How Can We Save the Working Class? Give Them Digital Skills

Posted on by Jeff Mazur

The rise of automation was already a struggle for the working class before 2020, but the pandemic hit even harder as unemployment swept the nation. At the same time, COVID-19 has fueled digital initiatives in many industries, and a society that’s more tech-driven than ever before demands new skills. It’s time for the federal government to prioritize workforce development and equip the working class with the digital skills they need to fill in the gaps.

America’s workforce is on the brink of crisis, and if our country’s leaders — both newcomers and incumbents — don’t prioritize workforce development now, the working class will crumble. Companies large and small have increasingly turned to automated technologies in the quest to do more with less, leaving more Americans jobless. This trend has been so persistent that, last year, the Brookings Institution predicted a quarter of Americans could soon lose their jobs to automation.

The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Even Harder

Today, quite unexpectedly, many of the roughly 53 million Americans already trapped in a cycle of low-wage work now face unemployment. This is the same segment of the workforce most vulnerable to the threat of automation — and that threat now looms even larger.

The nearly universal pivot to remote work has fueled private-sector digitization efforts and will accelerate innovation advancing automated technologies. While this could ultimately lead to a more efficient, resilient national economy, it makes the future of the American worker uncertain.

Transforming Into a Tech-Driven Society

The pandemic will subside, but many of the jobs that disappeared upon its arrival won’t come back. The newly elected Biden administration must grapple with that reality now and implement policies that empower the working class to thrive in the future’s digital economy. It’s time for leaders to focus on tangible, scalable strategies for moving workers out of low-wage hourly employment and into digital roles that will soon define the workforce. The most critical component of any such strategy? Accessible, accelerated digital training.

Tech careers aren’t launched overnight. In order to be productive in important digital roles, millions of Americans will need to develop new skills and expertise. For that to happen, the country must shift away from the traditional learning pathways that have resulted in ballooning college tuition costs and a national student debt crisis and toward more affordable training pathways.

Before making this shift, we must think seriously about the implications of our transformation into a tech-driven society. Some already have. The demand for technical knowledge has fueled the rise of countless online education platforms, massive open online courses and other alternative learning outlets.

New Digital Pathways for the Working Class

Younger, tech-savvy Americans are especially keen to ditch traditional classrooms in favor of more practical learning experiences. According to an Insider and Morning Consult survey, 44% of Millennials with a college degree don’t believe obtaining that degree was worth taking on loans.

So what does a viable alternative to college look like? To support and encourage participation in alternative training programs that match the needs of modern workers and the future workforce, the Biden administration must establish incentives — especially for training providers.

Most job training programs similarly get federal workforce funding. First, an organization gets on an eligible training provider list managed by a local workforce board. When a trainee enrolls, the program receives half of the agreed-upon cost of training and then gets the rest of the money around the halfway point. In exchange for the funds, providers have to issue regular reports detailing participant graduation rates and success. Generally speaking, programs that don’t maintain an 80% graduation rate can be kicked off the list.

Although these rational requirements intend to ensure funding doesn’t go to programs producing undesirable outcomes, they do come with a couple of damaging consequences:

  • The requirements unintentionally discourage providers from attempting to offer more difficult courses — the kinds of courses that could actually prepare unskilled workers for high-skill, high-demand jobs.
  • They also push training providers to adopt smaller class sizes with more individualized learning at higher costs. If providers are incentivized to ensure nine out of 10 participants graduate, they might focus on teaching relatively basic career skills or on developing programs that spend intensively on each enrollee.

How to Better Arm Workers With the Skills of the Future

If we want to equip many workers with sophisticated digital expertise, the Biden administration must change how it allocates public funding. Instead of requiring providers to create elaborate reporting systems to receive federal funds on the front end, workforce agencies should allow programs preparing participants for high-difficulty, high-demand careers to collect payment on the back end — but only when a graduate gets a job.

This arrangement incentivizes providers to place as many people as possible into new roles at the lowest possible cost while taking the public system off the hook for the cost of unsuccessful participants.

Of course, there’s more than one way to approach worker training, but there might never be a better time. When again will the federal government distribute billions to state and local governments to invest in human capital?

Workforce development has never been considered a sexy talking point — in fact, it was conspicuously absent from media lists of crucial campaign issues leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The election results are in, but the leaders who focus on and provide viable workforce policies still have the unique opportunity to gain new supporters from a multitude of unemployed and underemployed Americans.

How Can We Save the Working Class? Give Them Digital Skills

Posted on by Jeff Mazur

The rise of automation was already a struggle for the working class before 2020, but the pandemic hit even harder as unemployment swept the nation. At the same time, COVID-19 has fueled digital initiatives in many industries, and a society that’s more tech-driven than ever before demands new skills. It’s time for the federal government to prioritize workforce development and equip the working class with the digital skills they need to fill in the gaps.

