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Three-quarters of the world’s CEOs say more emphasis should be placed on measuring the value of non-financial assets such as intellectual capital and customer relationships.

This was the headline finding of a recent study (PDF) by the American Institute of CPAs and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Considering the sponsors, it’s sort of like the Army reporting that what we really need is more battleships. Unexpected, to say the least.

But let’s give our financial colleagues credit for acknowledging the fundamental imbalance that the CEOs are referring to. Companies spend countless hours tracking financials: assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and cash flow. Many devote almost no serious time to assessing the customer relationships that ultimately create economic value.

Perhaps that’s the result of customer metrics long being seen as “soft” numbers with little clear connection to “hard” numbers like revenue or cash flow. Yet companies all over the world increasingly realize they need to correct this imbalance and that customer metrics also must become “hard.” For example, many companies conduct frequent surveys asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or company to friends or colleagues. The surveys provide a steady stream of data on customer attitudes and probable behaviors. Company leaders track this data every week, just as all companies track financial results. And they use it the way other companies use financial reports — to inform operational and investment decisions. In short, it is their primary management system.

When Charles “Chuck” Schwab returned to the helm to turn around his troubled financial firm in 2004, for example, he installed such a system. Today, the firm no longer suffers from informational imbalance. Chuck Schwab and CEO Walt Bettinger regularly discuss customer metrics with securities analysts, including an economic analysis quantifying the value of promoters and detractors. The company’s executive committee has embedded its scores in its Key Business Indicator reports.

At the fast-growing company Rackspace, CEO Lanham Napier makes a point of reading customer survey data first thing every day. Rackspace went public in 2008 — shortly before the financial markets went belly up. Regardless of financials, many companies, including Rackspace, saw their shares plummet. Rackspace’s response was to double down on its commitment to what it calls “fanatical support” for customers and launched a broad set of customer-focused initiatives, including pricing changes, a reorganization of frontline phone reps into cross-functional teams, and a commitment to building a state-of-the-art process of gathering and acting on customer feedback. The result? Customer-churn rates declined by more than one-third, the company continued its double-digit growth, and its stock price has increased tenfold over the past few years. At Rackspace, the board of directors compares the company’s Net Promoter score with the scores of key competitors because it provides a much clearer (and more forward-looking) gauge of strategic success than the traditional financial metrics.

Global conglomerate Philips also found that it could rely on customer feedback scores as a reliable measure of growth. Studying individual accounts in its lighting business, the company found that revenue grew 69% for accounts where scores increased and just 6% for accounts where scores held steady. Accounts with declining scores saw revenue fall by 24%. Moreover, its business lines which enjoyed industry-leading scores outgrew those where Philips lagged the competition by 5 percentage points. Philips used this data along with profitability figures to develop the right investment strategy for each business line and each customer account.

These companies have demonstrated that it is possible to generate hard data on customer loyalty and use them in to inform strategic decisions. We think it’s time that all those other CEOs got their wish: more information about nonfinancial assets. After all, can you really run a business without information about the asset — customers — that provides the source of all positive cash flow?

Tony Schwartz’s recent post The Magic of Doing One Thing at a Time made a convincing case for staying focused. His claim that multitasking reduces individual productivity by about 25% is well supported by a mountain of research and other evidence.

Schwartz argues that it’s up to individuals and managers to avoid the multitasking trap. But I look at it a different way: ultimately, it’s up to institutions to make sure employees are focused. Businesses and government agencies that are serious about improving productivity need to tackle this as an organizational initiative.

With increasing automation in every aspect of organizational work, people tend to be left with tasks that require judgment, thought, and creativity – precisely the kind of tasks that require focused effort and are most hurt by the distractions of multitasking. Moreover, because most work emerges from collective, rather than individual, efforts, the losses caused by multitasking multiply and spread. Here’s how:

• Multitasking workers keep others waiting for their output. When people do not have everything they need to take a task to completion, they either begin work with incomplete inputs — only to be interrupted later — or they start on new tasks, which reduces focus and the quality of work.
• When managers multitask, even small decisions can take days. Instead of spending, say, a quality 15 minutes with people, they can afford only a rushed and ineffective two to three minutes.
• Every task seems equally urgent. As a result, truly critical issues and genuine bottlenecks can’t be identified, and the organization wastes its resources solving the wrong problems.

I would estimate the net loss in productivity at 50% to 75% for an organization, compared with the 25% figure for individuals.

