July–August 2023

How to Boost Your Sales Reps’ Performance

Researchers from the University of Missouri studied the auto insurance industry to learn more about what drives sales success.

The analysis showed that experienced reps found fewer prospective customers than novices did. But that didn’t necessarily hurt their overall performance, because they excelled at conversion. Advertising boosted both prospecting and conversion efficacy but was most beneficial among experienced reps. And the success of managerial levers to enhance both kinds of efficacy depended in part on reps’ level of experience.

In this article, the researchers offer several recommendations for sales managers looking to bolster their reps’ productivity.

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The TV You Watch When You’re Young Can Make You More Entrepreneurial

Having studied TV signals in East Germany from the 1960s to 1989 and rates of entrepreneurship there after German reunification, the researchers found that people in households with access to West German broadcasts were more likely than other East Germans to launch companies later in life.

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A Cofounder of Ralabs on Leading a Ukrainian Start-Up Through a Year of War

In early January 2022, as speculation about an impending Russian attack on Ukraine swirled, the leaders of Ralabs, a Lviv-based software-development company, started working on a business continuity plan, or BCP. They outlined various scenarios, each representing a different level of Russian action and Ukrainian response. They monitored the news to better understand the challenges the company and its employees might confront and talked nonstop to customers to gauge their nervousness about doing business in Ukraine.

On February 24, 2022, Russia did invade Ukraine, and the company’s advance planning paid off. Its leaders had already relocated some employees, allocated budget for BCP-related activities, developed HR policies for a range of emergency situations, and conducted a number of educational programs to help employees feel prepared, on topics ranging from managing in a crisis to being drafted into the army. As a result, just a few weeks after the invasion Ralabs was back to 90% of typical performance, which has more or less continued if not improved over the past year. The lessons it learned—around the importance of scenario planning, flexibility, decisive decision-making, and managing customers and employees through uncertainty—may be helpful both to other Ukrainian organizations during this war and to leaders around the world faced with navigating any crisis.

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Investing in Growth Through Uncertainty

When faced with disruptions and downturns, many leaders and companies instinctively focus on cutting costs to maintain profitability. But some identify opportunities and then take thoughtful action to emerge from crisis even stronger. That means not only planning for worst-case scenarios and pressure-testing operational and financial health but also staying alert for ways to find a winning edge and making needed investments. Those leaders do so by fostering three mindsets: sensemaking in crisis, a bootstrap ethic, and stakeholder balance. Examples from Alaska Airlines, Firefly, Panera Bread, and Edward Jones show how this works in practice. Leaders who embrace these ways of thinking can chart a course for the future even when the outlook is darkest.

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Cost Cutting That Makes You Stronger

When so much in the world feels beyond our control, costs are to a large extent controllable. But cutting them to drive short-term savings is a mistake. When companies take a one-off approach to cost cutting, they often sacrifice some of their most important investments. If cost-cutting programs are implemented in haste, little (if any) debate over the strategic intent of investments takes place. To the contrary, leaders typically dole out across-the-board targets, leaving organizations weaker, imbalanced, disjointed, and in some cases desperate and without direction. In this article the authors identify five keys to ensuring that companies build an efficient, effective culture around costs that works in both good times and bad.

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Don’t Eliminate Your Middle Managers

Organizations have long seen middle management as ripe for cutting whenever times get tight, and the current moment is no exception. The authors believe that this is a costly mistake. Human capital, they say, is at least as important as financial capital, and middle managers, who recruit and develop an organization’s employees, are the most important asset of all—essential to navigating rapid, complex change. They can make work more meaningful, interesting, and productive, and they’re crucial for true organizational transformation. But if managers are to fulfill this promise, leaders must reimagine their roles, push to more fully understand their value, and train, coach, and inspire them to realize their potential as organizational linchpins.

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How Generative AI Can Augment Human Creativity

There is tremendous apprehension about the potential of generative AI—technologies that can create new content such as text, images, and video—to replace people in many jobs. But one of the biggest opportunities generative AI offers is to augment human creativity and overcome the challenges of democratizing innovation.

