot?,” Mueller says. “But we were sold out in ten minutes, the first year we carried them.”

But is the effort paying off consistently beyond Black Friday?

Unlike smaller rival Lowe’s, Home Depot isn’t aggressively adding to its store base. In fact, it has opened just one new location in the U.S. market since 2013. Yet the retailer is beating Lowe’s in overall revenue growth thanks to its stronger customer traffic.

Would HD have had the savvy to go after the women’s market without Mueller’s and Kinzey’s viewpoint? Unlikely for guys who thought pink power tools were the answer.

Has it translated to more diverse hiring? It has in Canada (I couldn’t find US stats).

So, for all you guys who have no time for moral imperatives, turn your VSI up to high and do it for greed.

Image credit: Pexels and MotleyFool

I find it amusing that of everything I’ve read from a variety of academics, consultants, and other pundits regarding hiring and retaining millennials it is Sharna Goldseker who best described it

Interestingly enough, she wasn’t talking about hiring, but about charitable giving.

Goldseker agreed and said it’s time to do away with the stereotype of millennials as entitled slackers. “What we really saw, the top three reasons for giving among these generations, they’re supporting a mission or cause that fits with my personal values, fulfilling my duty as a person of privilege to give back to society, and seeing that my contribution makes a real difference and the organization has real impact,” she said. “As these people are entering the working world and having more resources, they are caring about values more than valuables, and they’re making choices in alignment with those values.”

“…care about values more than valuables.”

That pretty much says it all.

Of course, values are very much public knowledge, as opposed to a poster on the office wall, which makes them hard to fake.

Think Marc Benioff as opposed to Travis Kalanick and you can’t go wrong.

Image credit: Expert Infantry

I doubt I’ll ever understand why, but being busy supposedly makes a person more valuable.

I find this amusing, since it is slow time that makes you smarter and, perhaps, even wiser; both extremely valuable traits.

The pressure of social media to react impedes your ability/willingness to stop and think.

In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Plato writes that Socrates left the encounter thinking of the politician, “Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is—for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.“ Ever since, Socratic ignorance has been the hallmark of wisdom in Western thinking. (…)

That’s why slow thinking is not just wise—it’s also a revolutionary act right now. In reactionary times, slowness, responsiveness rather than reactiveness, is a radical rejection of the internet’s perpetual call to action: Always be choosing sides. Deliberate undecidedness, refusing to choose and know it all, is a kind of intellectual rebellion against the relentless pressure to get with the socially appropriate program—whatever it happens to be within your ideological and informational bubbles.

A post at Farnam Street introduces the idea of first-order positive, second-order negative (shoutout to Wally Bock for this article). It parallels the  exponentially increasing need for instant gratification.

We have trouble delaying gratification, so we do a lot of things that are first-order positive, second-order negative. We buy bigger houses than we need, only to find that rising interest rates make the mortgage payment untenable. We buy the sexy car only to discover later that it depreciates faster than the commuter car. (…)

Making time to think is a great example of something that’s first-order negative with some future payoff that’s not easily visible. However, when you think through problems, you’ll not only come to better decisions on the whole but you’ll also avoid a lot of problems.

Of course, those who are too busy to think will definitely be too busy to read.

Which means they are busier than

• Warren Buffett (80% of his time was/is spent reading and thinking)
• Charlie Munger (Buffet’s partner who said, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none. Zero.” )
• Bill Gates (reads a book a week and has taken a yearly two-week reading vacation throughout his career)

And then there is Barak Obama. I seriously doubt there is anyone in the business world who is busier, or under more stress, than Obama was during his eight years in office, yet he read for an hour every day (the 5-hour rule).

Ben Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

Paul Tudor Jones, the self-made billionaire entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who should know says, “Intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.” 

Futurist Alvin Toffler says, in no uncertain terms, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” 

And did you ever notice that learn is earn with an ‘l’?

Image credit: Katy Warner

Fortunes 2018 list of 100 Best Places to Work is out and guess who isn’t on it anywhere?

Google.

Why?

Because the criteria was tweaked this year.

But there’s something different about this year’s list, which was based on responses from more than 300,000 employees at large companies that opted into the survey. A change in methodology this year put greater emphasis on feedback from survey respondents who self-identified as women, minorities, or LGBTQ. It is the first time, says Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work, that the list reflects what he has dubbed a “Great Places to Work For All” mindset.

At first, adding “all” to the pot scared the heck out of many CEOs, but after explaining, most came back.

His clients could see that a “for all” commitment would mean the firm was “maximizing the potential of all employees.” (…) Bush reports that organizations scoring highest under the new “For All” methodology “grew their revenue about 10 percent faster over the same period than the companies that scored best according to [Great Place to Work’s] old methodology.”

