A conversation with CEO Eric Schmidt

Few would dispute that Google sits at the center of the Internet. As the leader in search, Google is now the Internet’s premier brand and the planet’s most potent free service. Managing that commanding position falls largely to seasoned technology executive Eric Schmidt, who in 2001 was tapped for the CEO post by Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Click Here to follow more on this article.

Building the next-generation business leader

How (And When) to Motivate Yourself

I woke up this morning to pouring rain and temperatures in the low 40s. I had planned on going for an early bike ride in Central Park but now I wasn't so sure. I like to get some exercise every day and given my commitments for the rest of the day, this was my only opportunity. But did I really want to get so wet and cold?
I decided to go for it, though I continued to question myself as I put on my biking clothes and got my bike out of the basement. I paused under the awning of our apartment building, as rain streamed down on either side of me.
A friend of mine, Chris, happened to be dashing home to avoid the rain and stopped under the awning for a second.
"Great day for a bike ride," he said, before running on.
He's right, I thought, this is dumb. I stayed under the awning for a few more minutes as I considered retreating into the warmth of my apartment.
Finally, knowing that I'd feel great after a good, hard ride, I got on my bike and took off, pedaling hard. The initial sting of the cold rain had me questioning myself again but I kept going.
Then, after less than five minutes, the rain stopped bothering me. And after a few more minutes, it felt kind of good. Invigorating. It turned out to be a great ride.
When I got back to the apartment building — drenched, a little muddy, and with a big smile on my face — one of my neighbors commented on how motivated and disciplined I was to be out on a day like that.
But he was wrong. My ride in the rain taught me a good lesson about motivation and discipline: we need it less than we think.
"I didn't need to be motivated for long," I laughed. "Just long enough to get outside."
Because once I was already in the rain, it took no discipline to keep riding. Getting started was the hard part. Like getting into a cold pool. Once you're in, it's fine. It's getting in that takes motivation.
In fact, when you think about it, we only need to be motivated for a few short moments. Between those moments, momentum or habit or unconscious focus takes over.
I write at least one post a week. Does that take discipline? Sure. But when I break it down, the hardest part — the part for which I need the discipline — is sitting down to write. I'll find all sorts of things to distract me from starting. But if I can get myself to start a post, I don't need much discipline to finish it.
Need willpower to work on something difficult? Ask yourself when you need that willpower the most. Received feedback that you should talk less in meetings? Figure out when are you most susceptible to blabbing on. Trying to maintain a commitment to yourself or someone else? Identify the times when you are most at risk of violating that commitment.
Then, whatever you do, don't give up in the moments when you're most vulnerable. Don't give up the bike ride while standing under the awning watching it rain. Even when your friend tells you you're crazy to go out.
In other words, never quit a diet while reading the dessert menu. It's too tempting. That's not the right time to second-guess your commitment. It's precisely the time to use your willpower and discipline.
We waste a lot of time, energy, and focus second-guessing ourselves. Am I doing the right work? Is this project worthwhile? Is this employee going to work out? That moment-by-moment deliberation is a distraction at best and sabotage at worst. If you keep asking yourself whether a project is worth working on, you'll reduce your effort on that project — who wants to spend time on something that might fail? — and doom its success.
On the other hand, it's impossible to ignore those feelings of uncertainty. The solution? Schedule them. Create an established time to second-guess yourself, a time when you know your commitment won't be weakened by the temptations of the moment. If you're going to break the diet, do it when your need for willpower is at its lowest. Decide to decide the next day, maybe after a healthy breakfast or a little exercise, when you know your inclination to stick to your goals will be naturally high.
Then, if you decide to stay on the diet, commit fully and powerfully until the next scheduled time to deliberate. Knowing you have a planned pause allows you to focus and concentrate without hesitation until the established time to second guess yourself.
And if you do eventually decide to change your commitment, you'll know it's not from momentary weakness. It'll be a strategic, rational, intentional decision.
What's important is that your moment of choice is when you are in the right state of mind — when you need the least willpower — to make the best decision.
Which is why, sitting here at my computer, dry, comfortable, and having had a great ride today, I've decided to go out again tomorrow.