Most importantly: it’s far easier to stop organizational multitasking than to change individual habits. Organizational multitasking happens when people’s day-to-day task priorities are out of sync. People don’t get the inputs and support they need from others in a timely manner, or are constantly pressured to do “more urgent” tasks first. So they stop what they’re working on and start other tasks. Changing individual habits is very difficult, but all that is needed to stop organizational multitasking is a process for synchronizing task-level priorities. With synchronized priorities, people can focus on one task at a time and take it to completion without interruptions.

Organizations can improve things with three simple steps:

1. Reduce the number of open projects by 25% to 50%. Fewer projects means fewer tasks and, therefore, less confusion about task level priorities. Moreover, managers and experts can also be more responsive because they have fewer issues and questions to deal with at any one time. Working on fewer projects is counterintuitive, but it works. We find that simply reducing the number of open projects by 25% to 50% can double the task completion rates.
2. Don’t start on a project without adequate preparation. Well begun is half done, as the idiom goes. If you have everything (i.e., good specifications, clear goals, and the necessary inputs) in place before starting a project, you encounter fewer questions and issues in execution. The dependence on managers and experts is reduced, and work gets done faster.
3. Establish a clear rule for task-level priorities. For simple projects, a simple rule — project priority equals task priority — is sufficient. Project priorities are clearly communicated to everyone in the organization and whenever there is a priority conflict, people work on the highest-priority project first. For complex projects, you need to prioritize tasks based on project priority as well as whether or not those tasks are on the project’s critical path.

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team’s sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you’ve had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You’ve told them, “Update me on the deals you’ve been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me a percentage chance for each one.”

You have been diligent in managing your people and in creating compensation plans that reward consistency and predictability. You have stayed on top of the major deals. You have put in place sales training and a market-leading, cloud-based CRM system. Everyone on your teams spends hours each week typing updates, but for those 48 hours, none of it seems to help much.

Basically, you’re going into the pipeline meeting and giving your bosses your best guess, because you lack the tools to offer something more precise.

But how can forecasting sales data be such of a problem? The performance of the sales team has always been the most measurable in a company. At the end of every week, month, quarter and year, the result of sales activity is shown on the top line for all to see.

There are two reasons. First, the obvious: the higher you go in the organization, the less connected you are to the deals happening beneath you — and the more vulnerable you are to individual reps or teams, either purposely or subconsciously, altering their pipeline projections to suit their needs. This is no different from how people in non-sales functions push to create budgets and targets they know they can beat.

The second reason for the sales manager’s pain is that when it comes to gathering data about upcoming sales possibilities, companies and CRM systems rarely measure anything real. For most kinds of business-to-business selling, your CRM database is an outdated collection of anecdotes and guesses. The fewer the deals, and the longer the sales cycle, the less your “data” matches reality. The stuff that does get accumulated in spreadsheets and CRM systems looks like data — there are dollar signs and probabilities next to prospect names — but it’s not. It’s really just the opinions, guesses, estimates and suppositions of your sales team.

Thus, the terrible two days. The number you present to your bosses will look definitive, and your reputation will be staked to it. You will have padded it, of course, and your boss will push back and demand that you raise it. You’ll settle on a compromise, but you’ll leave the room anxious, because you know that there’s nothing firm and reliable to back it up.

Why is this the best we, as sales leaders, can do? Because for the most part we are collecting and summing opinions instead of data.

Some innovative sales organizations are starting to move away from the old ways. The growth of inside sales teams and the increasing emphasis on more-measurable sales channels like phone calls and emails is a start. And while CRM systems have their shortcomings, the central repository of information and leads at least gives the harried manager a single pile through which to dig.

But there will be no end to the stress, the chaos and the cognitive dissonance of the 48 hours before the pipeline meeting unless we change. We have to start caring more about sales activities, the specific actions that salespeople and sales teams perform to close more business. We need to know how many phone calls, emails, demos and visits it takes for our teams to close a deal. Then we need to measure the underlying data for each team member without requiring them to report on themselves.

(Full disclosure: Although my company does make an email product to support the sales function, it doesn’t help with the problem of tracking sales activities.)

So this is a call to innovative sales leaders, sales operations people, technology and service providers, and the top companies of the CRM industry. Let’s build the processes, the services and the tools we need to collect data instead of opinions. Let’s learn to build forecasts based on what we do instead of what we say. And most importantly, let’s help our salespeople succeed instead of weighing them down with processes that waste valuable time and money.

