Giving Time to Others Alleviates Sense of "Time Famine"

Interesting implications for the Collaborative and its reliance on peer-to-peer sharing ....

http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/giving-gift-our-time-others

Learning From Failure

By SAM LOEWENBERG

New York Times. Published: February 1, 2013

AMERICANS love success stories. Go to the Web sites of the United States Agency for International Development, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or a plethora of global health and development organizations, and you’ll find articles, charts and videos documenting their triumphs and innovations, with the promise of more on the way.

Beyond simply doing good, there’s an impetus to show success: nongovernmental organizations, contractors and researchers want a good track record, funding officials must show they are spending wisely, and journal editors want to highlight breakthroughs.

But “success stories” are rarely the whole story. Global health and development projects frequently go off course, and it’s not unusual for them to fail outright. What is unusual is for researchers to openly discuss their failures. That’s a shame, because it’s a basic principle of science that you get things right by analyzing what went wrong.

So it was a pleasant surprise when, last summer, researchers at Mumbai’s City Initiative for Newborn Health published, in the journal PLoS Medicine, the disappointing results of their three-year effort to implement a community-based maternal- and infant-health initiative in the city’s slums.

It was a textbook global health project: community-based, empowering the beneficiaries, focusing on women and children. And the model was successful elsewhere, reducing newborn mortality rates in other parts of India, as well as Bolivia and Nepal, and by 30 to 40 percent.

But those programs were in rural areas. This was the first time the effort was tried in an urban setting.

It turned out to be a major hurdle. While urban areas have the advantage of more infrastructure and health services, there are also unexpected variables and unanticipated dynamics. Much of the global health boom since the 1990s has focused on rural areas; far less work has been done on urban programs, in part because those situations are difficult.

And Mumbai is not just any big city. More than half its nearly 13 million people are jammed into the concrete and corrugated-metal mazes of the city’s slums. In 2005, the researchers began gathering data in 48 slum communities. They set up 244 women’s groups, which met biweekly with social workers to discuss maternal and child health problems, counsel one another and work to develop solutions.

While that worked in rural villages, in the city slums, mothers were hesitant to depend on neighbors. At some meetings, residents from one street would not sit with hosts from a block away.

The researchers tried using innovative approaches to engage the women. In one case, they had them play a game, using cards that presented various social and health problems. The women then devised their own solutions within the game. But such prompting didn’t lead to substantial action back in the real world.

Measuring improvement in rural infant health is also easier than in urban areas. In the former, the situation is often so dire that almost any well-devised intervention will bring substantial improvements. In cities, people have access to urgent care through public hospitals. It is more in the pre-emergency period, before it becomes simply a matter of life or death, where change is needed.

Yet mothers in slums see issues like stunting and chronic disease as part of life and think “that’s how children will grow up in this environment,” said Neena Shah More, a researcher with the Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action, a member of the consortium behind the project. Instead, water and sanitation were top priorities. But those long-term issues were beyond the project’s scope.

Last year they rebooted. They set up small centers that offer basic health services like immunization, feeding, family planning and help navigating the city’s convoluted health and social service systems. So far, providing concrete services, rather than just advice on collective organizing, seems to be more in tune with the needs of people in the slums.

The travails of the Newborn Health project aren’t unique. What is noteworthy is that when the project did not work as planned, the team reported it openly and in detail, providing potentially valuable information for other researchers.

The risk is that too few people will follow. Especially in tough economic times, the pressure is on to show that they are getting bang for their buck. Last year an Obama administration official called on the aid community to adopt a “permanent campaign mind-set,” in which fund-raising and promotion are on the front burner. This creates an incentive to go for easy victories, highlight successes and bury failures. Even with the new fad in the aid world for metrics and impact assessments, their public reports are rarely forthcoming about missteps.

That’s bad science. While aid organizations must be accountable for outcomes, that pressure for positive results should not be an encouragement to skimp on the truth. Making a difference in the world is hard, often messy work. Pretending otherwise is no help at all.

