Midsized Firms Can Survive a Cash Crisis

by Robert Sher  |   8:00 AM May 8, 2014

Operational meltdowns can devour a midsized company’s cash. Without adequate outside capital, a financial hemorrhage can escalate to a liquidity crash, an ugly moment when no one gets paid. At such a time, company leaders must relentlessly focus on one thing: unearthing cash and holding onto it. Not growth, or even profits.

When start-ups run out of money, they often solve the problem with credit cards or a quick infusion of venture capital. But midsized companies typically need millions of dollars to survive. If they don’t receive it, hundreds of employees and their families suffer, as does the larger ecosystem of customers and suppliers. Large companies rarely face this growth killer since most of them maintain deep cash reserves, have access to the financial markets, and possess the financial discipline to react long before a crash.

Midsized companies need to be far more cash-conscious — even penurious — when their markets go sour. The story of MBH Architects, a northern California firm that designs retail stores, conveys an important lesson on how to survive such a cash crisis. And crisis it was in 2008, the same year the U.S. economy (especially the real estate market) fell off the end of the table.

Dennis Heath and John McNulty founded the Alameda, Calif., firm in 1989. By 2007, they had a staff of 205 and revenue of $26 million. Feeling flush about their current and future prospects, they moved the firm to a nicer headquarters, borrowing $3 million to spiff it up. Then, the great downturn hit. Retailers halted construction on new stores and shuttered underperforming ones. By the end of 2009, MBH’s revenue had nosedived 83% and Heath and McNulty had to lay off three-quarters of their staff.

Nonetheless, the company found a way to survive and even bounce back (more on that later) by taking four actions:

Keeping an emergency cash hoard. Owners of midsized businesses should build a financial cushion outside the company in case the coffers start running dry. The founders of MBH Architects had done this for two years before the Great Recession hit. In 2006 and 2007, the partners earned big bonuses. Rather than spending on yachts and second homes, they saved most of those earnings for a day they hoped would never come. But when it did, they were able to loan MBH a combined $1 million during the firm’s liquidity crisis in December 2008. “Without that money, we’d have been gone,” said firm controller, Oli Mellows.

Mastering the numbers. Many midsized companies maintain woefully inadequate general ledger information. To use a different company example, one growing financial services firm’s new CFO learned this in 2004. The financial reports his CEO showed him looked rosy: Revenue had doubled to $200 million and profits were $20 million. But nonetheless, the company was low on cash. The CFO couldn’t understand why. After three months of pre-audit investigation, he found material errors in the financial statements and revenue recognition problems. Cash revenues were indeed $200 million for the year, but the correct GAAP net revenues were only $30 million and profit was $2 million. He delivered a financial restatement to lenders and investors and created a detailed monthly and three-year forecasting model based on historical data. That enabled the company to find a new lender who refinanced $25 million in bank debt. It also helped the company fund a key acquisition. Four years later, the firm reached $400 million in legitimate revenue and strong profitability.

Cutting fast and precisely. To keep a finger on the financial pulse of the business, MBH Architects’ founders kept one eye on a key metric: the utilization of its people (i.e., the number of hours billed to clients as a proportion of the total number of available billing resources). As utilization dropped, Heath and McNulty made painful staff cuts and put all bonuses on hold.

But a company in the grips of a liquidity crisis must also consider what it might need in a better economic climate. Top management must be very careful about how they downsize the organization. MBH Architects’ Heath and McNulty closed down branch offices, reduced expenses significantly and closed an entire floor of their main office to cut the heating and lighting bill. Some of the staff – including Heath and McNulty — even did janitorial work to keep the bill collectors from the door. But to make sure they didn’t jettison the employees they would need once the economy improved, Heath, McNulty, the other partners, and controller Mellows put all 113 employees’ names on index cards and pinned them up on a conference room wall. They asked: “Who do we need in order to rebuild the firm?” They identified their 50 best people and laid off the remainder.

Maintaining borrowing capacity. If the CFO has a realistic budget, it’s much easier for a midsized company to borrow money. With the $1 million they had saved for their rainy day, MBH’s founders were the first financial backstop. That meant that “patient money” was invested in the firm. Ideally, borrowing should take the form of raising one’s line of credit with the bank every year (especially the good years). It’s far easier to negotiate with your bank for a higher line from a position of financial strength than from one of weakness.

When money gets tight, drawing on the line is better than running your cash down to nothing; that’s the purpose of your line of credit. If you need more money than you have available on the bank credit line, consider outside money in exchange for equity. But be very careful to whom you sell stock. Since most midsized companies are privately held, your new cash needs mean turning to private equity or other private investors. Make sure the payback expectations of your investors are in line with yours. PE firms typically sell portfolio companies in three to five years. VC funds can have 10-year horizons in exchange for an outsized return. If you can’t provide the return an investor wants in the timeframe he wants, things are likely to get ugly. In such cases, don’t take the money.

The MBH Architects story has a happy ending. Due to its fiscal prudence (and a rebounding economy), by 2012, the company was nearly the size it had been in 2007. (2012 revenue was 84% of 2007 revenue.) Profits were actually higher than in 2007. Heath and McNulty had survived the liquidity crash to live another day.

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3 Questions Executives Should Ask Front-Line Workers

by Douglas A. Wilson  |   12:00 PM May 9, 2014

The higher up you go in an organization, the harder it is to stay in touch with what’s really happening on the front lines.  And the bad news—if you hear it at all—is presented only in the best possible light.  How do you get the real truth about what’s happening out in the field?  How do you stay connected to all corners of your organization?  I have found that three simple questions, asked with the intent to learn, can help you stay in touch with reality and be a better leader:

Get out of your office and ask, “How can I help you?”

Doug Conant, while he was CEO of Campbell Soup Company, knew that if he was going to transform the company culture, he had to ask the simple question, “How can I help you?” He asked it continually of his employees, his suppliers, and his customers—and he demanded that each of his managers do the same too. Conant knew that as a leader he needed to show he cared about the employees’ and customers’ agendas if he wanted them to care about the company’s agenda. With this one question, people knew that Conant cared, had high expectations, and was committed to solving problems, adding resources, and removing barriers.  Through literally thousands of these connections with people, Conant was able to stay in touch, build confidence, motivate, and create urgency for transforming Campbell Soup.  He reversed precipitous declines in market value, employee engagement, financial results, and corporate responsibility.

Get out on the front lines and ask, “Why are we doing it this way?”

Mark McKenzie, the CEO of Senior Care Centers, a large skilled nursing company in Texas, often asks, “Why are we doing it this way?” He asks to learn, not to criticize. He knows that as the company grows, which it is doing rapidly, it will need new systems and new structures, and all of these need to be aligned with delivering outstanding patient care. McKenzie is building a culture of asking “why” and getting everyone engaged in the joy of being heard, seeing things change, and measuring progress.

Get out to your farthest perimeters and ask the question, “How are we doing in living out our values?”   

Stanley Bergman, the CEO of Henry Schein, a $10 billion global medical supply company, visits each company office at least once per year in every part of the globe. He meets with the country leaders and the product teams. Yes, he has great financial controls and excellent budget targets for each country and each product line but, as he says, the most important reason to visit is connecting with the people. In each office he visits, he makes sure he and his top people reach out to every person in the building. No one is left out. The questions he asks them are about values and how they are being demonstrated. He might ask a salesperson, “Are we living into our values as a company in ways that support you?” He wants the truth and he has established a reputation as someone who listens—and takes action based on what he hears. He continually relates the story of what Henry Schein is doing and will do, and he’s tireless in his commitment to show that each individual is a valued contributor to “Team Schein.” His entire message is, “I want to be certain you are getting everything you need to do your job well, and that we show you respect all along the way.”

Three questions, three stories. Each one puts you in closer touch with reality, builds trust, and inspires high performance.  Each time you ask these questions, you’re also acting as a role model for others in your organization.  Being present, asking the right questions, and listening to what your customers, employees, suppliers, and investors have to tell you creates an invaluable feedback loop for your performance as a leader and for the organization as a whole.  Do it consistently and others will follow with astounding results.

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Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Paul Duguid

BBN Inc, 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02238Many teaching practices implicitly assume that conceptual knowledge can be abstracted from the situations in which it is learned and used. This article argues that this assumption inevitably limits the effectiveness of such practices. Drawing on recent research into cognition as it is manifest in everyday activity, the authors argue that knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used. They discuss how this view of knowledge affects our understanding of learning, and they note that conventional schooling too often ignores the influence of school culture on what is learned in school. As an alternative to conventional practices, they propose cognitive apprenticeship (Collins, Brown, & Newman, in press), which honors the situated nature of knowledge. They examine two examples of mathematics instruction that exhibit certain key features of this approach to teaching.

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To Create a Real Connection, Show Vulnerability

by Michael Simmons  |   11:00 AM May 9, 2014

The hardest part of my business failing was not the loss of the business. It was the loss of the identity that came with being a successful entrepreneur.