It’s the only way to improve those awful 48 hours. And along the way, we’ll find ways to make a whole lot more money.

Each year, twenty million babies worldwide are born prematurely or with a low birth weight, and four million of them die, most in developing nations. Those who survive often suffer from low IQ, diabetes, and heart disease when they reach adulthood. According to the World Health Organization, 75% of these deaths and ailments could be averted by simply keeping these premature babies warm. Unfortunately, current options for warming babies in developing nations are either expensive or unsafe. The incubators sold in Western countries cost up to $20,000 and require electricity — which is unreliable in developing nations. And ad-hoc solutions like positioning babies under bare light bulbs are simply risky.

Enter jugaad innovation — a cost-effective approach for creating affordable products and services using limited resources. Jane Chen, Linus Liang, Naganand Murty, and Rahul Panicker cofounded a company called Embrace to come up with an affordable infant warmer for use in developing countries — one that costs far less than incubators available in the West. The founders came up with the idea for Embrace’s frugal business model while they were all attending Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability program. After producing an initial prototype — a stripped-down version of traditional incubators powered by electricity — they traveled to Nepal to test it in an urban hospital. But they soon learned that 80 percent of babies that die prematurely in developing nations like Nepal are born at home in villages, far from well-equipped hospitals and without access to regular electricity.

That insight led them to fundamentally rethink who their users really were. Realizing that their customers were doctors and parents in villages, they set out to identify the product features that would bring the most value to these rural users. That inquiry led them to design a portable infant warmer that looks like a tiny sleeping bag and gives mothers greater mobility and more intimate contact with their babies. The bag in turn contains a pouch of a wax-like phase-change material (PCM) that keeps babies warm for up to six hours at regular body temperatures. Not only is this infant warmer intuitive to use, but it requires only thirty minutes of electricity to heat up the PCM pouch — using a portable electric heater that comes with the product. Further, this design dovetails well with the recommended practice of ”kangaroo care,” whereby a mother holds her baby against her skin (hence the company name ”Embrace”).

Most importantly, priced at approximately $200, the Embrace portable infant warmer costs merely 1 percent of what incubators in Western markets cost. In 2011, Embrace piloted the product in India, where 1.2 million premature babies die each year. Early results have been very encouraging. A preliminary study validated Embrace’s safety and efficacy with twenty infants. Embrace then undertook a more extensive clinical study of 160 premature babies. In one instance, a two-pound baby born to parents from a village near Bangalore, in Southern India, was kept in the Embrace infant warmer for twenty days and began to gain weight — bringing great joy to its parents, who had lost two babies previously.

Embrace uses rapid prototyping techniques to get fast customer feedback on new product features and to zero in on the attributes that are of highest relevance and value to rural customers. For instance, after noticing that mothers in Indian villages didn’t trust numerical displays that indicate whether the temperature is right, Embrace replaced the numerical scale with symbols indicating ”OK” or ”Not OK.” Similarly, Embrace is planning to release a future version of its product targeted at mothers who live in far-flung villages with no electricity at all: in this version, the PCM pouch will be heated — and thus ”recharged” — using a heating device that runs on hot water (instead of electricity).

Embrace is also experimenting with different pricing models — such as a rental option — to make its product extremely affordable in countries like India, where hundreds of millions in villages live on less than $2 U.S. a day. ”Entrepreneurs often fall in love with their original product idea or business model and fail to listen to customers,” Chen explains. ”We, on the other hand, have no qualms about modifying our product features and pricing again and again until we find a solution that delivers the highest value to our customers at the lowest cost for them. For us, innovation is a dynamic process that never ends.”

Embrace has already negotiated partnerships with multinational pharmaceutical and medical device companies such as GE Healthcare. The company is also working with local NGOs to piggyback on their extensive distribution networks to make the Embrace infant warmer accessible to as many hospitals and clinics as possible in countries like India. Finally, Embrace is testing its infant warmer at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University: the entrepreneurs believe there is a big market for Embrace’s product in the United States, where infant mortality rates are among the highest in the developed world. Embrace has set itself a bold target of saving the lives of more than 100,000 babies over the next three years, as well as preventing illness in more than 700,000 babies. Here’s a video interview we did with Jane Chen that talks more about this.

