Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg. While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume. Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group. Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results. Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously. Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.
Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.” Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses” who failed miserably.
I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces. Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some godforsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him. The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.
Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will. As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.
Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation. On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!” Clearly, I needed to get with their program. Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When an extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly. Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.
When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect…Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard. I also see another potential case study of failure developing now. For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves, in reality, the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many. It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule is cleared for his own priorities.
The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article. History seems to repeat itself.
Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…
“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.” Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.
Connect, Then Lead
Reblogged from the HRB Blog
by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge
Niccolò Machiavelli pondered that timeless conundrum 500 years ago and hedged his bets. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he acknowledged, “but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”
Now behavioral science is weighing in with research showing that Machiavelli had it partly right: When we judge others—especially our leaders—we look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). Although there is some disagreement about the proper labels for the traits, researchers agree that they are the two primary dimensions of social judgment.
Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together, these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions to other people, groups, and even brands and companies. Research by one of us, Amy Cuddy, and colleagues Susan Fiske, of Princeton, and Peter Glick, of Lawrence University, shows that people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal (think of disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, whose extravagance made him an unsympathetic public figure). On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them (think of workers who become marginalized as they near retirement or of an employee with outmoded skills in a rapidly evolving industry).
To be sure, we notice plenty of other traits in people, but they’re nowhere near as influential as warmth and strength. Indeed, insights from the field of psychology show that these two dimensions account for more than 90% of the variance in our positive or negative impressions we form of the people around us.
So which is better, being lovable or being strong? Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors. Fear can undermine cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving, and cause employees to get stuck and even disengage. It’s a “hot” emotion, with long-lasting effects. It burns into our memory in a way that cooler emotions don’t. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman drives this point home: In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 of them were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness—in other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.
A growing body of research suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns. Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.
When Strength Comes FirstMost of us work hard to demonstrate our competence. We want to see ourselves as strong—and want others to see us the same way. We focus on warding off challenges to our strength and providing abundant evidence of competence. We feel compelled to demonstrate that we’re up to the job, by striving to present the most innovative ideas in meetings, being the first to tackle a challenge, and working the longest hours. We’re sure of our own intentions and thus don’t feel the need to prove that we’re trustworthy—despite the fact that evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others.
Amy J.C. Cuddy is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger are the authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Hudson Street Press, August 2013) and principals at KNP Communications.
Years ago as a young buck, I sat on the university commons grass and pondered WTF it was all about. I made an immediate decision that I no longer cared what others thought of me. My mind would only be focused on things that were important to me. Secondly, I questioned the strict educational requirements for a degree and determined that I would focus on learning only from the very best professors on campus, and let the degree qualification chips fall where they may.
Years ago as a young buck, I sat on the university commons grass and pondered WTF it was all about. I made an immediate decision that I no longer cared what others thought of me. My mind would only be focused on things that were important to me. Secondly, I questioned the strict educational requirements for a degree and determined that I would focus on learning only from the very best professors on campus, and let the degree qualification chips fall where they may. This led me to two minors in philosophy and photography, and not much concern about fitting into corporate requirements for a job. In the end, I came out only one-half credit off, and arm wrestled with the Academic VP over one semester of volleyball, which, coming from southern California, I actually loved. I got the real education I wanted, and ironically also managed to secure employment with one of the best new companies in the country. Later, my Harvard MBA colleagues would say to me that they envied my education, and I would tell them that I envied their Harvard MBA’s. In the end, neither mattered.
This opinion piece from the New York Times Sunday Review caught my eye, and after reading it I share the views of the author. In my university teaching experience, I have seen many of the same things mentioned by the author, particularly a greater focus on jobs, less emphasis on excellence in their area of focus, and the dramatic inflation in grading. When I was in university an “A” was at least 90% or above. When I started teaching I was shocked to learn that the bar for an “A” had been lowered to 80%. It seems that there are now an infinite number of variations of an “A” spanning 20 percentage points. I well remember my own experience at Oxford with ” first, upper second or second class” degree awards. A “first,” a la Stephen Hawking or Alan Turing is to this day an extraordinary accomplishment. I was shocked by the grading dilution and then began asking some of my industry colleagues their experience from university. They were equally shocked by the dilution of an “A”. Then I had students arguing with me and complaining to the Dean about their 80% “A” because it lowered their overall GPA. With regard to those students who have sought me out for additional “out of class” advice, counseling and guidance, I am pleased to say that I have a small group of students who have used me very effectively to advance their learning and their careers. Some have continued to do so even after leaving university. At the same time, that number mirrors the smaller numbers seeking guidance and tutoring. As higher education inexorably moves more toward remote online learning, I worry about the consequences.
What’s the Point of a Professor?
ATLANTA — IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the workforce or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors.
That’s what students say. Oh, they’re quite content with their teachers; after all, most students receive sure approval. In 1960, only 15 percent of grades were in the “A” range, but now the rate is 43 percent, making “A” the most common grade by far.
Faculty members’ attitudes are kindly, too. In one national survey, 61 percent of students said that professors frequently treated them “like a colleague/peer,” while only 8 percent heard frequent “negative feedback about their academic work.” More than half leave the graduation ceremony believing that they are “well prepared” in speaking, writing, critical thinking and decision-making.
But while they’re content with teachers, students aren’t much interested in them as thinkers and mentors. They enroll in courses and complete assignments, but further engagement is minimal.
