Will Predictive Analytics Impact the Future Of Talent Management?

Here is an excerpt from an article written by John Boudreau for Talent Management magazine. He suggests that, for talent managers, “creating learning and change is as much about changing habits as it is about imparting skills or providing great experiences.” To check out all the resources and sign up for a free subscription to the TM and/or Chief Learning Officer magazines published by MedfiaTec, please click here.

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Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit, describes tantalizing evidence on how much retail marketers and others can learn from data on customers’ purchasing habits.

In Retooling HR, I suggested marketing frameworks could apply to talent, including talent segmentation, to target employment features to pivotal employee groups, just as marketers use consumer segmentation to target product features to pivotal consumer groups.

More lessons are emerging from marketing, this time from research on habits. Duhigg’s Feb. 19 article in The New York Times Magazine describes a predictive analytics scientist at a major retailer who discovered that shoppers’ purchasing habits are remarkably hard to break. Big-box retailers have lots of customers who shop for large quantities of staple items like paper towels, but do not purchase electronics, groceries or specialty foods, even though they are cheaper than at other stores. This happens because habits become unconscious.

Neuroscience research at MIT and other universities suggests the brain shuts down once the habit is formed to preserve conscious brain space. If you already know where to shop for electronics, why reconsider it?

It’s the same with habits like overeating, with complicated patterns of cues and rewards that may have little to do with hunger. Duhigg describes his habit of visiting the company cafeteria to buy a cookie at 3:30 p.m. each day. Upon analysis, it was a combination of mid-afternoon boredom, getting away from his desk and gossiping. The cookie was incidental to the actual reward, but it was no less a culprit in weight gain.

For talent managers, creating learning and change is as much about changing habits as it is about imparting skills. Like retailers trying to lure customers with low prices, traditional efforts to create organizational learning may be thwarted if employees are not aware of the habits they must first unlearn.

Retail analytics show that there are certain life moments when people open up their habits and are ready to change. The birth of a child is such a moment, but not if you wait until after the baby is born. The second trimester is a key moment when purchasing habits change. Retailers found existing customer data that could reveal with great accuracy when a woman was entering her second trimester, and they could target baby-related advertisements and coupons to her family.

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To read the complete article, please click here.

John Boudreau is professor and research director at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Center for Effective Organizations, and author of Retooling HR. He can be reached at jboudreau@marshall.usc.edu.

Apple’s Success Secret: It Makes Mistakes All the Time

Erik Sherman

Here is an article written by Erik Sherman for BNET, The CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the BNET newsletters, please click here.

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In part of the long piece that Fortune did on Apple (AAPL) — the article itself has become a story because Fortune has posted only small parts on the Web — Adam Lashinsky wrote of Apple’s start-up nature. In the process, though, he bought into an Apple-inspired mythos and missed an opportunity to explain one thing that really does make Apple different.

The lead sentence telegraphs the myth: “Apple doesn’t often fail, and when it does, it isn’t a pretty sight at 1 Infinite Loop.” But if you pay attention to the clues that people from Apple, including CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of industrial design Jonathan Ive, have dropped over the year, it’s clear that people at Apple make mistakes. They do so all the time, and it is those mistakes that make it possible for the company to come up with the products that it does. Where Apple differs from other companies is in how it makes mistakes.

Apple believes in making a lot of mistakes internally. Where Apple differs from other companies is that its standard for what constitutes a mistake is stratospheric and it doesn’t tolerate mistakes in public.

By no means are new Apple products right the first time out. The company will return to the drawing board to keep changing and polishing an idea until it does what it needs to do. Any engineering or design process at any company works that way. Where Apple parts ways with the mainstream lies first in its general standards of what’s acceptable and what isn’t, as this video with Jobs and Ive helps show.

You can argue whether the Jobsian view of perfect actually applies to what all people would like, but it clearly fits the vast number of Apple’s loyal customers. As Jobs said:

“We’re willing to throw something away because it’s not great, and try again when all of the pressures of commerce are at your back saying, ‘No, you can’t do that.’”

For most companies, “good enough” rules. That’s true for most consumers as well, though perhaps that’s because many rarely see high enough quality to make them willing to pay more. In an interview last fall on the topic of being the boss of Steve Jobs, former Apple CEO John Sculley had an interesting observation about Microsoft (MSFT):

“The legendary statement about Microsoft, which is mostly true, is that they get it right the third time. Microsoft’s philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve would never do that. He doesn’t get anything out there until it is perfected.”

And that gets to the intolerance for making mistakes in public. Not that Apple has never made product mistakes. Flawed mortals run the company, and you don’t have to look far to see evidence such as the iPhone 4 antenna problems, the recent privacy issue of stored location tracking on iPhones, and iPods that overheated to the point of physical danger to consumers. Look at what happened with Apple’s MobileMe service, according to Fortune, when it got panned on launch. Jobs addressed the engineers responsible:

For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.” The public humiliation particularly infuriated Jobs. Walt Mossberg, the influential Wall Street Journal gadget columnist, had panned MobileMe. “Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us,” Jobs said. On the spot, Jobs named a new executive to run the group.

The problem wasn’t having made a mistake. You can’t create and improve products without making mistakes. The problem was in not insisting on fixing the mistakes at a time when they should have been obvious. Perhaps that’s why other tech companies look cowardly in comparison, trying to creep along behind Apple to find the magic product features that will guarantee sales.