In the past two decades, companies have used crowdsourcing and idea competitions to involve outsiders in the innovation process. But many businesses have struggled to capitalize on these contributions. They’ve lacked an efficient way to evaluate the ideas, for instance, or to synthesize different ideas.

Generative AI can help over­come those challenges, the authors say. It can supplement the creativity of employees and customers and help them produce and identify novel ideas—and improve the quality of raw ideas. Specifically, companies can use generative AI to promote divergent thinking, challenge expertise bias, assist in idea evaluation, support idea refinement, and facilitate collaboration among users.

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The Labor-Savvy Leader

For much of the past century, U.S. companies feared that unions would hurt shareholder value and innovation, so they responded to organized labor with one strategy: Fight, at all costs. This was brutally effective. Companies perfected the skill of union busting—so much so that most business leaders now have little experience with organized labor.

But owing to an array of forces, including the pandemic and inflation, the landscape is shifting. Workers today feel less secure in their jobs and more uncertain about the future, and not surprisingly, a growing number of them are organizing. In fact, worker interest in joining a union, and public support of organized labor, is at its highest in decades.

If business leaders stick to their old playbook, they risk permanently disenchanting their workforce and harming their brands. Instead, they must begin to reinvent corporate America’s relationship with organized labor, working with, rather than against, unions and other formal and informal structures. Indeed, in the next 20 years, the skill of leading an organized—or organizing—workforce may well become the critical leadership skill.

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The Evolving Role of Chief Sustainability Officers

The role of the CSO is undergoing a rapid and dramatic transformation. Historically CSOs have acted like stealth PR executives—their primary task was to tell an appealing story about corporate sustainability initiatives to the company’s many stakeholders. Now, however, some CSOs have moved away from a role centered on messaging and instead are spearheading the true integration of material ESG (environmental, social, and governance) issues into corporate strategy. This pivotal change requires close collaboration with other members of the senior leadership team and active engagement with investors.

This article argues for four major changes to the CSO role. The CSO should be involved in strategy and capital allocation; be more focused on and realistic about stakeholder interactions; be more fully engaged with investors; and be supported with sufficient resources and exper­tise throughout the entire organization, including on the board and senior leadership team.

In an ideal world, the authors say, a stand-alone CSO role would become obsolete once companies fully integrate ESG considerations into their corporate strategy and operations. Until that day arrives, however, it is crucial to adapt and evolve the CSO role.

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The Ethics of Managing People’s Data

Over the past few years the European Union has fined companies more than 1,400 times for a total of nearly €3 billion for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Almost every week stories appear about how AI-driven decisions result in discrimination against women or minority members in job recruitment, credit approvals, medical diagnoses, or criminal sentencing. These stories are stoking feelings of unease about how data is collected, used, and analyzed. According to the authors, managers who are examining projects that involve gathering human-provided data or leveraging existing databases need to focus on five critical issues: the provenance of the data, the purpose for which it will be used, how it is to be protected, how the privacy of the data providers can be ensured, and how the data is prepared for use. They begin with a brief overview of the organizational requirements for a robust ethical-review process.

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The Leap to Leader

The author has conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of CEOs and other executives for the New York Times feature “Corner Office” and his leadership series on LinkedIn, and he has coached hundreds of high-potentials. In this article he shares the lessons that emerged about the mental shifts needed to make a successful transition to a senior leadership position. The process involves identifying and communicating your core values and learning how to approach tough decisions. It requires setting the bar for your team’s performance and learning to compartmentalize so that you can find the right pace for yourself. And it requires expanding your self-awareness and paying attention to the stories you tell yourself about your experiences—your successes and failures, your bad times and good ones—when you contemplate the arc of your career and life.

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Disability as a Source of Competitive Advantage

Many companies realize the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But most focus on gender and ethnicity, paying less attention to people with disabilities.

