Category: Development

I recently read a great article from the Harvard Business Review (HBR) on why you should create a “shadow board” to help tackle some of the increasing challenges around adapting to changes in your market.

A lot of companies struggle with two apparently unrelated problems: disengaged younger workers and a weak response to changing market conditions. A few companies have tackled both problems at the same time by creating a “shadow board” — a group of non-executive employees that works with senior executives on strategic initiatives. The purpose? To leverage the younger groups’ insights and to diversify the perspectives that executives are exposed to.

They seem to work. Consider Prada and Gucci, two fashion companies with a good track record of keeping up with — or shaping — consumer tastes. Until recently, Prada enjoyed high margins, a legendary creative director, and good growth opportunities. But since 2014, it has witnessed declining sales. In 2017, the company finally admitted that it had been “slow in realizing the importance of digital channels and the blogging online ‘influencers’ which are disrupting the industry.” Co-CEO Patrizio Bertelli said, “We made a mistake.”

Over the same period, under the direction of CEO Mario Bizzarri, Gucci underwent a comprehensive transformation that made the company more relevant to today’s marketplace. Gucci created a shadow board composed of Millennials who, since 2015, have met regularly with the senior team. According to Bizzarri, the shadow board includes people drawn from different functions; they’re “the most talented people in the organization — many of them very young.” They talk through the issues that the executive committee is focused on and their insights have “served as a wakeup call for the executives.” Gucci’s sales have since grown 136% — from 3,497 million Euro (FY2014) to 8,285 million Euro (FY2018) — a growth driven largely by the success of both its internet and digital strategies. In the same period, Prada’s sales have dropped by 11.5%, from 3,551 million Euro (FY2014) to 3,142 million Euro (FY2018).

HBR researched companies that use shadow boards, trying to understand what they really contribute to the organization and what best practices look like. HRB focus here on three companies’ experiences.

Business model reinvention. Facing increasing pressure from Airbnb, French AccorHotels needed a new business model. Top management asked marketing to develop a brand for Millennials. However, after two years marketing came up empty. Arantxa Balson, chief talent and culture officer, decided to turn the project over to a shadow board. In 2018, the Jo&Joe brand was born. Considered “an urban shelter for Millennials,” the brand communicates creativity, flexibility, and a strong sense of community. According to Balson, the shadow board succeeded in part because they focused on their vision and developed their point of view “regardless of all internal and cost constraints.” The shadow board then gave birth to another innovation, the Accor Pass, a hotel subscription that provided people under 25 with a place to stay while they hunted for a permanent residence.

Process redesign. Stora Enso, a Finnish paper and packaging company, used their shadow board (which they call Pathfinders and Pathbuilders) to revise how the executive committee assigned work. Until this shift, work was assigned to groups that the executives considered experts and therefore best suited to the assignment. The shadow board convinced them to assign certain tasks to non-experts, arguing that an unbiased view would increase the chance of breakthroughs. One project, aimed at reducing supply-chain lead time, had stumped a supposedly expert team. The new team came up with a workable plan within six months. No team members came from the business unit in question, nor had they any prior supply chain experience.

Organizational transformation. CVL Srinivas, the CEO of GroupM India, needed to implement a three-year digital and cultural transformation. With that end in mind, he created the YCO (Youth Committee). Since its inception in 2013, the YCO has led GroupM’s Vision 3.0, making digital the centerpiece for driving future growth. Working across departments, the shadow board also led a scoping initiative focused on the digitalization of contracts. It strengthened GroupM’s ecosystem by increasing the number and improving the nature of partnerships with media owners, data providers, consultants, auditors, and start-ups. Additionally, the group noticed that there wasn’t much cross-agency interaction. To promote meaningful conversations, the YCO developed a social media platform (Yammer) that facilitated conversations between management and lower-level employees across agencies.

Increased visibility for Millennials. Research suggests that Millennials crave more visibility and access, which shadow boards deliver. This visibility often results in significant career progression for shadow board members. At Stora Enso, a female shadow board member was a group-level financial controller when she began the program. As a result of her impressive work on a project involving one of their legacy businesses (paper), she was promoted to be the sales director of the largest paper segment a few months after the program’s end. As HR director Lars Haggstrom stated, “This [promotion] would never have happened had it not been for the shadow board program.”

What are the best practices for implementing a shadow board?

Look beyond the “high-potential” group. Many companies staff shadow boards exclusively through executive-committee nominations or with already identified high potentials. Millennial participants tend to prefer a more open process. Stora Enso’s Haggstrom pushed for an open-application process — allowing anyone who fit certain criteria to apply. Doing so not only created a more diverse cohort; it also allowed the company to discover some hidden gems who would not otherwise have been on the radar. Interestingly, they tested the performance of the company’s top forty high potentials (who were clear shoo-ins for the program) against the employees chosen via open enrollment. On abilities such as data analytic skills, sense-making, and teamwork, the open-enrollment members outperformed the high-potentials.

Make it a CEO-sponsored program. In order for the program to have maximum impact, support needs to come from the top of the organization (though most are coordinated on a procedural level by HR). For example, AccorHotels’ shadow board program succeeds because CEO Sebastian Bazin plays an active role by interviewing potential members and regularly interacting with existing members. At Stora Enso, members reported directly to the CEO on issues related to the Pathfinders and Pathbuilders work.