One measure of interest in what professors believe, what wisdom they possess apart from the content of the course, is interaction outside of class. It’s often during incidental conversations held after the bell rings and away from the demands of the syllabus that the transfer of insight begins and a student’s emulation grows. Students email teachers all the time — why walk across campus when you can fire a note from your room? — but those queries are too curt for genuine mentoring. We need face time.
Here, though, are the meager numbers. For a majority of undergraduates, beyond the two and a half hours per week in class, contact ranges from negligible to nonexistent. In their first year, 33 percent of students report that they never talk with professors outside of class while 42 percent do so only sometimes. Seniors lower that disengagement rate only a bit, with 25 percent never talking to professors, and 40 percent sometimes.
It hasn’t always been this way. “I revered many of my teachers,” Todd Gitlin said when we met at the New York Public Library last month. He’s a respected professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, but in the 1960s he was a fiery working-class kid at Harvard before becoming president of Students for a Democratic Society.
I asked if student unrest back then included disregard of the faculty. Not at all, he said. Nobody targeted professors. Militants attacked the administration for betraying what the best professors embodied, the free inquisitive space of the Ivory Tower.
I saw the same thing in my time at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty offices without stepping over the outstretched legs of English majors lining up for consultations. First-year classes could be as large as 400, but by junior year you settled into a field and got to know a few professors well enough to chat with them regularly, and at length. We knew, and they knew, that these moments were the heart of liberal education.
In our hunger for guidance, we were ordinary. The American Freshman Survey, which has followed students since 1966, proves the point. One prompt in the questionnaire asks entering freshmen about “objectives considered to be essential or very important.” In 1967, 86 percent of respondents checked “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” more than double the number who said “being very well off financially.”
Naturally, students looked to professors for moral and worldly understanding. Since then, though, finding meaning and making money have traded places. The first has plummeted to 45 percent; the second has soared to 82 percent.
I returned to U.C.L.A. on a mild afternoon in February and found the hallways quiet and dim. Dozens of 20-year-olds strolled and chattered on the quad outside, but in the English department, only one in eight doors was open, and barely a half dozen of the department’s 1,400 majors waited for a chance to speak.
When college is more about career than ideas, when paycheck matters more than wisdom, the role of professors changes. We may be 50-year-olds at the front of the room with decades of reading, writing, travel, archives or labs under our belts, with 80 courses taught, but students don’t lie in bed mulling over what we said. They have no urge to become disciples.
Sadly, professors pressed for research time don’t want them, either. As a result, most undergraduates never know that stage of development when a learned mind enthralled them and they progressed toward a fuller identity through admiration of and struggle with a role model.
Since the early 2000s, I have made students visit my office every other week with a rough draft of an essay. We appraise and revise the prose, sentence by sentence. I ask for a clearer idea or a better verb; I circle a misplaced modifier and wait as they make the fix.
As I wait, I sympathize: So many things distract them — the gym, text messages, rush week — and often campus culture treats them as customers, not pupils. Student evaluations and ratemyprofessor.com paint us as service providers. Years ago at Emory University, where I work, a campus-life dean addressed new students with a terrible message: Don’t go too far into coursework — there’s so much more to do here! And yet, I find, my writing sessions help diminish those distractions, and by the third meeting students have a new attitude. This is a teacher who rejects my worst and esteems my best thoughts and words, they say to themselves.
You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters. When it comes to students, we shall have only one authority: the grades we give. We become not a fearsome mind or a moral light, a role model or inspiration. We become accreditors.
The University of British Columbia is following the lead of faculty and students at Harvard University, the University of California, Stanford University and many other universities across North America. Also of note, Norway’s sovereign investment fund, the largest in the World @ $1.3 Trillion, has already made the decision to divest. The current fossil fuel market collapse and likely long term instability is prima facie evidence of the need for divestment, and to prevent further increases in carbon emissions.
The University of British Columbia is following the lead of faculty and students at Harvard University, the University of California, Stanford University and many other universities across North America. Also of note, Norway’s sovereign investment fund, the largest in the World @ $1.3 Trillion, has already made the decision to divest. The current fossil fuel market collapse and likely long term instability is prima facie evidence of the need for divestment, and to prevent further increases in carbon emissions.
This Big Idea is sweeping public and private institutional investment funds globally in the belief that it is overdue to begin more demonstrative action against human caused climate change. Canadians have a particularly important role to play in this. Current government policy has focused the economy on fossil fuels, at the expense of a broader based economy, and is now experiencing the wrath of the “natural resource curse. Canadian innovation and productivity have plummeted on the OECD scale, and Canada is entering a highly volatile and uncertain recessionary period, as forecast by The Conference Board of Canada, the International Monetary Fund, and numerous Canadian banks.
From the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
Faculty at the University of British Columbia have voted in favour of the institution divesting its existing fossil fuel holdings and forgoing further investments in companies connected with fossil fuels.
“Students have spoken. Faculty have spoken. It’s time for UBC to act,” George Hoberg, professor in forest resources management, said in a statement. “Climate change presents an urgent crisis for humanity.”
The results of the referendum were released Tuesday, with 62 per cent of voters supporting divestment.
A fossil-free portfolio
Of UBC’s $1.2-billion endowment fund, more than $100 million is invested in oil, natural gas and coal. The faculty vote is calling on the university to divest completely from those holdings within five years.