I had become so attached to this identity that when others asked how the non-existent business was doing, I said, “Great!” The chasm between the image of being financially set for life and owning a failed business was painful. I felt like a fraud.

When I finally got up the courage to start telling the truth, I could feel a weight lift off my shoulders. I had no idea how much stress I had been causing myself. To my huge surprise, instead of shunning me, people actually treated me with more respect and confided in me with their challenges. I wondered how had I been so wrong in judging other people’s reactions.

In his highly cited research, University of Georgia social psychology professor Abraham Tesser found that when someone close to us outperforms us in a task relevant to us, it often threatens our self-esteem. The more relevant the task is, the greater the threat we feel.

My personal experience matches the research. As much as I would like to be purely happy for my closest friends when they achieve something amazing, sometimes part of me feels diminished. I wonder why I haven’t been able to duplicate their successes, attributing it to advantages they had over me or their superior abilities.

In talking with Dr. Tesser, I learned that what I thought of as insecurity is actually part of being human: “In our studies, when we gave people information about someone else’s success who is close to them in an area they’re also trying to be good at, they say they feel proud and behave that way, but, in fact, they weren’t. When we surreptitiously video-recorded them you could see disappointment and negative affect in their face. Their behaviors did not reflect how they said they felt.”

While I had always looked at this mechanism as a negative force in society, Dr. Tesser’s belief is that people reconstructing their worldviews to constantly think about what they’re best at actually helps the divisions of labor in society. And yet I wondered if it was really necessary for us to try and hide our disappointment, as his study participants did. What if we shared our mixed feelings with others?

In 1997, Arthur Aron, a social psychologist and director of the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at Stony Brook University, performed a groundbreaking study that answers this question.

He and his research team paired students who were strangers. The students were given 45 minutes to ask each other a series of questions. Half the pairs were given questions that were factual and shallow (e.g., a favorite holiday or TV show). The other half were given questions that started off as factual but gradually became deeper (e.g., the role of love in their lives, the last time they cried in front of someone else). The final question was, “Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find the most disturbing?”

After the 45 minutes, Aron’s team asked the participants to rate how close they felt to their partner. Pairs from the second group formed much deeper bonds. In fact, many of these participants started lasting friendships. In one longer version of the experiment, two participants even got engaged a few months after the study.

Aron’s team also surveyed a broad selection of students not involved with the experiment and asked them to rate how close they felt to the closest person in their life. Aron then compared these scores with the ratings of the study participants who had asked each other the deeper questions. Amazingly, the intensity of their bonds at the end of the experiment rated closer than the closest relationships in the lives of 30% of similar students. A 45-minute conversation created a connection that was perceived as closer than the closest connection with someone people known for years.

Only presenting an idealized version of ourselves separates us from others.

The mistaken assumption is that if people find out who we really are underneath, they’d remove themselves from our lives. The reality is that if we share the ups and downs of our human experience in the right way in the right context, we build deeper connections. In so doing, we can break down the roles we play (e.g., client/customer, boss/employee, fundraiser/philanthropist) and connect with each other as humans.

In a world where people compare their behind-the-scenes with others’ highlight reels, we can surprise ourselves, and put others at ease, by sharing our full humanity.

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Feedback Exercise: Positive Affirmations

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The Innovation Strategy Big Companies Should Pursue

by Tony Davila  |   2:00 PM June 5, 2014

The inability of established firms to come up with breakthrough innovations is a truism today. It wasn’t always so. Joseph Schumpeter, the 20th century economist known for heralding the role of innovation in the evolution of society, argued that established firms were best positioned to innovate because of the resources available to them. Edith Penrose, one of the most prominent management thinkers of the 20th century, agreed.

It was the modern combination of internet and venture capital that changed people’s minds, by opening up a new source of breakthrough innovation: high-growth startup companies. With their appetites for high risks and returns, and no legacy systems or brands to encumber them, agile young businesses produced so many breakthrough products and services that they came out ahead, even given a high rate of failure and even though it often took many experiments to arrive at a winning business model. Innovation scholars who studied these new wellsprings of innovation soon came to appreciate the power of the entrepreneurial ecosystem, rich with resources and creative stimulus.

As the idea took hold that innovation comes from the “startup nation,” many established companies ceded the ground, deciding to focus on execution and efficiency instead. It wasn’t long, however, till they realized that these two strengths without innovation were not enough to win.

In reality, established companies never lost the advantages that served them well in past innovations: the much larger set of resources under their control and the extensive networks, often spanning the globe, they could tap. They might be at a disadvantage in hatching breakthrough solutions at the product and service level, but they beat startups in more complex breakthroughs – those that called for creations or transformations of whole markets and industries. Take, for example, the challenge of bringing about any major innovation in healthcare. Yes, we see startups launching ingenious products and services, but established players are taking the lead in shaping the new healthcare market into which these new solutions can be integrated. The same is true in the energy and transportation sectors, and in the realm of “smart cities.” (In some rare cases, such as social networks or internet content marketing, startups launch products and services capable in and of themselves of creating new industries. But in general, the newness of the business behind them imposes important growth constraints.)

Is it possible that large established companies could excel in both parts of the innovation challenge – not only driving the industry change to take advantage of new solutions, but also serving as hotbeds to create them? It is, but it will require creating different environments within enterprises, more conducive to breakthrough, bottom-up innovation.

You’re no doubt familiar with the distinction between breakthrough and incremental innovation. Terms such as the ambidextrous organization have been coined to highlight the difficulty of managing both simultaneously. What makes this especially challenging is that incremental innovation calls for managing knowledge on many fronts, whereas breakthrough innovation is more about managing ignorance. The processes are necessarily different.

There is another important dimension along which business innovations differ. Some come from the top down, conceived in the upper ranks of an organization and translated into execution plans for lower levels to carry out. Others percolate from the bottom up.

Combine these two dimensions and you can imagine four distinct types of innovation. First there are incremental innovations driven from the top – the updates and extensions planned to ensure continuous progress. Second, there are incremental innovations driven from the bottom, which we could call emergent improvements. The third group consists of breakthrough innovations driven from the top: these are strategic bets. And fourth, it is possible for breakthrough innovations to start at the bottom, and constitute strategic discoveries.

A firm choosing to pursue one of these types of innovation would rely on different processes than it would use for another type. A goal of continuous progress would involve formal planning processes yielding specific, demanding goals, while a goal of emergent improvements would call for processes such as employee suggestion collection and brainstorming. A firm wanting to place strategic bets would need processes to test the rightness of the vision and the organization’s ability to execute.

Big companies have all these processes in place. The ones they don’t tend to have are processes appropriate for strategic discoveries. The advantage of the startup ecosystem is that it brings together people with diverse skills and perspectives and allows the good ideas that result from their interchange to gain traction, without hierarchies of decision-makers to quash them. Corporate processes not only neglect but often prevent such breakthroughs.

How would a management team change that? To create a “startup corporation” environment, it would need to put a number of things in place, beginning with a different approach to motivation. People should be inspired by the vision and culture of the company, not compelled by its hierarchy and rewards structure. It would need to provide the stimulus to inspire new ideas: ways to interact with others from a rich mix of backgrounds through interest groups, idea fairs, and collaborative networks. It should attract interesting players from the company’s landscape to discuss and test ideas. Mechanisms would have to be designed to enable these diverse people and ideas to be combined. Methods would have to exist by which experiments would reveal the technology-business model combination that could succeed.

The point here is that breakthrough innovation need not be random: How you innovate determines what you innovate. Luck plays a role, but it favors the prepared mind.

It’s up to managers in big companies, then, to work on this missing part of their innovation capability – building the startup corporation strengths to generate strategic discoveries. Established companies can be at least as great a source of high-growth innovation as new, agile ones. They can be effective in devising breakthrough products and services, and they are uniquely positioned to create and redefine markets and industries. If they can learn to believe this about themselves, perhaps we will see that Shumpeter and Penrose were right all along.

When Innovation Is Strategy
An HBR Insight Center

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Emotions Are Data, Too

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t meet it, the struggle with emotions at work.

The misunderstood colleague, filled with frustration, attempting not to show it; the executive wondering how to confront her team’s lack of enthusiasm; the student hesitating to confess his affection to a classmate.

It has been two decades since emotional intelligence became a cornerstone of managers’ self-improvement projects. Meditation has broken into the C-suite. Alpha males and females extol the virtues of mindfulness. And still we remain unsure about what to do with emotions at work.

One moment we do not have enough emotion, the next we have too much.  We want work to ignite our passion but we don’t want our passions to affect our judgment. We want cool heads and warm hearts—as long as they remain apart.

The pursuit of passionate equanimity in the office might look like a valid remedy for the consuming pace of business in our day and age. I’d like to argue, however, that it might be a symptom as well—of a work culture that views emotions in ways that keep us struggling with them in the long run.