Embrace is a clear example of how jugaad innovators are able to find abundance in scarcity — and to share that abundance with customers and other stakeholders who also face scarcity. Jugaad innovators may lack financial, natural, and technological resources, but they compensate by finding ingenious ways to leverage social networks and their intimate knowledge of customers to create and deliver more value at less cost. In many ways, jugaad innovators embody Theodore Roosevelt’s belief that ”all the resources we need are in the mind.”

Do you know of similar frugal business models — pioneered by entrepreneurs or large corporations — that deliver customers significantly more value at much lower cost? Please share them with us in the comments below.

This post is adapted from the book Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Jossey-Bass, 2012).

What do your innovators want? What do they need from you?

Earlier this month, we invited the HBR community on Twitter to share their personal insights into what they need to be at their most innovative. “What can your organizations do to help you?” we asked. “If you tell us, we will pass your comments on.” A spirited conversation followed, one whose very richness demonstrates just what a challenge fostering innovation really is.

Innovators are, almost by definition, a diverse lot, and our discussion made it clear that different people need different things to be innovative, some of which are organizational, others personal.

“I need to get out of my mind and put pen on paper,” said one.

“I need to understand my limitations to innovate,” said another, adding “Really believing I don’t know works for me. I see new angles this way.”

“Just doing it on the side and presenting a prototype/business case has worked well for me in the past,” offered a third.

Many don’t want — or don’t expect — much from their organizations at all: “Just give me $$ and get out of my way,” pretty much summed up the sentiments of this sizeable group. “Sometimes knowing who to leave out of the innovation [process] can help,” said a similarly minded innovator, adding “Just stay below the radar!”

In fact, some (well, many, really) are, like the author of that last comment, highly cynical about their organizations’ commitment to innovation, a point that’s easy to see in their rapid-fire responses when they were asked “What are the biggest obstacles to innovation for you?”

“Lack of vision”
“Lack of focus”
“Bureaucracy”
“What’s in it for me, approach”
“Fear of change”
and perhaps most alarming, “Those with pre-set agendas (which they don’t share).”

But not everyone agreed, as the most cogent of them put it: “Sometimes I wonder if fear of change is assumed to be more common than it is.”

For this (also sizeable) group, their organizations’ structure, resources, and community are essential to unleashing their creativity (“What do I need to innovate better? Deadlines!”). And they’d like more. “More coaches and less cheerleaders,” requested one innovator, “especially when dealing with complex challenges.” “We really need mentor-coaches for complex innovation,” echoed another, “and to develop skills needed for global collaboration.”

And they’d like to contribute more, too. So many of these people, it seems, are waiting to be invited to the innovation party but haven’t gotten an invitation: “Managers often do not invite ALL employees to contribute ideas,” as one person put it bluntly. In fact, it would appear some organizations, might be systematically, if unwittingly, discouraging large majorities of potential innovators from contributing:

“I was recently told that because I’m [only] 21, I have no business giving any kind of work advice,” said another frankly.

“That’s funny,” was the immediate reply, “because once people get older, they feel they don’t have a place to recommend anything cutting-edge.”

These comments should trouble many organizations because if there’s one thing pretty much everyone needed to be at their innovative best, it was emotional safety. “Show me an innovator. I’ll show you a crazy person” — and that person needs to feel that it’s okay to be a little bit crazy at work. “To be creative and innovative, employees need mental and emotional space — and freedom to voice personal perspectives.” These were sentiments voiced more than once.

In the end, innovation in established companies is always something of a paradox. True iconoclasts and major-league risk takers tend to start their own businesses. Corporate innovators are something of a different breed: undoubtedly creative, definitely passionate, often very original, but also seekers of community (sometimes), organizational validation (almost always), structure (of various sorts), and the resources and security established companies could provide, if so moved.

What do your innovators ultimately want? Maybe it was this reply that best summed up the challenge, the paradox, and the insecurities facing your company’s innovators: “Give me the freedom to work myself out of job, but then still have one.”

But don’t take my word for it, click here and see a far fuller range of comments, uncensored, for yourself. And if that piques your curiosity, see what everyone’s talking about right now, and join in.