“Just as UBC has pledged to use its campus as a ‘living laboratory’ for sustainability, we call on our university to apply its expertise with the same vigour to the endowment,” said Kathryn Harrison, professor of political science and a climate policy expert.
“UBC should devise a profitable, fossil-free portfolio that can serve as an inspiration for sustainable investing by other institutions.”
The faculty will now put their proposal to the university’s board of governors.
“UBC is a place of academic dialogue and debate, and we welcome our faculty members’ interest in our investment policies,” the university said in a statement responding to today’s result. “As the trustee of the endowment, UBC has a fiduciary obligation to ensure that it is managed prudently.”
A growing movement
The fossil fuel divestment movement started in the United States and has spread across North America and Canada.
Last year, UBC students held their own referendum on the issue, with an almost four-to-one vote in favour of divestment.
Today’s vote comes just before Global Divestment Day on Friday when, the UBC campaigners say, a divestment campaign will be launched at the University of Calgary.
Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are adopting drastically different strategies for delivering business education. These differing strategies are reflected in the debate that has erupted between two of Harvard Business School’s best known professors and their visions for the future of business education, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. I have also been personally tire kicking MOOC’s, acting as a mentor for Stanford’s online Technology Entrepreneurship course, hosted by NovoEd. I have been pleasantly surprised by the experience, and among the teams I am mentoring is a group of Xerox senior research scientists acting as an entrepreneurial team.
Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma
Harvard Professor Michael Porter, author of numerous books on Competitive Strategy
Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are adopting drastically different strategies for delivering business education. These differing strategies are reflected in the debate that has erupted between two of Harvard Business School’s best known professors and their visions for the future of business education, Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen. I have also been personally tire kicking MOOC’s, acting as a mentor for Stanford’s online Technology Entrepreneurshipcourse, hosted by NovoEd. I have been pleasantly surprised by the experience, and among the teams I am mentoring, is a group of Xerox senior research scientists acting as an entrepreneurial team.
Christensen predictably argues, as in his most famous book, that in order to survive disruptive change, businesses themselves must embrace disruptive change. Professor Porter on the other hand, argues that an enterprise “… must stay the course, even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.” Ironically, this debate is closely related to my most recent post, and a much earlier post on recognizing “strategic inflection points,” and acting on them.
If any institution is equipped to handle questions of strategy, it is Harvard Business School, whose professors have coined so much of the strategic lexicon used in classrooms and boardrooms that it’s hard to discuss the topic without recourse to their concepts: Competitive advantage. Disruptive innovation. The value chain.
But when its dean, Nitin Nohria, faced the school’s biggest strategic decision since 1924 — the year it planned its campus and adopted the case-study method as its pedagogical cornerstone — he ran into an issue. Those professors, and those concepts, disagreed.
The question: Should Harvard Business School enter the business of online education, and, if so, how?
Universities across the country are wrestling with the same question — call it the educator’s quandary — of whether to plunge into the rapidly growing realm of online teaching, at the risk of devaluing the on-campus education for which students pay tens of thousands of dollars, or to stand pat at the risk of being left behind.
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Harvard Business School faced a choice between different models of online instruction. Prof. Michael Porter favored the development of online courses that would reflect the school’s existing strategy.CreditDavid De la Paz/European Press Photo Agency
At Harvard Business School, the pros and cons of the argument were personified by two of its most famous faculty members. For Michael Porter, widely considered the father of modern business strategy, the answer is yes — create online courses, but not in a way that undermines the school’s existing strategy. “A company must stay the course,” Professor Porter has written, “even in times of upheaval, while constantly improving and extending its distinctive positioning.”
For Clayton Christensen, whose 1997 book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” propelled him to academic stardom, the only way that market leaders like Harvard Business School survive “disruptive innovation” is by disrupting their existing businesses themselves. This is arguably what rival business schools like Stanford and the Wharton School have been doing by having professors stand in front of cameras and teach MOOCs, or massive open online courses, free of charge to anyone, anywhere in the world. For a modest investment by the school — about $20,000 to $30,000 a course — a professor can reach a million students, says Karl Ulrich, vice dean for innovation at Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Do it cheap and simple,” Professor Christensen says. “Get it out there.”
But Harvard Business School’s online education program is not cheap, simple, or open. It could be said that the school opted for the Porter theory. Called HBX, the program will make its debut on June 11 and has its own admissions office. Instead of attacking the school’s traditional M.B.A. and executive education programs — which produced revenue of $108 million and $146 million in 2013 — it aims to create an entirely new segment of business education: the pre-M.B.A. “Instead of having two big product lines, we may be on the verge of inventing a third,” said Prof. Jay W. Lorsch, who has taught at Harvard Business School since 1964.
Starting last month, HBX has been quietly admitting several hundred students, mostly undergraduate sophomores, juniors and seniors, into a program called Credential of Readiness, or CORe. The program includes three online courses — accounting, analytics and economics for managers — that are intended to give liberal arts students fluency in what it calls “the language of business.” Students have nine weeks to complete all three courses, and tuition is $1,500. Only those with a high level of class participation will be invited to take a three-hour final exam at a testing center.
“We don’t want tourists,” said Jana Kierstead, executive director of HBX, alluding to the high dropout rates among MOOCs. “Our goal is to be very credible to employers.” To that end, graduates will receive a paper credential with a grade: high honors, honors, pass.