America’s workforce is on the brink of crisis, and if our country’s leaders — both newcomers and incumbents — don’t prioritize workforce development now, the working class will crumble. Companies large and small have increasingly turned to automated technologies in the quest to do more with less, leaving more Americans jobless. This trend has been so persistent that, last year, the Brookings Institution predicted a quarter of Americans could soon lose their jobs to automation.

The Pandemic Hit the Working Class Even Harder

Today, quite unexpectedly, many of the roughly 53 million Americans already trapped in a cycle of low-wage work now face unemployment. This is the same segment of the workforce most vulnerable to the threat of automation — and that threat now looms even larger.

The nearly universal pivot to remote work has fueled private-sector digitization efforts and will accelerate innovation advancing automated technologies. While this could ultimately lead to a more efficient, resilient national economy, it makes the future of the American worker uncertain.

Transforming Into a Tech-Driven Society

The pandemic will subside, but many of the jobs that disappeared upon its arrival won’t come back. The newly elected Biden administration must grapple with that reality now and implement policies that empower the working class to thrive in the future’s digital economy. It’s time for leaders to focus on tangible, scalable strategies for moving workers out of low-wage hourly employment and into digital roles that will soon define the workforce. The most critical component of any such strategy? Accessible, accelerated digital training.

Tech careers aren’t launched overnight. In order to be productive in important digital roles, millions of Americans will need to develop new skills and expertise. For that to happen, the country must shift away from the traditional learning pathways that have resulted in ballooning college tuition costs and a national student debt crisis and toward more affordable training pathways.

Before making this shift, we must think seriously about the implications of our transformation into a tech-driven society. Some already have. The demand for technical knowledge has fueled the rise of countless online education platforms, massive open online courses and other alternative learning outlets.

New Digital Pathways for the Working Class

Younger, tech-savvy Americans are especially keen to ditch traditional classrooms in favor of more practical learning experiences. According to an Insider and Morning Consult survey, 44% of Millennials with a college degree don’t believe obtaining that degree was worth taking on loans.

So what does a viable alternative to college look like? To support and encourage participation in alternative training programs that match the needs of modern workers and the future workforce, the Biden administration must establish incentives — especially for training providers.

Most job training programs similarly get federal workforce funding. First, an organization gets on an eligible training provider list managed by a local workforce board. When a trainee enrolls, the program receives half of the agreed-upon cost of training and then gets the rest of the money around the halfway point. In exchange for the funds, providers have to issue regular reports detailing participant graduation rates and success. Generally speaking, programs that don’t maintain an 80% graduation rate can be kicked off the list.

Although these rational requirements intend to ensure funding doesn’t go to programs producing undesirable outcomes, they do come with a couple of damaging consequences:

  • The requirements unintentionally discourage providers from attempting to offer more difficult courses — the kinds of courses that could actually prepare unskilled workers for high-skill, high-demand jobs.
  • They also push training providers to adopt smaller class sizes with more individualized learning at higher costs. If providers are incentivized to ensure nine out of 10 participants graduate, they might focus on teaching relatively basic career skills or on developing programs that spend intensively on each enrollee.

How to Better Arm Workers With the Skills of the Future

If we want to equip many workers with sophisticated digital expertise, the Biden administration must change how it allocates public funding. Instead of requiring providers to create elaborate reporting systems to receive federal funds on the front end, workforce agencies should allow programs preparing participants for high-difficulty, high-demand careers to collect payment on the back end — but only when a graduate gets a job.

This arrangement incentivizes providers to place as many people as possible into new roles at the lowest possible cost while taking the public system off the hook for the cost of unsuccessful participants.

Of course, there’s more than one way to approach worker training, but there might never be a better time. When again will the federal government distribute billions to state and local governments to invest in human capital?

Workforce development has never been considered a sexy talking point — in fact, it was conspicuously absent from media lists of crucial campaign issues leading up to the 2020 presidential election. The election results are in, but the leaders who focus on and provide viable workforce policies still have the unique opportunity to gain new supporters from a multitude of unemployed and underemployed Americans.

How B Corps Offer Real-World Lessons for Future Business Leaders

Posted on by Christopher Marquis

Certified B Corporations are a growing field of study for the business leaders of the future — the students at a number of universities where faculty are part of B Academics, the global B Corp academic community.

The group’s leaders include Jessica Yinka Thomas, Director of the Business Sustainability Collaborative and Lecturer at the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University. She oversees the university’s B Corp Clinic, where students can get real-world experience. They work with companies pursuing B Corp Certification or improving their social and environmental impact. She incorporates B Corps into her curriculum, including her undergraduate business ethics class.

“We look at how businesses can operate in a socially, environmentally, and ethically responsible manner, studying B Corps throughout that class,” she says. This includes a case study on New Belgium involving open-book management and employee ownership as strategies for engaging workers and speakers. An alumnus who works at Athleta also shared what it’s like to be a B Corp within a major multinational brand that offers products with innovative materials and an empowerment message for women and girls.

