One day, I realized that if we could afford it, it’s just as important to hire exceptionally talented people even when you don’t have an opening. On occasion we found a gifted person and we’d hire them into our organization. At first, we would just give the person something to do. Always, after a few months, they were working 10-hour days and making a big contribution. Inevitably, we found an important role for them, or they found it on their own. I never regretted hiring someone who cosistantly brought their A game.
I always put brainpower first because intellect is the most important of the raw materials we work with. From intelligence comes thoughtful analysis, asking the right questions, good judgment, and better decisions. I want the smartest people I can find to join our organization. High-potential people like to be with other high-potential people. When I interview candidates, I’ll often ask them to bring me through their lives. I want to know what their family history is. I want to know how well candidates performed in high school and college. I want to know whether they also reached beyond their academic potential to demonstrate some leadership potential.
Frankly, I want to know if their grade-point average (GPA) was 2.7 or 3.9 out of a possible 4.0. Even if they’ve been out of school for many years, a GPA can represent four years of evaluation, not a sixty-minute impression during a brief interview on a busy day. It may not be necessarily true that a 3.9 GPA will be better than a 2.7, but the odds are with you.
So I’m looking for the Phi Beta Kappa, the captain of the debating team the president of the student council. It’s no coincidence that seventeen presidents of the United States, thirty-seven U.S. Supreme Court justices, and 131 Nobel laureates have been members of Phi Beta Kappa.
I’m also looking for the person who rose quickly in another organization and was rewarded with an important leadership job. What challenges did that executive overcome to get something meaningful done? How did that person apply his intelligence to the job to make something happen?
My hurdle for brainpower is high, but once it’s jumped I’m on to the next most attribute of success: values. Ultimately, all the intelligence in the world isn’t going to help a person who lacks basic integrity and compassion for other human beings. I’m looking for honesty, decency, respect, kindness, generosity, and consideration.
Getting a fix on a person’s values is admittedly difficult. Values are easier to discern once you have a person on staff, but much harder to recognize in an interview. You have to sense them. I can pick up some fairly good clues by the way candidates speak about their parents, their teachers, their role models in life. I want people who have been inspired by others, who are generous in giving credit to those who made a difference in their lives. I’m looking for people who want to help others in need, who have demonstrated kindness and consideration to the disadvantaged. Some of this may be subtle. It’s what you can interpret from tone of voice or a face lighting up. But this tells me a lot about a person’s purpose in life.
Passion has become an overused word in recent years. Still, it’s the level of enthusiasm and interest in work and life that makes someone stand out above the rest. It’s a fire that burns deeply within us. Once tapped, it can bring you to places that few other people can go.
Unlike values, passion is easy to spot. You either have it or you don’t. There is a spirit or fervor in people who have passion. You can often feel their energy. They also are infectious team members. They ignite the passion in others. They get others to care as much as they do about accomplishing the possible and the seemingly impossible.
My fourth hiring attribute is work ethic. I work hard. I do so because I’m passionate about the work I do, and I feel good when I’m highly productive. I expect the same from the people we hire. We want people who embrace work, who understand that it’s not something you do only to earn a living, but rather something that can help define who you are in this life.
During interviews, I try to get a feel for people how have a strong work ethic. You get that from learning they worked during high school and college, whether they worked weekends, what they sacrificed at times to work instead of play. At some level, work is about sacrifice: giving up some time with your friends or your family to perform your job at the highest possible level of excellence.
Finally, we come to experience. Experience, though important, is the last of the five things I look for because it’s something you can provide your staff. We can’t give them more intellect, better values, passion, or a strong work ethic. But we can give them experience by providing an opportunity to learn a discipline or a job. That’s why we can make a compromise when it comes to experience, but never on the first four.
When I recruit talent, I want to be as sure as possible that the person I’m hiring has all of these attributes. That requires patience and work. And then I will do whatever it takes to bring that exceptional person on board.
We work across domains like media, health care, retail, education, and banking, and the work always involves an element of “new.” A new platform or technology, a new business proposition, or new target users. We work at the front edge of mainstream, where innovation meets mass-market appeal. The constant presence of “new” in our work feeds our curiosity, and makes exploration a necessity.
In order to guide our work and inspire our clients, we constantly think about what tomorrow will bring. Each year, we ask our teams at to predict the major trends that will impact businesses and society next year. Here, we delve into five of our predictions for 2013 and share our thoughts on what designers should be doing to make sure they stay ahead of the curve.
