Investing in Women: State Farm Insurance

Cheryl offers:  I met a truly interesting man today at First Friday Book Synopsis; his name is Dean Rubsamen. He works for my insurance company, State Farm. Though he’s not my agent, in a manner of speaking, he is. What I learned was my insurance company is changing their ways in order to give women what we want. If you’ve read either the HBR article “The Female Economy” or the book Women Want More both written by Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre, you’d know there’s a huge emerging opportunity for many businesses to capture the multi-trillion dollar sized female market. Yes, that “t” is correct; it’s not an “m” or a “b”. In the book, the research is clear about what women want and what is missing from today’s offerings in several key areas: food, fitness, beauty, apparel and financial services. We want convenience that saves us time, products that fit our needs, to be treated as intelligent consumers, and we are willing to trade up to get it.  State Farm recognizes this opportunity and is doing something about. In the words of Melanne Vermeer, cofounder and chair of Vital Voices Global Partnership, “Without women’s full participation, no country can prosper, but in order to tap their potential, women need the tools for effective leadership. There is no better investment for our world.” I’ve been with State Farm for years based on their service; now I’m with them because they are innovative.

Scott Anthony on the key to spotting disruption before it happens

Here is an excerpt from article written by Scott Anthony for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

The April 15 issue of The Economist published a simple chart that gave me chills. Look at it for a minute. What looks scary to you?

http://www.economist.com/business finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15911952

The chart displayed the number of pieces of mail sent by year over the last decade. When you look at the chart, the first thing you probably noticed was the precipitous decline in mail volume over the past few years. Indeed, mail volume has sagged 17 percent since 2006. Even though the postal service has furiously cut staff over that time period, it’s still pleading with regulators to allow it to consider additional strategic responses to address the disruption clearly affecting its business.

That’s not what scared me though. I found the years from 2000 to 2006 to be particularly frightening, when nothing much was happening in mail volume.

How could a relatively flat line be scary?

It just looked so eerily familiar. Go back and look at what happened to CD sales from 1996 to 2001. Or check out newspaper company revenues from 1996 to 2005. Or Kodak’s film sales during the 1990s. Or Blockbuster’s revenues in the early part of the 2000s. Or Digital Equipment Corporation’s revenues in the 1980s. And on and on and on.

In the early days of transformation, market leaders tend not to feel deep pain. The transformation takes root away from the mainstream, or in a seemingly non-connected market. It’s not yet good enough for mainstream markets. Or, the overall increase in consumption acts as a “rising tide” that lifts the boats in the mainstream market. This makes it easy for executives to say, “I get what you are talking about. But my business is healthy! It’s all overblown.”

It’s only after the not-good-enough transformation gets better that a “Big Switch” begins. And when that magic tipping point hits, the switch accelerates rapidly.

The lesson for executives is that it’s important to look beyond revenue or basic market share data to determine whether or not a would-be disruption is a legitimate threat. If the U.S. Postal Service had measured its market share of “pieces of communication” (which, it very well might have) it would have noticed sharp share declines even as its revenue was increasing. Similarly, while Digital Equipment Corp. might have felt great that its revenues went up from $3 billion to $11 billion during the 1980s, that growth paled in comparison to the explosive growth in the personal computer market.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

Scott Anthony is the Managing Director of Innosight Ventures. He has written three books on innovation, the latest being The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times.

Coming in June for the First Friday Book Synopsis: Daniel Pink’s Drive, and Employee Engagement

For the June First Friday Book Synopsis, I will be presenting a synopsis of the best-selling Daniel Pink book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. This has been well-reviewed, Bob Morris and I have both blogged about it on this site a few times, and it will be a terrific choice to help you think about what motivates you and those around you.

Karl Krayer has chosen a practical book on employee engagement.  All companies want their employees to be fully engaged, but attaining this elusive goal is tough.  The book is Make Their Day!:  Employee Recognition That Works by Cindy Ventrice.

Mark your calendars now for June 4, our June First Friday Book Synopsis.

(and note:  our synopses from this morning — Linchpin by Seth Godin and ReWork by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson — should be up on our companion web site, 15minutebusinessbooks.com, in just a few days).

We Could All Use A Coach Or A Good Secretary (Or A Nagging Mother) – We Need All The Cajoling We Can Get

(You might call this post “a lament for the good old days.”)

Here’s an inescapable truth.  The really good athletes are that good because they have a coach yelling at them to “stay focused,” day after day after day after day…  Oh, there are a few exceptions:  Jerry Rice, Michael Jordan – athletes who would work even more, put in extra time, on their own.  But they were the exceptions.  The rest of us are mortals  – and probably need a coach to yell at us to stay focused.

Recently, Dan Weston (who is best known as the spokesman for The Scooter Store on all those commercials — but I know him as a loyal supporter of the First Friday Book Synopsis), told me about an early version of a personal coach.  He knew a woman who would go to the offices of insurance salesmen (at the time, it was almost all men), and help them manage their time better so that they could get more done.  Her primary job – helping with the “keeping up with clients” tasks.  You know, sending clients cards every year on their birthday – that kind of task.