Professor Thomas says awareness of B Corps has grown in the last few years among students. They embrace the shift toward a stakeholder capitalism model as a primary method to confront the climate crisis and economic inequalities projected to worsen in their lifetimes.

“It’s a combination of a very clear and ambitious vision for the movement, and a comprehensive and clear framework for explaining what it means to have a strong impact across your business stakeholders,” she says. “Something just clicks with the students. They say, ‘I get this. I want to work at a B Corp. I want to buy from B Corps. I want to learn more about what it means to be a B Corp.'”

Thomas and I recently talked about the group’s history and plans for growth as part of my research on the B Corp community. She shared more about the B Academics group’s plans to expand knowledge and awareness of B Corps among students of all ages. They also plan to grow the number of participating faculty around the globe.

Christopher Marquis: Share a little bit more about the student experience. How are B Corps incorporated into curricula? How do students react if they are first learning about the B Corp community?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: I’ve had the opportunity to work in academia for about 15 years now. And I have never seen anything that really captures the imagination and inspires students like B Corps. There’s something about having such a clear framework for impact that’s very accessible and understandable, and at the same time very rigorous and comprehensive but not a one-size-fits-all. It can be understood by entrepreneurs and by business leaders simultaneously, which makes it really accessible and attractive. It’s also engaging for students as a movement that includes well-known brands, like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Seventh Generation, and New Belgium.

It’s a combination of a very clear and ambitious vision for the movement, and a comprehensive and clear framework for explaining what it means to have a strong impact across your business stakeholders. Something just clicks with the students. They say, ‘I get this. I want to work at a B Corp. I want to buy from B Corps. I want to learn more about what it means to be a B Corp .'”

When I first started teaching about B Corps around 10 years ago, I would ask “How many of you have seen this logo?” And you might get a hand or two. Now I would say it’s a majority of students I have the opportunity to interact with who are at least familiar with the concept of a B Corp.

Christopher Marquis: As a co-founder of B Academics, how did you come up with the idea? How did the group get its start and gain traction?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: I learned about B Corps around 2009. I was running a sustainable business accelerator at the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at University of North Carolina Kenan Flagler Business School. We were looking for an impact measurement tool for the companies going through the accelerator. Two people who were critical in the early days were the other co-founders, Rosanna Garcia and Joel Gehman. Since then, we have been, from a grassroots level, building what is now a global network of educators and researchers who have this shared vision of studying business as a force for good. We want to teach the next generation of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and workers how to embed impact into business.

For the first few years, it was a very informal network. We hosted regular webinars, an annual B Academics Roundtable, and started to build out a founding leadership team. In 2019, we became a 501(c)3 nonprofit and have really started to formalize the organization. B Academics is an independent organization from B Lab, the nonprofit that oversees B Corp Certification.

We had about thirty people attend that first B Academics Roundtable in 2016. Now we have a mailing list of close to 2,000 people from at least 52 countries, representing more than 600 academic institutions or organizations that have expressed interest in engaging with B Academics. There is a core group of 12 board members at different academic institutions worldwide who are deeply involved in our work.

We’re building a resource platform with over 400 paper abstracts, cases, videos, podcasts — just a range of different research and teaching tools that will be accessible to members. Often, the research that academics publish is not easily digestible by non-academics. So we are developing a series of briefs that will translate some of the faculty and our network’s research in a way that highlights the lessons that industry can take away.

Christopher Marquis: Can you tell me a bit more about the B Corp Clinic at North Carolina State and the work students do there?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: We’ve been through many iterations of the B Corp Clinic since we launched the program in the Summer of 2015. Over the last 11 semesters, we’ve worked on 68 projects with more than 60 companies — from start-ups to multinationals — from various industries and from around the world. Some are on the road to B Corp Certification, and others are recertifying. We’ve worked with 15 companies that have become B Corp certified.

We have coaches who are typically leaders from North Carolina B Corps who provide guidance and subject matter expertise to the teams. In the first four years of the program, we designed a co-curricular model where students applied to participate in the program. At that point, we had students from seven different academic institutions across the state, including public and private universities, community colleges, and HBCUs.

Each university looks a little different, and you can adapt the model to meet the needs of the companies and the students you’re working with — undergraduate, grad students, business school students, or those from different disciplines.

How B Corps Offer Real-World Lessons for Future Business Leaders

Posted on by Christopher Marquis

Certified B Corporations are a growing field of study for the business leaders of the future — the students at a number of universities where faculty are part of B Academics, the global B Corp academic community.

The group’s leaders include Jessica Yinka Thomas, Director of the Business Sustainability Collaborative and Lecturer at the Poole College of Management at North Carolina State University. She oversees the university’s B Corp Clinic, where students can get real-world experience. They work with companies pursuing B Corp Certification or improving their social and environmental impact. She incorporates B Corps into her curriculum, including her undergraduate business ethics class.