	MORE ON KNOCKING DOWN BARRIERS TO INNOVATION
	The Myths That Prevent Change
	Why We Can’t See What’s Right in Front of Us
	The Biggest Obstacle to Innovation? You.
	To Innovate, Turn Your Pecking Order Upside Down

Every day brings some new bit of information — or hype — about social business. If you actively follow the social space, it’s easy to get caught in the never-ending stream. If you don’t, you may find all the talk about social overwhelming. So it’s useful to step back, gain some perspective and see the bigger picture.

And it is a big picture. Communication revolutions like this have happened before, but you have to go back to Gutenberg in 1450 to find one as significant. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, monks laboriously produced written manuscripts and few people could read. The printing press changed all that, ushering in an era of mass communication.

The combination of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices ushers in an era of mass collaboration. These new technologies allow anyone to connect to anyone and everyone, at any time — and there are already signs that the relationships we have with ourselves, with each other, and with our institutions are changing in response.

We are still early in this social revolution, so exactly how these changes play out is yet to be determined. But the general outline is coming into view along six trajectories. As you read each one, ask yourself how well they apply to your organization or work. Your answers will tell you more about where you are in the social revolution than how many likes you have on Facebook or followers on Twitter.

1. Media: From Audience to Community
The first shift relates to media and the evolution of audience to community. For five hundred years, we have lived in a world of broadcast media. We are accustomed to thinking about media as a channel to distribute a message to an audience. But as “one-to-many” becomes “many-to-many,” our audiences become communities. Audiences once passive, anonymous, and isolated are suddenly active, empowered, and connected. You aren’t giving a lecture anymore; you are hosting a dinner party. Your success is determined by how well you connect people together and keep the conversation going.

2. Individuals: From Consumer to Co-Creator
The second shift affects our identities as individuals. With the evolution from passive audiences to active communities, we shift from consumers to creators. In commerce, customers participate in the the quality of services (Yelp), the design of products (Threadless), and even their manufacture (Shapeways). In education, students don’t just consume, but co-create their education in flipped classrooms (Khan Academy, TED-Ed). In government, citizens suggest ideas and participate in the policy process through open government. Social technologies are empowering individuals, enabling them to find their voice and take collective action.

3. Brands: From Push to Pull
The third shift affects brands and the ways they engage customers, employees, and the public. In a social age, people don’t like to be pushed. They don’t need brands to tell them what to buy, where to buy, or when to buy. Their social networks do this for them. It’s why the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi recently declared that “Marketing is dead.” Furthermore, the fragmentation and cacophony of the social bazaar drowns out even the loudest megaphone. As I’ve written in earlier posts, brands need to learn how to attract people into orbit around their brand by generating social gravity.

4. Organizations: From Hierarchies to Networks
Organizations are also experiencing a shift as employees become more empowered and connected. Formal hierarchies are giving way to informal networks. One of the most fascinating examples of this transformation is the U.S. armed forces over the last decade. After 9/11, the military realized it was now fighting a network of “super-empowered, hyper-connected” individuals. Its leaders recognized that the traditional command-and-control hierarchy would not be smart or fast enough to defeat a networked enemy. It would take a network to defeat a network. As chronicled by Ret. Gen. Stan McChrystal, the military created new doctrine, new training, and new strategies to empower soliders as not only warriors but nation-builders, and promote information sharing and collaboration around a shared purpose. In the coming years, companies will need to make a similar transformation to serve their own empowered and connected constituencies.

5. Markets: From Products to Platforms
The basis of competitive advantage is shifting from products to platforms. The shift is most notable in the technology arena. Apple’s dominance is due to the success of its platform more than its products. Other companies make an excellent smartphone. But the iPhone is a superior platform for creating a seamless experience through iTunes, the App Store, and now iCloud. Facebook is increasingly a platform for other companies, most notably Zynga, the social gaming company. This same shift is taking place in media (Huffington Post) and financial services (AmEx). Competition is becoming how well you create platforms from which you can (a) bring products to market, (b) grow an ecosystem of partners, and (c) pull key constituencies into orbit.

6. Leadership: From Control to Empower
As with any change, it takes leadership to make these shifts. But the social revolution is calling for a new kind of leadership. It took different skills to manage hierarchies and influence audiences. The new leadership challenge is how to design networks, build platforms, and engage communities. It takes a higher level of authenticity, transparency, and purpose, combined with a commitment to excellence, responsiveness, and performance. What Michael Beer and Russ Eisenstat call Higher Ambition leadership. In the social age, the nature of power shifts from how much you control to how well you empower.