“Harvard is going to make a lot of money,” Mr. Ulrich predicted. “They will sell a lot of seats at those courses. But those seats are very carefully designed to be off to the side. It’s designed to be not at all threatening to what they’re doing at the core of the business school.”
Exactly, warned Professor Christensen, who said he was not consulted about the project. “What they’re doing is, in my language, a sustaining innovation,” akin to Kodak introducing better film, circa 2005. “It’s not truly disruptive.”
‘Very Different Places’
Professor Christensen did something “truly disruptive” in 2011, when he found himself in a room with a panoramic view of Boston Harbor. About to begin his lecture, he noticed something about the students before him. They were beautiful, he later recalled. Really beautiful.
“Oh, we’re not students,” one of them explained. “We’re models.”
They were there to look as if they were learning: to appear slightly puzzled when Professor Christensen introduced a complex concept, to nod when he clarified it, or to look fascinated if he grew a tad boring. The cameras in the classroom — actually, a rented space downtown — would capture it all for the real audience: roughly 130,000 business students at the University of Phoenix, which hired Professor Christensen to deliver lectures online.
Why had his boss, Mr. Nohria, given him permission to moonlight? “Because we didn’t have an alternative of our own” online, Mr. Nohria explained.
The dean had taken a wait-and-see approach — until 18 months ago, when his own university announced the formation of edX, an open-courseware platform that would hitch the overall university firmly to the MOOC bandwagon.
He said he remembered listening to an edX presentation at an all-university meeting. “I must confess I was unsure what we’d be really hoping to gain from it,” he said. “My own early imagination was: ‘This is for people who do lectures. We don’t do lectures, so this is not for us.’ ” In the case method, concepts aren’t taught directly, but induced through student discussion of real-world business problems that professors guide with carefully chosen questions.
“Nitin and I are close friends, and we’ve talked about this repeatedly,” Professor Porter said. “I think the big risk in any new technology is to believe the technology is the strategy. Just because 200,000 people sign up doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.” Though Professor Porter published “Strategy and the Internet” in the Harvard Business Review in 2001, before the advent of MOOCs, the article makes his sternest warning about the perils of online recklessness: “A destructive, zero-sum form of competition has been set in motion that confuses the acquisition of customers with the building of profitability.”
Mr. Nohria ultimately chose for the business school to opt out of edX. But this decision forced a question: What should the school do instead? “People came out in very different places,” Mr. Nohria said. “Very different places.”
One morning, he sat down for one of his regular breakfasts with students. “Three of them had just been in Clay’s course,” which had included a case study on the future of Harvard Business School, Mr. Nohria said. “So I asked them, ‘What was the debate like, and how would you think about this?’ They, too, split very deeply.”
Some took Professor Christensen’s view that the school was a potential Blockbuster Video: a high-cost incumbent — students put the total cost of the two-year M.B.A. at around $100,0000 — that would be upended by cheaper technology if it didn’t act quickly to make its own model obsolete. At least one suggested putting the entire first-year curriculum online.
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On the topic of online instruction, Prof. Clayton Christensen said: ‘Do it cheap and simple. Get it out there.”CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
Others weren’t so sure. “ ‘This disruption is going to happen,’ ” is how Mr. Nohria described their thinking, “ ‘but it’s going to happen to a very different segment of business education, not to us.’ ” The power of Harvard’s brand, networking opportunities and classroom experience would protect it from the fate of second- and third-tier schools, a view that even Professor Christensen endorses — up to a point.
“We’re at the very high end of the market, and disruption always hits the high end last,” said Professor Christensen, who recently predicted that half of the United States’ universities could face bankruptcy within 15 years.
Mr. Nohria states flatly, “I do not believe our M.B.A. program is at risk.” He concluded that disruption is not always “all or nothing,” and cited the businesses of music and retailing as examples. “In the music business, all record stores are gone,” he said, while in retailing, “it’s not like Amazon has eliminated everything; after those debates, my feeling was that we’re going to be more in that category.”
Still, Mr. Nohria said, he wanted some insurance. “Our beliefs can always turn out to be wrong,” he said. Harvard Business School could not afford to stand on the sidelines. So last summer, he said, he asked the business school’s administrative director, “What would you say if we started a little skunk works around this technology?”
‘Hollywood’ at Harvard
That skunk works, in a low-slung building 300 yards from campus, is not little. It buzzes with 35 full-time staff members — Wharton’s online efforts, by comparison, employ one-half of one staffer, Mr. Ulrich said — who are scrambling to complete a proprietary platform that, after this summer’s limited go-round, could support much larger enrollments.
“Here’s Hollywood,” Ms. Kierstead said on a recent tour, passing an array of video equipment that’s hauled around to film business case-study protagonists on location. Nearby, two digital animators worked on graphics for Professor Christensen’s forthcoming course. Another staff member handled financial aid.
To run HBX with Ms. Kierstead, Mr. Nohria tapped Bharat Anand, 48, a strategy professor who had been researching how traditional media companies have coped, or haven’t, with digital disruption. “I think about those cases a lot,” said Professor Anand, who is also Mr. Nohria’s brother-in-law.
The dean handed him a sheet of six guiding principles, including these: HBX should be economically self-sustaining. It should not substitute for the M.B.A. program. It should seek to replicate the Harvard Business School discussion-based style of learning. This was no easy assignment, Professor Anand conceded.
