Editor's note: A version of this summary was provided by getAbstract.
Today’s market disrupters — startup companies that embrace digital technology — offer quality products at lower costs. Digital platforms allow these newcomers to market directly to consumers and to compete with legacy companies quickly. Incumbents can learn from the disrupters, however, by cultivating an organizational culture that encourages creativity and invests in future opportunities.
At the core of the late Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption was the startup company that entered the market with a lower-quality product that appealed to a niche market segment. Today’s disrupters, however, take advantage of digital technologies and instantly market high-quality products that are comparable to those of legacy companies, targeting the same customers.
The economics and scale of digital technology today continue to change how organizations deliver products and services. YouTube, for example, makes it possible for startups to message millions of potential customers using cellphones, whereas in the past, companies needed to engage major media outlets to advertise. Digital speed, ubiquity, and interconnectivity level the playing field by removing the entry barriers.
The infrastructure built since the beginning of the 21st century enables a startup to enter a market quickly — for example, by procuring external resources, such as developers and servers, that once required considerable investment. Incumbents who cling to old rules and rely on the obsolete doctrine of competitive advantage fail to pivot to this new disruptive economy.
Several astute companies, however, have learned to balance their commitment to their core business with their investments in the future. Nike, McGrath notes, made small investments over the years by adopting disruptive technology and ultimately changed its business model. Where it once sold to about 40,000 retailers, it now primarily sells directly to consumers, retaining just a fraction of its former retail partners. Opportunities continue to present themselves, even in this uncertain economy. One company that normally produces shutters quickly pivoted and is now offering medical shields for ambulances.
Lack of leadership and governance inhibits incumbents’ abilities to segue into the digital business model. Many traditional companies fail to embrace a process or a culture that cultivates innovation. Such a culture needs to originate from senior leadership. When leaders emphasize operations over innovations, employees will optimize the day-to-day business. Where leaders prioritize understanding trends and learning about current challenges, they can foster an environment that encourages growth and creates safe spaces for workers to introduce and test disruptive ideas.
Disrupters and incumbents alike must deal with a state of uncertainty, yet base assumptions about the market remain consistent. Your customers’ “jobs to be done” — their core needs — don’t change. Businesses and individuals still want security and stable environments. Demand for skill development and learning will persist. The current pandemic crisis also presents an opportunity for creativity to rethink skill development, worker protections, and health care.
Takeaways from the session:
Digital tools and platforms enable disrupters to offer high-quality, cost-effective products, thus challenging incumbent businesses.
Digital speed, ubiquity, and interconnectivity level the playing field by removing entry barriers.
Lack of leadership and governance inhibit incumbents’ abilities to segue into the digital business model.
Editor's note: A version of this summary was provided by getAbstract.
In his last book, the late Clayton Christensen and his coauthors observed that the best of altruistic intentions — and billions of dollars in aid — haven’t lifted countries out of poverty. Instead, Christensen advocated market-creating innovation as the key to prosperity. Coauthors Karen Dillon and Efosa Ojomo discuss the role of innovators in developing economies.
The Prosperity Paradox describes the failures of typical development aid efforts to fight poverty and the effectiveness of market-creating innovations. Since its publication, emerging entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in low- and middle-income countries have been using Christensen's framework to make the case for opportunities to build prosperity.
Innovative entrepreneurs can create new markets even in dire circumstances. The explosion of mobile communications in the late 20th century illustrates how an innovation can create a market where none existed before. In the 1980s, consultants told AT&T’s decision makers to expect around 900,000 cellphones in the United States by 2000. Based on those figures, AT&T declined to invest — and missed out on a market that grew to more than 100 times that size.
In impoverished countries, an innovation can generate its own market and create significant opportunities. History shows that this can happen even where the possibility seems remote — for example, in environments that may appear hostile to innovation.
Supportive government plays a role, but innovators can do this work on their own. In many poor countries, governments lack the financial resources to tackle crucial challenges. But the history of Western countries shows that infrastructure — such as railroads and telegraphs — first developed through the efforts of innovators who were promoting their own innovations. Only later did the government step in to manage the infrastructure.