Some of the Top 10 may surprise you, but Salesforce in the top slot shouldn’t.

One reason Google didn’t participate in the survey may be found in job site Hired’s 2018 State of Salaries report.

The average worldwide salary for a tech worker in 2017 was $135,000, says Hired, up 5% from the 2016 survey. (…) But the data also showed that a person’s race has what Hired called “a significant impact” on salary in the tech industry. And black tech workers are the ones getting the most shortchanged — Hired found that black tech workers are making $6,000 a year less than their white peers, on average.

Interestingly, the data suggests both a cause and a solution. Black candidates and Hispanic candidates tend to begin their salary negotiations at a lower point than their white counterparts, according to this data.

White candidates tend to ask for the highest salary, $130,000, and get offered $136,000 (+4.6% on their request).

Meanwhile, black and Hispanic candidates using Hired’s platform say their preferred salary is $124,000, on average. But even when an offer beats their initial request, it’s still relative to the lower number. Black workers are being offered $130,000 (+4.8%) on average and Hispanic candidates are offered $131,000 (+5.7%). Asian candidates ask for $127,000 on average and are offered $133,000 (+4.7%).

I guess it’s just simpler to ignore this and similar surveys and ignore the media questions about why you didn’t participate, than it is to fix the problem — and this one is definitely fixable.

No one ever said solving fundamental problems like diversity was easy, especially when it takes more than data and algorithms.

Join  my tomorrow for a look at why most diversity efforts fail, what works, and how diversity programs are being considered trade secrets.

Video credit: Fortune

Way back in the early 1980s, when companies were far more sensitive, not to mention controlling about appearance, “Roy” asked me if it was a good idea to shave the beard he’d had for 15 years for an interview.

I said sure, as long as he didn’t intend to grow it back. He responded that his wife loved the beard would probably divorce him if he didn’t re-grow it. I told that Roy shouldn’t shave.

Back then, hair was cut, grooming polished up and tattoos covered when interviewing.

If you think things have changed, think again.

People are still jumping, just though different hoops.

These days they’re rushing to clean up their social media history.

Brand Yourself’s reputation tool, introduced last month, is a logical outgrowth of its business, said CEO Patrick Ambron. While the company launched in 2009 to help business and users massage their search results, Ambron says it now focuses on helping job seekers find and repair embarrassing blunders in their online past. Employers are increasingly screening  job candidates’ social media history for red flags, and it’s incumbent upon job seekers to scrub their posts of any blemishes, he said. Simply tightening the privacy restrictions may not help when some companies are demanding social media passwords from applicants.

For the heck of it I registered to see how it works. It gave me a list of places I was identified, short, since I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, etc. At each one I had to say it was positive, negative or “not me.”

There were three “questionable” items and when I checked them I was left guessing why they were potentially damaging.

One wasn’t me, one an article from 1999 that appeared in the SF Chronicle, and one post from the Leadership Turn blog that I used to write and is archived here. There was nothing any algorithm could have taken exception to unless you could the work “sex” in a comment on the post, so I marked both “positive.”

If the word “sex” was what got flagged you have to wonder if it rates the same as the f-bomb and if WTF counts the same. If you’re interested my score was 700 (whatever that means).

I digress. The point of all this is that no matter how well you scrub the profile and social media under your control it won’t remove all the places to which it has migrated.

More importantly, no matter how you scrub your past you are still you.

Moreover, if a company is dumb enough to pass on candidates for the stupid stuff they did in college or even the more recent past, then perhaps you should see it as having dodged a bullet, as opposed to missing an opportunity.

Notice I said “stupid stuff.” Bragging about knocking your partner or kid around, etc. shouldn’t get a free pass.

Although it was not that long ago when people’s private lives were actually private.

Flickr image credit: Bernard Goldbach

Back in 2009 I asked what it meant to be educated, considering the amazing basic ignorance displayed daily by Americans — often the same folks who disparaged education focused on liberal arts and the humanities.

Two years later Bill Gates agreed with them, while Steve Jobs disagreed.

In 2011, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told a panel of American governors that a liberal arts education would hold back college graduates in the modern economy.

A few days later, late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs declared that “it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Their opposite attitudes partially account for Apple’s rise and Microsoft’s fall

In 2015 I wrote about the value of a liberal arts education.

It took seven years and a full change in management, for the “new” Microsoft to acknowledge this fact.

Microsoft president Brad Smith and EVP of AI and research Harry Shum wrote in their new book “The Future Computed” that “one of the most important conclusions” of Microsoft’s recent research into artificial intelligence is that lessons from liberal arts will be critical to unleashing the full potential of AI.

“At one level, AI will require that even more people specialize in digital skills and data science. But skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering, and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.”

Jobs wasn’t much of a coder. His real genius lay his ability to “see around corners,” know what his market wanted before it knew and then invent it. The fact is that he could see because he was grounded in liberal arts and the humanities.