The growing number of devices and sensors that we incorporate into our lives will set the scene for what we call “living services”--the point at which individual smart objects interconnect to form a support network for their owner. This is when a set of connected objects becomes greater than the sum of its parts: your “personal ecosystem.”
The past 18 months have seen the beginnings of mass-market adoption for a select few connected objects, driven by the services that make them meaningful. Nike+ FuelBand, Jawbone UP, and the Nest self-learning thermostat are early pacesetters. The “battle for the wrist” will hit the mainstream in earnest in 2013, with a variety of approaches coming to market focused on everything from health and wellness to information and entertainment.
We’ll soon start to see connected devices infiltrating more areas of our lives. As we are confronted with more data visualizations about our homes, jobs, and health, we are likely to develop what we’re calling “chart fatigue,” where information overload makes it difficult to extract meaning from data that should be valuable to us.
How to get in on the personal ecosystem:
• Increase focus on designing for the glance as wearable tech becomes more mainstream.
• Help users tie together elements of their object ecosystem to extract further value from a service.
• Segment interactions into things that are best seen and done on small dedicated devices, and things best done on the smartphone that they inevitably will connect to.
• Design for adaptability. Services that fit naturally into people’s lives and adapt to their habits and priorities will be the big winners in 2013.
As digital progress marches on, so does complexity. A growing family of personal devices, and ever-increasing volumes of data, constantly threaten the efforts of service designers to create elegant, focused, and simple solutions.
But at the same time, more organizations are finding that a focus on simplicity can have a transformative effect on services and businesses alike. As Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler.”
Simplicity has a long track record of success and disruption. Ikea and Zipcar are good examples from the physical world. In the digital world, Skype was able to gain global market share with a very simple proposition, and Google disrupted the search-and-portal world with its singular focus and excellence. Other examples include Amazon’s one-click shopping, and Apple’s touch-focused iOS.
Now we’re seeing single-purpose apps and services gaining ground, feeding a desire for simplification. The payments startup Square is a good example: By simplifying the bureaucratic process of becoming a credit-card merchant, Square has managed to become a $3 billion company in under three years. Bank Simple has also changed the conversation in the financial-services sector with its radical approach to making finances transparent and easy.
Leaders in simplification will continue to disrupt and transform. As choices and options multiply, companies with solutions that can guide users through the mess will have an opportunity to become trusted advisers.
Simple rules for a K.I.S.S. world:
• Focus on what can be removed, rather than what could be added. Make sure every single feature, element, and interface drives real value for the user.
• Bravely go to the pain threshold that separates “extremely simple” from “plain dumb.”
• Use mobile as a primary tool to drive simplicity across products and services.
• Apply the principles of simplicity internally: How could your teams and your structure be leaner and more effective? Taking action to simplify internally will enable you to reflect that simplicity outward as well.
We’ve seen seismic shifts in the area of digital distribution of music, movies, and every other form of media. Users now expect their purchases to be portable and consumable on multiple platforms. We crave flexibility, and the way we buy and “own” is changing accordingly.
Spotify has proved that consumers are willing to pay to rent music if they feel they’re getting a valuable service. Services like AirBnB, 9flats, Getaround, and Lyft are making flat-sharing and car-sharing mainstream. The new competitor Jetsetter is helping to turn the concept of a luxury second home or family holiday on its head.
In the past, we projected our status and success through the things we owned--the car in the driveway, the vacation house, the books and the CDs that we displayed in our home. But increasingly status is now projected through our experiences and pursuits, and consequently the desire to “own” material objects fades.
Innovative new services will see companies generate increased revenue based on usage. For example, Microsoft’s Kinect technology could be used to charge for movies based on the number of people in the room.
As the focus shifts from ownership to access, these are key implications:
• Companies should design clear access models like renting, trading, and leasing. Ownership could simply become a standard “upgrade” function across categories.
• Include a variety of status-boosting elements in “access” services. For example, one-click ways to capture experiences and share them through social media networks, as well as “insight” sharing for those who prefer to project their intellectual pursuits.
• Create an “API for commerce” by atomizing your catalogue or offering. This could allow third parties to distribute your content, and it should also allow more flexibility, for example, by giving someone who’s bought a physical book the ability to take digital chapters along with them on their smartphone or tablet.