Sam Loewenberg was a 2012 Nieman Foundation global health reporting fellow at Harvard. Financial support for this article was provided by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on February 3, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning From Failure.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/learning-from-research-failure.html?_r=0

Lincoln’s School of Management

Michael Falco

A 2012 re-enactment of the Battle of Shiloh as captured by a pinhole camera in Michie, Tenn. Such a camera has no lens, viewfinder or shutter — just a pinhole at the front and film at the back. Images can be soft and require long exposures.

By NANCY F. KOEHN

Published: January 26, 2013

The legacy of Abraham Lincoln hangs over every American president. To free a people, to preserve the Union, “to bind up the nation’s wounds”: Lincoln’s presidency, at a moment of great moral passion in the country’s history, is a study in high-caliber leadership.

In this season of all things Lincoln — when Steven Spielberg is probably counting his Oscars already — executives, entrepreneurs and other business types might consider dusting off their history books and taking a close look at what might be called the Lincoln school of management.

Even before “Lincoln” the movie came along, there was a certain cult of leadership surrounding the 16th president. C.E.O.'s and lesser business lights have long sought inspiration from his life and work. But today, as President Obama embarks on a new term and business leaders struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing global economy, the lessons of Lincoln seem as fresh as ever. They demonstrate the importance of resilience, forbearance, emotional intelligence, thoughtful listening and the consideration of all sides of an argument. They also show the value of staying true to a larger mission.

“Lincoln’s presidency is a big, well-lit classroom for business leaders seeking to build successful, enduring organizations,” Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, said in an e-mail. Lincoln, he said, “always looked upward and always called American citizens to a higher road and to a purpose bigger than themselves. He did this by listening carefully to those both inside and outside of his immediate circle and sphere of influence. Listening, always being present and authenticity are essential leadership qualities whether one is leading a country in wartime or a company during a period of transformation.”

As a historian at Harvard Business School, I have been a student of Lincoln for more than a decade. I have written a case study and several articles about his presidency and talked extensively about him to business executives and entrepreneurs. The film “Lincoln,” which follows his efforts to ensure the passage of the 13th Amendment, making slavery unconstitutional, offers ample evidence of his ability to lead. But to me, his earlier experience in drafting and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation offers one of the best ways to appreciate his strengths as a leader.

Michael Falco

The Battle of Gaines’s Mill, as re-enacted in 2012 in Elizabethtown, Pa. No retouching or Photoshop processes were used on these images, with the exception of basic color correction. More photographs are at civilwar150pinholeproject.com.

Before and after he signed the proclamation, 150 years ago this month, Lincoln confronted a string of military setbacks, intense political opposition and his own depression and self-doubts. In the summer of 1862, Confederate forces under Robert E. Lee attacked “repeatedly, relentlessly, with a courage bordering on recklessness,” as the historian James M. McPherson has written. Union supporters realized that the Civil War — originally envisioned as a short, swift conflict — would be much longer and bloodier than imagined.

Northern newspapers and politicians assailed the administration for incompetence. The number of Union Army volunteers dwindled. Abolitionists, who since the war’s start had urged Lincoln to move aggressively against slavery, grew increasingly frustrated.

All of this bore down on the president. When he learned that George B. McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac, had retreated after a series of conflicts known as the Seven Days’ Battles, Lincoln described himself “as nearly inconsolable as I could be and live.” And, personally, the death of his 11-year-old son, Willie, five months earlier still weighed heavily on both the president and his wife.

Yet despite all of his mental suffering, Lincoln never gave way to his darkest fears. His resilience and commitment to preserve the Union helped sustain him.

The ability to experience negative emotions without falling through the floorboards is vital to entrepreneurs and business leaders. Ari Bloom, a strategic adviser to consumer-related companies and a former student of mine, put it this way: “Nothing prepares you for the emotional ups and downs that come with starting a business. There will be obstacles, big and small, that come at you every day, from personnel issues to supplier delays, to late payments or even hurricanes.” Throughout, entrepreneurs must maintain their professional composure while staying true to their vision and their integrity, he said.