Keep evaluating and iterating. All of the companies HBR profiled adjusted the programs as they learned what worked (and what didn’t). For example, Stora Enso’s leaders reviewed the program annually and as a result added resources to better capitalize on diversity within the shadow board and interactions between the shadow board and executive committee. And while GroupM’s YCO program originated as a 12-month program, the organization extended it by one year in order for the YCO to maximize potential contributions.

In this delightful, hilarious talk, data journalist Mona Chalabi shares handy tips to help question, interpret and truly understand what the numbers are saying in a straight forward way.

So something I often think about within the analyst community is what the role of creativity and ideas play. As analysts it can be uncommon to think creatively and often think more more logically.

The unfortunately side effect of this however is if one of us can’t solve a problem the rest, faced with the same facts and logical rationale, can’t solve it either. Additionally we can sometimes fail to seek out and be open to new ideas. Logically what we have or do today works, why change it?

There is a ton of research and development material touting much the same but the example I wanted to share is something I heard during a virtual conference recently and found quite astounding.

In the US, in 1986 seven million children disappeared from the tax records. Now assuming there wasn’t some cataclysmic event, what could have possibly changed? Well…

In the early 1980’s, an I.R.S. research officer in Washington named John Szilagyi had seen enough random audits to know that some taxpayers were incorrectly claiming dependants for the sake of an exemption (around $250 per dependant). Sometimes it was a genuine mistake (a divorced wife and husband making duplicate claims on their children), and sometimes the claims were comically fraudulent (Szilagyi recalls at least one dependent’s name listed as Fluffy, who was quite obviously a pet rather than a child).

Szilagyi decided that the most efficient way to clean up this mess was to simply require taxpayers to list their children’s Social Security numbers. Naturally the response was ‘no’, and his manager pointed out the approval process it would have to go through, the cost involved in changing the form, etc. Effectively why introduce cost and effort to something that ‘works’.

A few years later, however, with new leadership and a government desperate for more tax revenue, Szilagyi’s idea was reevaluated and put into law for tax year 1986. When the returns came in the following April, Szilagyi and his bosses were shocked, seven million children had suddenly vanished from the tax rolls, some incalculable combination of real pets and phantom children. Szilagyi’s clever twist generated nearly $3 billion in a single year.

Szilagyi’s immediate bosses felt he should get some kind of reward for his idea, but their superiors weren’t convinced. Eventually, five years after his brainstorm became the law, Szilagyi, who earned about $80,000 annually at the time, was given a check for $25,000. By this point, his idea had generated roughly $14 billion.

What really astonished me about this other than the amount is that out of the 10,000 odd employees that had worked in that department doing a similar role for decades, not a single one had presented the same idea. Something so simple, so obvious in hindsight. Perhaps if the I.R.S. had been quicker to recognised and reward Mr. Szilagyi more might have been inspired to follow in his footsteps!

PowerPoint 2010 has a new feature that’s very hard to find, but that people are praising over and over. It’s called Custom Shapes, and it’s a set of four tools that you can use to create your very own shapes. Why do you need Custom Shapes?

• To make your slides unique.
• For the flexibility to communicate your message in the way that works best for you and your audience.
• For a professional, designer (custom-made) look.

Usually, Microsoft highlights new features, but the Custom Shapes tools aren’t even on the ribbon! As a result, many people don’t know about them. First, I’ll tell you how to add them to your Quick Access toolbar, which is at the top-left corner of your PowerPoint window.

At the right of the Quick Access toolbar, click the down arrow and choose More Commands.

In the PowerPoint Options dialog box, you’ll see a Choose Commands From drop-down list at the top. Choose Commands Not in the Ribbon to make the Custom Shape commands easier to find.

Scroll down the list of commands until you get to “Shapes.” You’ll see 4  commands–Shape Combine, Shape Intersect, Shape Subtract, and Shape Union. Select Shape Combine and click Add. Do the same with the other 3 commands that start with “Shape.”

Click OK to close the PowerPoint Options dialog box. The commands are now on the Quick Access toolbar.

What can you do with these tools? Almost anything! Here’s a quick summary:

1. Union adds two shapes together
2. Subtract subtracts them; select the one you want to keep first
3. Intersect keeps just the intersection between the two if they overlap
4. Combine cuts out the intersection between multiple shapes but also makes the result a freeform so you can edit points

In this post, I’ll show you a simple example using the Shape Union command.

How to use Union to create a simple custom shape

Let’s say that you want to create a SmartArt diagram, but can’t find the shape you want. You want a space for a small, circular photo at the left, some text in the middle, and an arrow at the right. Here’s what you sketched on a napkin:

Here are the steps to create this shape:

1. Insert a circle. (Remember, you can press Shift as you drag the circle on the slide to make sure it’s a perfect circle, not an oval.)
2. Insert a rectangle to the right of the circle. Resize and move it so that it looks like the above image. You’ll see the outline around each shape, but don’t worry about that now.
3. Insert an isosceles triangle. To get the shape you want, you need to rotate it to the right. Press Shift and drag the little green rotation circle to the right. Then resize and move the triangle so that it matches up to the right side of the rectangle.

Your shapes should look like this:

1. Select all 3 shapes and click Shape Union on the Quick Access toolbar. (The command button isn’t active unless you select at least 2 shapes.)

Your new, custom shape looks like this:

Go ahead and add a photo (I added another circle on top and filled it with the photo) and text. You can add text to it, just like any shape that comes with PowerPoint!

Here’s the final result:

Now go forth and create your own custom shapes!