“We look at how businesses can operate in a socially, environmentally, and ethically responsible manner, studying B Corps throughout that class,” she says. This includes a case study on New Belgium involving open-book management and employee ownership as strategies for engaging workers and speakers. An alumnus who works at Athleta also shared what it’s like to be a B Corp within a major multinational brand that offers products with innovative materials and an empowerment message for women and girls.

Professor Thomas says awareness of B Corps has grown in the last few years among students. They embrace the shift toward a stakeholder capitalism model as a primary method to confront the climate crisis and economic inequalities projected to worsen in their lifetimes.

“It’s a combination of a very clear and ambitious vision for the movement, and a comprehensive and clear framework for explaining what it means to have a strong impact across your business stakeholders,” she says. “Something just clicks with the students. They say, ‘I get this. I want to work at a B Corp. I want to buy from B Corps. I want to learn more about what it means to be a B Corp.'”

Thomas and I recently talked about the group’s history and plans for growth as part of my research on the B Corp community. She shared more about the B Academics group’s plans to expand knowledge and awareness of B Corps among students of all ages. They also plan to grow the number of participating faculty around the globe.

Christopher Marquis: Share a little bit more about the student experience. How are B Corps incorporated into curricula? How do students react if they are first learning about the B Corp community?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: I’ve had the opportunity to work in academia for about 15 years now. And I have never seen anything that really captures the imagination and inspires students like B Corps. There’s something about having such a clear framework for impact that’s very accessible and understandable, and at the same time very rigorous and comprehensive but not a one-size-fits-all. It can be understood by entrepreneurs and by business leaders simultaneously, which makes it really accessible and attractive. It’s also engaging for students as a movement that includes well-known brands, like Patagonia, Ben & Jerry’s, Seventh Generation, and New Belgium.

It’s a combination of a very clear and ambitious vision for the movement, and a comprehensive and clear framework for explaining what it means to have a strong impact across your business stakeholders. Something just clicks with the students. They say, ‘I get this. I want to work at a B Corp. I want to buy from B Corps. I want to learn more about what it means to be a B Corp .'”

When I first started teaching about B Corps around 10 years ago, I would ask “How many of you have seen this logo?” And you might get a hand or two. Now I would say it’s a majority of students I have the opportunity to interact with who are at least familiar with the concept of a B Corp.

Christopher Marquis: As a co-founder of B Academics, how did you come up with the idea? How did the group get its start and gain traction?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: I learned about B Corps around 2009. I was running a sustainable business accelerator at the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at University of North Carolina Kenan Flagler Business School. We were looking for an impact measurement tool for the companies going through the accelerator. Two people who were critical in the early days were the other co-founders, Rosanna Garcia and Joel Gehman. Since then, we have been, from a grassroots level, building what is now a global network of educators and researchers who have this shared vision of studying business as a force for good. We want to teach the next generation of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and workers how to embed impact into business.

For the first few years, it was a very informal network. We hosted regular webinars, an annual B Academics Roundtable, and started to build out a founding leadership team. In 2019, we became a 501(c)3 nonprofit and have really started to formalize the organization. B Academics is an independent organization from B Lab, the nonprofit that oversees B Corp Certification.

We had about thirty people attend that first B Academics Roundtable in 2016. Now we have a mailing list of close to 2,000 people from at least 52 countries, representing more than 600 academic institutions or organizations that have expressed interest in engaging with B Academics. There is a core group of 12 board members at different academic institutions worldwide who are deeply involved in our work.

We’re building a resource platform with over 400 paper abstracts, cases, videos, podcasts — just a range of different research and teaching tools that will be accessible to members. Often, the research that academics publish is not easily digestible by non-academics. So we are developing a series of briefs that will translate some of the faculty and our network’s research in a way that highlights the lessons that industry can take away.

Christopher Marquis: Can you tell me a bit more about the B Corp Clinic at North Carolina State and the work students do there?

Jessica Yinka Thomas: We’ve been through many iterations of the B Corp Clinic since we launched the program in the Summer of 2015. Over the last 11 semesters, we’ve worked on 68 projects with more than 60 companies — from start-ups to multinationals — from various industries and from around the world. Some are on the road to B Corp Certification, and others are recertifying. We’ve worked with 15 companies that have become B Corp certified.

We have coaches who are typically leaders from North Carolina B Corps who provide guidance and subject matter expertise to the teams. In the first four years of the program, we designed a co-curricular model where students applied to participate in the program. At that point, we had students from seven different academic institutions across the state, including public and private universities, community colleges, and HBCUs.

Each university looks a little different, and you can adapt the model to meet the needs of the companies and the students you’re working with — undergraduate, grad students, business school students, or those from different disciplines.