“What is competitive advantage?” he asked, invoking Professor Porter’s signature theory. “It comes from being fundamentally different. We teach this all the time. But saying it is one thing. Putting it into practice is hard. When everyone is going free, everyone is going with a similar type of platform, it takes courage to do your own thing.”
On campus, Harvard business students face one another in five horseshoe-shaped tiers with oversized name cards. They fight for “airtime” while the professor orchestrates discussion from a central “pit.”
“We don’t do lectures,” Mr. Nohria said. “Part of what had already convinced me that MOOCs are not for us is that for a hundred years our education has been social.”
The challenge was to invent a digital architecture that simulated the Harvard Business School classroom dynamic without looking like a classroom. In a demonstration of a course called economics for managers, the first thing the student sees is the name, background and location — represented by glowing dots on a map — of other students in the course.
A video clip begins. It’s Jim Holzman, chief executive of the ticket reseller Ace Ticket, estimating the supply of tickets for a New England Patriots playoff game: “Where I have a really hard time is trying to figure out what the demand is. We just don’t know how many people are on the sidelines saying, ‘Hey, I’m thinking about going.’ ”
It’s a complex situation meant to get students thinking about a key concept — “the distinction between willingness to pay and price,” Professor Anand said. “Just because something costs zero doesn’t mean people aren’t willing to pay something.” A second case study, on the pay model of The New York Times, drives the point home.
Then a box pops up on the screen with the words “Cold Call.” The student has 30 seconds to a few minutes to type a response to a question and is then prodded to assess comments made by other students. Eventually there is a multiple-choice quiz to gauge mastery of the concept. (This was surprisingly time-consuming to develop, Professor Anand said, because the business school does not give multiple-choice tests.)
At a faculty meeting in April, Professor Anand demonstrated the other two elements of HBX: continuing education for executives and a live forum. He unveiled the existence of a studio, built in collaboration with Boston’s public television station, that allows a professor to stand in a pit before a horseshoe of 60 digital “tiles,” or high-definition screens with the live images and voices of geographically dispersed participants. “I’m proud of our team, and how carefully they’ve thought about it even before they’ve done it,” Professor Porter said.
The Clashing Models
Not everyone was so impressed. Professor Christensen, for one, worried that Harvard was falling into the very trap he had laid out in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” “I think that we’ve way overshot the needs of customers,” he said. “I worry that we’re a little too technologically ambitious.”
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The dean, Nitin Nohria, found that students were also divided on the issue of online instruction.CreditRick Friedman for The New York Times
He also feared that HBX was tied too closely to the business school.
“There have been a few companies that have survived disruption, but in every case they set up an independent business unit that let people learn how to play ball in the new game,” he said. IBM survived the transition from mainframe computers to minicomputers, and then from minicomputers to personal computers, by setting up autonomous teams in Minnesota and then in Florida. “We haven’t got the separation required.”
Professor Porter has expressed the opposite view. Companies that set up stand-alone Internet units, he wrote in 2001, “fail to integrate the Internet into their proven strategies and thus never harness their most important advantages.” Barnes & Noble’s decision to set up a separate online unit is one of his cautionary tales. “It deterred the online store from capitalizing on the many advantages provided by the network of physical stores,” he said, “thus playing into the hands of Amazon.”
Here is where the two professors’ differences come to a head. In the Porter model, all of a company’s activities should be mutually reinforcing. By integrating everything into one, cohesive fortification, “any competitor wishing to imitate a strategy must replicate a whole system,” Professor Porter wrote.
In the Christensen model, these very fortifications become a liability. In the steel industry, which was blindsided by new technology in smaller and cheaper minimills, heavily integrated companies couldn’t move quickly and ended up entombed inside their elaborately constructed defenses.
“If Clay and I differ, it’s that Clay sees disruption everywhere, in every business, whereas I see it as something that happens every once in a while,” Professor Porter said. “And what looks like disruption is in fact an incumbent firm not embracing innovation” at all.
In other words, it’s not that U.S. Steel was destined to be undone by minimills. It’s that its managers let it happen.
“The disrupter doesn’t always win,” argued Professor Porter, who nonetheless called Professor Christensen “phenomenal” and “one of the great management thinkers.”
Who will win the coming business school shakeout? Professor Porter acknowledged that it’s a multidimensional question.
Most schools offering MOOCs do so through outside distribution channels like Coursera, a for-profit company that has Duke, Wharton, Yale, the University of Michigan and several dozen other schools in its stable. EdX, of which Harvard was a co-founder with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, counts Dartmouth and Georgetown among its charter members.
“These will come to have considerable power,” predicted Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He pointed to the aircraft industry: “In order to get into China, Boeing transferred its technology to parts manufacturers there. Pretty soon there’s going to be Chinese firms building airplanes. Boeing created their own competition.” Business schools, he said, “are doing it again; we are creating our own demise.”
Professors as Online Stars
The worry is all the more acute at midtier schools, which fear that elite business schools will move to gobble up a larger share of a shrinking pie.
“Would you rather watch Kenneth Branagh do ‘Henry V,’ or see it at a community theater?” asked Mr. Ulrich at Wharton. “There are going to be some instructors who become more valuable in this new world because they master the new medium. We’d rather be those guys than the people left behind.”
