ET CITINGS

Globalism Analysed
October 18, 2017, 11:57 PM IST Economic Times in ET Citings | Economy, World | ET
By Pankaj Ghemawat
Business leaders are scrambling to adjust to a world few imagined possible just a year ago. The myth of a borderless world has come crashing down. Traditional pillars of open markets — the US and the UK — are wobbling, and China is positioning itself as globalisation’s staunchest defender. Countries in North America and Europe have experienced waves of anti-globalisation sentiment.
In the face of such uncertainty, leaders of multinationals wonder whether they should retreat, change strategy or stay the course. In making that decision, they need to understand two things. First, the world is less globalised than even experienced executives realise. Two, history tells us that even in a trade war, global trade and investment would still be too large for strategists to ignore.…
Recall that just a decade ago, business leaders believed that the world was becoming “flat” and that global companies, unconstrained by country borders, would soon dominate the world economy. Those exaggerated claims were proven wrong.
Today’s cries for a massive pullback from globalisation in the face of new protectionist pressures are also an overreaction, in the other direction.
While some of the euphoria about globalisation has shifted to gloom, especially in the US, globalisation has yet to experience a serious reversal. And even if it did, it would be a mistake to think of the end of globalisation: the “rewind” button on a tape recorder shouldn’t be confused with the “off” button.
(From “Globalisation in the Age of Trump”)

Givers and Takers - who succeed & where & howmuch ? 
By: Adam Grant

The takers are people who, when they walk into an interaction with another person, are trying to get as much as possible from that person and contribute as little as they can in return, thinking that’s the shortest and most direct path to achieving their own goals.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have this strange breed of people I call “givers”. It’s not about donating money or volunteering necessarily, but looking to help others by making an introduction, giving advice, mentoring or sharing knowledge, no strings attached.…

These givers actually prefer to be on the contributing end of an interaction. Very few of us are purely takers or purely givers. Most of us hover somewhere in between — the third group of people, who are matchers.

A matcher is somebody who tries to maintain an even balance of give and take.… Indeed, the givers are over-represented at the bottom. Putting others first, they often put themselves at risk for burning out or being exploited by takers. Alot of people say, “Well, it’s hard for a taker to rise consistently to the top, because oftentimes, takers burn bridges.

So, it must be the matchers who are more generous than takers, but also protect their own interests.” When I looked at the data, I was really surprised to see that those answers were wrong. It’s actually the givers again. Givers are over-represented at the top as well as the bottom ofmost success metrics.
Book Excerpt From “Givers vs Takers: The Surprising Truth About Who Gets Ahead”

( Book Excerpt ) Decision Making mixup in Big Data & Techie  Times
" Managing decisions "

By: AARON DE SMET ET AL
It’s the best and worst of times for decision-makers. Swelling stockpiles of data, advanced analytics and intelligent algorithmsare providing organisations with powerful new inputs and methods for making all manner of decisions.
 Corporate leaders also are much more aware today than they were 20 years ago of the cognitive biases — anchoring, loss aversion, confirmation bias and many more — that undermine decision-making without our knowing it.
Some have already created formal processes — checklists, devil’s advocates, competing analytic teams and the like — to shake up the debate and create healthier decision-making dynamics.
Now for the bad news. In many large global companies, growing organisational complexity, anchored in strong product, functional and regional axes, has clouded accountabilities.

That means leaders are less able to delegate decisions cleanly, and the number of decisionmakers has risen. 

The reduced cost of communications brought on by the digital age has compounded matters by bringing more people into the flow via email, and internal knowledge-sharing platforms.

The result is too many meetings and email threads with too little high-quality dialogue. 

The untangling solution: to become flatter and more agile, with decision authority and accountability going hand in hand.
Excerpted From “Untangling Your Organisation’s Decision-Making”

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" Psychology matters"
By John Devine & Keith Gilson

Service operations seem a natural setting for the ideas of behavioural science.… Companies care deeply about the quality of those interactions and invest heavily in effective websites and in responsive, simplified call centres.

Yet, the application of behavioural science to service operations seems spotty at best. Its principles have been implemented by relatively few companies, such as the telecom business, which found that giving customers some control over their service interactions by allowing them to schedule field service visits at specific times could make them more satisfied.…

Many more companies ignore what makes people tick. Banks, for example, often disturb the customer experience by altering the menus on ATMs or the interactive-voiceresponse systems in call centres.