Struggling to Love Your Job? Detach Yourself From It

Posted on by Daren Barone

The typical CEO works 14 hours a day for 300 days a year, which totals around 42,000 hours annually. Even before ‘work-from-home’ became a global phenomenon, the modern business landscape had increasingly shifted toward one that blurs the line between work and our personal lives.

Today’s culture teaches us that success is getting paid to do what you love, and if you get that opportunity, you must prove your dedication by living, eating, sleeping, and breathing your work. This is true for employees, but more so for CEOs and those in leadership roles.

However, the sad irony is that this systemic cultural push toward overwork not only fails to yield happiness — that doing the work you love is supposed to deliver — but it also leads to its antithesis: job dissatisfaction and burnout. These affect job performance and bleed into your personal life.

The solution to this paradox is just as paradoxical: To prosper at your job and thrive in your work, you must actively find ways to regularly separate from your work. That means leaving the office at the office, even if the office is inside your home.

Not sure where to start? Here are some suggestions.

Take control of your physical space

As a leader, your physical environment can be critical to your team’s connection, ability to feel empowered and excel in their jobs. But at the same time, however, a leader also needs their own space to complete their tasks throughout the day.

When working in the same facility as your team, try moving to a different floor, so you’re still in the same building but not so readily at hand. If your firm is working only partly from home, spend one day a week working from a conference room onsite.

Whether you’re working onsite or at home, take the occasional break to change up your scenery. Go on a walk around the block, or use your lunch break to go on a small hike, weather permitting. This can help trigger an energetic shift in your thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and motivation. You could have a large goal of moving to a different space altogether, or simply rearranging or redecorating your current space.

Rediscover your identity

People are generally different at work than at home, which is usually for good reason. You have a specific job to perform in the office that requires you to be professional, timely, and efficient. Your role defines you because that’s what you’re hired to do.

But when the lines between your identity at work and at home begin to blur, it’s hard to see yourself as anyone but ‘vice president’ or ‘HR director’ or ‘software developer’. It get’s tiring, and soon you’ll find yourself struggling to love your job like you once did.

You have passions. You have hobbies. You even have professional development goals outside of your current career path. Connect with these interests again. Take time outside work to explore other areas that you’ve been curious about for a while. You’ll rediscover the joy and satisfaction you once knew, and continue to cultivate a new identity for yourself. Or, at the very least, remind yourself that who you are at work isn’t the only version of yourself. 

Spend time away from the office

Executives typically work as needed, leading them to lose sight of how much they’re working. When you work this way, it’s more difficult to feel comfortable using sick days or PTO. This is counterintuitive to your success and that of the company, as the very act itself of taking time away from the office, for whatever reason, can help refresh and rejuvenate you for when you return.

Leaders often pine for personal time, but fail to allow themselves any. Whether you believe taking personal time sets a bad example for your team or you simply feel too busy to leave, you’re developing a bad precedence for the rest of your company — but, more importantly, yourself. Leaders who take sick days when they need them or go on frequent vacations throughout the year are more satisfied and effective in their work and personal lives. This prevents burnout and facilitates creativity.

Get creative

The average executive spends close to 58 hours each week on the job, with an average of around 10 to 11 hours each day. It can’t always be easy to get time away — for a hobby or a vacation — with this type of schedule. While you won’t always have control over every aspect of your calendar, you can change how creative you get with the time you have. If you commute to work, figure out how you can spend that time more rewardingly, such as listening to a podcast or carpooling with your kids to school.

The most effective leaders are not the ones who work the most but the ones who work the best. In other words, leaders who maximize their focus, attention, and productivity at work perform better than those who spend the most time at work. It’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter so that you can live harder.

Struggling to Love Your Job? Detach Yourself From It

Posted on by Daren Barone

The typical CEO works 14 hours a day for 300 days a year, which totals around 42,000 hours annually. Even before ‘work-from-home’ became a global phenomenon, the modern business landscape had increasingly shifted toward one that blurs the line between work and our personal lives.

Today’s culture teaches us that success is getting paid to do what you love, and if you get that opportunity, you must prove your dedication by living, eating, sleeping, and breathing your work. This is true for employees, but more so for CEOs and those in leadership roles.

However, the sad irony is that this systemic cultural push toward overwork not only fails to yield happiness — that doing the work you love is supposed to deliver — but it also leads to its antithesis: job dissatisfaction and burnout. These affect job performance and bleed into your personal life.

The solution to this paradox is just as paradoxical: To prosper at your job and thrive in your work, you must actively find ways to regularly separate from your work. That means leaving the office at the office, even if the office is inside your home.

Not sure where to start? Here are some suggestions.

Take control of your physical space

As a leader, your physical environment can be critical to your team’s connection, ability to feel empowered and excel in their jobs. But at the same time, however, a leader also needs their own space to complete their tasks throughout the day.

When working in the same facility as your team, try moving to a different floor, so you’re still in the same building but not so readily at hand. If your firm is working only partly from home, spend one day a week working from a conference room onsite.