This raises a still more radical case, in which the winners are not any institution, new or old, but a handful of star professors. One of Professor Porter’s generic observations — that the Internet increases the “bargaining power of suppliers” — suggests just that. “It’s potentially very divisive in a way,” he acknowledged. “We’re all partners; we all get paid roughly the same. Anything that starts to fracture the enterprise is a sobering prospect.”
François Ortalo-Magné, dean of the University of Wisconsin’s business school, says fissures have already appeared. Recently, a rival school offered one of his faculty members not just a job, but also shares in an online learning start-up created especially for him. “We’re talking about millions of dollars,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said. “My best teachers are going to find platforms so they can teach to the world for free. The market is finding a way to unbundle us. My job is to hold this platform together.”
To that end, he has changed his school’s incentive structure, which, as in most of academia, was based primarily on the number of research articles published in elite journals. Now professors who can’t crack those journals but “have a gift for inspiring learning,” he said, in person or online, are being paid as top performers, too. “We are now rewarding people who have tenure to give up on research,” Mr. Ortalo-Magné said.
Mr. Ortalo-Magné spins out the possibilities of disruption even further. “How many calculus professors do we need in the world?” he asked. “Maybe it’s nine. My colleague says it’s four. One to teach in English, one in French, one in Chinese, and one in the farm system in case one dies.”
What is to stop a Coursera from poaching Harvard Business School faculty members directly? “Nothing,” Mr. Nohria said. “The decision people will have to make is whether being on the platform of Harvard Business School, or any great university, is more important than the opportunity to build a brand elsewhere.
“Does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen just by himself? Or does Clay Christensen become Clay Christensen because he was at Harvard Business School? He’ll have to make that determination.”
Baseball players, particularly pitchers, are known for being superstitious. These superstitions have been immortalized by characters like Pedro Cerrano, the Cuban center fielder and his doll Joboo, in the film Major League. Real life examples abound. But it now turns out that research has shown that following personal rituals may increase your self-confidence and actually help you ace a job interview or a big presentation.
Baseball players, particularly pitchers, are known for being superstitious. These superstitions have been immortalized by characters like Pedro Cerrano, the Cuban center fielder and his doll Joboo, in the film Major League. Real life examples abound. But it now turns out that research has shown that following personal rituals may increase your self-confidence and actually help you ace a job interview or a big presentation.
The role that rituals and superstition play in nailing a job
interview
Alison Wood Brooks used her own research when she interviewed for a job at Harvard Business School this spring. ”Academic job interviews are very intense,” she said. “They ask you very difficult questions.”
So she started preparing for questions and the lecture that would come after a day of packed interviews. Her ritual of preparation followed the pattern she’d established earlier in her career for giving academic talks. “I always pack the same outfit and get ready in the same order. I lay out the outfit, shower do my hair and makeup and put on the suit,” she said. “I practice the talk exactly once” wearing the heels she’d be wearing. Then she heads out the door.
An array of rituals—from deep breathing and then a drink of water before a presentation to spinning the basketball before a free throw—allow people to improve their performance at a crucial moment in their career. Pre-performance rituals can improve confidence, concentration, and emotional stability.
With a PhD from the Wharton School, Brooks has studied everyday anxiety in individuals for years as well as workers’ concerns “about deadlines, when they have to meet with a boss, when they have to perform under pressure.” She’s found that ”people have very complex rituals that are very ingrained in their lives,” and in their work.
Her recent research, conducted with two University of Chicago professors and a Wharton School professor, was presented at a panel on the value of rituals at the Academy of Management conference in September.
Brooks and her fellow researchers asked test subjects to sing “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey with a karaoke machine. They were told they would be evaluated on their singing accuracy, measured by voice recognition software. The request definitely raised their stress levels, she noted.
Some participants completed a five-step ritual beforehand: They drew a quick sketch of their feelings, sprinkled the drawing with salt, counted to five, crumpled the paper and threw it in the trash. Those participants sang better after the ritual than those who sat quietly for a minute; they also reported lower nervousness.
Another test involved a math problem, Gauss’s modular arithmetic task. Some participants followed the same ritual detailed above, another group was asked to wait two minutes before completing it, and others watched and answered a couple questions about an unrelated video clip of a coral reef. One group drew a tree and others drew their feelings, an unconnected and a connected ritual, respectively.
Those who performed the connected ritual did the best at solving the math problem. “The connected ritual was more effective than the distraction alone, and much more effective than an affectively unconnected ritual as well as simply waiting,” the researchers wrote in a paper presented to the Academy of Management conference last month.
“There’s some sort of calming essence doing something sequential and ordered. It sort of increases your sense of self” and may slow your heart rate, Brooks said.
Other papers from Academy of Management session indicate that ”avoidant action” like throwing salt or knocking on wood make people feel like they’re reducing risk, lowering their concerns or reversing a jinx. Rituals also may improve people’s sense of control and alleviate grief. At work, team rituals may reinforce desired behaviors and create a shared identity, a professor from Milanwrites in the Harvard Business Review.
What is Brooks’ advice for creating a ritual before a key job interview or conversation with their boss? “It depends if the person believes in good luck,” she said. “Having a superstitious element is very helpful.”