We have come to regard emotions as assets—precious or toxic as they may be—rather than as data. Therefore we focus on managing them, which often means trying to exploit, diffuse, or sanitize them, far more than staying with them long enough to discern their meaning. And when we do the latter, we usually interpret them as revealing something about their owners alone.

Treating emotions this way, as spillovers of our inner worlds, leaves us with acute, even obsessive awareness of them—and yet limited insight.

Not because we’re neglectful of our emotions, incompetent at managing them, or simply, hopelessly human. Not because emotions are neither always conscious nor easily named. Not just, at least.

It is because our emotions at work are more than echoes of our history, expressions of our virtues and neuroses, or shadows of our longings. While those always play a part, emotions are seldom ours alone.

What you and I feel at work has as much to do with what we are doing, and what others expect of people in our roles—and of someone who looks like us—as it does with our own inner lives.

We readily accept that work shapes how we act and how we see ourselves, that others’ expectations subtly corner us. We rarely think the same may be true of our emotions — even private ones — as well.

But if we play a part at work, more or less willingly, a part more or less fitting with the person we believe we are, why should we not feel that part as well?

What if emotions were another element in our role’s unwritten script, which our history merely prepares us for and our aspirations only make us more willing to perform? What if the assumption that emotions are ours—alone—to mind and tame made us more likely to torment ourselves than to question how that script casts us and who its authors and intended audience are?

Take an energetic executive who was wondering if he had become depressed when I met him, shortly after a big promotion. He had been asked to turn a division around, and had relished the challenge at first.

Months later, however, his reviled predecessor was thriving in another company while he himself was deeply dispirited. Despite his good progress, he could not exorcise a lingering fear of failure with the usual enthusiasm and determination, and worried that it might be catching up with him.

Reflective as he was, he could easily link his fear and shame to certain disappointments of his youth. What he found harder was to see that his feelings also spoke of something broader than his unresolved sense of inadequacy. They reflected the status of his division, whose problems were blamed for everything that threatened the company’s viability in the marketplace.

His well-disguised fears and old sensitivities made him a perfect match for the position, psychologically speaking. They made him more likely to carry the sense of inadequacy on behalf of other executives, who could thus feel blameless for the company’s difficulties, than to challenge the arrangements that evoked it.

Taking a more systemic (and less conformist) view of emotions, as sources of intelligence about the work and culture of our organizations, does not make us any less responsible for them. Quite the contrary, it calls for us to use the insight we gain for more than improving our effectiveness or achieving peace of mind.

How would we go about extracting systemic insight from our emotion? Here are three questions to get us started.

How do we show (which) emotions?

Stop asking whether you show enough emotions. Ask how you show them. We are always expressing emotions, even if we are not talking about them. Particularly when we are not talking about them. There are no emotions we express more than those we are trying to hide, especially from ourselves.

(It’s when we believe that we have no emotions that emotions can most easily have us.)

It is not always unpleasant emotions that we deny—or hide in plain sight. I know workplaces where aggression is acceptable while needs for comfort and recognition make people uncomfortable. So fighting, for all it is bemoaned, becomes a safer form of intimacy—a way to connect and show that one cares.

Silencing emotions breeds mistrust and loneliness. Acting them out without talking about them safeguards the status quo. Silence makes it harder to recognize, make sense of, and challenge the division of emotional labor, so to speak, that keeps us feeling the same way over and over again.

Who gets to feel what?

Emotions are seldom distributed equally. They are often bundled with certain roles.

Consider hope and despair, confidence and concern, pride and shame, poise and agitation, vocal outrage and silent contempt. The former in each pair is usually assigned to, and expected of, people in powerful and visible roles. The latter is consigned to those in less powerful and visible ones, to nurse on behalf of those who must avoid them.

“Be yourself” and “get a grip” are common ways we are nudged into those places, as both often translate into, “Feel and show more of what I expect you to.”

This runs counter to the common belief that our emotions are what funnel us into different roles, and that by managing those emotions we make ourselves more suitable for certain assignments.  In fact, our roles often elicit our emotions. And we don’t often realize that until, when we move on from one role to the next, the emotions we felt dissipate, only to capture our successors.

Needless to say, such divisions of labor, never explicit but respected by most, do not bode well for problem solving, mutual understanding, and collaboration.

What is the purpose of these emotions (and who benefits from them)?

Assume that which emotions are silenced and which are voiced, and who gets to feel and express what, is neither random nor affected by our character alone.

The heartless CEO, the guilty working mom, the ambitious middle manager, the frazzled assistant. Consider them assignments, albeit unconscious ones.

Then you have a lens to examine what purpose, and whose interests, those assignments may serve—what they enable, what they avert, who they protect—and what everyone, including you, gets out of them.

It may be safety, righteousness, approval, achievement, or relief. It may be the illusion that everyone gets what they deserve rather than what they can afford.

It may be the familiarity, if not comfort, of experiencing what we are used to—within and around us. A sense of knowing our place and what it feels like.

Interpreted that way—tied to ourselves in a role, in context, doing work—emotions can help us learn about and manage more than just ourselves. They give us hints about what keeps us in our place, how we may change places, and even what it might take to change the whole place.

When you find yourself thinking, “Here I go again,” because you sense that you are getting caught up in a familiar pattern, ask where in your past that pattern comes from, what it says about you, and how you may ease its grip. But don’t stop there. That’s only half the work. Ask also what evoked those emotions here, in these circumstances, now.

Unless we use our self-awareness to examine the system more dispassionately, reflection is just another form of withdrawal. Unless we turn our hard-earned equanimity into resolve to change our surroundings as much as ourselves, the struggle with emotions never ends. Any practice to manage them becomes at best a coping mechanism—at worst an instrument of the status quo.

We can’t be saner, or at least freer, until we stop sanitizing emotions. We can’t make workplaces fairer if we lock people into managing them alone.

Yes, emotions are personal. They are just not all about us.

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Productivity and Citations of Educational Research: Using Educational Psychology as the Data Base

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Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Seventeen years ago Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) published the landmark article “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” giving a coherent theoretical statement for resource pedagogies that had been building throughout the 1970s and 1980s. I, like countless teachers and university-based researchers, have been inspired by what it means to make teaching and learning relevant and responsive to the languages, literacies, and cultural practices of students across categories of difference and (in)equality. Recently, however, I have begun to question if the terms “relevant” and “responsive” are really descriptive of much of the teaching and research founded upon them and, more importantly, if they go far enough in their orientation to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society. In this essay, I offer the term and stance of culturally sustaining pedagogy as an alternative that, I believe, embodies some of the best research and practice in the resource pedagogy tradition and as a term that supports the value of our multiethnic and multilingual present and future. Culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling. In the face of current policies and practices that have the explicit goal of creating a monocultural and monolingual society, research and practice need equally explicit resistances that embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality.

Django Paris is an Assistant Professor of Language and Literacy in the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, 329 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI, 48824-1034; dparis{at}msu.edu. His research focuses on language, literacy, and educational justice among youth of color in changing multiethnic and multilingual schools and communities.

Received September 4, 2011. Revision received February 4, 2012. Accepted February 9, 2012.

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Get Over Your Fear of Conflict

by Amy Jen Su  |   1:00 PM June 6, 2014

Most of us have some resistance to conflict. Instead of addressing issues directly, we try to be “nice” and end up spending an inordinate amount of time talking to ourselves or others — complaining, feeling frustrated, ruminating on something that already happened, or anticipating something that might happen. These conversations usually sound something like this:

“My colleague interrupted me again. We’re supposed to be leading this effort together and this is his way of showing he’s the boss. He just makes me look bad in front of the team. I’ve been replaying it in my mind over and over again.”

“Someone has to tell my direct report that his bad attitude is affecting the rest of the team, but I’m dreading it. I’ve been thinking about it all day and haven’t been able to get anything done.”

“I know what they’re going to say — that we can’t have more resources due to budget constraints. I’ll probably just give up on this.”

Sound familiar? These are just three recent examples that I heard in coaching sessions with clients.

Here’s the trouble: These efforts to be “nice” can have pretty significant costs. You create relationships that are neither authentic nor constructive. Your health and self-esteem may suffer and you signal that you’re a victim. And your organization loses out as you make compromises with the loudest person in the room, lose the diversity of thinking that’s critical for innovation, or stop producing the best solutions.

Below are five tips I’ve offered clients when they find themselves avoiding conflict:

Recognize that being nice is an outdated strategy. At some point in your life or career, you probably got burned by conflict, and felt shamed or criticized. When that happens, we often decide to be accommodating rather than ever feeling that way again. We choose safety, peace, and harmony over speaking up.

When I ask clients why they don’t want to have difficult conversations, it usually comes down to fear of experiencing those emotions again. Many have an “a-ha” moment when they realize they’re no longer that younger version of themselves; they’re now a more seasoned, experienced person with new skills and know-how.  As one client recently put it, “I’m still behaving as if I’m that second-year associate who got shouted-down by the senior partner for pushing back. But I’m now the general counsel of this organization.”