Whether you’re working onsite or at home, take the occasional break to change up your scenery. Go on a walk around the block, or use your lunch break to go on a small hike, weather permitting. This can help trigger an energetic shift in your thinking, creativity, problem-solving, and motivation. You could have a large goal of moving to a different space altogether, or simply rearranging or redecorating your current space.

Rediscover your identity

People are generally different at work than at home, which is usually for good reason. You have a specific job to perform in the office that requires you to be professional, timely, and efficient. Your role defines you because that’s what you’re hired to do.

But when the lines between your identity at work and at home begin to blur, it’s hard to see yourself as anyone but ‘vice president’ or ‘HR director’ or ‘software developer’. It get’s tiring, and soon you’ll find yourself struggling to love your job like you once did.

You have passions. You have hobbies. You even have professional development goals outside of your current career path. Connect with these interests again. Take time outside work to explore other areas that you’ve been curious about for a while. You’ll rediscover the joy and satisfaction you once knew, and continue to cultivate a new identity for yourself. Or, at the very least, remind yourself that who you are at work isn’t the only version of yourself. 

Spend time away from the office

Executives typically work as needed, leading them to lose sight of how much they’re working. When you work this way, it’s more difficult to feel comfortable using sick days or PTO. This is counterintuitive to your success and that of the company, as the very act itself of taking time away from the office, for whatever reason, can help refresh and rejuvenate you for when you return.

Leaders often pine for personal time, but fail to allow themselves any. Whether you believe taking personal time sets a bad example for your team or you simply feel too busy to leave, you’re developing a bad precedence for the rest of your company — but, more importantly, yourself. Leaders who take sick days when they need them or go on frequent vacations throughout the year are more satisfied and effective in their work and personal lives. This prevents burnout and facilitates creativity.

Get creative

The average executive spends close to 58 hours each week on the job, with an average of around 10 to 11 hours each day. It can’t always be easy to get time away — for a hobby or a vacation — with this type of schedule. While you won’t always have control over every aspect of your calendar, you can change how creative you get with the time you have. If you commute to work, figure out how you can spend that time more rewardingly, such as listening to a podcast or carpooling with your kids to school.

The most effective leaders are not the ones who work the most but the ones who work the best. In other words, leaders who maximize their focus, attention, and productivity at work perform better than those who spend the most time at work. It’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter so that you can live harder.

The Three Big Reasons New Products Fail (and How to Avoid Them)

Posted on by Howard Tiersky

As your organization takes its place in the digital transformation that’s underway everywhere, you’ll inevitably need to create or update a large number of different products. But just because you think your shiny new app, website, service, or other digital offering is great doesn’t automatically mean the customer will.

According to Nielsen, 85 percent of new consumer products fail in the marketplace. Yours doesn’t have to be one of them. Just make sure your “solution” isn’t less desirable than the problem you’re trying to fix.

Sometimes what seems like a great idea doesn’t resonate with consumers. The problem is that you can spend a lot of money on an innovation that unintentionally detracts from the customer experience rather than improves it.

Back in the early 2000s, I moved my business into a shiny new skyscraper in Times Square. The building had a keypad-controlled elevator. Instead of “calling” your elevator and having to pick a floor once you got in, you used a numerical touchscreen that you had to touch only once.

To request an elevator, you typed the number of the floor you wanted and received a response from a screen with a letter of the alphabet that corresponded to an assigned elevator. You went to “your” elevator, and when it arrived, you got in, and it automatically took you to your floor. Presumably, this got you there faster. 

Maybe. But people found the new system extremely confusing and off-putting in other ways.

For instance:

  • If you were already in the elevator, there was no way to change your mind without getting off at the wrong floor, and then repeating the process above.
  • Even if you didn’t change your mind, you didn’t like the feeling that you couldn’t. You were locked in a metal box that was taking you to one place, and you felt powerless.

Frankly, you just didn’t want to relearn a skill you had already mastered — knowing how to work an elevator — (even though it took only 30 seconds).

It’s not that people are unwilling to learn new things. We’re happy to learn to use iPhones and Kindles. But these devices delivered enough value that it justified the investment to understand them. The keypad elevators didn’t provide enough value to overcome the pain of change — and this is why they haven’t caught on in a significant way (though they are still found in some very large buildings). One office building in Houston went so far as to remove these “smart” elevator controls and revert to the “old-school” form due to so many tenant and visitor complaints.

The good news is that there are specific methodologies to massively reduce the likelihood of this outcome (like Design Thinking). For now, though, let’s focus on a few of the big reasons new products fail.

Reason #1: The Wrong Value Proposition. For a product to be successful, it has to meet customers’ needs and do so in a way that is “worth” more than the cost the customer is asked to bear. Furthermore, it must offer a value that is superior to competitive options at that price point. This “value proposition” is the core of any product idea — a specific solution to a customer problem delivered at a defined price point and revenue model. 