Competitors are used to sending out half-baked products and then fixing problems over various releases. They don’t want to see mistakes in house and close their eyes to the value of making them. Instead, they want the winning answer in advance, when that winning answer is to be willing to throw out a steaming pile of crap and start over.

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Erik Sherman is a freelance writer, editor, and photographer. His work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Fortune, Inc, Newsweek Japan, the Financial Times, Chief Executive, Advertising Age, and CIO Insight. Before going into journalism, he was head of product marketing at a publicly-held technology company and later was an independent business consultant. Follow him on Twitter at @ErikSherman or on Facebook.

Andrew Sullivan on Montaigne: “The Great Blogger”

Andrew Sullivan

Here is an excerpt from one of my favorite Andrew Sullivan blog posts in which he discusses Sarah Bakewell’s brilliant book, How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, about Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, author of Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580.

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Reflections In A Mirror

Sarah Bakewell reiterates what I’ve long argued, that the greatest blogger avant la lettre was Montaigne:

[Sullivan then quotes from Bakewell’s article that appeared in The Paris Review.]

Montaigne raised questions rather than giving answers. He wrote about whatever caught his eye: war, psychology, animals, sex, magic, diplomacy, vanity, glory, violence, hermaphroditism, self-doubt.

Most of all, he wrote about himself, and was amazed at the variety he found within…

“In taking up his pen,” wrote the great essayist William Hazlitt of Montaigne, “he did not set up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind.” He wrote about things as they are, not things as they should be—and this included himself. He communicated his being on the page, as it changed from moment to moment; we can all recognize parts of ourselves in the portrait.

In America, Ralph Waldo Emerson felt this shock of familiarity the first time he picked up Montaigne in his father’s library. “It seemed to me as if I had myself written the book, in some former life, so sincerely it spoke my thought and experience,” he wrote. “No book before or since was ever so much to me as that.” From Renaissance winegrower to nineteenth-century transcendentalist seems a big leap, yet Emerson could hardly tell where he ended and Montaigne began.

These days, the Montaignean willingness to follow thoughts where they lead, and to look for communication and reflections between people, emerges in Anglophone writers from Joan Didion to Jonathan Franzen, from Annie Dillard to David Sedaris. And it flourishes most of all online, where writers reflect on their experience with more brio and experimentalism than ever before.

Bloggers might be surprised to hear that they are keeping alive a tradition created more than four centuries ago.

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Andrew Sullivan is a British-born journalist, blogger and political commentator who now lives in the United States. A self-described libertarian and “true conservative,” he is also gay, HIV-positive and a prominent same-sex marriage activist. He has written for or edited The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine and TIME. Sullivan currently writes for The Atlantic Monthly. His personal blog The Daily Dish, published via The Atlantic Monthly‘s website, is one of the most trafficked and linked political blogs on the web.

Nicholas Carr on “the pleasure of waiting”

Nicholas Carr

Here is a recent post (June 23, 2010) by Nicholas Carr at his blog, Rough Type. I urge you to check out his articles so that you can explore the dimensions and (especially) the nooks and the crannies of his brain, one that reminds me of a Swiss Army Knife. Please click here.

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James Sturm, the cartoonist who has taken a four-month sabbatical from the Internet, continues to write (and draw) about his experience as one of The Disconnected. Here’s a bit from the “halftime report” [click here] he recently issued, after having been offline for two months:

“Whether it’s a sports score, a book I want to get my hands on, or tuning into Fresh Air anytime of day, I can no longer search online and find immediate satisfaction. I wait for the morning paper, a trip to the library, or, when I can’t be at my radio at 3 p.m., just do without. I thought this would drive me crazy, but it hasn’t. Anticipation itself is enjoyable and perhaps even mitigates disappointing results. I don’t seem to mind as much when the Mets don’t win (often) or Dave Davies is subbing for Terry Gross and is interviewing an obscure jazz producer.

“In the two months since I’ve been unplugged, I have been experiencing more and more moments of synchronicity—coincidental events that seem to be meaningfully related. … I know this type of magical thinking is easily dismissed, but I keep having moments like this. So how do I explain it? Are meaningful connections easier to recognize when the fog of the Internet is lifted? Does it have to do with the difference between searching and waiting? Searching (which is what you do a lot of online) seems like an act of individual will. When things come to you while you’re waiting it feels more like fate. Instant gratification feels unearned. That random song, perfectly attuned to your mood, seems more profound when heard on a car radio than if you had called up the same tune via YouTube.”

Sturm is onto something deep here. The Net – and it’s not just search – does seem to encourage the willful arrangement of experience, moment by moment. As he has rediscovered, sometimes it’s best to let the world have its way with you.

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Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. His new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, was recently published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He has written for many periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, The Financial Times, Die Zeit, The Futurist, and Advertising Age, and has been a columnist for The Guardian and The Industry Standard. His much-discussed essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” which appeared as the cover story of the Atlantic Monthly‘s Ideas issue in the summer of 2008, has been collected in three popular anthologies: The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Technology Writing, and The Best Spiritual Writing. Carr has written a personal blog, Rough Type, since 2005. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors and is on the steering board of the World Economic Forum’s cloud computing project. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English and American literature and language, from Harvard University.