“Lincoln is striking because he did all this under extremely difficult circumstances,” Mr. Bloom said. “Some of his ability to navigate such difficult terrain was about emotional intelligence and the deep faith he nurtured about his vision. But some of it was also about how he gathered advice and information from a wide range of people, including those who did not agree with him. This is important in building a business because you have to listen to customers, employees, suppliers and investors, including those who are critical of what you are doing.”

Lincoln had long opposed the expansion of slavery, declaring it wrong, morally and politically, because it violated the rights of all people to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness set forth in the Declaration of Independence. But he had also made it clear that preserving the Union was more important than trying to abolish slavery head on.

In the early summer of 1862, events conspired to change his perspective. There was McClellan’s humiliating retreat, the mounting overall toll of the war and growing support in the North for attacking slavery. His earlier concerns were overridden by exigency.

“Things had gone on from bad to worse,” Lincoln recalled later, “until I felt that we had reached the end of our rope on the plan of operations we had been pursuing; that we had about played our last card, and must change our tactics, or lose the game!”

Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Though the proclamation had limited initial effect on slavery, Lincoln understood that its issuance was still a radical act. An Emancipation Proclamation display at the National Archives in 2006. 

Lincoln’s ability to shift gears during hard times — without giving up his ultimate goal — is a vital lesson for leaders operating in today’s turbulence. When I teach the case, many executives comment on the importance of shaping one’s tactics to changing circumstances.

Sometime in late June or early July of 1862, Lincoln began drafting what would become the Emancipation Proclamation. On July 22, he told his full cabinet that he had “resolved upon this step, and had not called them together to ask their advice,” but rather “to lay the subject matter of a proclamation before them.” He had decided that, as of Jan. 1, 1863, all people held as slaves in states in rebellion against the United States government would be declared forever free.

Lincoln had always been a slow, deliberate thinker, examining an issue from all sides. The cabinet was divided over the proclamation, but at this point he was unlikely to be dissuaded. Nevertheless, when Secretary of State William H. Seward suggested that the president wait for a Union victory before issuing the proclamation, lest it seem “the last measure of an exhausted government, a cry for help,” Lincoln agreed.

In mid-September 1862, after a bloody victory at Antietam in which more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded, Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation public. Practically, it would free none of the almost four million slaves held in the Confederacy, where it could not be enforced; it made no claims to liberate slaves held in the border states that were not in rebellion against the United States. And it did not free slaves held in certain parts of the Confederacy occupied by Union forces.

But as Lincoln understood, the proclamation was a radical act. In declaring certain slaves free as an act of military necessity, it transformed the meaning and stakes of the Civil War. What started as a conflict to save the Union as it had existed since the 1787 Constitutional Convention had become a contest to save a new, different kind of United States — one in which slavery was permanently abolished.

Americans reacted strongly to the proclamation. Abolitionists greeted it with acclaim, but many in Lincoln’s own party called it unconstitutional. Union Democrats condemned it; the Democratic-leaning New York World said Lincoln was “adrift on a current of radical fanaticism.”

In the South, President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy called the proclamation an effort to incite servile insurrection, saying it supplied additional reasons for the Confederacy to fight for its independence. Foreign response was also critical, partly because the proclamation posed a potential threat to cotton supplies. That November, the effects of the Emancipation Proclamation, the war’s huge casualties and the government’s deteriorating military fortunes combined to hand the president’s party major reverses in the midterm elections.

Faced with these and other setbacks, Lincoln grew more depressed, but his commitment to the proclamation did not waver. When he signed the final document into law, he knew he was altering a landscape that had become much larger than when he became president. And he realized that he must communicate his own steadfast commitment to a larger purpose.

Throughout the war, Lincoln was able to experience a range of emotions without acting on them rashly or in other ways that compromised his larger mission. This ability offers another powerful lesson for modern leaders.