Years ago I was invited to join a newly forming Intel marketing group comprised primarily of Ivy League MBA‘s, with a few of us Intel veterans thrown into the mix to create some cross-fertilization in the group. This was the famous period of Harvard MBA’s belief that they were all marketing gods, and needed only to be ruthless: greed was good. One of my Harvard educated Intel colleagues related a story of HBS students playing an allegedly “friendly” game of football on the green next to the Charles River. One player suffered a compound fracture of his leg. While waiting for an ambulance, a member of the other team came up and demanded to know when the game would resume. Everything was about competition and one-upmanship. To this day I remember fondly (believe it or not) that this was also the mantra of our Intel group. Who got the girl on Friday night: who got stuck with the bar tab. There was a big scoreboard in the sky tabulating the imaginary results. Perhaps against the odds, our group survived and succeeded famously. Many of us are still very close personal friends. One is the godfather of my son.
Ray Rund, one of my Intel colleagues, and Harvard MBA told me another story of HBS students eager to take John Kotter‘s leadership class, at the time called “Power & Influence.” They all thought that Kotter’s course would teach them how to become the meanest “sons-of-bitches in the valley.” Ray amusingly remembered that Kotter’s course taught them the exact opposite: managers must first learn to be humble, connect and gain the respect of their subordinates, before attempting to lead, or they would be doomed. The book version of Kotter’s course is now 30 years old, but is still as relevant as ever. It is filled with case studies of “hard asses” who failed miserably.
I have often explained Kotter’s point to others by using the example of an old WWII film clip of Lord Louis Mountbatten, leading the beleaguered British commandos in Burma against overwhelming Japanese forces. Mountbatten was standing on a pedestal in some god forsaken Burmese village, with his troops standing at attention in rank. The first thing Mountbatten did was to beckon his troops to break rank and come up near him. The old film clip speaks volumes about Mountbatten’s intuitive understanding of leadership.
Specialists in organizational behavior probably like to debate these points, pointing out the Peter Drucker “high task, low relationship” approach to change management. Basically, like the George S. Patton “school of management” in the film, kick ass and take names until the organization submitted to his will. As the film shows, this approach has its drawbacks.
Ironically, I had learned Kotter’s lesson in leadership in my first assignment at Intel, managing 250 people running a semiconductor manufacturing operation. On my first day, my manager introduced me to my people, half-jokingly saying to them, “Let’s see how long it takes you to break your new supervisor!” Clearly, I needed to get with their program. Just for the record, my manager, Dean Persona and I became fast friends. My employees had the knowledge of how to get the job done, and I did not. It is a valuable lesson I have never forgotten. I managed to get the respect of my people by respecting them. When extra effort was required, I could ask for that extra effort, and it was given willingly. Others failed miserably in their jobs while I rapidly rose to bigger and better things.
When I noticed this HBR blog post on leadership, titled “Connect….Then Lead,” I thought of Kotter, who is still teaching at Harvard. I also see another potential case study of failure developing now. For all of the good intentions of this manager, he is failing to understand Kotter’s lesson about leadership. This manager professes openness. This manager made a point to take a very modest office and leave his door open. But despite these superficial moves, in reality the substance of his management style is that of an austere, autocratic manager who isolates himself behind a wall of handlers who manage access to him, even reading all of his emails, which is offensive to many. It takes weeks to schedule a simple meeting with this manager, if you can successfully maneuver the gauntlet of handlers. Then the meeting will typically start late, only to be ended by another handler interrupting the meeting, tapping on their watch, to extract the manager early from the meeting, because he is so “busy” he must move on. He demands that his schedule be cleared for his own priorities.
The rudeness and distant behavior of this manager is obviously having a serious impact on the manager’s effectiveness with his people, but the manager seems more interested in his own matters. It has been noted by some that it is not uncommon for autocrats to view themselves as being open and welcoming toward their people, when in reality the manager’s true behavior exhibits an extreme distance, lack of sensitivity, and the subordinates are intimidated by his overbearing personal style. This is all laid out in Kotter’s books and in the following HBR Blog article. History seems to repeat itself.
Andrew Carnegie, a scion of the Gilded Age of Monopolists at the turn of the 20th Century, is noted for this quote about the importance of his employees…
“Take away my factories, my plants, take away my railroads, my ships, my transportation; take away my money, strip me of all these, but leave me my men and in two or three years, I will have them all again.” Despite Carnegie’s megalomaniacal tendencies, he nevertheless seemed to understand the importance of having a strong bond with his people.
Connect, Then Lead
Reblogged from the HRB Blog
by Amy J.C. Cuddy, Matthew Kohut, and John Neffinge
Niccolò Machiavelli pondered that timeless conundrum 500 years ago and hedged his bets. “It may be answered that one should wish to be both,” he acknowledged, “but because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved.”
Now behavioral science is weighing in with research showing that Machiavelli had it partly right: When we judge others—especially our leaders—we look first at two characteristics: how lovable they are (their warmth, communion, or trustworthiness) and how fearsome they are (their strength, agency, or competence). Although there is some disagreement about the proper labels for the traits, researchers agree that they are the two primary dimensions of social judgment.
Why are these traits so important? Because they answer two critical questions: “What are this person’s intentions toward me?” and “Is he or she capable of acting on those intentions?” Together, these assessments underlie our emotional and behavioral reactions to other people, groups, and even brands and companies. Research by one of us, Amy Cuddy, and colleagues Susan Fiske, of Princeton, and Peter Glick, of Lawrence University, shows that people judged to be competent but lacking in warmth often elicit envy in others, an emotion involving both respect and resentment that cuts both ways. When we respect someone, we want to cooperate or affiliate ourselves with him or her, but resentment can make that person vulnerable to harsh reprisal (think of disgraced Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, whose extravagance made him an unsympathetic public figure). On the other hand, people judged as warm but incompetent tend to elicit pity, which also involves a mix of emotions: Compassion moves us to help those we pity, but our lack of respect leads us ultimately to neglect them (think of workers who become marginalized as they near retirement or of an employee with outmoded skills in a rapidly evolving industry).