A mistaken view has taken hold: that governments should bear all the costs of building schools, hospitals, and transportation infrastructure. In poor countries, governments simply can’t afford to do this. And entrepreneurs have proven astonishingly resourceful in building the infrastructure, logistics, and other systems that they need. The mobile telecommunications sector bears this out: The sector is thriving in almost every impoverished country, thanks to the efforts of entrepreneurs who built it without government support. Supportive governments can accelerate innovators’ progress, but typically states come onto the scene to offer support only after an innovator has created a successful business model.
Western business leaders could assist — and benefit — by viewing nonconsumption as an opportunity. Business leaders in the West should realize, Christensen and his coauthors argue, that Europe and the United States once had business environments similar to those of low- and middle-income countries today. Nonconsumption in these countries represents an opportunity for companies to create new markets, enjoy substantial returns, and simultaneously improve many people’s lives. Western organizations shouldn’t attempt to transplant what works in their own countries into developing economies, but instead should become familiar with the environments there and seize existing opportunities in context.
Takeaways from the session:
Innovators can help lift communities out of poverty and profit along the way.
Innovative entrepreneurs can create new markets, even in dire circumstances.
Supportive government plays a role, but innovators can do this work on their own.
Western business leaders could assist — and benefit — by viewing nonconsumption as an opportunity.
A crisis pressure-tests leadership and culture. Many new values are formed under the strain, and employees gain new perspectives on their organization and its leadership. Communication is the key to keeping them motivated and productive in a season of enormous distraction.
The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t my first financial crisis. No matter how well you run a business, external forces will test you, your culture, and your resolve. Leaders are constantly processing the future, and our employees are watching to see how confident we are and how clearly we see the situation. They look to us for emotional fuel and signs that everything will be OK.
Your ability to get through to your team doesn’t just depend on what you say. Your message is heavily influenced by your interactivity, your chosen communication mediums, and how dedicated you are to your larger mission and values.
Techniques to Motivate Through a Crisis
Five communication techniques have helped me build trust with, connect with, and motivate my employees during high-pressure times.
Mix up your delivery channels. In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, I sent out email memos with subject lines such as “COVID Memo #4.” These had situational information on where I was getting my news, what I was doing about the business, and what short-term things employees could do to help at work. Some were instructional, like “Start to work from home today” or “Let’s rally behind parents with kids.” Some had reflections in them. But all of them were sincere. Every time one went out, I received grateful notes back.
At the end of a particularly scary week of news, I decided to send out a video I recorded privately on Zoom. It was clear and measured. It had hope, but it was honest about what we were all hearing.
Let your employees ask questions. I soon realized that it wasn’t enough to communicate out. I had to actively listen to what my employees had to say. Even if you think you know what questions are on your employees’ minds, giving them the opportunity to ask makes all the difference in how “heard” they feel.
We started an ANA (Ask Nancy Anything) process. I really mean it, in terms of my commitment to transparency — I’ll answer any question from our staff. We use a polling tool called Slido, where employees can submit questions and vote up the ones they want me to answer. Everyone in the company can see what’s on everyone else’s minds. They also know I’m willing to respond to even the tough questions or admit that I don’t have all the answers. It’s important to not randomly select questions to address, because employees will notice if you’re skirting an issue that’s on all their minds. If you have a high-performing team, the questions will be productive and push the organization forward.
Side note: If you decide to answer employee questions by video, keep your camera on and make sure you look straight into the lens when speaking. Make sure your team sees the sincerity in your eyes so they feel that you’re speaking directly to them.
Tell stories. One of our company’s values is to let people know they belong here, and stories are a powerful vehicle to make people feel they are part of a shared culture with a past and a future.
