Author: Nilofer Merchant

All his life, he hated brushing his teeth. Getting toothpaste onto a toothbrush can be messy if your fine motor skills are still developing. And, of course, even though you know you’re supposed to replace a toothbrush every three months, who really keeps track of that? So, Houston Diaz decided to invent a solution. And several prototypes later, he designed a toothbrush that has the toothpaste dispenser integrated into the brush itself, allowing himself and others to have a more convenient solution. And when the toothpaste runs out? It’s a natural reminder that it’s time to buy a new brush.

Even though he’s only five years old, that product will one day be on the shelves of your local Bed Bath and Beyond, or Target. And, no, as precocious as this kid is, he is not an entrepreneur, and doesn’t need to raise VC money or write a business plan.

This five-year old is able to be the inventor without also creating a company because of a product innovation company called Quirky. What Quirky does is make invention accessible to anybody — and quite possibly everybody. In the Industrial Era, becoming an “inventor” meant you also had to create an organization that could produce, market, and sell your invention. Thus, it’s been a hard gig to crack. You not only had to be able to come up with great winning ideas, you also had to deal with the complexities of financing, engineering, distribution, recruiting staff, and legal liability — to name just a few. The intensity of the organizational demands narrowed the chances that new solutions would ever actually come to market. And, of course, this slowed innovation and restrained market outcomes.

Quirky has created an innovation engine more suited for the Social Era — in which work and jobs are no longer the same thing, and collaboration happens outside of organizations as much as within it — in three ways:

1. It disaggregates the process of innovation from the innovator’s work itself.
2. It aligns interests and economics so that all parties have a shared interest.
3. It engages community to improve ideas and ultimately co-create the value.

To date, Quirky has allowed 590 inventors to bring their products to market. Anyone can submit an idea, or you can help another idea be improved, or you can collaborate in further design refinement. Over 407,000 community members (growing at a rate of about 1,000 members a day) help create the solution in a variety of ways (from voting on best ideas to iterating or actually prototyping the concept). Organizationally, this means that with 140 people on payroll, less than 1% of the people involved are “inside” the organization in the traditional sense. This is scale in the social era: scale happens not by having more people report to you, but by having people engaged with you. Interests are 100% aligned. Both the inventor and the larger community get compensated for their work.

By working with an extended community, Quirky can bring at least three new consumer products to market each week. And by “market” we mean 188 retail partners. Ben Kaufman, the founder and CEO, says there is no limit to what they can create. “Even cars?” I asked him, curious about how far his vision holds. “Yeah, sure,” he replied. Ben himself is 26 and has been on the Tonight Show to tell the Quirky story. Thus far, Quirky has brought nearly 500 products to market, since 2009 and the level of sophistication and quality continues to grow.

Back to Houston Diaz’s toothbrush. He started this project with help from his dad. When he was done, he uploaded video and watched as votes started to roll in for his “no mess toothbrush. He agitated for more support himself, even calling his dentist and asked his vote. “No one was exempt from his pitch,” says Houston’s mom, Nancy Lublin. (As CEO of Dosomething.org, she’s clearly raising someone who believes in action.) Then Quirky put it “under consideration” — a live debate takes place for vetting ideas, which entrepreneurs are encouraged to attend. Houston and his dad wore matching jackets and ties, and Houston made sure his mohawk was extra spiky. He listened as people debated his idea, and answered questions as they came up. And very shortly (in the next 3-4 weeks), they will put the product into production.

Now you may not want to be an inventor. And maybe your kid doesn’t want to either. But the Quirky business model embodies a set of ideas that every business ought to be considering, in light of the Social Era. Quirky builds on a fundamental truth of the social era: Ideas can come from anywhere, from anyone without first being vetted to see if that person is “allowed” to have that idea. And as we find our way into the Social Era, we’re going to grapple with what it means to be a leader like Ben Kauffman — more like a community organizer than a traditional head honcho. Show me a leader, goes the saying, and I’ll show you a bunch of followers. The challenges of our era don’t require more followers; they require the kind of leadership that encourages the community to build what’s needed so that anyone and quite possibly everyone can exercise initiative.

Today, a few smart people see this as “the future.” Even smarter ones see it as “the present.” Which one are you?

You might have noticed that Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has a new book out. Lean In builds on her TED talk, “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders,” which has been seen over 2,000,000 times and launched a national conversation among women.

No doubt, her book will be devoured and discussed by women. But if that’s all that happens, it will be a disservice to our organizations.

The truth is, men still hold the lion’s share of power. Sandberg shares stats that many women know almost by heart — but men may not. Women hold just 20% of seats in parliaments globally, 18% in the US Congress. Women have been at least 50% of college graduates in the US since the early 1980’s, yet the percentage of women at the top of corporate America has barely budged over the past decade. Just 21 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women, a measly 4%. Women hold just 16% of board seats, and women of color hold a tiny 3% of board seats.