Source: By Peter Bregman (Harvard Business Review)

Signs Point to Strong April Jobs Report

Today’s ADP employment report showed the private sector added jobs for the third month in a row. The 32,000 jobs added in April was in line with what economists expected, while the report itself is expected to foreshadow an even more robust jobs  report coming Friday from the  federal government.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is expected by economists to show the U.S. economy grew anywhere from about 180,000 to 189,000 jobs in April. If so, that would be the biggest gain since Nov. 2007. In March, the economy added 162,000 jobs, a number the BLS is likely to revise when the April numbers are released in two days.
“The slow pace of improvement from February through April is consistent with the pause in the decline of initial unemployment claims that occurred during the winter months,” explained Joel Prakken, chairman of Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC. The ADP report is drawn from the payrolls the company processes for several hundred thousand U.S. clients. ADPs partner Macroeconomic Advisers handles the statistical analysis.
Prakken observed that the ADP report doesn’t include government hiring. The BLS report does, and will include the thousands of temp jobs added by the U.S. Census Bureau. Still, the ADP report estimated that 50,000 jobs were added in the service sector,while manufacturing added 29,000. Nearly all the new jobs came from companies larger than 50 employees.
The feeling that the economy is on the mend and that things may be looking up is beginning to be shared by Main Street citizens. Last week, the Consumer Confidence Index jumped more than 5 points. It now stands at 57.9, more than 18 points abover where it was in April of last year.
Says Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center: “The Index is now at its highest reading in about a year and a half (September 2008, 61.4). Consumers’ concerns about current business and labor market conditions eased again. And, their outlook regarding business conditions and the labor market was also more positive than last month. Looking ahead, continued job growth will be key in sustaining positive momentum.”
Another economic indicator, the number of jobs advertised online, also took a big positive swing in April. The Conference Board’s Help Wanted OnLine Data Series showed there were 4.15 million openings advertised online in April, an increase of 222,700 jobs over the March count.

5 Steps Toward Making an Indispensable Recruiting Team

During this economic downturn, recession, slump — pick your phrase — we have seen more contract recruiters and search companies take a hit. Not a surprise. Fewer hires, and thereby less to outsource to third parties. As I talk with third-party recruiting organizations, many are trying desperately to branch out into other industries, get new accounts, and market. Many are changing terms and offering discounts. This behavior was expected, and as with the time after the Internet boom, and there are a percentage of these staffing companies that just won’t make it. There are a number of contract recruiters who will also want to go inside.

However, our U.S. economic situation may not allow for expansion of RPO or the conversion of contractors to full-time hires.

    * HR transformation (defined as increasing the percentage of HR specialists in recruiting, compensation, OD, and other HR disciplines) has been a trend for several years.
    * Many organizations have already made the decision to re-invest in their internal recruiting organizations or transfer to RPO
    * Out-of-work contract recruiters and those working for RPO/search firms who were laid off are going to find that their brothers and sisters in corporate recruiting have also been let go. So how is there possibly room for an executive search or RPO veteran on the inside, let alone getting transactional business?
    * Hundreds, if not thousands, of corporate recruiters have their goals and objectives directly tied to open requisitions, and with requisitions being down, why outsource?

How did we get to our current situation? How did we so closely link the entire function to transactional work? Why didn’t we align recruiting to business objectives, like procurement, finance, and information technology have done? We had the opportunity to transition to talent organizations built with strategic leaders and rely on partnerships or flexible staffs to do variable work. As staffing experts, we should have known better.

We should have learned from our manufacturing colleagues, who eliminated part-time workers and outsourced shift labor in exchange for full-time efficiency, quality, and safety experts. From our IT colleagues, who stopped programming in house and swapped headcount for MBA business analysts that sit with the business and solve problems. But what is done is done. There are recruiters with no jobs to fill, and thus no need for recruiters.

Our leaders need to retool the function and staff to a headcount level that disregards the number of positions filled annually.

What? You want me to build a recruiting organization and not use the number of hires we have to indicate how many people should be on the team? Exactly.

Let’s admit something first. For years we have been measuring time to fill, cost per hire, and all these different metrics, and benchmarking ourselves against world-class companies. Google does this, and Microsoft does that. Honeywell does this and GE does that. Now we have no reqs open (or considerably fewer open) and we have a bunch of managers looking around saying “what are you doing recruiting?”