Employing people with disabilities is usually seen as a social cause—one best suited to nonprofits or the public sector. That is a mistake—and more important, a missed opportunity. In many industries innovative companies are demonstrating that including people with disabilities can lead to real competitive advantage, in four ways: (1) Disabilities often confer unique talents that make people better at particular jobs. (2) The presence of employees with disabilities elevates the culture of the entire organization, making it more collaborative and boosting productivity. (3) A reputation for inclusiveness enhances a firm’s value proposition with customers, who become more willing to build long-term relationships with the company. And (4) being recognized as socially responsible gives a firm an edge in the competition for capital and talent.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to do good in the world, but there is also nothing wrong with wanting to do well, and the latter is enough reason to employ people with disabilities.

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What Smart Companies Know About Integrating AI

AI has the power to gather, analyze, and utilize enormous volumes of individual customer data to achieve precision and scale in personalization. The experiences of Mercury Financial, CVS Health, and Starbucks debunk the prevailing notion that extracting value from AI solutions is a technology-building exercise. That thinking holds companies back from capturing the power of AI. They needn’t build it; they just have to properly integrate it into a particular business context.

But AI is probably only about 10% of the secret sauce. The other 90% lies in the combination of data, experimentation, and talent that constantly activates and informs the intelligence behind personalization. Personalization is the goal; it’s what constitutes a company’s strategic brawn. The technology is merely the tool for reaching it. The authors describe what it means to integrate AI tools and what it takes to continually experiment, constantly generate learning, and import fresh data to improve and refine customer journeys.

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Accounting for Carbon Offsets

Markets for carbon trading function poorly, and many traded offsets do not actually perform as promised. Without robust protocols for monitoring offsets and in the absence of proper accounting mechanisms, market-based approaches to reducing atmospheric GHG will be vulnerable to misrepresentation and fraud.

This article presents an accounting framework based on five core principles. The first two define what can and cannot be counted as an offset and what may or may not be traded. The remaining principles set out basic accounting guidelines for offsets. Together they provide the foundation for a well-functioning market that accelerates innovation and deployment of improved offsetting technologies, leading to atmospheric decarbonization.

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Why It’s So Hard to Ask for Help

Although human beings are naturally social creatures, ready to both give and accept help, many of us struggle to actually ask for it, which over time can make us miserable and bitter. And because remote work is on the rise, leaving many of us isolated from colleagues, the challenges of asking for help have only intensified. To feel fulfilled and be successful both personally and professionally, it’s important to acknowledge and accept when you are working beyond your own capacity and be open to asking others for help. In this article the author, a management scholar and a leadership guru, looks at what drives people’s reluctance to seek help and offers strategies for overcoming the barriers.

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Case Study: How Should a Start-Up Cut Its Burn Rate?

Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of the enterprise software firm Puck.io, is facing a hard decision. Just three months earlier the company laid off 20% of its employees to reduce its burn rate amid growing economic uncertainty and a suddenly unattractive funding environment. The company’s lead investor and its board think more cost cuts are necessary, and they’re pushing Tyler to execute a second, 10% reduction in force. Worried about employee morale if they do back-to-back layoffs, Tyler and two other members of the C-suite are looking for alternatives.

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The Power of Words

Four new books investigate how language connects, differentiates, and enlightens us. Viorica Marian’s The Power of Language explores the benefits of multilingualism. People who are multilingual perform better on executive-functioning tasks, for instance, and draw more novel connections.

In A Myriad of Tongues, author Caleb Everett notes that more than 7,000 languages exist today. And while academics traditionally looked for commonalities among languages, recent research has focused on how languages diverge, and what those differences can teach us.

A third book, Magic Words, by Wharton professor Jonah Berger, examines how specific words can carry an oversize impact, making them more likely to change hearts and minds or drive change.

By contrast, Dan Lyons’s STFU reminds readers that sometimes saying nothing is the best approach. “All of us,” he writes, “stand to gain by speaking less, listening more, and communicating with intention.” His book offers advice on how to do that, whether online, at work, or at home.

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Life’s Work: An Interview with Chita Rivera

Nominated for 10 Tony Awards, the Broadway star began her career as a chorus girl. She went on to play the original Anita in West Side Story and the original Velma in Chicago. Despite her success, she describes herself as “obedient” and says, “You get so much by being humble.”

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