Sandberg could have also mentioned that women represent less than 20% of speaker and panel spots that help confer recognition as experts in their field, or that women receive less than 3% of venture capital funding. Or that even in movie crowd scenes meant to depict “the general population”, the film industry shows only 17% of crowds as female, compared with the 51% that they actually are. Women are seemingly invisible. Without visibility, consideration is absent, opportunity is lost, and access is denied.

When I ask men how to solve this gender imbalance, they often say that the problem will take care of itself when there are more qualified candidates. But this view often hides a circular argument. How will we know when more women are qualified? When more women hold those roles! Or when those men know of more women who can hold the role. This logic might work if one could magically ensure that gender selection bias does not exist. But there is ample evidence for precisely the opposite. Gender bias exists, and both men and women are affected by it (yes, you read that right, even women can be sexist!). We are not talking about equality of outcomes here; the results show bias thwarts equality of opportunity.

I see three major reasons every manager, whether male or female, should read Lean In, and this is the first: increasing your awareness of the paradoxes facing women. One of the most illuminating sections of Sandberg’s book is her discussion of the famous Heidi / Howard study done at Harvard Business School. Professors asked students to read a case based on Heidi Roizen, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley (disclosure: she’s a friend). They assigned half of the students to read the story of Heidi, half to read a version of the case where the name had been changed to Howard. Students rated Heidi and Howard as equally competent, which made sense since their accomplishments were identical. But they regarded Howard as a more appealing colleague while seeing Heidi as selfish and “not the type of person you’d want to hire or work for.” This points to one of six common binds women face, which is that women are either perceived as either competent or liked, but not both. Similarly, a few years ago, Clay Shirky wrote a piece called “A Rant Against Women” in which he claimed that women were not being pushy enough to get his attention. Yet research shows that women who sing their own praises get penalized in society by both men and women and that women are culturally discouraged from self-promotion. When we know the research, we start to eliminate these kinds of Catch-22s from our thinking.

Knowing the research can help us acknowledge that all people have subconscious biases. Once you acknowledge that, you enable yourself to begin consciously filtering in more women, rather than unconsciously filtering them out — the second reason all leaders should read this book. You reduce the impact of your own biases by consciously changing what you expose yourself to. Whether you are a man or a woman, the odds are that you give credence to men more than women. That’s not because smart expert women don’t exist as leaders, business experts, or board members. But we tend to follow the people we already know, the ones we’re already comfortable with, and especially those already proven “worthy” — which as the data above suggests, is incredibly slanted towards men. But by being intentional about including women, (beyond the few you know by first name — Caterina, Sheryl, Marissa, Ann-Marie, Hillary, etc.) you will naturally start seeing a fuller set of ideas, and considering more women as leaders, speakers, board members, and so on.

The truth is this: There are tons of qualified women for whatever position you’re trying to fill. They’re just invisible to you right now. For example, recently an HBR blogger posted “11 Books Every Young Leader Must Read” — a list that did not include a single work by a woman. I’m sure he did not intentionally exclude women like Linda Hill, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Ellen Langer, or Carol Dweck. But he did. So as a follow-up, Whitney Johnson countered with a more diverse list. It’s not a question of lowering standards — the books on Whitney’s list were all equally well-regarded — just having the consciousness to notice that you’ve inadvertently ignored half the talent.

So here’s one immediate action item: Go on Twitter, and ask others, “Point me to 5 thinkers (who happen to be women) who I should be paying attention to. I want to #changetheratio”. Don’t assume talented women for any role don’t exist; assume they do — and get help finding them.

This brings me to the third reason I think all managers need to hear the message in Lean In. While I certainly see the value in helping women understand how to raise their own visibility by “leaning in,” we won’t unlock the economic potential of female talent and ideas until we change our systems. If your system of finding people to hire, speakers for your stage, or members for your board depends on having them step forward and ask, you’ve effectively institutionalized a bias. Knowing key facts, such as those Sandberg lays out, may help. For example: Research shows that men apply for jobs for which they have 60% of the stated qualifications while women demur unless they have 100%. Sure, we can ask women to have more chutzpah. But we can also redesign our hiring approach. The most famous example of this is probably the shift to blind auditions for new symphony musicians. In the 1970s and 1980s, most orchestras began to place a screen in front of candidates during the audition, so that judges would not know the gender of the musician. (Some savvy women also removed their high heels to avoid the telling “clickety clack” of female footwear.) As a result, while some bias still exists, women went from being 5% of all players in 1970 to being 25% of the orchestra by 1997. This result wasn’t because female musicians “leaned in,” but because hiring managers — many of them male — changed the system to prevent qualified candidates from being filtered out.

I’d like to leave you with this call to action: make this your problem. Don’t leave it to women to create change all by themselves. We needed white people to help pass civil rights laws that helped blacks; we need straights to help fight for rights for gays. And we need men to help fight for equal opportunities for women. Find a way to act. For example, pledge to phase out all-male panels at conferences. Or, if you see boards made up of only men, speak up — because companies with more than one woman on their board have performed 26% better than those with no female directors.