Well, most companies don’t have brands like Google or Microsoft, and many don’t have the HR/project management excellence of Honeywell or General Electric. So why do we continue to try to mimic their every move? While mimicking we used inflated numbers and transactional data to build our recruiting operations and now we have nothing to operate on, and thus we are expendable. We became the manufacturing plant that needs to be shut down because nobody is buying cars.

Take this time to look at your remaining group and rethink. Here are some steps to get you started on building an indispensable team, and one that will retain employees in the new economy:
Evaluate the Team

Figure out if there are team members in your organization who were hired based on the simple fact that they can handle managers and fill reqs when open. This group may need some training. Get them trained up on project management, special initiatives, and communicating with managers regularly and regardless of hire. Of course they may feel like they are targets for dismissal now, and may be looking at industries that are hiring and ready to make a switch. So talk to them. Get an understanding of their point of view, and then craft personal development plans as needed.
Talk to Leaders About Their Plans

Get a handle of the attrition and retention rates of your company historically, and ask the CEO and executive suite what the real plans are. Are you letting people go? Acquiring? Divesting? Get a handle on the new volume — not so you can divide up the reqs, but so you can create a service organization that can enable the business. You need to plan on some hiring eventually, and your team needs to be customer-service oriented, and ready for anything in this new economy. Now is not the time to start adding hiring managers to each member of your team; instead, set a tone where each recruiter spends more time with each hiring manager.
Prepare for More Work

Assume that it will be harder than before to perform staffing. The talent marketplace may have increased, but that does not always mean it is easier. Look at the facts: we were already on track for talent shortage with the baby boomers retiring, and that generation lost 40% of its net worth. You think they are retiring now? No, they are staying put, and likely not moving around. With real estate in the tank, few can sell their houses. With more dual income families than ever before, having the spouse leave the other job is going to be difficult. We already have more applicants applying per requisition, meaning more to go through. We are having more conversations with managers about hiring the unemployed or the underemployed. There are more people on LinkedIn, Twitter, CareerBuilder, and Monster than ever before. By the way: remember that we stripped recruiting resources to the bone, so all this extra work has to get done by fewer people. So plan accordingly. Use technology, outsourcing, and flexible staffs to get the extra stuff done. Don’t simply hire more recruiters. Remember you are on a roller coaster.
Keep Driving Initiatives

Lay out all the projects that need to get done in the next 12 to 24 months and assign project leaders with retention in mind. This includes ATS upgrades, university relations programs, interview training, etc. Assume that you are staffing like you used to, so what areas needed improvement then? Start now. Figure out how long it will take and how much your team is capable of doing. If you can do it all, great. Likely you can’t. I may live in a house, but it does not mean I can build one. Use your internal teams, other departments, vendors, partners, consultants, and contractors to augment where your need. Push your team to projects that teach them something, and stretch them, but don’t wear them out. Don’t assign your recruiting team the admin work. Indispensable means you can’t throw them away, but it also means you can’t dump on them. Figure out who is working on what, and get the OK from management, and make those goals and objectives bonus-driven.
Build for Scale

Make a case right now that some of your new core organization will never touch an open requisition. Of course others may have to, so build that in. Now go and get the flexible team (RPO, contractors, rotation personnel, etc) to surround your core team. Maybe those resources are full time. Maybe not. They could be internal or external. My advice is make it easy to turn them on and off, and make the ROI justified. You want an internal sourcing group using search strings and blogs to save on search fees? Fine. Make sure you can still justify it. If you are not hiring executives or have been able to attract executives without hard core sourcing in this economy, then your justification for a full-time internal sourcing team may have changed or is no longer valid. Remember there is great part-time talent out there. One hundred dollars per hour may be expensive, but part-time work for 60 hours a month @ $100/hour is cheaper than a full-time sourcer at $75,000 in salary, overhead, and management.

The watchword is value (it always has been that, by the way). We are under pressure now to drive value in recruiting and prove our existence. It will look different in the coming months, but with planning we can be much better off than where we were.