Consider Lincoln’s emotional state after the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863: Lee’s retreating forces had escaped south into Virginia and out of the Union Army’s reach. Lincoln was frustrated and furious. He composed an angry letter to Gen. George C. Meade, who had commanded the Union forces at Gettysburg, writing him that Lee “was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would, in connection with our other late successes, have ended the war.” He added: “Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it.”

But Lincoln decided not to mail the letter. Instead, he placed it in an envelope labeled “To Gen. Meade, never sent or signed.” There is no question that Lincoln had cause to lament the general’s inaction, especially in the larger context of the president’s early experience with Union Army officials, but he recognized that he couldn’t afford to alienate him at such a crucial time.

When I work with executives, I often say: “Imagine if e-mail had existed in Lincoln’s time and he had hit ‘send’ because he was distressed. The course of history might have taken a very different turn.”

It is crucial for today’s leaders to practice this kind of forbearance. Much of what leaders experience every day is emotionally difficult. Instantaneous, round-the-clock communication like e-mail, texting and social media often stir up even more turbulence within.

Executives face the challenge of navigating their own and others’ emotions with forethought and consideration. As Lincoln realized, the first action that comes to mind is not always the wisest.

In November 1863, at the new cemetery in Gettysburg, Lincoln outlined the important moment in which America found itself and which he had helped create. In 272 words, he laid out the stakes of the Civil War, asserting that its bloody toll was necessary in order that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

When I discuss the Gettysburg Address with executives and entrepreneurs, they often compare the huge changes wrought by the Civil War to aspects of organizational transformation and their own roles in communicating with stakeholders.

Executives including Anne M. Mulcahy, the former C.E.O. of Xerox, often find that decisions made in the best long-term interest of a company often conflict with the shorter-term demands of shareholders. In 2000, against the counsel of advisers, Ms. Mulcahy refused to declare bankruptcy as Xerox ran up nearly $18 billion in debt. She faced criticism and skepticism as she worked to reinvent the organization, but she remained focused on restoring company profitability, innovation, competitiveness and efficiency.

Lincoln often traveled to battlefields to visit Union troops, and he held open “office” hours in the White House to receive interested citizens — and their countless requests. Like Lincoln, Ms. Mulcahy knew she could not lead from behind closed office doors. She often went into the field to speak with executives, employees and, most important, customers. “Even while Rome was burning,” she said in a 2006 speech, “people wanted to know what the city of the future would look like.”

Today she is credited with leading a very successful business turnaround.

Executives often point to the strength that Lincoln found to bear the death and destruction of the war and to weather intense opposition and still not relinquish his mission. If there is one point when Lincoln discovered his own leadership backbone, it was surely in conceiving and issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and then committing himself and the country to its broader consequences.

When I discuss my Lincoln case study with executives, that is one of the most powerful lessons they take away. As Kelly Close, founder and president of Close Concerns, a health care information firm, said in an e-mail, “Being responsible for even a small company and all the people and issues involved in such management forces you to come to terms with yourself and whether you can rise to the challenge — not once but many times.” Lincoln, she added, “was able to do this in a way that amazes and inspires me.”

On April 9, 1865, at Appomattox, Va., Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, head of the Union forces. Six days later, Lincoln was dead. And the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect two years earlier, would become part of a broader process of emancipation that culminated in ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865.

Lincoln, said Mr. Schultz of Starbucks, “taught us that whether you are a business leader, an entrepreneur or a government official, one’s foremost responsibility is to serve all of the people,” and not just one’s self-interest. “Lincoln knew that success is best when shared.”

Lincoln was able to learn and grow amid great calamity. His story, like no other, demonstrates that leaders do not just make the moment; they meet it and, in the process, are changed by it.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 27, 2013, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Lincoln’s School of Management.

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/business/abraham-lincoln-as-management-guru.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hpw

Google Awards $3.7 Million for Civic Innovation

Google.org has announced two grants totaling $3.7 million in support of efforts to encourage more open and innovative societies.