Women will not be able to undo debilitating, ingrained cultural biases on their own. And there’s no reason why they should have to. This isn’t just their problem. This is an economic problem. We need the talent of all our people — to bring that which only they can bring — to solve old problems with new ideas or, to come up with entirely new solutions. This will not happen if we leave a huge swath of talent out of the boardroom — and out of our benefit.

Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Social Business, Social Innovation, Social Era — are they all the same, or are they quite different? Do you know?

If you don’t know, you might be using the wrong term in the wrong context. Which doesn’t sound so bad, but the risk is misunderstanding, or quite possibly sounding stupid. It’s like using poor grammar; if you use “you’re” when you really mean “your,” some people are going to notice. Beyond looking silly, the much bigger risk — the risk to the business — is that when we throw terms around imprecisely, we risk introducing confusion into the strategy we’re trying to execute. So let’s try to disambiguate the terms so we all know what we’re talking about.

The term “social media” was popularized by Chris Shipley in 2004, as she described the impact of influencers and bloggers in shaping product adoption, more so than traditional media outlets. Because it includes the word media, and the genesis is marketing, most people think of this as the stuff the CMO and their team worry about. It’s like describing electricity by tying it to what came before it. Saying Social Media is like saying “electric candle.” It points to the new, but is still anchored in the old.

Andrew McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 about six years ago, and the emphasis was on the on software tools and platforms that increase information flow. The idea was that if we use social tools, we would share information freely both within the organization and external marketplaces. The specific definition in his book of the same name was how “how the Web 2.0 technologies could be used on organizations’ intranet and extranets”. It’s like describing electricity by describing the wires instead of the light — it’s a technologist’s point of view.

Social Business (sometimes going by the hashtag #socbiz) was a term first created by Mohammed Yunus but more recently claimed as a popular way to describe the way companies can generate greater value for all the constituents (stakeholders, employees, customers, partners, suppliers) — the idea being to add a social overlay to the existing enterprise, and thus more meaning. This second generation of Social Business terminology was coined by the Dachis Group, a marketing organization, and specifically by Peter Kim, who consults on it. Some experts use the Social Business term as the evolution of Social Media as the same tools used for marketing efficiencies can be applied to product development, customer care, or supply chain work. Some people tie it to Michael Porter’s Shared Value concept. Sometimes people use the term Social Capitalism to get to this same idea.

And Open Innovation or Crowdsoucing are often linked to any of these three terms – enterprise 2.0, social media and social business. Organizations can use social tools to improve how others work with you to create value together.

With all of these definitions around, you might wonder why I even added to the terminology when I wrote a book and coined the term #socialera. I didn’t want to create a new term, and yet I felt that none of the terms to date capture the key shifts. The term “Social Media” is limited by its connection with marketing and communications. “Enterprise 2.0” is too technological. And “Social Business” simply added an overlay to the existing framework rather than challenging the premise of an organization. “Social Era” then captures two distinct power shifts:

1. Organizational. Connected individuals can now do what once only large centralized organizations could. This fundamentally alters the structural core and role of “the firm,” and of working people. As more and more freelancers and solopreneurs enter the market, work is increasingly freed from jobs. The shift is from “value chain” to “value flows.” (An earlier post of mine on this idea can be read here.)
2. Individual. Anyone can be a game changer by using the power of their ideas. They need not first be vetted or chosen to be powerful. These largely unheard voices are essential for solving new problems, as well as for finding new solutions to old problems. Without celebrating what anyone — quite possibly everyone — can offer, people are simply cogs in a machine: dispensable and undervalued. By celebrating each person and the value only they can create, economic power is unlocked. And it’s not that everyone will, but that anyone can. (See earlier talks and posts on this idea).

Sometimes it helps to see distinctions side by side:

In some cases, we’re talking about tools. In others, we’re talking about how the marketplace economy changes. And, in some ways we’re talking how the organization changes. When we use the terms interchangeably, confusion is prevalent and meaning is lost. Unless you’re talking about marketing specifically, don’t use the term “Social Media.” The electric light bulb wasn’t a new kind of candle. Not to mention, CEOs and boards think of “social media” as the stuff their marketing team drives. If you are discussing ways social tools can be applied to all parts of a value chain, “social business” is probably the term you are looking for, although there’s still plenty of confusion with social enterprise. If you describing a reconstitution of work and institutions, then use Social Era.

No term is ever complete. Each of us are building on each others’ ideas as we collectively grapple with understanding and decoding what is happening, and what we think it means. We are all seeking clarity but are limited by our own understanding, our vantage, and by, of course, the examples we witness.

But this is not about semantics. When we focus on tools alone, I think we’re making a mistake. It’s geek chic, it’s even interesting, but it’s not talking about what is possible. The bigger point is that major changes are afoot that change value creation, the meaning of work, and the structures for our institutions.

When we conflate the tools with the outcomes, I think we risk meaning and impact. When we all use more precise language, each of us will find that people understand our meaning, and more clearly see the light.