Focus on the business needs. When you avoid conflict, you’re actually putting the focus squarely on yourself. In all three cases above, the clients felt backed into a corner, concerned about how others might perceive them. But it’s not about you.

When I ask clients, “What would the CEO, customers, or shareholders of your organization say about this situation, and what does the business need?” they’re suddenly much more objective and clear:

“The business needs me and my peer to be a united front.”

“This direct report has a lot of potential and if I could coach him to use a more positive style, he could make a great contribution.”

“We need to discuss the vision of what we’re trying to achieve and the resources it will take to make that possible.”

Take the focus off you and your fear and concentrate on what the business needs.

Speak objectively and make requests. Use observations, not labels. For example, in the case of the direct report, he’s likely to be defensive if you say, “I need to talk to you about how negatively you come off in staff meetings.” Instead, talk about what you observed: “I noticed in the last two staff meetings that when the COO got to the topic of the change initiatives, your body language changed and you reacted quite strongly. I’d love to discuss how you could share your concerns in the most productive way possible.”

Include a request for the behavior that would support the shared business goal. In the case of the interrupting colleague, you might say, “In the last team meeting, I noticed that we were interacting with each other in a way that may be throwing the team off. To keep the team on track, it’s important that we appear as a united front. Can we determine what role we’ll play in the meetings in advance or agree on some non-verbal signals when it’s time to pass the baton?”

Keep a calm demeanor. People who shy away from conflict often assume that it has to look aggressive, overbearing, or disrespectful. It doesn’t. You can — and should — be yourself and remain approachable, non-judgmental, and calm in these situations by being clear, focusing on the business needs, and making a request to ensure the business goal is achieved.

Start with baby steps. Like any muscle you build, it takes practice and repetition before you can ratchet up your abilities. Start with easier situations first and address the conflict retrospectively (it can be hard to do it in the moment at first). But institute a statute of limitations whereby you cannot ruminate, fume, or carry on unproductively beyond 48 hours. During that 48 hours, focus on being more conscious and self-aware. Ask yourself:  What are my triggers?  What caused my anxiety and why does this feel personal? What does the business need from me in this situation? What request am I not making? Then, take action.

Gradually, each of these new experiences will help you reframe conflict from something you dread, to something that — when properly embraced — can help move the business forward.

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The Best Teams Hold Themselves Accountable

by Joseph Grenny  |   1:00 PM May 30, 2014

Want to create a high performance team? Want to limit the amount of time you spend settling squabbles between team members? It turns out those two issues are closely related: Our research shows that on top performing teams peers immediately and respectfully confront one another when problems arise. Not only does this drive greater innovation, trust, and productivity, but also it frees the boss from being the playground monitor.

I first saw the connection between high performance and peer accountability years ago when consulting with a very successful financial services company. It had an unparalleled return on capital, breathtaking sales growth, and the highest customer renewal rate in the industry.

In my first face-to-face meeting with the CEO, whose name was Paul, and his direct reports, I committed a major faux pas. I discovered halfway through the meeting that I was calling the wrong guy, “Paul.”

It was an innocent mistake. When it was time to begin, one member of the executive team wasn’t present. He showed up six minutes late and the guy at the head of the table (I learned later that his name was Frank) said, “We all agreed to be here at 10 AM—what happened?” It was a jarring moment. The tardy teammate flushed red, stammered an explanation, and the meeting moved on. I assumed since this guy was at the head of the table and he held the latecomer accountable that this was Paul. I smiled and made a small wave at him. He looked confused but waved back.

Ten minutes later, Lydia was reporting on sales in her business unit. Apparently, things weren’t going well. The woman next to me asked most of the hard questions about her disappointing performance. Her comments were thoughtful and constructive but firm. She concluded by suggesting that they reconsider how much capital they were deploying in Lydia’s business unit that year. I wondered if maybe she was in charge.

The best decision I made that day was to keep my mouth shut. It turned out Paul was the quietest guy in the room. I could have spent the entire time playing “Who’s Paul?” and gotten it wrong every time. (This has since become one of my favorite stories illustrating the importance of peer accountability.)

There was something strange about that team. And many other teams we subsequently studied. We’ve found that teams break down in performance roughly as follows:

In the weakest teams, there is no accountabilityIn mediocre teams, bosses are the source of accountabilityIn high performance teams, peers manage the vast majority of performance problems with one another

Paul didn’t have to monitor latecomers or ask Lydia hard questions because he had created a culture of universal accountability. The basic principle was that anyone should be able to hold anyone accountable if it was in the best interest of the team. Team members were both motivated and able to handle the day-to-day concerns they had with one another, with him, or with anyone outside the team.

We’ve found that you can approximate the health of a relationship, a team and an organization by measuring the average lag time between identifying and discussing problems. The shorter the lag time, the faster problems get solved and the more the resolution enhances relationships. The longer the lag, the more room there is for mistrust, dysfunction, and more tangible costs to mount. The role of leader is to shrink this gap. And the best way to do it is by developing a culture of universal accountability. Here are some ways we’ve seen managers like Paul create this kind of norm:

Set expectations. Let new team members know up front that you want and expect them to hold you and others accountable.Tell stories. Call out positive examples of team members addressing accountability concerns. Especially when they take a big risk by holding you accountable. Vicarious learning is a powerful form of influence, and storytelling is the best way to make it happen.Model it. The first time your team hears you gripe about your own peers to others—rather than confronting your concerns directly—you lose moral authority to expect the same from them.Teach it. The best leaders are teachers. Codify the skills you think are important for holding “crucial conversations”—and take 5-10 minutes in a staff meeting to teach one. In these teaching episodes, ensure the team practices on a real-life example— perhaps one that happened recently. Trust me, they’ll complain, but this will make a huge difference in retention and transference to real life.Set an “It takes two to escalate” policy. If you struggle with lots of escalations, set a policy that “it takes two to escalate.” In other words, both peers need to agree they can’t resolve it at their level before they bring it to you together.

The role of the boss should not be to settle problems or constantly monitor your team, it should be to create a team culture where peers address concerns immediately, directly and respectfully with each other. Yes, this takes time up front. But the return on investment happens fast as you regain lost time and see problems solved both better and faster.

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Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
David N. Boote and

Curriculum Studies in the College of Education, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816-1250; dboote{at}mail.ucf.edu. His research interests include education research studies, teacher educators, mathematics and physics problem solving, and moral education. Penny Beile

The University of Central Florida, P.O. Box 162666, Orlando, FL 32816-2666; pbeile{at}mail.ucf.edu. Her areas of specialization are the production and use of scholarly information in education and the information literacy abilities of education students. She is completing the development and validation of the Information Literacy Assessment Scale for Education (ILAS-ED) A thorough, sophisticated literature review is the foundation and inspiration for substantial, useful research. The complex nature of education research demands such thorough, sophisticated reviews. Although doctoral education is a key means for improving education research, the literature has given short shrift to the dissertation literature review. This article suggests criteria to evaluate the quality of dissertation literature reviews and reports a study that examined dissertations at three universities. Acquiring the skills and knowledge required to be education scholars, able to analyze and synthesize the research in a field of specialization, should be the focal, integrative activity of predissertation doctoral education. Such scholarship is a prerequisite for increased methodological sophistication and for improving the usefulness of education research.

Received December 10, 2003. Revision received April 28, 2005. Revision received January 4, 2005. Accepted May 6, 2005.

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Standards of Evidence in Qualitative Research: An Incitement to Discourse

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Melissa Freeman, assistant professor

The Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy in the College of Education at The University of Georgia, 329 River’s Crossing, Athens, GA 30602; freeman9{at}uga.edu. Her research interests include transformational and relational theories and methodologies in qualitative research and evaluation, parental perceptions of public schooling, and philosophical hermeneutics Kathleen deMarrais, professor

The Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy and associate dean in the College of Education at The University of Georgia, G3 Aderhold Hall, Athens, GA 30602; kpd{at}uga.edu. Her research interests include the political context of qualitative research, qualitative pedagogy, and the influence of neoconservative philanthropy on educational policy Judith Preissle, professor

The Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy in the College of Education at The University of Georgia, 303 River’s Crossing, Athens, GA 30602, and an affiliated member of UGA’s Institute for Women’s Studies; jude{at}uga.edu. She teaches, researches, and writes in educational anthropology, qualitative research, feminist studies, and ethics Kathryn Roulston, associate professor

The Department of Lifelong Education, Administration, and Policy in the College of Education at The University of Georgia, 324 River’s Crossing, 850 College Station Road, Athens, GA 30602; roulston{at}uga.edu. Her research interests include qualitative research methodology, qualitative interviewing, analysis of talk-in-interaction, and topics in music education Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, professor of language and literacy education and a qualitative methodologist

The University of Georgia, 125 Aderhold Hall, Athens, GA 30602; stpierre{at}uga.edu. Her research interests include poststructural theories of language and subjectivity and a critique of conventional qualitative inquiry In a climate of increased accountability, standardization, federal control, and politicization of education research and scholarship, this article briefly reviews various positions outlined by qualitative researchers about quality in qualitative inquiry, showing how these are implicated in the acquisition, conceptualization, and use of qualitative evidence. It concludes by identifying issues in and challenges to setting standards of evidence for qualitative researchers in education.