The philanthropic arm of search giant Google awarded $1.6 million to UK-based mySociety to build a global platform that provides software developers with tools and resources that enable them to create new civic apps and services more quickly and easily. In addition, Google.org awarded $2.1 million to the Sunlight Foundation to help the organization expand its efforts to make government more transparent and accountable, particularly at the local level. The grant also will enable Sunlight to offer local mini-grants and bolster its efforts to develop policy case studies that demonstrate the power of technology-driven transparency to increase civic engagement.

full announcement, see also:

“Promoting Civic Innovation Through Technology.” Google.org Blog 1/16/13.

The Strategic Plan is Dead. Long Live Strategy.

NONPROFIT MANAGEMENT

In today’s fast-changing world, why freeze your strategic thinking in a five-year plan?

By Dana O’Donovan & Noah Rimland Flower | 2 | Jan. 10, 2013

Take a moment and read these two words: strategic plan. Now close your eyes and picture one. If what comes up is a thick binder, gathering dust on a shelf next to other thick binders from five and ten years past, you’re not alone. We believe that a better understanding of the history of strategy and what caused the demise of binder-bound strategic planning can point the way to re-inventing strategy for the world we live in today. It is important to remember that strategy’s roots are military. Military strategy focuses on setting objectives, collecting intelligence, and then using that intelligence to make informed decisions about how to achieve your objectives—take that hill, cut this supply line.

Historically, the battlefield was a place where you could count on a few constants:

• The past was a good predictor of the future. There were years or decades between meaningful shifts in the basic variables, such as the power of a soldier’s weapons or the range of aircraft.
• Good data was scarce and hard to come by. Scouts and spies had to risk their lives to find and relay information, and had to be ever on the lookout for enemy deception.
• Lines of communication were unreliable at best. Small numbers of clear directives were a tactical imperative.

Not surprisingly, after a couple of millennia, military strategy became well adapted to these constraints.

After World War II, when military strategy came into the business world as strategic planning, so did these constraints. As a result, strategic planners focused on predicting the future based on historic trend lines; invested heavily in gathering all available data; and produced a small number of directives issued from the top, for the rest of the organization to execute.

This approach to strategic planning was a reasonably good fit for much of the business world from the fifties through the eighties. But with the rise of high-tech tools and increased globalization in the nineties, the world began to change, and now it looks quite different indeed. The future is no longer reasonably predictable based on the past—in fact, it is liable to be startlingly different. Good data is easy to access and cheap to acquire. Communication is rapid, indiscriminate, and constant.

The world has become a more turbulent place, where anyone with a new idea can put it into action before you can say “startup” and launch widespread movements with a single Tweet. This has left organizational leaders with a real problem, since the trusted, traditional approach to strategic planning is based on assumptions that no longer hold. The static strategic plan is dead.

This has led to increasingly polarized attitudes about the value of having a strategy at all. Some leaders are valiantly trying to save strategic planning by urging us to focus even more on rigorous data analysis. Others deny the value of strategy, arguing that organizations need agility above all else (an attitude that famed strategist Roger Martin reports hearing with increasing frequency).

We think that what is necessary today is a strategy that breaks free of static plans to be adaptive and directive, that emphasizes learning and control, and that reclaims the value of strategic thinking for the world that now surrounds us. Martin acknowledged this point at the Skoll World Forum in 2010 when he said: “Every model is wrong and every strategy is wrong. Strategy in a way helps you learn what is ‘righter’. People think you can prove a strategy in advance. You can’t.”

The approach we developed in working with our clients at Monitor Institute is what we call adaptive strategy. We create a roadmap of the terrain that lies before an organization and develop a set of navigational tools, realizing that there will be many different options for reaching the destination. If necessary, the destination itself may shift based on what we learn along the way.

Creating strategies that are truly adaptive requires that we give up on many long-held assumptions. As the complexity of our physical and social systems make the world more unpredictable, we have to abandon our focus on predictions and shift into rapid prototyping and experimentation so that we learn quickly about what actually works. With data now ubiquitous, we have to give up our claim to expertise in data collection and move into pattern recognition so that we know what data is worth our attention. We also know that simple directives from the top are frequently neither necessary nor helpful. We instead find ways to delegate authority, get information directly from the front lines, and make decisions based on a real-time understanding of what’s happening on the ground. Instead of the old approach of “making a plan and sticking to it,” which led to centralized strategic planning around fixed time horizons, we believe in “setting a direction and testing to it,” treating the whole organization as a team that is experimenting its way to success.