Regardless of what happens to Facebook, these fundamental shifts are happening and will affect every aspect of our lives. It’s useful to keep in mind that Gutenberg’s press led to some very big changes: the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and the rise of the nation state (see The Printing Press as an Agent of Change by Elizabeth Eisenstein). Granted, it took 300 years for all these changes to take place. But at the pace things move today, we should be counting in decades rather than centuries.

Ever been shut down by someone who supposedly knows more than you? It happens to me daily. I get denied by people that are more senior, more polished, and more knowledgeable than me. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed professional rejection, but I try my best to dust myself off and move forward, reminding myself that that a series of controlled failures are necessary for eventual success.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one getting ignored because of my inexperience, and the rejections can be downright vicious. Just last week, Kate called me in tears after attending a media conference with well-known industry bigwigs. After spending months anxiously anticipating meeting her professional heroes, she couldn’t have been more disheartened on the day of the event. Noting that she had been working in the industry for less than a year, most executives simply refused to engage in conversation with her, and the ones that did spoke to her in a condescending, suspicious manner that made her “feel like a kid who was inconveniencing a gathering of distinguished adults.” She flew home categorically disillusioned.

As a proud supporter of the young, I was disgusted at the extent to which she was repeatedly shunned for, essentially, being too inexperienced. Yes, young and ambitious people with bright eyes and open hearts need to learn to accept the cold shoulder of established industry gatekeepers, even when it seems like the only goal of the latter is to prevent new ideas and innovation bubbling to the surface of their tired companies and low-growth industries. But a line needs to be drawn between not fully engaging with the inexperienced (painful, but understandable) and making them feel like they’ve committed a crime with their lack of knowledge and years under their belt (not okay, ever).

More importantly, though, I’m disheartened at the response — at how those with limited experience beef up resumes, wear expensive suits, use industry jargon liberally, name-drop awkwardly, and generally try to paper over cracks in an effort to mask inexperience and appeal more to bosses, investors, or interviewers. Why are we playing dancing bear in the circus of the experienced? Everyone knows that you don’t have “deep expertise in retail” when you’re only three years out of grad school. Trying to sound more experienced than you are is a flawed strategy, so you need to change the way you compete.

Instead of forging the impression of experience, I’d rather we turn the tables and use our inexperience as an advantage in the organizations we work for and the companies we start. In other words, we need to start playing to our strengths.

Being inexperienced means you’re not shackled with decades of service in a narrow vertical and the accompanying entrenched biases and relationships. You have natural qualities to offer that companies spend millions of dollars per year in training budgets trying to replicate in their most senior executives. You question long-held assumptions, cross-pollinating your projects with outside ideas. You don’t have to pander to the person who did you a favor all those years ago, and more generally, you don’t have social capital within your organization to protect. This means you’re pretty free from some huge barriers to innovation: sunk costs, self-interest, and bias. That sense of freedom and independence leads you to think that hitting that stretch goal is possible, which makes achieving it more likely. You tend to think of new solutions quickly, refuse to compromise yourself out of existence, and are a native end-user of technologies that could blow existing business models to bits. All this amounts to at least two things: 1) The best organizations should wage wars for people like you, and 2) you can stop looking for opportunities to appear to be adding value. Instead, you can actually add value.

If those nagging self-doubts return, don’t look up to role models for inspiration; look around at your peers for evidence. Writing Passion & Purpose showed me how countless young people have impacted the world in incredible ways, and how they’re doing this in public, private, and nonprofit sectors, across industries, within established organizations and in their own companies. Most importantly, they’re making a difference in industries that they haven’t spent the better part of their lives in. You can join them.

Inexperience doesn’t equal ineptitude, and we need to stop treating young professionals like second-class citizens. To those of you who think that your inexperience is a chronic disadvantage, stop. Don’t let anyone confuse your inexperience in performing a task with an inability to perform it. Instead, be encouraged and seize the opportunity to remain humble, play to your advantages, and show the world you can do better.

The new millennium has not brought much progress for women seeking top leadership roles in the workplace. Although female graduates continue to pour out of colleges and professional schools, the percentages of women running large companies, or serving as managing partners of their law firms, or sitting on corporate boards have barely budged in the past decade.

Why has progress stalled? A recent study suggests the unlikeliest of reasons: the marriage structure of men in the workplace.