In 2012, the argument around use of personal data got heated. As users become more aware of what can be done with their information, they are beginning to demand access--and real value--in return for their data. With so many alternatives available for virtually any service, users are increasingly walking away from experiences that they find creepy or uncomfortable, and taking their business elsewhere.
We expect the wave of data visualization to continue to grow, driving value and building relationships between individuals and those who help them to extract value from their own behaviors.
How you can survive the personal data battle:
• Make the most of aggregated data. It can go a long way to improve your product and customer service without demanding hyper-personal information.
• Work to turn your customers’ data into actionable insights--for them.
• Be the one who makes sense of big data for the little guy.
Personalization is nothing new in the digital world, but in the world of retail, users often find that comparatively few services actually meet their needs. This is likely to change in 2013, as the online and offline retail environments merge, creating a more holistic and immersive customer experience.
A statistic to strike fear into the heart of any retailer: Almost half of U.S. smartphone users have used their devices in-store, and more than half of those have gone on to abandon their in-store purchase. For smartphone users, the distinction between online and in-store shopping has all but disappeared.
The key to retail success lies in creating experiences that make customers feel better. A shopping experience that feels smarter or easier can be more valuable for many customers than simply getting the best deal. Key factors that ensure success are increasingly going to be based on recognition, recommendation, follow-through, and support. Services like Intuit GoPayment and PayPal are already revolutionizing commerce for small retailers by simplifying payment, and the next natural step is to offer digital customer relationship management for these small merchants.
Shop staff will increasingly be equipped with tablets or smartphones to deliver improved individual service, and opt-in location-based services will help customers find precisely what they’re looking for, when they’re looking to buy, and will enable them to pay on the spot without queuing. Virtual shops, in other words, will also take hold in the physical world.
Suggestions for the shopping services of 2013:
• Design commerce services that make use of smartphone sensors and contextual data--camera, gyroscope, time of day, and location.
• Design innovative and simple solutions for small merchants. This is a big group of merchants, yet they are not digitally savvy at all. Inventory management, customer relationships, loyalty solutions, digital storefronts--these can be life-changing services for small retailers.
• Re-imagine the boring things and make them engaging. As PayPal and Square have shown, even something as painful as paying can be pretty cool.
These trends give a glimpse into the dramatic changes in people’s expectations, habits, and relationships that are being driven by the fast-changing digital service landscape. They have affected both people’s personal relationships and their interactions with services and brands. There is undoubtedly more change and transformation to come. Looking ahead, we believe that these are the fundamental lessons that designers need to embrace to have a real impact on business and society in 2013:
Design for a growing range of devices and a growing range of interaction modes. The new form factors include a much broader range of tablets, phablets, and hybrid devices (pc/tablet combos). They also include a fast-growing range of wearables--wrist bands, wrist watches, and much more. The interaction modes move from purely the graphical touch paradigm to include additional modes like voice and ambient information. Flexibility and adaptability will be key properties for successful designers.
Data is the currency of today, and data visualization is all about meaning. Designers will hold a key role in designing not just beautiful but also sharp and actionable insights. They will design data visualizations for large corporations, and make sense of big data for the little guy.
The digital/physical divide is disappearing. Bits and atoms used to be competing enemies; now they’re becoming friends that hang out together. Examples include digital real-world shopping, digital payments, wearable fitness and health technology, the ubiquity of mobile map usage, the connected car, etc. Designers need to be very thoughtful when designing things that people wear (comfort/fashion/durability considerations) and that affect people’s "real"-world experiences.
Today’s global economy is characterized by rapid and unpredictable change. The challenge of such turbulent times can only be met by employing an appropriate blend of the leadership and management mindsets.
Leaders in all sectors--industry, government, the military, academia, and non-profits--are being challenged to do more with less to better utilize their people’s time, physical assets, and budget. Your first response to a shrinking budget might be to do more yourself. An alternative is to delegate more to team members either proportionally or by getting your high potentials to take on extra work. In the first case, you are likely to burn out and have insufficient time to lead. In the latter two cases, you burn out either everyone or just the best people on your team. There is a better way: eliminate low-value tasks.
The core lesson is to think broadly in your definition of your team--it is more than just you and your direct reports. It includes everyone who has a stake in your success. Look for alliances that can dramatically expand the capabilities, resources, and reach of your team. A second lesson to understand is that when you do not ask a question, you are really the one who is saying no. When you ask questions, you tap into others’ knowledge so as to create new possibilities. The boundaries of your possible actions are no longer what you know, but rather what the organization and community know and can do.