Received June 30, 2006. Revision received September 25, 2006. Accepted September 28, 2006.

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Improving Impact Studies of Teachers' Professional Development: Toward Better Conceptualizations and Measures

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
Laura M. Desimone

LAURA M. DESIMONE is an associate professor of education policy at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate School of Education, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104; lauramd{at}gse.upenn.edu. Her research focuses on policy effects on teaching and learning, policy implementation, and the improvement of methods for studying policy effects and implementation (e.g., improving the quality of surveys and the appropriate use of multiple methodologies); much of her work is in the areas of standards-based reform/accountability and teacher quality initiatives (e.g., teachers’ professional development, induction). The author suggests that we apply recent research knowledge to improve our conceptualization, measures, and methodology for studying the effects of teachers’ professional development on teachers and students. She makes the case that there is a research consensus to support the use of a set of core features and a common conceptual framework in professional development impact studies. She urges us to move away from automatic biases either for or against observation, interviews, or surveys in such studies. She argues that the use of a common conceptual framework would elevate the quality of professional development studies and subsequently the general understanding of how best to shape and implement teacher learning opportunities for the maximum benefit of both teachers and students.

Received July 2, 2008. Revision received October 3, 2008. Revision received November 26, 2008. Accepted December 1, 2008.

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Successful Holiday Parties: Tips for the Respectful Workplace

It’s that time of year again: December, the month in which the excitement of the end-of-year holidays descends upon the workplace in many parts of the world – and with it the stress, expectations, complications and hiccups (so to speak) that can come with seasonal celebrations.

Here are tips for employers when considering such celebrations for their workplaces.

 

We’re Partying It Up!

It seems a lot of employers are planning to host end-of-year parties for their workplaces in 2012: According to a survey conducted by OfficeTeam, a leading Administrative Staffing service, and reported in HRM 7Online, 77% of senior managers surveyed responded by saying said their organization would have a holiday celebration this year.

Given the cost and the expense if these events, it seems important to ask why holiday parties are being considered by employers -- particularly given the current economic realities.

Why Hold a Holiday Party?

In our experience, employers sponsor holiday functions because they assume such events will bring people together and strengthen social bonds. Commonly-stated objectives:

create a fun, relaxing experience for employees;make people feel good;foster a sense of connection amongst colleagues;celebrate the workforce’s accomplishments; andinspire a moment of shared meaning in the workplace community.

Of course, there may be other ways of accomplishing these objectives. Some organizations opt for bringing workgroups together for activities other than a traditional party. Consider this article, Alternatives to the Traditional Office Christmas Party, which proposes outdoor activities, workgroup cooking or craft lessons, etc.

Certainly there seems to be a growing trend in some workplaces towards workgroups participating in collective “giving back” activities, like volunteering for local charities. Cori Maedel, CEO of the Jouta Performance Group, a team of HR consultants based in Vancouver, BC, says that her whole HR team looks forward to the shared experience of volunteering at through the YWCA each year in December, because of the rich benefits they derive individually and as a group.

Some people even point to tax and cost considerations in certain jurisdictions in arguing that it may be better for employees to just give gifts. (See Your office Christmas party: can you claim the expense on tax? for a discussion from the Australian perspective, in Business IT.)

Despite these alternative options, holiday parties apparently remain the favorite choice for employers who want to reward and engage employees at the year’s end.

A “No-Fun” Party?

“Urrrgh, the office party is tonight!”

It seems that employers may in fact be missing the mark with the parties they host: HRM Online reports that OfficeTeam surveyors found only 55% of employees admitted to enjoying the workplace holiday party, with 45% saying they did not.

Why the dismal results?

It’s Not MY Party

We suspect that the explanation for negative responses by employees to workplace-hosted holiday events lies in a fundamental disconnect between the employees and the event in question: Because of the way that the party is planned and executed, some individuals are left feeling that it isn’t really “their” event, but instead “belongs” to the company or other individuals, and that the party somehow excludes them, their interests and their values.

That’s not necessarily a disastrous thing – after all, you can seldom please everyone in a workplace. Generally speaking, any of us in even moderately functional workplaces should be resilient enough to tough out an employer-sponsored event with good grace, even an event that falls short of our own personal expectations, or that doesn’t reflect our own personal tastes and preferences.

The real risk of negative holiday party fallout arises when interpersonal dynamics are already strained in the workplaces, when there are low levels of trust operating, when individuals already perceive a lack of inclusivity amongst their colleagues, and when problematic behaviors are tolerated. Under those circumstances, each of the apparently innocuous questions that go into planning a holiday party carries a huge potential for creating divisiveness, sparking corrosive arguments, surfacing bad feelings and ratcheting up tensions.

Diversity, Inclusivity, Safety & Liability

“I’m in the South American office, and December is the start of our summer. It’s not a big deal, and certainly not intentional, but when year after year all the corporate messaging about the December holiday comes out of our northern US head office covered only images of snow and evergreens, it just seems like we’re not really on their radar at all.”

By acknowledging and taking into account the diverse realities of their workforces in planning the holiday party, including differences in economic and social backgrounds, personal and family experiences, family status, faith and religious communities, and so on, employers are much more likely to create events that feel open, inclusive, and welcoming for all employees. This, of course, will reduce both the chances of some individuals feeling excluded, as well as perceptions of disrespect and unfairness.

It is also important not to lose sight of safety and even liability considerations, especially when the decision is made to make alcohol available at the party. A few glasses of wine is all it takes to raise “drinking and driving” safety and liability issues in a growing number of jurisdictions. Just as importantly, a couple of glasses of alcohol can do wonders in laying bare the differing understandings among employees as to what constitutes appropriate workplace party behaviour.

What to Do?

Does it have to be such a big, complicated deal?

Certainly not. Lots of workgroups seem to pull off successful holiday parties with aplomb. But this does require some forethought and planning.

The Critical Questions

Questions that need to be dealt with well in order to ensure a good time is had by all, include the following:

What you will call the event -- Christmas Party? Winter Solstice Party? New Year’s Party? Holiday Party?Will the event include an acknowledgement of religious traditions – and if so, whose religious traditions will be acknowledged, and whose won’t? What about the atheists?When will you hold the event -- Workday? Evening? Weekend? Someone’s day of religious observance?Where will the event be held?Are people expected to come? (If so, tell them so!)Will spouses and family be invited?Will alcohol will be served – and if so, who will pay?What activities will be included – and will people be expected to participate?

More Resources

Here are some additional links to check out to ensure that your organization's holiday celebtration supports the creation of a Respectful Workplace:

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Strategy Is Iterative Prototyping

by Roger Martin  |   10:00 AM June 6, 2014

Managers have no way of predicting with any certainty what will happen with respect to an industry and its likely evolution, customers and their likely preferences, a firm itself and its potential capabilities and cost structure, and competitors and their likely responses/actions.  We just can’t do it.

One common response to this reality is to ignore the inherent complexity: simplify, analyze, and then make a plan. That typically doesn’t end well, because complexity and unpredictability undermine the plan almost as soon as it is made. A second response is to throw up one’s hands, declare the situation too complicated to make a decision, and adopt an unhelpful interpretation of “emergent strategy,” the modern strategy scourge.

The third approach is to recognize that while the world is complex and uncertain, abdication of choice is not a productive response. This third way treats strategy as prototyping. Prototyping is a tool for progressively shortening the odds of a course of action and minimizing the costs along the way. An organization produces a succession of prototypes to test an idea, gain insights, improve the prototype, test again, gain insights, improve, and so on until the idea is ready for prime time.

The same can hold for strategy. A strategic possibility — a set of answers to the five key questions of strategy (what is our winning aspiration, where will we play, how will we win, what capabilities must we have, and what management systems are required) — is, in fact, a prototype. At first, it is a conceptual prototype. Strategy can be thought of as moving from the conceptual realm to the concrete realm through the process of iterative prototyping.

The first iteration of prototyping involves asking what would have to be true in order for the initial answers to those five questions to be sound and then testing those answers without actually putting the strategy into action. The answers can then be modified and enhanced.

The refined prototype can be tested again, modified, tested again and so on. And with each iteration the tests move further into the realm of action and the marketplace. Aspects of the strategy can be tested by actually doing things with customers — and gaining more understanding to hone and refine the strategy with each iteration.

In fact, the prototyping should never stop. It is ongoing, as you receive new data from the market, your competitors and within your organization. It is better to think of your strategy as not set in stone but rather as the most recent prototype being tested by the latest marketplace experience. That way strategy will never get out of sync with the competitive environment.