Silicon Valley, where we are based, had issued shelter-in-place orders much earlier than anywhere else in the U.S., and it scared people. The first Monday after that government announcement, I carved out 30 minutes from our staff meeting to tell stories. In 32 years, this was the fifth financial crisis hitting our business through external forces. We told a story from each season of crisis and explained what we learned, how each crisis shaped our values, and how we emerged stronger — different, but stronger.
I have to say, in the week that followed that staff meeting, when everyone could have been distracted and unproductive, the team killed it. That first week sheltering in place, the team redesigned four training products to virtual format, which was no easy feat. Many of them stayed up late to get this new format to market to minimize the hit to our revenue.
Stories don’t just help people feel like they belong to something, they motivate people — because they subtly communicate why people’s actions will have meaning and value. I wonder whether that product would have gone to market so quickly without the stories of resilience that Monday. That week was one of our finest hours.
Leverage symbols. Be on the lookout for new symbols that can take on potent meaning in this season. Here’s one that emerged for us: We hold optional internal employee bonding events on Zoom. At one meeting early in this crisis, an employee shared stories about what she had learned in the past year from her son, who has Down syndrome. She said he had taught her to be brave, and she used the American Sign Language sign for brave. That sign has become the symbol of the season, and we end a lot of meetings with that gesture.
Recommunicate the vision. A strong and consistent company vision helps your team members feel like they’re building something great and heading toward their purpose. If you’ve been good at establishing a vision and think it will stay the same on the other side of this crisis, make sure to remind people of the longer journey. Hopefully, you are still leading them to the same place, but you are also navigating the adversity of an unexpected detour.
As a leader, when you state and restate your vision, you provide stability and build trust — the two major factors in inspiring and motivating people. At the end of one of my employee videos, I leaned way into the camera and reminded the team that we’re all still going to the same place and that when we get there and look back, we’ll all be proud of what we did in this season.
Leading isn’t for the fearful. How you show up and how you communicate can dissipate anxiety and help your team be more connected to the purpose of your company and to one another. It can also help them be productive while getting there.
Poorly run meetings have a tremendously negative impact on team success, innovation, creativity, and on individuals’ well-being and stress. In fact, experiencing a poor meeting can even result in meeting recovery syndrome, where employees lose additional time and productivity mentally recovering from a bad meeting.
My research suggests that only around 50% of meeting time is effective, well used, and engaging — and these effectiveness numbers drop even lower when it comes to remote meetings.
Running meetings right can result in many positive and energizing outcomes, including better decision-making and increased innovation, cohesion, agility, and resilience — essential outcomes as teams and organizations struggle with the working challenges of the pandemic.
The good news is that there’s an evidence-based path forward based on more than 20 years of research on meetings and teams. Meeting science has yielded key insights that can be incredibly helpful to meeting leaders, especially during this challenging time that is marked by an increase in remote meetings. (Many of these guidelines will work equally well for in-person meetings, too, when those are again possible.)
Adopt a Stewardship Mindset When Managing Remote Meetings
The best meeting leaders appear to share a similar mindset: recognizing their role as a steward of others’ time. Leaders often adopt a stewardship mindset when meeting with important customers or stakeholders because they would never want these key individuals to feel the meeting was a waste of time. Stewardship is often disregarded, however, when meeting with one’s team and/or peers.
When you adopt a stewardship mindset, you become deliberate in your meeting decisions from start to finish. Being intentional and making smart meeting choices do not take much time at all — with practice, they can take only a minute. These choices span how you set up beforehand, how you manage productivity and presence during the meeting, and how you conclude it.
Set Your Remote Meeting Up For Success
Don’t over invite. Remote meetings plummet in quality as size increases. Luckily, remote meetings can be readily recorded and listened to at twice the speed by attendees who don’t attend live. Let nonessential members off the hook and share the recording so they can listen at their convenience rather than interrupt their flow. However — and this is key — to avoid any feelings of marginalization on behalf of team members who weren’t invited to a particular meeting, give them the option to attend any future meetings on the topic if they so desire. They typically won’t take you up on it, but they will appreciate being asked.