A group of researchers from several universities recently published a report on the attitudes and beliefs of employed men, which shows that those with wives who did not work outside the home or who worked part-time were more likely than those with wives who worked to: (1) have an unfavorable view about women in the workplace; (2)think workplaces run less smoothly with more women; (3) view workplaces with female leaders as less desirable; and (4) conside female candidates for promotion to be less qualified than comparable male colleagues.

The researchers also found that the men who exhibited resistance to women’s advancement were “more likely to populate the upper echelons of organizations and thus, occupy more powerful positions.”

Their conclusion? “Marriage structures play an important role in economic life beyond the four walls of the house.” They affect how people view gender roles and how they categorize others. And, as Harvard professor Mahzarin Banaji has documented in her work, using the Implicit Association Test, this can happen even unconsciously.

So even if a male boss explicitly states — and believes — he supports women in leadership, he might still exhibit contradictory behavior or remain oblivious to the obstacles that female colleagues face. Indeed, according to this HBR Research Report from the Center for Work-Life Policy, only 28% of men, compared with 49% of women, see gender bias as still prevalent in the workplace.

I saw this in my own research for Ending the Gauntlet: Removing Barriers to Women’s Success in the Law. Many of the women partners I interviewed described a lack of support and sponsorship from key men in their firms. Several talked to male colleagues who admitted that the success of married women as equity partners invalidated the choices they and their wives had made about how to divide the responsibilities of work and family.

These biases are understandable. It’s natural to seek validation for the choices, and particularly the sacrifices, you have made. But when this expresses itself in attitudes and actions that make it difficult for talented individuals whose choices have been different to advance, it is critical for workplace leaders to intervene.

In light of all we know about unconscious bias, including the new research on marriage structures, it is clear that organizations need to rethink old approaches to women’s advancement. We need better training so everyone understands how their own experiences might affect their perceptions about their colleagues’ fitness for leadership. Increased awareness is the first step on the path to change.

You want to start a business. So you need a plan, right? No. Not really.

As part of the research for a book I’m co-authoring — Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, due out in August from HBR Press — my colleagues and I interviewed and surveyed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs around the globe to better understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur and build a really great business. One of our most striking findings was that of the entrepreneurs we surveyed who had a successful exit (that is, an IPO or sale to another firm), about 70% did NOT start with a business plan.

Instead, their business journeys originated in a different place, a place we call the Heart. They were conceived not with a document but with a feeling and doing for an authentic vision. Clarity of purpose and passion ruled the day with less time spent writing about an idea and more time spent just doing it.

It’s not that all planning is bad. It’s that efforts to write the “perfect” business plan usually lead to being precisely incorrect rather than approximately correct. One problem is that the content that most people focus on in business plans has little to do with the reality that will actually emerge. Many start-up plans emphasize some gigantic potential market and how getting just the smallest sliver of it will make them and investors rich. A colleague of mine offers the hypothetical example of selling a bar of soap for a dollar every month to just 0.5% percent of the people in China. It’s nearly a $100M business! Good luck making it happen, though.

At a business’s inception, resources are limited, and the best content for a business plan is real-world data based on testing aspects of the concept. These experiments need not be complex. You want simple, iterative tests that are easily measurable and let you know whether you are winning or not.

It’s not just start-ups. The strategic architecture of any business should incorporate facts from real world testing to allow one to adjust course as necessary. This is what Henry Mintzberg, a seminal figure in competitive strategy theory, once described as “emergent” or “evolutionary” strategy. My business partner Mats Lederhausen (formerly global head of strategy for McDonald’s as well as former Executive Chairman of Chipotle) has his own saying for it: think big, start small, then scale or fail fast.

So don’t worry too much about a business plan. But to guide your thinking, improve a pitch to prospective investors, or better align your teams, consider these design points:

1. Identify and clearly articulate your Heart and purpose. Whether you want to call it vision, Heart, purpose or calling, be very clear on the why of a business — the bigger goal at hand.

2. The team is more important than any idea or plan. The top three priorities should be people, followed by people, and then people.

3. Think big, start small, then scale or fail fast. Per Lederhausen’s advice, set the right first “start small” milestone; it will usually involve seeing people’s willingness to buy or at least try your product.

4. Focus on a well-defined market sub-segment or niche. At least to start, think of where you can potentially be the best. This strategy is almost always more successful than being just another player in a massive market.

5. Understand your business model. How you will make money is more important than pages of Excel showing financials that are simply too hard to predict at this early stage anyway. Understand instead the basic way you will make money – is it through transactions, advertising, subscriptions, etc?