At the end of the day, only action produces results. Building relationships, developing others, and making decisions lead to more effective actions; but it is the actions of you and your team along with the outcomes they produce that will build your reputation as a great leader.
1. Choose action or inaction wisely. Deciding when to take action is a basic leadership choice. You can lead your people into action quickly or let the energy build while they prepare for what must be done. Both approaches are appropriate at times. 2. Make teamwork a priority. Even high potentials must perform as a team to be successful. Conflicting actions or complaints about difficulties in getting agreement are symptoms of poor teamwork. Fix the teamwork issues first, and other challenges will be easier. 3. Hold planning conversations. The time you spend in up-front conversations will be less than the time you otherwise would spend correcting the unintended and costly consequences of poorly planned and misaligned actions. 4. Ensure that the plan is understood. Ask high potentials, especially those who did not participate in planning, to describe your organization’s goals and strategies. If their answers are accurate, congratulate yourself. If they are not, improve the methods you use to communicate the strategic plan to your people. 5. Plan obsolescence. Look at the products and services you offer today. Which will be irrelevant three years from now? Are you developing the next generation of offerings? Whether you are or not, someone else is. 6. Create a people strategy. Invest as much in creating the people strategy for your next major change as in developing new processes and systems. People will accept change when they feel it is necessary, when their inputs are heard, and when they believe that the process of change is fair. 7. Learn from success. Looking back, would you say you learned more from your failures than from your successes? If you said yes, spend more time examining your recent successes to determine how you can repeat and expand them. 8. Stretch the comfort zone. Think about your team’s biggest achievement last year. What have you learned since then that could have made it bigger? Push your people into the uncomfortable learning zone and coach them to higher levels of success. 9. Confirm alignment. Next time you finish a key meeting, ask each person what he or she plans to do--especially to support each other. Agreement is real only if all parties share the agreements, the actions to be taken, and the expected results.
10. Get comfortable with silence. Silence can be the prelude to a big decision or decisive action. Use silence in your conversations as thinking and reflecting time.
Every strategy consultant has one PowerPoint slide he regards as his opus. After eight years in the field, I had several contenders: a two-by-two matrix that made people rethink the very nature of x and y axes; a waterfall chart that redefined the relationship between revenue and expenses; a customer- profitability Mekko chart that would sit as easily at MoMA as it did in GoToMeeting. But my greatest gift to the value-adding arts was for a telco that feared it had no future in the Internet era. Using clip art of stacked cylinders to represent databases (did I mention I'm a brilliant artist?), I depicted the missed opportunities in the valuable customer info our client didn't use.
Internet companies could ask users to share their location, but telcos already knew where all their devices were. Facebook could talk up the "social graph," but what is the Call Detail Record but an indicator of true friendship? And payments? Phone companies are basically billing operations with fiber optics. They were leaving money, market share, and innovation on the table.
My team imagined telcos collecting, analyzing, and building APIs to provide access to customer data, making the world a more efficient, creative, and just place where freedom would ring for a thousand years--or at least until privacy concerns reined in growth. Our clients nodded their approval and promptly filed the slide in "The Department of Too Far Outside the Box."
When it comes to data, possession is perhaps only four-tenths of the law. Set-top boxes know our remote-control interactions. Vehicles know how much, how well, and how fast we drive. Credit card companies know what, when, and where we buy. Google knows, well, all the things. If the prevalence of chatter about "big data" is any indicator, data has evolved from something we collect with the vague promise of future value to something we analyze to retrieve that value.
This fall, I got to see this transition up close at DataGotham, an event celebrating New York's "data community" and showcasing how data analysis was transforming finance, fashion, startups, and urban life. Michael P. Flowers, director of the city's Policy and Strategic Planning Analytics Team (does your city have one of those?), explained how the N.Y.C. government had reduced emergency-response times by optimizing where it put idling ambulances, placing them close to likely trauma areas and 24-hour coffee shops with bathrooms.
There's another transition looming for the role of data in our world: of data into language itself. We can tell stories with data. We can make art (as the recent Art Hack Day, in Boston, did), and we can even demonstrate the true measure of one's language proficiency.
Just as smartphones revolutionized how we avoid talking to each other and food trucks changed our tolerance for eating while standing on the street, the emergence of data science as a vehicle for expression is going to radically change how we create. It gives us a new way to tell the story of the world around us.