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Reinvent Your Company by Reassessing Its Strengths

by Ken Favaro  |   11:00 AM May 30, 2014

Strategic consistency is the hallmark of many great companies. Southwest Airlines’ decades-long strategy of “short-haul, high-frequency, point-to-point, low-fare service” produced what was not only one of the best-performing airlines in the U.S. over the last half-century, but also one of the best-performing companies in any industry. For over 50 years, Wal-Mart has pursued essentially the same strategy of “offering the lowest price so its customer can live better.” Wells Fargo has become the most valuable bank in the world by sticking to its strategy of building a value proposition around selling more products per customer than anyone else. And the essence of Walt Disney’s original strategy remains intact today: to construct a range of businesses — from animated film to fun parks, TV, retail, cruise ships, and more — around a group of engaging, family-friendly characters.

But the corporate landscape is also littered with once-great companies whose strategies became obsolete faster than they were able to reinvent themselves. For example, deregulation killed off icons in the airline business such as Pan Am and TWA. Digital technology overwhelmed Kodak’s once-formidable business in photography. The emergence of e-commerce obliterated the likes of Borders, Circuit City, and Blockbuster. Smartphones destroyed Nokia’s cell phone business. Strategic consistency may be a hallmark of great enterprises, but it hastened the demise of these companies. They needed reinvention, not more of the same.

Smart executives know that sustaining great companies requires both strategic consistency and reinvention. But how do you achieve each without sacrificing the other?

In my experience, the answer lies in being able to answer — and act on — two important questions: what capabilities set your company apart from everyone else? And, are there changes happening in your world that will make those capabilities obsolete or insufficient?

The foundation of strategic consistency is being clear about the capabilities that make your company special. Frito-Lay’s direct-to-store delivery capability, Inditex’s fast-fashion supply chain, and Toyota’s production system took years to hone into true sources of enterprise differentiation. If a company’s leaders understand the capabilities that define its unique identity, they’ll make smarter decisions about what businesses to buy and sell, what markets to enter and exit, what to prioritize in new product development, how to manage costs, where to invest, and all the other choices that are inherent in sustaining a great company.

However, leaders must always ask themselves whether their differentiating capabilities are still relevant. Today, all the major credit card companies are seeking to move from traditional payments to digital commerce. In payments, core capabilities are tied to driving card usage because the economic model is based on card transaction fees; but as they move into digital commerce, most credit card firms are finding they lack a new set of required capabilities — the ability to generate, analyze, and use customer data in order to drive sales and loyalty for their primary customer, the merchants who accept their cards.

Similarly, in big-box retailing, most players have run out of room in their home markets for laying down more super stores, so they are seeking growth by using a small-store format to penetrate pockets of geography that their bigger stores cannot reach. But the capabilities — from merchandising to managing store staff and operating the supply chain — are very different for a small-store format.

Or consider U.S. health care providers: the push for more accountable care will require new business models where risk sharing with private and government insurers becomes more the norm. And, yes indeed, such models will demand a set of capabilities now alien to most care providers. Leaders of any company operating credit cards, big box retailing, or health care should be be saying to themselves, “Yes, changes happening in our world are making our capabilities insufficient, if not obsolete. Strategic consistency is not enough right now; we need strategic reinvention to shore up and bolster the foundation of capabilities that will underpin great performance from the business we will have, not just the business we have today.”

There are a handful of leaders who have successfully managed the tension between strategic consistency and reinvention to survive major changes and create a new life for their companies. Andy Grove pivoted Intel from a memory chip to a smart chip company; Lou Gerstner turned IBM from a hardware OEM to an IT services provider; and Phil Knight transformed Nike from a sports shoe company to a sports licensing company. In each case, the reinvention was about adding new capabilities to those that made the company great in the first place. Thus, neither its reinvention meant the loss of strategic consistency nor did strategic consistency come at the cost of falling behind the changes happening all around it.

Managing the tension between strategic consistency and reinvention does not have to mean taking less of one in order to have more of the other. If you correctly identify the capabilities that make your company great and build your strategies around them, and if you act smartly on the enhancements or additions to those capabilities that your changing world requires, you will achieve the benefits of strategic consistency while also preparing your company for the seismic shifts that are inevitable in every industry.

When Innovation Is Strategy
An HBR Insight Center

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Why Your Employees Should Be Playing With Lego Robots

by Colin Lewis  |   9:00 AM April 10, 2014

Two years ago, Swedish communications technology giant Ericsson found itself looking for a way to explain the value it saw in the Internet of Things. Rather than publish another whitepaper on the topic, the company struck on a different communication tool: Legos. More specifically, Lego robots.

Ericsson used Lego Mindstorm robots in a demonstration at the 2012 Mobile World Congress to bring to life its vision of how connected machines might change the way we live. A laundry-robot sorted socks by color and placed them in different baskets while it chatted with the washing machine. A gardening-robot watered the plants when the plants said they were thirsty. A cleaner-robot collapsed and trashed empty cardboard coffee cups that it collected from the table, and a dog-like robot fetched the newspaper when the alarm clock rang.

Rather than merely talking or writing about its vision, Ericsson saw robots as a perfect medium for explaining its ideas. This is more than just a smart marketing campaign. As a variety of researchers have argued, it may offer a way to better equip workers with the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Training programs that encourage the use of robots to achieve goals – not just by playing with them, but by building them — encourage participants to use their creativity and natural curiosity to overcome problems through hands-on experiences.

Lego’s Mindstorm robots (or education and innovation kits as they are sometimes known) were developed in collaboration with MIT Media Lab as a solution for education and training in the mid to late 90’s. The work was an outcome of research by Professor Seymour Papert, who was co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab with Marvin Minsky. Papert later co-founded the Epistemology and Learning Group within the MIT Media Lab. Papert’s work has had a major impact on how people develop knowledge, and is especially relevant for building twenty-first century skills.

Papert and his collaborators’ research indicates that training programs using robotics influences participants’ ability to learn numerous essential skills, especially creativity, critical thinking, and learning to learn or “metacognition”. They also emphasize important approaches to modern work, like collaboration and communication.

This form of learning is called constructionism, and it is premised on the idea that people learn by actively constructing new knowledge, not by having information “poured” into their heads. Moreover, constructionism asserts that people learn with particular effectiveness when they are engaged in “constructing” personally meaningful artifacts. People don’t get ideas; they make them.

Papert’s influential book Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas as well as extensive scientific research into fields such as cognition, psychology, evolutionary psychology, and epistemology illustrate how this pedagogy can be combined with robotics to yield a powerful, hands-on method of training.

In training courses that use robotics, the program leader sets problems to be solved. Teams are presented with a box of pieces and simple programs that can run on iPads, iPhones, or Android tablets and phones. They are given basic training in the simple programming skills required and then set free to solve the problem presented.

Problems can be as ‘simple’ as building a robot to pass through a maze in a certain time frame, which requires trial and error and lots of critical thinking. What size wheels to use for speed and maneuverability, what drain on battery power, which sensors to use for guidance around walls. One team may decide to build a small drone to view and map out the terrain of the maze, this would require theorizing on the weight of the robotic drone and relaying data filmed to a mapping system which the on-ground robot could use to negotiate through the maze.

It is an entirely goal-driven process.

Participants get to design, program, and fully control functional robotic models. They use software to plan, test, and modify sequences of instructions for a variety of robotic behaviors. And they learn to collect and analyze data from sensors, using data logging functionalities embedded in the software. They gain the confidence to author algorithms, which taps critical thinking skills, and to creatively configure the robot to pursue goals.

Participants from all backgrounds gain key team building skills through collaborating closely at every stage of ideation, innovation, deployment, evaluation and scaling. At the end of the training teams are required to present their ideas and results, building effective communication skills.

It is quite astonishing to see how teams have developed robots to achieve tasks such as solving Rubik’s cubes in seconds, playing Sudoku and drawing portraits, creating braille printers, taking part in soccer and basketball games. These robots have even been used for improving ATM security.

Using robots in training programs to overcome challenges pushes participants out of their comfort zone. It deepens their awareness of complexity and builds ownership and responsibility.

The array of skills and work techniques that this kind of training offers is more in need today than ever, as technology is rapidly changing the skills demanded in the workplace.

Instead of programming people to act like robots, why not teach them to become programmers, creative thinkers, architects, and engineers? For companies seeking to develop these skills in their employees, hands-on goal-focused training using robots can help.

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The Unique and Combined Effects of Homelessness and School Mobility on the Educational Outcomes of Young Children

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
This study examined the unique and combined associations of homelessness and school mobility with educational well-being indicators, as well as the mediating effect of absenteeism, for an entire cohort of third-grade students in Philadelphia. Using integrated archival administrative data from the public school district and the municipal Office of Supportive Housing, multilevel linear models were estimated to test these associations while adjusting for nesting of students within schools. Findings demonstrated that homelessness had a unique association with problems in classroom engagement, school mobility was uniquely related to both academic achievement and problems in classroom engagement, and experiencing both homelessness and school mobility was the most detrimental for both forms of educational well-being. Absenteeism was found to partially mediate the relations between homelessness, school mobility, and problems in task engagement. Results provide support for the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and the need for educational policies for mobile children.

