You're doing sit-ups alongside your personal trainer. "Come on," he says, encouragingly, "You can do it. You've got this." Is he motivating you to give it your all? Apparently not, suggests lab research from Kansas State kinesiology professor Brandon Irwin. Subjects exercising with such a virtual partner actually did worse than those sweating alongside a similar partner who said nothing at all. Does this mean giving encouragement is a bad idea? Irwin won't go that far, but he does suggest that it may not be as effective as leading by quiet example. And most motivating of all in a business setting, he's found, is believing that you're both indispensable to the success of your team — yet somewhat paradoxically, also its weakest link.
How would you get the resources to jump-start a new idea in your company? Or convince people to radically change direction? Or persuade a group of CEOs to donate to a civic project? Who better to answer these questions, served up in this interview by executive editor Sarah Cliffe, than Robert Cialdini, the leading social scientist in the field of influence. In that first instance, Cialdini suggests, you need to have already some favors for the people who hold the purse strings — then you could fairly ask them to reciprocate. In the second case, people are best convinced by a respected member of their own group who can sincerely argue for change. And the third situation? Get the top execs to commit right there, together, on the spot — and then get those promises in writing. The principles of influence (laid out in a nifty sidebar) remain timeless, even as new technologies make them easier, but perhaps more dangerous, to implement.
Johnson Controls guarantees to save the International School in Bangkok $120,000 in annual electricity charges in exchange for keeping any additional savings it can generate through its efforts to make the school's heating and cooling systems more efficient. An enterprising Indian company is franchising a business in which vending machines dispense clean water (more than 200 million liters of it so far) for less than it costs to purify tap water at home. These and other companies are uniquely positioned, this HBS senior lecturer argues, to shape the sustainable, economically competitive cities of the future. The keys are new business models that optimize resources; innovative financing arrangements that match upfront costs to long-term returns for multiple parties; and careful selection of markets. (And for more on why the private sector needs to focus on improving cities, see this video from the author.)
There are quants and there are quants, it seems. If you want to get sensible answers from your big data, seek out and befriend the analysts in your organization who have a passion for solving business, rather than mathematical, problems. Focus on the beginning (the assumptions behind the data), and the end (communicating the results not as a string of numbers but as a narrative). Ask a lot of questions (Davenport provides a good starter list). And on no account should you suggest the answers you want to hear. (What decisions call for analytics? Davenport offers cogent advice in this related video).
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