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Leadership in the Age of Transparency
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Rarely do before-and-after business cases present such a neat study in contrasts. Compare the recent actions of the key players in the food industry with those of the tobacco industry two decades earlier.
In the 1980s, executives at Philip Morris were still fighting energetically to hold back the tide of evidence that cigarettes cause lung cancer, and claiming that customers were exercising free will in choosing to smoke. A 1993 Washington Post article titled “Scientists Testify Tobacco Company Suppressed Addiction Studies” tells the tale: Damning company-sponsored research had been spiked a decade before by senior executives.
Fast-forward to the turn of the millennium and you see a very different kind of behavior in the packaged food and restaurant industries. As the dangers of trans fats came to light, managers in the most powerful firms took the health implications to heart and responded quickly, before the issue became a cause célèbre, by changing recipes, funding public education campaigns, and pushing reduced-fat products. By 2005, a trade publication was already announcing “Kraft completes trans fat reformulation,” and every one of the company’s competitors was following suit. Given that the first U.S. state law outlawing trans fats in restaurants went into effect only this year, these were voluntary changes taken well in advance of legal or regulatory compulsion—or even public anger.
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How to Measure Cultural Fit Up, Down, and Sideways
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Here’s a link to a Forbes magazine article that was pushed to me last month (January 27, 2012) by LinkedIn Today, highlighting why 46% of all new hires fail. The point of the article was to introduce a “radical” new approach to selection based on Mark Murphy’s new book Hiring for Attitude. The key point of the book and the article is that lack of proper attitude, not skills, is the primary contributor to weak performance. The author is only partially right.
For one thing the idea proposed is far from radical. There have been many other books over the past 10-15 years including the Amazon best-sellers Hire With Your Head (for full disclosure — this is mine) and Top Grading that espouse similar themes. For another, and far more important reason, he mistook cause for effect.
I absolutely agree that a bad attitude is an extremely common hiring problem, but the bad attitude was caused by a lack of job fit, not the other way around. Bad fit is a multi-headed monster, including a bad fit with the manager, the team, the job itself, the company’s culture, the company’s growth rate, and the underlying business environment. There are probably a few more “lack of …” factors that could have been cited, but these represent the 80/20 rule and the primary cause of a bad attitude.
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Small Businesses That Are Hiring
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A recent poll suggests that despite economic uncertainty, America's fastest-growing small businesses are looking for talent. Their biggest hurdle: finding it.
The entrepreneurs and CEOs leading America's fastest-growing private companies aren't letting the troubled economy slow down their hiring plans for 2012, a new survey reports.
The survey, "High-Growth Entrepreneurs Plan to Continue Growing," found that 133 CEOs who attended the Inc. 500|5000 Conference last week are readying themselves for plenty of new hires in 2012. It was compiled by the Kauffman Foundation.
Among the results Kauffman reported:
- 96 percent plan to add employees in 2012
- 41 percent plan to hire more than 20 employees in 2012
- 71 percent do not outsource business operations outside of the U.S.
While the findings indicate the Inc. 500|5000 are on the hunt for new talent, the general feeling among small business owners is a bit gloomier. The Vistage CEO Confidence Index, which tracks sentiment among small business CEOs, reported this week that 1,700 entrepreneurs expect "a stagnant economy during the year ahead…and will likely curtail hiring plans."
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Pharmaceutical Hiring Slow to Respond to Market Changes
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Even after cutting their way through 2011, pharmaceutical companies expect to make more cuts this year to their salesforces as they struggle to adapt to the changing marketplace for their products.
A survey by consultants Hay Group found that half of Big Pharma, as the major drug companies are collectively called, believe themselves overstaffed, with many planning to eliminate from 6 to 15 percent of their sales staffs. The consulting group’s 2011 Annual Study of Sales Force Effectiveness says only 5 percent of the the other companies in the life sciences industry plan cuts.
“While smaller, more specialized companies appear to be aggressively hiring, Big Pharma is still fixated on continual cuts and retrenchment, as these organizations seek to find their way in an uncertain world,” says an article by Hay Group practice leaders and survey authors.
The article in Pharm Exec, which distills the findings in the proprietary report, says a “dramatic structural change” is underway in the pharmaceutical marketplace, but bemoans the industry’s response. “While change is championed publicly,” the authors write, “recruiting still focuses almost exclusively on those with industry experience.”
Among the changes to the historical sales scenario identified in the article are the decrease in direct physician contact, the widening role of generics, and the diminishing number of new blockbuster drugs coming to market. Though there is no universal agreement on how to change, there is an emerging sense that product differentiation and focusing on new customer groups may be the way to go. The Hay Group study found more companies last year intent on adopting a customer-centric sales approach.
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A Nagging Question: What Happens if Facebook Decides to Shut You Down?
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I had just finished a presentation at ERE and was walking though the event reception area when a voice from behind me asked “what happens if Facebook decides to shut you down?” I turned to see who had asked such a bold question. I recognized the inquiring voice to be John Sumser. I thought to myself: ‘we are Microsoft, why would they want to shut us down?’ After all, Microsoft owns part of Facebook, which would not make sense. My reply to John was: “great question, John, but I have not really thought much about it. I am not really worried about it.” After a few more minutes of cordial conversation, I departed to the adventures of the day. But over the next months, I was nagged by the question which I really did not have an answer.
Now, I have an answer. I know firsthand what happens when Facebook decides to shut you down.
My experience began on November 4th, when Facebook decided to deactivate all the corporate accounts that I manage; all 13 of the Microsoft IEB (Interactive Entertainment Business) and MCB (Mobile Communication Business) Facebook pages were not working. Ugh. No warning letter. No telephone call from our Facebook rep. No explanation. I was totally out of control with nothing/no one to leverage — a place that a Microsoft employee seldom visits.
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