This research was supported in part by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the William Penn Foundation. Data were provided through the Kids Integrated Data System, a partnership between the City of Philadelphia and the School District of Philadelphia. The findings and discussion presented in this manuscript, however, represent the views of the authors and do not reflect those of the City or the School District of Philadelphia.

Received October 12, 2011. Revision received May 16, 2012. Revision received October 16, 2012. Accepted October 24, 2012.

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Poetic Respectful Workplace Training? 4 Great Tips

Training + Poetry = Engagement
Yesterday I found myself reflecting again on a piece I read in The Opinion Pages of The New York Times on December 2, 2012, Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination, by Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone. I was left thinking once more about the benefits of taking an intentionally poetic approach to the content and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not advocating that you make your Respectful Workplace Training "touchy-feely". We've written elsewhere about the need to ensure that Respectful Workplace Programs are practical, effective, and focused on achieving specific business outcomes; we firmly believe that both the content and delivery of associated training sessions must reflect this approach. (See our previous posts, Keys to Effective Organizational Training for a Respectful Workplace; 5 Reasons for "Respectful Workplaces": Optimizing for Growth; 4 Best Practice Tips: Respectful Workplace Programs)  

I'm not even suggesting that you include actual verse in the content. 

Instead I'm suggesting that you evaluate your Respectful Workplace Training content and delivery through the lens of poetry, in order to achieve maximum uptake and retention by participants.

From our perspective, the intent of Respectful Workplace Training is to support specific behavior change outcomes in the organization, and these outcomes can only be achieved when participants engage with, digest and internalize the training content, converting it from ideas into action.

In order for this process of engagement, digestion and internalization to occur, the presenter must first translate the essential ideas of the training content into words, images and constructs that are both accessible and meaningful to the participants -- each of them.

As Lepore and Stone say,

"part of what makes language artistic is that we have to explore it actively in order to appreciate it.  We may have to look beneath the surface, and think harder about what images the author has used, who the author purports to be, and even how the language is organized.  These efforts can lead to new insights, new perspectives and new experiences."

So, the "lens of poetry" suggests that we should pay attention to the words and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training, to evoke new insights, new perspectives, and new experiences for participants.

The challenge in all this is apparent when you consider that Respectful Workplace Training must be delivered to a population of diverse individuals in any organization. What is accessible and meaningful to some will not necessarily be so to others.

Here's where the importance of poetry comes in: In each training session, facilitators of Respectful Workplace Training sessions must build on the key messages of the Respectful Workplace Program, while weaving a poetic experience that captures the heart and mind of each individual participant.

Why do I use the word, "poetic" in this context? Because I want to capture the essence of what Lepore and Stone allude to in their article, when they point to the Craigslist’s “Missed Connections” posts that The New York Times reporter Alan Feuer presents as "found poetry". As Lepore and Stone say,

The poems are original ads, “printed verbatim, with only line and stanza breaks added; their titles are the subject headings.” There’s something frivolous and impertinent about this project.  Poems are no accident: true poets hone their craft over decades and struggle to perfect the execution of each piece.  But, of course, Feuer has selected examples from countless others that do not work as poems.  It is this act of curation that makes the column a celebration of the poetic imagination.

They then give a wonderful example of Feure's “Missed Connections” poetry, from a column that was published in January, 2012:

Drunk Irish Guy to the Girl in the Red Tights on the Subway to Queens

drunk irish guy
to the girl in the red tights
on the subway to queens

i really hope
I did not creep you out…
I was so drunk
and you were so hot…

I wish I could have met you
at a different moment
and a different place.

Lepore and Stone observe that,

In short, a poem — and artistic language more generally — is open to whatever we find in it.  Whenever we notice that an unexpected formal feature amplifies our experience of a poem in a novel way, we add to our understanding.  All the same, we can still say what makes these interpretive efforts poetic.  They do not concern the ordinary significance of form in language.  When we approach language prosaically, our focus is on arbitrary conventions that link words to things in the world and to the contents of thought.  These links allow us to raise questions about what’s true, and to coordinate our investigations to find answers.  But poetry exists because we are just as interested in discovering ourselves, and one another, in what we say.  Poetry evokes a special kind of thinking — where we interpret ordinary links between language and world and mind as a kind of diagram of the possibilities of experience.

For the ProActive ReSolutions team, this simply emphasizes the link between poetic language and experiential learning in relation to Respectful Workplace Training.

When we are at our best as trainers, we are facilitating a learning experience that engages individual participants -- through words, constructs and images -- in a process of reflective interaction with critical ideas, with the ultimate objective of helping participants to shift their understanding of themselves and their world through deep reflection on their experiences.

Clearly, emotion and feelings have a significant potential role in such learning. Of course Respectful Workplace Training sessions must assert and validate the moral, legal and business reasons that participants have to behave in certain ways in the workplace. Beyond that, however, the facilitator's conscious employment of poetic elements in the design and delivery of Respectful Workplace Training content, in order to strategically elicit interest, excitement, pleasure -- and even discomfort, annoyance and frustration -- allows for a qualitatively different learning experience for participants. Hopefully, the experience will be one that changes their respective worlds.

Metaphor, Imagery and Stories. You want people to take this stuff seriously? Be ready to make it real, bring it to life. Work with the structures of drama, comedy, tragedy to provoke, confront, raise questions and ponder aloud.  Cadence, Tone, Pacing and Volume. Lead their affect with your voice: find your passion in the message, and give voice to it. Deliver your message in a way that makes them hear your conviction in the value and importance of what you are saying.Kinetic Energy. Use your body to energize and dance with their attention -- get close, edge away, move your hands, shift your weight. Alternately grab them and lull them with the movement of your hands, the tilt of your head.Respect the Individual. It's not just about individual learning styles -- it's about individual world views, which will be informed by different cultures, different backgrounds, different biologies, and different life experiences, among other things. Some people resonate with drama, some with humor, some with tragedy. Be ready to say the same thing many different ways, to make it relevant to each person in the room.

Some of it's about content, some about delivery -- and it's all about finding the poetry, and creating the poetic experience, to move hearts and engage minds towards positive action.

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Curricular Coherence and the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
In this work, we explored the relationship of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) to student achievement. Building on techniques developed for the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), we found a very high degree of similarity between CCSSM and the standards of the highest-achieving nations on the 1995 TIMSS. A similar analysis revealed wide variation in the proximity of state standards in effect in 2009 to the CCSSM. Finally, we used regression and analysis of covariance techniques to assess the relationship between the proximity of a state’s standards to the CCSSM and performance on the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). After adjusting for cut-points on state assessments and controlling for state demographics related to socioeconomic status and poverty, we found that states with standards more like the CCSSM, on average, had higher NAEP scores.

Received May 7, 2012. Revision received June 19, 2012. Accepted August 6, 2012.

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Challenging the Research Base of the Common Core State Standards: A Historical Reanalysis of Text Complexity

Impact Factor:2.779 | Ranking:6/219 in Education & Educational ResearchSource:2012 Journal Citation Reports® (Thomson Reuters, 2013)
The widely adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call for raising the level of text complexity in textbooks and reading materials used by students across all grade levels in the United States; the authors of the English Language Arts component of the CCSS build their case for higher complexity in part upon a research base they say shows a steady decline in the difficulty of student reading textbooks over the past half century. In this interdisciplinary study, we offer our own independent analysis of third- and sixth-grade reading textbooks used throughout the past century. Our data set consists of books from 117 textbook series issued by 30 publishers between 1905 and 2004, resulting in a linguistic corpus of roughly 10 million words. Contrary to previous reports, we find that text complexity has either risen or stabilized over the past half century; these findings have significant implications for the justification of the CCSS as well as for our understanding of a “decline” within American schooling more generally.

Received February 22, 2013. Revision received July 18, 2013. Accepted August 13, 2013.

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5 Reasons for "Respectful Workplaces": Optimizing for Growth

In a recent post, I pointed to an article by ProActive ReSolutions' Richard Hart as support for the proposition that, within the current economic climate, organizations should consider Respectful Workplace Programs as part of their strategy for growth. In this post, I want to explore further the rational behind that proposition.

Since the global fiscal collapse was triggered in September 2008, when New York investment bank Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, there has been a dramatic shift within the world's economic landscape. In the US alone, as a direct result of those developments, more than $11bn of personal wealth has been lost, millions of jobs have been eliminated, and more than 10 million homes have been foreclosed on. (Bob Abeshouse, Prosecuting Wall Street, Aljazeera, posted 14 September, 2012)

From our work with private and public sector clients in over 25 countries, we had the opportunity to hear first-hand from executive leaders and managers about their concerns over projected reductions in revenues immediately following the onset of the fiscal collapse. The initial reaction from both corporations and government organizations was wide-spread cost-cutting and restructuring. The benefits of those strategies have been largely realized, and there is little ability to effect further reductions in workforces or resourcing without the negatively impacting operations and innovation in fundamental ways.