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Top Ten Ways to Find Joy at Work

I set out to write a David Letterman-style Top Ten list about finding joy in the workplace in tough times. But recent revelations about how Letterman found joy at work is not what I'm advocating. His extramarital affairs with subordinates were perverse, dishonest, conspiratorial, and exploitative power-mongering -- harmful and possibly illegal. No joke. Jobs are not saved nor enhanced by turning workplaces into sleaze factories.

Exploiting others is definitely not on my list for getting more joy out of work. But enlisting others in a great cause tops it.

In researching my SuperCorp book, I saw joy during what I call "Rubik's Cube moments," when everything clicks into place for an uplifting accomplishment. "Rubik's Cube moments" might come after pulling off a complicated food drive for the homeless; collaborating across functions for a creative presentation that wins a big client; flying technology experts to the rescue after a natural disaster to manage relief supplies; convincing bosses to try job-sharing instead of a layoff; or seeing a product prototype work for the first time. Creating collaborative innovation to save the business (and overcoming frustrating drudgery) was how managers Juliana Azevedo and Tarek Farahat found themselves holding hands with workers and customers at a P&G factory as a new product first came off the line - an iconic "Rubik's Cube" SuperCorp story.

Although some studies report growing employee cynicism, job satisfaction polls show high satisfaction rates for those still employed. Job security has been the most important factor in an 80% satisfied rate for the past two years, followed by compensation and benefits, in Society for Human Resource Management surveys.

Clearly, people report job satisfaction simply because they get a paycheck. But are they getting joy? OK, maybe work was never all that joyous, and that's why it's called "work." But the post-crash daily grind is grinding some people down to a pitiful pulp. Melodramatic, I know, but I've heard sad tales from people in numerous cities during my book tour. People in secure jobs they once liked report working harder with fewer resources just to hold their own, like treading water in an endless swim machine. If current economic trends continue, we might face not just a job-less recovery but a joy-less recovery.

Here are some clues about joy. On a recent Gallup Healthways survey of 100,000 Americans, business owners outrank 10 other occupations in overall well-being, despite working longer hours and earning slightly less, on average, than professionals and managers/executives, who rank second and third. The surprising fourth is farming, fishing, and forestry, despite the lowest income of any group. (Maybe not surprising, given how many leaders unwind by fishing or brush-cutting.) More confined service, clerical, transportation, and manufacturing workers are at the bottom, in the low 40s on Gallup's 100-point well-being index compared to over 70 for business owners.

Autonomy, influence, and a sense of meaning are associated with lower stress and fewer work-related illnesses, regardless of hours worked. Supervisors are better-off than the supervised, and entrepreneurs are the best-off of all.

This suggests that exerting leadership is the surest route to joy (other than going fishing). The key is setting the agenda and starting the pieces moving towards a purpose-driven goal. If 90% of success in life is just showing up, Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor advises that when you show up, you might as well run the meeting.

So here is my list of top ways to find joy at work.

10. Identify long-term personal purpose. Write a personal mission statement, to review often.
9. Be an entrepreneur from anywhere. Even if you don't start a business (now), imagine starting a project that will improve your current job, workplace, or community.
8. Discuss the idea informally to find others feeling the same way. Enlist them in the quest. Now they're counting on you not to let them down. Describe it as an experiment that will benefit others. Incorporate feedback so that others hear their ideas in yours.
7. Get a Big Name to endorse giving it a try.
6. Negotiate out of demands that don't contribute to the goal. Keep doing what you must to keep your job, but simplify.
5. Find every supporter a task, however small. Show that you're working for their goals, too.
4. Widen the circle of the informed. Involve people not usually included.
3. Remain positive. Smiling takes fewer muscles than frowning and is contagious. Ignore skeptics unless easily converted.
2. As the bits of the cube start moving, keep communicating and coordinating.
1. Celebrate each "Rubik's Cube" moment of accomplishment. Share the joy to multiply it.

More jobs with more joy - now that's an agenda the public should rally behind. Let's not wait for employers to make changes, necessary as those are. A few good "Rubik's Cube moments" can keep us going - and influence employers to see why joy matters.

About the Author: Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a professor at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change. Her latest book is SuperCorp.Read author full profile at http://hbr.org/authors/kanter

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