Set time properly. Given our shorter attention spans right now, avoid defaulting to the hour-long meeting. Don’t hesitate to schedule just 15, 20, or 25 minutes for a meeting. Reducing the meeting length creates positive pressure; research shows that groups operating under some level of time pressure actually perform more optimally given increased focus and stimulation.
Sharpen the agenda. To create focus, which is often lacking in remote meetings, try organizing the agenda as a set of questions to be answered rather than a set of topics to be discussed. By framing agenda items as questions, you have a better sense of who really has to be invited to the meeting. Once the questions have been answered, you know when to end the meeting — and you can easily gauge if the meeting has been successful.
Use video. Remote meetings are subject to something called social loafing, a human tendency to reduce effort and motivation when working in a group. Social loafing increases the more anonymous one feels, akin to hiding in a crowd, and can increase during remote meetings due to the virtual barrier between team members. Using video, along with inviting as few people as possible, helps counter that sense of anonymity.
Managing Productivity and Presence During Meetings
Start and end on time. Nothing kills momentum like a 15-minute delay because people need to download software, can’t get the video or audio to work, or encounter other technical hiccups. Meeting presenters should log in five minutes early to ensure that all the technology is working smoothly. Ending meetings late is a tremendous source of stress for individuals, so don’t run over.
Start the meeting well. As the meeting leader, your mood matters. It sets the tone. Research even suggests it may produce a contagion effect on attendees in which their mood mirrors yours. Start the meeting with energy, appreciation, and gratitude, especially during this stressful time. Doing so increases the chances of a more positive meeting mood state, which promotes more creativity, listening, and constructiveness.
Establish norms. How can we expect our remote meetings to be effective if we never talk about what makes for a good one and what we should avoid? With your attendees, periodically create mutual expectations about what makes for a good remote meeting. Surface expectations, like “let’s keep all contributions to no more than 60 seconds so everyone has a chance to speak,” and give colleagues a chance to reply. To combat meeting fatigue in longer meetings, it’s helpful to set norms about when folks can take breaks, stand up, and stretch.
Actively facilitate. This is absolutely key in remote meetings. Meeting leaders must embrace the role of facilitator. Draw in virtual attendees (for example, “Sasha, please share your thoughts”) to keep them engaged. You might even consider keeping a tally to be sure all are contributing and all voices are heard, as some successful professors do. Avoid the generic question, “Any comments?” Instead, call on people specifically. Lastly, don’t let people ramble or go off course; kindly interrupting, if necessary, is your job as a meeting leader.
Use tools. Silence does not indicate understanding or agreement. Some great apps (such as Klaxoon, Mentimeter, and Poll Everywhere) allow participants to vote, an easy way to determine if the group has reached a consensus. This can be done in real time during the meeting, or immediately afterward to separate deliberation from decision-making. Use available chat room technology, not for side conversations but for attendees to communicate that they want to speak or that they missed something. For some meetings, the chat room can be used as a second channel of communication that the leader or another attendee moderates. Utilizing the technological tools at your disposal helps increase involvement and engagement.
Ending Meetings and Gathering Feedback
End meetings well. With a few minutes left, be sure to clarify takeaways. Identify the individual directly responsible for each action item. Don’t let anyone leave your meeting wondering what was accomplished or what the next steps are.
Ask for feedback. Finally, the best way to make your team meetings better is to ask attendees how the meetings are going — the ultimate act of stewardship. Send out a quick survey where folks share what is going well or not so well, and provide ideas for improvement. Then learn, reflect, and try some new things based on the feedback. Now that we have been meeting remotely for some time — and may continue for the foreseeable future — the timing may be ideal for this step.
Is it possible to achieve virtual meeting perfection? Probably not, but with focused development and intentionality, you can turn your meetings into efficient and engaging events. While you can’t control others’ meetings, you can make excellent meeting choices and demonstrate stewardship. You can be the example that you hope others will follow. Let’s commit to fixing our meetings, one meeting at a time.
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