He said her secret was simple – she nagged them until they mailed the cards.  Dan described this as “the nagging mother approach to time management.” He said the salesmen would hire her just to get her to nag them so that they would do what they should do anyway on their own.   And they were motivated by the desire to get her off of their case – even though they paid her to get on their case!

And it worked!

It got me to thinking about my old life.  This was nearly twenty years ago, the last time I worked in a nice, efficient, multiple worker office setting.  (This was in my full-time ministry days).  I had my own personal secretary.  And, yes, secretary was still the word we used back then.  I had a few such helpers through the years, and the last one I had was remarkable.  She would come in at the end of the day and straighten up my desk.  She would always magically know when I needed what supply/resource.  But what she was really good at was this – nagging.  You can choose some other word  — pestering harassing, cajoling, coaxing…  It always boiled down to this – she knew what I needed to do, when I needed to have it finished, and she made it her job to make sure I got it done.

It is amazing how efficient I was.  I wrote a monthly column for a national magazine, I prepared some five new presentations every week, I wrote two columns for the church bulletin/newsletter every week, and so much more.  She stayed on top of my schedule, got me out the door when I needed to leave, made sure I called/wrote the right people when I needed to.  But she was really attentive to those writing deadlines.  She had to cajole; nag; sometimes more than once; sometimes more than twice.  But I got it done.

She “protected” me from distractions.  And she dealt with my deficiencies, which were many.  I should have been more cooperative.  But…(yes, I could be difficult to work with at times, I’m sorry to report).

And, yes, at times I wanted her off of my case, just as some of those good athletes have moments when they would like to send their coaches on a one-way trip to the North Pole.

But here’s the thing: It was as an amazing period of productivity.

I have read books on time management (like David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done).  I have presented synopses of such books.  These books present wonderful, clear principles, like….

Always know your “next action.”  Have a weekly meeting with yourself, to plan what you will do the next week.
Always know what to do, when to complete it, and what to do next.  Always.

I know the principles.  I try to follow such principles.

But I have difficulty.

Alas, we live in the age of administrative assistants, virtual assistants, all positions filled with good people, who do very good and valuable work.  But deep down, I suspect that for those of us who have such difficulty staying on task, saying no to distractions, carving out time for those weekly planning meetings with self – what we really need is a nagging mother or a really good cajoling secretary.

I’ve tried the tricks.  But I still remember her coming in and saying”

“I need this now – do nothing else until you finish this!”

I miss those words!

Roger Martin on the “eureka moment” with strategy

Roger Martin

Here is an excerpt from article written by Roger Martin for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

* * *

Do you find that company strategy meetings often descend into adversarial position-taking? Many people complain to me that it’s the single biggest block to strategy-making that they encounter. But getting around that block is a lot easier than you might think. The solution lies simply in posing a single question, which I believe is the most important question in strategy.

I discovered the question about 15 years ago in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, a town of 7,500 inhabitants equidistant from Green Bay, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota. We had a group of about 10 executives from a mining company in a conference room, split evenly between mine management and executives from head office in Toronto. Everybody had an opinion — i.e. what was true — but given the wide array of experiences, technical knowledge, and organizational interests, those opinions were all over the map. We quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.

Then an idea popped into my head. Rather than have them talk about what they thought was true, ask them to specify what would have to be true for the option on the table to be a fantastic choice. It was magic. Clashing views turned into collaboration on really understanding the logic of the options.

For all the options, the participants were perfectly happy to contribute to laying out the logic of what would have to be true in a cooperative way, instead of insisting on what was true in an adversarial way. By the end of the day, we had the group’s agreement on what had to be true for each of the five options for it to be the very best choice. And we had a plan for analyzing the items that were most important to hold true, but about which the group had the most reservations. The group was game to have those specific items analyzed and then come back and make the decision based on the structuring of the choices we had just carried out.

I was so struck by how well the group worked together when I didn’t let them dwell on what they thought to be true and asked them to focus on what would have to be true that from that moment on, that question became the single most important in my strategy work.

Why is it so important? The central reason is that it allows managers to step back from their beliefs and contemplate the possibility that they might not be entirely correct.

If you think an idea is the wrong way to approach a problem and someone asks you if you think it’s the right way, you’ll reply “no” and defend that answer against all comers. But if someone asks you to figure out what would have to be true for that approach to work, your frame of thinking changes. No one is asking you to take a stand on the idea, just to focus on what would have to be true for that idea to work. This subtle shift gives people a way to back away from their beliefs and allow exploration by which they give themselves the opportunity to learn something new.

* * *

To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Daily Alerts, please visit dailyalert@email.harvardbusiness.org.

Roger Martin (www.rogerlmartin.com) is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada. He is the author of The Design of Business: How Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009).