To be sure, we notice plenty of other traits in people, but they’re nowhere near as influential as warmth and strength. Indeed, insights from the field of psychology show that these two dimensions account for more than 90% of the variance in our positive or negative impressions we form of the people around us.
So which is better, being lovable or being strong? Most leaders today tend to emphasize their strength, competence, and credentials in the workplace, but that is exactly the wrong approach. Leaders who project strength before establishing trust run the risk of eliciting fear, and along with it a host of dysfunctional behaviors. Fear can undermine cognitive potential, creativity, and problem solving, and cause employees to get stuck and even disengage. It’s a “hot” emotion, with long-lasting effects. It burns into our memory in a way that cooler emotions don’t. Research by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman drives this point home: In a study of 51,836 leaders, only 27 of them were rated in the bottom quartile in terms of likability and in the top quartile in terms of overall leadership effectiveness—in other words, the chances that a manager who is strongly disliked will be considered a good leader are only about one in 2,000.
A growing body of research suggests that the way to influence—and to lead—is to begin with warmth. Warmth is the conduit of influence: It facilitates trust and the communication and absorption of ideas. Even a few small nonverbal signals—a nod, a smile, an open gesture—can show people that you’re pleased to be in their company and attentive to their concerns. Prioritizing warmth helps you connect immediately with those around you, demonstrating that you hear them, understand them, and can be trusted by them.
When Strength Comes FirstMost of us work hard to demonstrate our competence. We want to see ourselves as strong—and want others to see us the same way. We focus on warding off challenges to our strength and providing abundant evidence of competence. We feel compelled to demonstrate that we’re up to the job, by striving to present the most innovative ideas in meetings, being the first to tackle a challenge, and working the longest hours. We’re sure of our own intentions and thus don’t feel the need to prove that we’re trustworthy—despite the fact that evidence of trustworthiness is the first thing we look for in others.
Amy J.C. Cuddy is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Matthew Kohut and John Neffinger are the authors of Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential (Hudson Street Press, August 2013) and principals at KNP Communications.
In honor to my UBC Management students graduating this month and early next month, I am posting this compilation of videos of commencement speeches. Yes, the Steve Jobs’ legendary Stanford commencement address is here (Jobs wore his trademark levi’s under his academic gown), but the others are equally compelling. The David Foster Wallace “What is Water?” speech is also here, but as a link to that video at the bottom of this post.
In honor to my UBC Management students graduating this month and early next month, I am posting this compilation of videos of commencement speeches. Yes, the Steve Jobs’ legendary Stanford commencement address is here (Jobs wore his trademark levi’s under his academic gown), but the others are equally compelling. The David Foster Wallace “What is Water?” speech is also here, but as a link to that video at the bottom of this post.
Tweet from (Sir) Tim Berners-Lee on the death of Aaron Swartz” “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.” And the web wept.
Today the blogosphere and media have lit up with tributes and obituaries to Aaron Swartz: not least of these include The Economist Magazine “Babbage” editorial page, and The Harvard Business Review blog
Only 26 years old, Aaron Swartz took his own life late last week. Swartz was an Internet intellectual giant, recognized as such since his early teenage years.. We have lost a second generation Internet visionary..someone who could have helped us get to the next level of The Global Village..
At the age of 14, Swartz was credited with inventing RSS, known as “rich site summary,” a format for delivering to users content from sites that change constantly, such as news pages and blogs. We all use it.
The problem was that the powers that want corporate control the Internet did not like Aaron.. They want us to pay big corporations big bucks and they see the Internet as a threat to their power. I personally view Swartz’ suicide as an existential act of immense courage, making the ultimate statement with his life, screaming at us that we need to “wake the fuck up” as Samuel L. Jackson screamed at us in his viral video, during the US Presidential campaign.
According to the federal indictment, Swartz – who was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Center for Ethics – used MIT’s computer networks to steal more than 4 million articles from JSTOR, an online archive and journal distribution service. JSTOR did not press charges against Swartz after the digitised copies of the articles were returned, according to media reports at the time. So why did the US Attorney insist on driving Aaron to commit suicide?
Swartz, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, faced 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine if convicted. He was released on bond. His trial was scheduled to start later this year. Many legal scholars who have studied the case, have described the US federal prosecution as a travesty, and out of all proportion to the facts..
Most importantly, if the United States views the Internet as a strategic national security resource, they completely fucked up by forcing the suicide of one of its most important new geniuses. You can’t get more fucked up than that.
On Saturday, online tributes to Swartz flooded across cyberspace. “Aaron had an unbeatable combination of political insight, technical skill and intelligence about people and issues,” Cory Doctorow, Canadian blogger and science fiction writer, co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing, wrote on the site. Doctorow wrote that Swartz had “problems with depression for many years.” Depression, mood swings and even bipolar disorder are commonly associated with extremely bright people.
We lost Steve Jobs.. Now we have lost Aaron as well. He could have been our next generation Marshall McLuhan, showing us the way…. But it was not to happen. I am so angry I could spit.
mayo615 