The quality of a Skype call may not be the same as expensive teleconferencing equipment, but it’s free. So, for many customers, it’s a more compelling value proposition. Of course, other customers prefer to pay more and have more reliable connections. That’s fine as well; both are valid propositions and address different markets. 

The “right” idea for a successful product is one that will resonate with its intended customers, be worth the cost, and be either better than the competition or cheaper. Ideally, both. How do you find it? Understanding your customers’ unmet needs, pain, or problems is the starting point. But some solutions may work well for the customer, while others might just not be worth the trouble, like the numerical elevator keypad.

Reason #2: Failure to Execute. It’s not enough to have an idea with the right value proposition because ideas are not products. You still have to bring them to life. Many products born of grand ideas fail in their execution. Take the beloved 2017 Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Even though it launched with rave reviews, Samsung’s valuation dropped by over $26 billion when the phones’ batteries started catching on fire. The point? Some products just don’t work quite the way they are supposed to. 

My team was brought in to help “save” a project management software tool that a client had launched. They built what they thought was a “killer” app, but the market was rejecting it. We conducted some market research and found that while the tool had excellent features aligned with what customers wanted, it had one problem: It was slow. It required so much computational power that each change to your project plan took 5-10 seconds to “recalculate.” That was all it took for users to reject it. This is a big challenge of product development: A lot can be right, but if one critical thing is off, it can tank the whole thing. 

We improved the project management software in part through performance optimization but mostly by removing features that weren’t “worth” their impact on speed. After that, the product was more successful.

Reason #3: Lack of Awareness. You know the adage (attributed, perhaps falsely, to Ralph Waldo Emerson) about building a better mousetrap and having people beat a path to your door? It’s not true. There have been 4,000 patents for new ideas for mousetraps, yet the world continues to use the classic (grisly and dangerous) “snapping” model. Even though this customer journey has many pain points — from the need for insect-attracting peanut butter to the disturbing front-row view of a dying mouse — none of those new designs have overshadowed the original model. Even if an idea is well-executed, it can still fail if nobody knows about it. 

Awareness does not just mean customers know your product exists. It consists of three critical components:

  • The product’s existence and core value proposition. 
  • The product’s claim of differentiation. Why choose this one over all the other options? 
  • How to take action — where to order the product and how to access it. 

In “old-school” product development thinking, you’d consider these marketing issues. But if you embrace a Design Thinking approach, you realize you can’t split them out that way. Every stage of the customer experience must be considered together.

By no means are these three obstacles insurmountable. When you address them head-on, you’re all the more likely to launch a highly successful product.

The Three Big Reasons New Products Fail (and How to Avoid Them)

Posted on by Howard Tiersky

As your organization takes its place in the digital transformation that’s underway everywhere, you’ll inevitably need to create or update a large number of different products. But just because you think your shiny new app, website, service, or other digital offering is great doesn’t automatically mean the customer will.

According to Nielsen, 85 percent of new consumer products fail in the marketplace. Yours doesn’t have to be one of them. Just make sure your “solution” isn’t less desirable than the problem you’re trying to fix.

Sometimes what seems like a great idea doesn’t resonate with consumers. The problem is that you can spend a lot of money on an innovation that unintentionally detracts from the customer experience rather than improves it.

Back in the early 2000s, I moved my business into a shiny new skyscraper in Times Square. The building had a keypad-controlled elevator. Instead of “calling” your elevator and having to pick a floor once you got in, you used a numerical touchscreen that you had to touch only once.

To request an elevator, you typed the number of the floor you wanted and received a response from a screen with a letter of the alphabet that corresponded to an assigned elevator. You went to “your” elevator, and when it arrived, you got in, and it automatically took you to your floor. Presumably, this got you there faster. 

Maybe. But people found the new system extremely confusing and off-putting in other ways.

For instance:

  • If you were already in the elevator, there was no way to change your mind without getting off at the wrong floor, and then repeating the process above.
  • Even if you didn’t change your mind, you didn’t like the feeling that you couldn’t. You were locked in a metal box that was taking you to one place, and you felt powerless.

Frankly, you just didn’t want to relearn a skill you had already mastered — knowing how to work an elevator — (even though it took only 30 seconds).

It’s not that people are unwilling to learn new things. We’re happy to learn to use iPhones and Kindles. But these devices delivered enough value that it justified the investment to understand them. The keypad elevators didn’t provide enough value to overcome the pain of change — and this is why they haven’t caught on in a significant way (though they are still found in some very large buildings). One office building in Houston went so far as to remove these “smart” elevator controls and revert to the “old-school” form due to so many tenant and visitor complaints.

The good news is that there are specific methodologies to massively reduce the likelihood of this outcome (like Design Thinking). For now, though, let’s focus on a few of the big reasons new products fail.