This approach wouldn’t surprise anyone in the world of current military strategy. Recent generations of military thinkers have long since moved beyond the traditional approach, most notably famed fighter pilot John Boyd. He saw strategy as a continuous mental loop that ran from observe to orient to decide and finally to act, returning immediately to further observation. By adopting his mindset (with a particular emphasis on the two O’s, given our turbulent context), we can get much better at making strategy a self-correcting series of intentional experiments.

To provide structure to this fluid approach, we focus on answering a series of four interrelated questions about the organization’s strategic direction: what vision you want to pursue, how you will make a difference, how you will succeed, and what capabilities it will take to get there.

The skills and mindset for today’s strategic planning will come from continuously asking ourselves these questions about our organizations, programs, and initiatives. Once we accept Dwight D. Eisenhower’s sage advice that “Plans are useless, but planning is everything,” we will be ready to adapt to whatever curveballs the twenty-first century sees fit to throw.

Dana O’Donovan (@DanaODonovan) is the COO of Monitor Institute and is fascinated by the border between strategy and execution, where seemingly incremental changes in day-to-day behavior can enable individuals, organizations and collectives to achieve breakthrough social change. Her consulting practice at Monitor Institute focuses on identifying opportunities, developing strategy, designing organizational and activity systems, helping organizations learn, and facilitating groups through periods of transition.

Noah Rimland Flower (@MntrInstitute) works with leaders to achieve large-scale social change through new uses of collaboration, networks, and technology. Over close to a decade of work at Monitor he has combined consulting and research to develop new strategies on issues including education reform, healthy food systems, and climate change.

http://www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_strategic_plan_is_dead._long_live_strategy#When:17:30:00Z

When Can We No Longer Call Ourselves a Startup?

10 Jan 2013 at 1:14 pm by Janet Koslof

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When is a start-up no longer a start-up?  When do you start referring to yourselves as a “growth stage” company, or an “established” company?  Are you a start-up for a certain time period, or until you meet certain revenue and profitability goals?  Are you a start-up until you have a certain number of employees or clients?  Is it merely a state of mind and you can be a start-up forever?

As InCrowd moves closer to our 2^nd anniversary (we launched with our first client in April 2011) I’ve been contemplating this question quite a bit.

At InCrowd we have had an amazing year and three quarters, we’ve grown to nearly 15 employees (including a few interns), more than 40 clients, over 12,000 respondents, thousands of answers delivered to our clients, we are well financed and financially stable…so, is it time to stop referring to ourselves as a start-up?

I think clients have a love/hate relationship with start-ups.  They like the energy, enthusiasm and innovations that come with many start-ups, but they don’t necessarily like the idea that a company is not well established, possibly not well resourced and could be on shaky ground as go through the process of building their business.  Clients want to know that the company they are working with will have the resources to service their needs properly and that they will be around for the foreseeable future.

I like being a start-up!  I like the notion of being new and fresh and all of the cool things people associate with start-ups.  I like being part of the start-up community, I like sharing war stories with other entrepreneurs, I like being forced to be more creative then established companies because we have to be… but how long can we carry that moniker?

According to Wikipedia, Paul Graham, founder of one of the top startup accelerators in the world, defines a startup as: “A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of “exit.” The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth.” [emphasis added]

If you agree with Mr. Graham, a start-up can be a start-up so long as it’s growing and if there is one word to describe InCrowd at this moment it’s growing.  This is good news for me at least, as we see no end to our growth. Does that mean we can be a start-up forever? I hope so!

What do you think? How do you define a startup? When can a company no longer claim startup status?

http://bostinno.com/channels/when-can-we-no-longer-call-ourselves-a-startup/