There appears to be a perennial market for how-to classes, books, and templates that promise almost “color by number” instructions for populating business plans. While aspects of those tools are helpful for a structured approach, they are more likely to mislead because of their emphasis on completing the plan of a business before uncovering its soul and demonstrating whether others connect with it. People feel a sense of accomplishment upon completing their plan, but what does that plan really get them? Filling worksheets can never replace zeroing in on the passion and purpose of your business. That Heart has to be there day one. The most researched business plan holds little value without a genuine Heart behind the idea and the Guts to just get it going.

You probably think that the barriers to innovation are negative elements of your organization — that is, the wrong people, behaviors, and processes. But the most subtle and pernicious barriers to innovation may be the seemingly positive myths about what has made your organization successful.

Every organization has myths about who are the great leaders, what are the behaviors to admire and imitate, what business you are in, what customers want, what are the best skills to run a process. Whenever someone proposes an idea, it is explicitly or implicitly screened with the myths. Unfortunately, the competitive landscape changes, but the myths don’t.

Consider Bang & Olufsen, the Danish manufacturer of music players and speakers. Its people have believed that its success depended on achieving the ultimate pureness of sound, creating beautiful objects, delighting users through great physical product interfaces, and thinking of music as a home experience. As a result, it has viewed architects and industrial designers as the best interpreters of customers’ aspirations.

These myths impeded Band & Olufsen from reacting to the rise of MP3 digital encoding. MP3 technology has radically changed the world of music by making music more accessible, shareable, and embedded in the net. But MP3 conflicted with B&O’s beliefs because it downgraded the quality of sound, replaced nice speakers with small headphones and computers, made the digital sphere more relevant than the physical objects, and made listening to music a dynamic on-the-go experience rather than a static at-home experience.

As a result, B&O was slow in capturing the opportunity of this “outlandish” technology. Even when MP3 eventually became dominant, B&O’s myths remained the same: Its people accepted MP3 as something they “had” to use, rather than something they “wanted” to use. Today the Danish company is still struggling to cope with the digital revolution.

Myths are pernicious barriers to innovation because they are so deeply and silently embedded in an organization that they almost hypnotize it. I’ve been recently inspired by I miti del nostro tempo (The Myths of Our Time), a book by the Italian philosopher Umberto Galimberti. He says that “myths are ideas that own and govern us by means that are not logical but psychological, and therefore are rooted in the depths of our soul. These are ideas that we have mythologized because they give no problems, they facilitate judgment; in a word, they reassure us.”

Galimberti talks of individuals. But the same dynamics happen in organizations.

What’s the remedy? Galimberti’s advice is that because “myths prevent us from deeply understanding the world … we must therefore put our myths under critical scrutiny…”

I couldn’t agree more. You need to challenge the untouchable myths of your organization. The next time someone proposes an idea that looks wrong or outlandish, try the following:

Identify the myth to be challenged.
Myths are often connected to the parameters you use to judge an idea. So identify the parameter that makes this idea wrong. For example, imagine you are a leader in a corporation that produces industrial robots and someone proposes the bizarre idea of using robotic arms in amusement parks to swirl people around on scary rides. This idea conflicts with a major myth in your industry: Value comes from safety, which involves keeping robots and humans apart.

Now, instead of challenging the idea, try the opposite: Challenge the myth. For example, what if there is a value in industrial robots being dangerous? What if there is a value in bringing humans close to them?

Seek an outside perspective.
Given that myths are deeply rooted into your organization, it’s hard for you to criticize them. You need to look at the myth through third parties’ eyes. So ask someone outside your company to answer the questions posed above. You might ask designers of amusement parks or experts on virtual games about the value of using robots in amusement-park rides. They will tell you that people in amusement parks value the feeling of defying scary machines and the unpredictable movements of robotic arms.

Reconsider the outlandish idea.
Be nice to your myths; the purpose of this exercise is not to destroy the myths but to reinterpret them. Leverage the idea of a robot being dangerous by creating a scary ride with fearsome sounds. But of course, make sure the ride is totally safe.

The outcome of this critical analysis of the myth may be surprising. Indeed, nowadays there are more than 250 “Robocoasters” in amusement parks around the world — to the delight of teenagers and the bewilderment of traditional robotic manufacturers who judged this idea as outlandish.

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