At a macro level, central banks across the world have clung tenaciously to low interest rates in an attempt to stimulate both domestic spending. and investment in the stock market. However, corporations have largely failed to respond to these "motivators", opting instead to accumulate cash reserves, stockpile commodity inventories, and sit on excess production capacity. This picture is particularly evident in relation to the worldwide holdings of U.S. companies, which, as David Cay Johnston points out in his article, Idle Corporate Cash Piles Up (Reuters, posted July 16, 2012), appear to have good reason to hoard cash:

First, Congress lets overseas profits accumulate untaxed, so long as offshore subsidiaries own the cash. Second, companies have a hard time putting cash to work because fewer jobs and lower wages mean less demand for products and services. Third, a thick pile of cash gives risk-averse CEOs a nice cushion if the economy worsens.

Given the enduring hard times, you might think that corporations have used up their cash since 2009. But real pretax corporate profits have soared, from less than $1.5 trillion in 2009 to $1.9 trillion in 2010 and almost $2 trillion in 2011, data from the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis shows.

That is nearly $1 trillion of increased profits over two years, while actual taxes paid rose less than a tenth as much, BEA reports show. Dividends, wages and capital expenditures all grew less than profits, while undistributed profits rose. The result: more cash.

More cash -- and fewer places to park it. 

Under these conditions -- an abundance of cheap capital, continuing low demand in traditional markets, excess production capacity and commodity inventories, and low returns on bonds and related investments -- we see two primary areas for real growth potential for corporations:

Inorganic growth: The realization of growth through the acquisition of existing businesses, in order to gain access to new markets and new product offerings. The combination of accumulated cash and stagnant markets leaves larger, more stable multi-national corporations in a prime position to acquire other businesses, technologies and companies. By way of example, one of our clients, ABB Inc., has spent billions on acquisitions in the U.S. over the past several years, expanding its corporate base to include Baldor, Ventyx, and most recently, Thomas & Betts. In the process, ABB has added tens of thousands of employees to its workforce, expanded into new markets, and expanded its share of existing markets. Just over a year ago, in November 2011, ABB's CEO, Joe Hogan, indicated that the company had allocated $15 billion for further acquisitions.  Internal efficiencies: Moving beyond cost-cutting, present conditions suggest organizations have an opportunity to fundamentally transform themselves in terms of internal capacities and efficiencies, learning how to not simply do more with less, but how to do it all better, faster and more responsively in relation to the emergence of local and regional opportunities. In Alberta, for instance, we see our client, the City of Red Deer aggressively pursuing safety and injury reduction targets by engaging both staff and the public within the scope of its Respectful Workplace Program. Meanwhile, since 2006, staff at City of Kamlooops, British Columbia, have worked collaboratively on developing an award-winning on-line service, MyCity, which allows city residents to deal with everything from property taxes, to building permits, to re-zoning and subdivision processes, to utility billing. The 24/7 access to relevant file information reduces complaints and increases user satisfaction, while enhancing organizational transparency and accountability.

Real growth, then, will come from optimizing workplaces, to ensure that new business units are quickly integrated into the organization, and that the full potential of the existing human capital is operating for the benefit of the enterprise. Organizations that focus strategically on creating and leveraging an effective, sustainable and responsive "corporate consciousness" – essentially, cultures of respectful and responsible behavior, that empower people to work together more safely, productively and effectively – will be best positioned to maximize returns on acquisition and internal rationalization initiatives, and thereby drive enterprise performance. From this perspective, Respectful Workplace Programs as workplace optimization programs may indeed offer a path to future growth.

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11 Indicators That Your Workplace Is A Conflict Zone

The Indicators of Workplace Conflict can show up as causes or as effects – either way, they are clues that something is wrong and needs to be addressed. 

A conflict is an entrenched state of negative feelings, such as anger, fear, or disgust that a person feels in relation to someone or something. When people are in conflict with each other, they typically don't trust each other’s motives or intentions. 

Generally, we find that a number, if not all, of the following Indicators are present when a conflict is rumbling:

1. PEOPLE AREN’T PERFORMING - They are not meeting reasonable expectations in terms of productivity and effort. 

As a Cause of Conflict: When we see our peers not working to the same standards in terms of productivity and effort, we often start to feel resentful towards them and the managers who are failing to hold them accountable.

As an Effect of Conflict: Workgroup conflict is a huge de-motivator. Nothing sucks the life and energy from a workgroup in quite the same way.

2. PEOPLE ARE DISENGAGING - They are uninterested in what is happening in the workplace and in the projects and initiatives that are being undertaken.

As a Cause of Conflict: People who are disengaging from the workplace often leave us feeling as if we are carrying the ball, not just for getting the work done, but also for keeping the workplace environment a pleasant one.

As an Effect of Conflict: When conflict is present in the workplace, people are generally thinking about being anywhere but at work.

3. PEOPLE ARE LEAVING - They are quitting, transferring to other departments and inquiring about opportunities for alternative placement.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we see everyone else leaving the ship, we question our own commitment to the organization and the people who work there.

As an Effect of Conflict: When conflict runs unchecked in the workplace, fantasies, dreams and plans of leaving the workplace are never far from mind.

4. PEOPLE ARE OFF SICK - They are taking time off for short term or long-term sick leave.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we suspect others are taking time off by abusing sick leave entitlements while we are at work, we feel angry with them and the managers who let them get away with it.

As an Effect of Conflict: When conflict runs unchecked in the workplace, the associated stresses can cause a variety of associated illnesses and medical conditions.

5. PEOPLE ARE BREAKING THE RULES - They are engaging in behaviors that are explicitly prohibited by laws or by policy.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we see others breaking rules with which we take effort to comply, we feel resentful – and maybe tempted to break some rules ourselves.

As an Effect of Conflict: Under the strain of intense conflict, people can feel driven to act in ways they would not consider under normal circumstances – including breaking some important rules they would normally respect.

6. PEOPLE AREN’T COOPERATING - They are failing to share information, to involve each other in decision making and to support each other in getting the work of the organization done.

As a Cause of Conflict: When others don’t keep us in the loop or treat us as members of a team, we start to see them as working against us rather than with us.

As an Effect of Conflict: Intense conflict acts as a barrier to the sort of cooperative communication that organizations rely on to succeed and thrive.

7. PEOPLE ARE TALKING DISRESPECTFULLY - They are talking in clipped tones to each other, rolling their eyes in meetings, turning away while others are talking, and trying to talk over each other.

As a Cause of Conflict: When others talk rudely to us, roll their eyes, turn away while we are speaking to them or try to talk over us, we become angry, frustrated and resentful – and respond in kind.

As an Effect of Conflict: Intense conflict makes us see others as not deserving of our respect, and our respectful behavior.

8. PEOPLE ARE GOSSIPING MORE - They are repeating stories about others, referring to each other by unflattering names, and talking each other down.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we have a sense that others are talking about us this way, it can make us feel isolated and attacked – and inclined to act defensively.

As an Effect of Conflict: When we feel people have been treating us unjustly, we are inclined to talk badly about them to others.

9. PEOPLE ARE EXCLUDING EACH OTHER - They are sitting in cliques at coffee breaks, or “secretly” arranging gatherings to which a few people are very specifically not invited.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we feel that a group of others doesn’t like us and is ganging up against us for no apparent cause, we can feel embarrassed, angry and upset.

As an Effect of Conflict: Conflict can bring people together in factions against individuals they see as being problems in the workplace.

10. PEOPLE ARE LODGING FORMAL COMPLAINTS - They are initiating/filing complaints and grievances against each other.

As a Cause of Conflict: Investigations, disciplinary proceedings, and adjudications don’t bring people together – they drive people further apart.

As an Effect of Conflict: When we feel that there is no other way to get our concerns addressed, we use the only recourse left to us. These processes are usually much more about problems in workplace relationships than around real concerns over extreme behaviors.

11. PEOPLE’S BEHAVIOURS ARE ESCALATING - They are “raising the stakes” with problematic behaviors.

As a Cause of Conflict: When we feel things spiraling out of control in a workgroup with no one stepping up to address the situation, we can feel unsupported and left to react defensively on our own.

As an Effect of Conflict: When there is no other recourse available to us to address perceived instances of unprofessional or even hostile behavior, we can feel as if we have no choice but to respond in kind to make them stop.

At ProActive ReSolutions we specialise in dealing with Conflict in Workplaces. In doing so we bring the parties effected by conflict together in a ProActive Conference to discuss what needs to be done to make things better.

If your workplace is displaying some of the Indicators discussed in this blog then a ProActive Conference might be the answer. Find out more about how ProActive ReSolutions can help by calling our Sydney Office on 02 9221 0446 or in North America call 877 585 9953.

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