They fail to recognise the psychological discomfort customers experience when faced with unexpected changes.

Likewise, for every restaurant that surrounds a bill’s arrival with a succession of complementary desserts — capitalising on the customer’s preference for service encounters that end positively — there are a lot of call centres that ignore the importance of a strong finish.

Indeed, many companies actively work against one by placing so much emphasis on average handling times that they inadvertently encourage agents to end a call once its main business is complete, leaving customers with memories of brusque treatment.

From “Using behavioural science to improve the customer experience”
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
Courtesy : Economic Times . 

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ET Citings 
“Winning hearts and minds in the 21st century” by Tessa Basford & others 

   
TESSA BASFORD ET AL

The psychological contract that traditionally bound employees to their employers has been fraying.… 
Job-hopping has been described as the ‘new normal’, and millennials are expected to hold 15-20 positions over the course of their working lives.

Meanwhile, middle management — the executives who traditionally act as a conduit for communication from the top to the bottom of companies — has been hollowed out ! 

 So it’s no surprise that in the face of these 2 trends, leaders struggle to get their employees to embrace big change programmes. Rather than adapt to the demands of organisational transformation, employees are more likely to resist passively, undermining the effort and spreading that contagion across the organisation.

Or they might simply decide that such a transformation is not worth the risk and look for their next opportunity elsewhere. To counter these problems, it’s more important than ever for companies in transition to invest time and effort in changing the mindsets and behaviour of the workforce.

Example : 
Digital advances can turbocharge efforts to foster understanding and conviction, thereby helping employees to feel more involved in change efforts and better able to play a role in shaping them. 
Consider how modern digital communications make it easy to PERSONALIZE messages, TAILORING them to the needs of individuals and delivering them DIRECTLY to frontline employees.

From “Winning hearts and minds in the 21st century”

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Book Extract
Cutomer Lifetime Value ( CLV ) and how to find it ?
 
By Peter Fader

As I celebrate year 30 on the faculty here, I’ve spent about half that time — well, I’ve spent all that time — building mathematical models to predict different things about consumer behaviour.

But I spent about half that time on this notion of customer lifetime value.
Can we look at what a customer has done in the past and make a pretty accurate projection of what they are likely to do in the future? And it’s not only coming up with a single number, it’s breaking it down into how long will this customer maintain the relationship with us?

How many more transactions will they have?
 What will be the size of those transactions?
 So, it takes in a number of predictive elements that, when you combine them all together, gives you CLV [Customer Lifetime Value]. I’ve been…developing these models, and they’re really accurate and diagnostic, and really good. I’ve been going to companies and saying, “Here is a cool new thing that can really help you run your business better,” and a lot of companies, especially retailers, say,

 “Ah, we’re busy.We can’t deal with all of that math stuff, we’re trying to sell things here.”

 Let’s try to motivate retailers, or the companies, gaming companies, pharmaceutical firms, telecommunications firms, by thinking about this big, broad strategy of putting the right customers at the centre of everything that we do.

From “How to Find Your Most Valuable Customers” by Peter Fader

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Debiasing Decisions

By Philip Meissner et al
Good managers — even great ones — can make spectacularly bad choices. Some of them result from bad luck or poor timing, but a large body of research suggests that many are caused by cognitive and behavioural biases. While techniques to ‘debias’ decision making do exist, it’s often difficult for executives, whose own biases may be part of the problem, to know when they are worth applying.
Our early research suggests that is the case roughly 75% of the time. Two particular types of bias weigh heavily on the decisions of large corporations — confirmation bias and overconfidence bias. The former describes our unconscious tendency to attach more weight than we should to information that is consistent with our beliefs and hypotheses, and to discount information that contradicts them.
Overconfidence bias frequently makes executives misjudge their own abilities, as well as the competencies of the business.
It leads them to take risks they should not take, in the mistaken belief that they will be able to control outcomes. The combination of misreading the environment and overestimating skill and control can lead to dire consequences.
Fortunately, debiasing techniques can help organisations overcome such biases. These techniques aim to limit the effects of overconfidence by forcing the decision-maker to consider downside risks that may have been overlooked.

(From: Are You Ready to Decide?)

ET Citings 15 July 2016

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