This is the advantage non-tech founders often bring to the table.

Just as AI can beat humans at chess and Go, it will soon beat them at coding, I wonder just how many of the highly paid techies at Google, Facebook, etc., have the knowledge, philosophy and empathy to design algorithms fit for human consumption?

Image credit: Kyle Pearce

A month ago KG shared an article about how Facebook rummages through your life in pursuit of profit using and algorithm called People You May Know. The results are beyond creepy (emphasis mine).

• A woman whose father left her family when she was six years old—and saw his then-mistress suggested to her as a Facebook friend 40 years later.

• An attorney who wrote: “I deleted Facebook after it recommended as PYMK a man who was defense counsel on one of my cases. We had only communicated through my work email, which is not connected to my Facebook, which convinced me Facebook was scanning my work email.”

Still creepier, but great for profit, are Facebook’s shadow profiles.

… built from the inboxes and smartphones of other Facebook users. Contact information you’ve never given the network gets associated with your account, making it easier for Facebook to more completely map your social connections. (…) Because shadow-profile connections happen inside Facebook’s algorithmic black box, people can’t see how deep the data-mining of their lives truly is, until an uncanny recommendation pops up.

Then there is Android, which collects information even when you tell it not to.

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?

Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet…”

“Don’t be evil” Google also records conversations around their products; that’s not counting the bug in the new Home Mini that secretly recorded everything said near it.

And Amazon’s Echo is no different.

Chamath Palihapitiya, Founder and CEO Social Capital, who worked at Facebook for seven years and became vice president for user growth, is the most recent social media veteran to publicly apologize, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Social media addiction is not an accident; it’s intentional, design driven, and it’s sole purpose is to generate revenue.

“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Palihapitiya’s isn’t the only one feeling guilty.

Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.

The forces at work behind social media are also money-driven.

In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.

I doubt any of this is going to change your social media consumption.

But never forget that these companies are not your friend. Their primary purpose is not to make you or anyone else happy.

Their purpose is to make money.

Period.

Anything else that happens is plain old serendipity.

(Watch the entire interview.)
Flickr image credit: Duck Lover

In response to a post by Ellen Pao in September I said I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for things to change.

Good thing I wasn’t.

What changed started with a post by Susan Fowler calling out Uber’s misogamist culture, which led to CEO Travis Kalanick’s firing, Gretchen Carlson sued roger Ailes and won, other women started coming forward with their own stories and then the entire #metoo thread on Twitter.

Next came the harassing men crying crocodile tears and saying how terribly sorry they are if their past actions caused any pain.

Talk about arrogant, unfeeling, ignorant, and purely self-focused.

Monday Sheryl Sandberg wrote an excellent post pointing out that harassment has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power.

The 1992 presidential race was once summed up in a pointed phrase: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Today, as headlines are dominated by stories about sexual harassment and sexual assault at work, a similar phrase comes to mind: “It’s the power, stupid.”

And that nothing would change until the white male power structure became more balanced.

She goes on to say,

It is my hope that as more employers put thoughtful, effective policies into place – and as more is done to punish the perpetrators – more people will come forward without fear. For too long, too many people have believed that there’s no point in reporting harassment – that nothing will happen, or worse, that it will negatively impact their career. And on the other side, some people are scared that their reputations will be ruined unfairly. Having a consistent and fair process that applies to everyone helps protect against both scenarios and restores a degree of faith in the system.

However, I don’t believe anyone has much faith as long as they are forced to take harassment complaints to arbitration.

A growing number of American companies are requiring workers as a condition of their employment to sign agreements that stipulate they must resolve a dispute with their employer through arbitration. This agreement is known as a mandatory arbitration clause.

It was Carlson whose lawyers found a way around it.

In signing her employment agreement 11 years prior, Carlson had agreed to resolve disputes with Fox News Channel through private arbitration. But she and her legal team found a way around this by suing Ailes personally.

But, as Sandberg says, you need to have a certain level of power to even consider moving on someone with more power — and enough money that you can survive for a while sans paycheck.

Private arbitration is good for companies, since the rules favor businesses and most arbitrators think of the companies as clients — and who bites the hand that feeds it?

Moreover, the results aren’t published, so, there is little blowback even in the rare cases when the company loses.

“This veil of secrecy protects serial harassers by keeping other potential victims in the dark, and minimizing pressure on companies to fire predators,” Carlson wrote for The Times.

The Arbitration Fairness Act of 2017, which is before the House Judiciary Committee and for which Carlson is an advocate, would prohibit employers from requiring arbitration.

But considering the men who make up our current Congress, let alone the current president who would have to sign it into law, I certainly won’t be holding my breath for this one, either.

Flickr image credit: caninhas