Reason #1: The Wrong Value Proposition. For a product to be successful, it has to meet customers’ needs and do so in a way that is “worth” more than the cost the customer is asked to bear. Furthermore, it must offer a value that is superior to competitive options at that price point. This “value proposition” is the core of any product idea — a specific solution to a customer problem delivered at a defined price point and revenue model. 

The quality of a Skype call may not be the same as expensive teleconferencing equipment, but it’s free. So, for many customers, it’s a more compelling value proposition. Of course, other customers prefer to pay more and have more reliable connections. That’s fine as well; both are valid propositions and address different markets. 

The “right” idea for a successful product is one that will resonate with its intended customers, be worth the cost, and be either better than the competition or cheaper. Ideally, both. How do you find it? Understanding your customers’ unmet needs, pain, or problems is the starting point. But some solutions may work well for the customer, while others might just not be worth the trouble, like the numerical elevator keypad.

Reason #2: Failure to Execute. It’s not enough to have an idea with the right value proposition because ideas are not products. You still have to bring them to life. Many products born of grand ideas fail in their execution. Take the beloved 2017 Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. Even though it launched with rave reviews, Samsung’s valuation dropped by over $26 billion when the phones’ batteries started catching on fire. The point? Some products just don’t work quite the way they are supposed to. 

My team was brought in to help “save” a project management software tool that a client had launched. They built what they thought was a “killer” app, but the market was rejecting it. We conducted some market research and found that while the tool had excellent features aligned with what customers wanted, it had one problem: It was slow. It required so much computational power that each change to your project plan took 5-10 seconds to “recalculate.” That was all it took for users to reject it. This is a big challenge of product development: A lot can be right, but if one critical thing is off, it can tank the whole thing. 

We improved the project management software in part through performance optimization but mostly by removing features that weren’t “worth” their impact on speed. After that, the product was more successful.

Reason #3: Lack of Awareness. You know the adage (attributed, perhaps falsely, to Ralph Waldo Emerson) about building a better mousetrap and having people beat a path to your door? It’s not true. There have been 4,000 patents for new ideas for mousetraps, yet the world continues to use the classic (grisly and dangerous) “snapping” model. Even though this customer journey has many pain points — from the need for insect-attracting peanut butter to the disturbing front-row view of a dying mouse — none of those new designs have overshadowed the original model. Even if an idea is well-executed, it can still fail if nobody knows about it. 

Awareness does not just mean customers know your product exists. It consists of three critical components:

  • The product’s existence and core value proposition. 
  • The product’s claim of differentiation. Why choose this one over all the other options? 
  • How to take action — where to order the product and how to access it. 

In “old-school” product development thinking, you’d consider these marketing issues. But if you embrace a Design Thinking approach, you realize you can’t split them out that way. Every stage of the customer experience must be considered together.

By no means are these three obstacles insurmountable. When you address them head-on, you’re all the more likely to launch a highly successful product.

Caffeine Kicks: Shoes Made From Coffee

Posted on by Real Leaders

A Finnish start-up, Rens, is making shoes from waste coffee. Every pair is made from 300 grams of used coffee grounds— the equivalent of 21 cups of coffee. They are waterproof and vegan and also contain the recycled material of six plastic water bottles. Founded in the heart of Helsinki, the idea started as a conversation between two sneakerheads — Son Chu and Jesse Tran (pictured below) — about the environmental impacts of the global sneaker industry and the less-than-stylish sustainable options on the market. Thousands of pairs have been sold across the world since their launch in November 2019.

The start-up is not the only company to reinvent food waste. Luxury German brand Hugo Boss has made shoes from pineapple leaf fibers, and Swedish fashion retailer H&M makes the soles of sandals from algae. British designer Stella McCartney is even making clothes from mushrooms. The fashion industry has a huge environmental impact, consuming large amounts of land, energy, and water, with the United Nations estimating that the fashion sector generates 20 percent of the world’s wastewater.

Caffeine Kicks: Shoes Made From Coffee

Posted on by Real Leaders

A Finnish start-up, Rens, is making shoes from waste coffee. Every pair is made from 300 grams of used coffee grounds— the equivalent of 21 cups of coffee. They are waterproof and vegan and also contain the recycled material of six plastic water bottles. Founded in the heart of Helsinki, the idea started as a conversation between two sneakerheads — Son Chu and Jesse Tran (pictured below) — about the environmental impacts of the global sneaker industry and the less-than-stylish sustainable options on the market. Thousands of pairs have been sold across the world since their launch in November 2019.

The start-up is not the only company to reinvent food waste. Luxury German brand Hugo Boss has made shoes from pineapple leaf fibers, and Swedish fashion retailer H&M makes the soles of sandals from algae. British designer Stella McCartney is even making clothes from mushrooms. The fashion industry has a huge environmental impact, consuming large amounts of land, energy, and water, with the United Nations estimating that the fashion sector generates 20 percent of the world’s wastewater.

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