Square Pegs

Corporate cultures, by definition, restrict behavior. 

A few lucky workers find a corporate culture they can willingly conform to. The rest check their real selves at the door. 

But sooner or later (usually sooner) these misfits get detected and are forced out.

Severance is particularly grave for workers over 40, who are cursed by their age with experience.

Employers prefer inexperienced 20-year-old workers over 40-60 year-old ones, not only because they're less costly, but because they're more malleable.

Experience shapes you, robbing employers of the opportunity to do so.

Is Silence Golden?

Under attack, corporations used to hunker down.

Herbert Schmertz changed that.

Schmertz, who died last week at 87, as head of PR at Mobil in the 1970s pioneered use of the "advertorial” to confront critics of the company.

He bought space on the op-ed page of major dailies like The New York Times and used it to publish essays expressing his company's viewpoint.

Many of his peers said Schmertz took unnecessary risks by combating critics. 

Critics, they insisted, are best ignored; eventually, they go away; and, in the meantime, media reporting of their positions can be influenced privately.

But is silence golden?

No company wants to go on record at the risk of losing business. A slip can tarnish a reputation in an instant; customers sympathetic with critics' views can be alienated; and arguing in public can make management look callous.

But the lessons of PR failures today are plentiful. They teach that “no comment,” while a company's knee-jerk response to critics, isn't always the safe course.

Beat the Clock

If you don't think your performance is sharply rhythmic throughout the day—or that timing matters—consider the results of 26,000 corporate earnings calls.

Regardless of earnings and management's outlook—rosy or bleak—when CEOs conducted the calls in the early morning, their tone was positive; but as morning progressed, their tone grew less so. Calls held around noon were again upbeat; but as the afternoon unwound, until the market's closing bell, the tone went steadily downhill.

The time of the earnings calls and the CEOs' tone affected investors' reactions and companies' share prices. CEOs who held earnings calls late in the day saw shares in their companies underpriced—at least temporarily.

It appears CEOs are "morning people." About seven of 10 people are.

Managing your internal clock for performance is the point of Dan Pink's new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing.

In When, Pink parses nearly 300 scientific studies (like the one about the earnings calls) and distills the findings into a long list of action items. He lists the items after each successive chapter in a "Time Hacker's Handbook" meant "to help put the insights into action." 

You can skip the science and only read the handbook, if you just want to improve performance. 

But that would take all the fun out of it. 

Pink is a delight to read (I like to read his books twice, because there's so much good stuff packed into them). He can popularize dreary science findings better than most business writers, and generally finds a practical lesson for the layperson in even the obscurest of research papers.

Safety in a Box

Customers' values have changed, and so has their definition of "quality," according to the travel and hospitality journal Skift.

Skift asked 5,000 people in five countries to describe three attributes of the word.

Authentic headed customers' lists. Products and services need not be opulent or expensive to be high-quality; it's more important they're "innovative" and "tell a good story." Customers crave relationships with "brands that deliver goods and experiences that help customers fulfill their desires to become higher quality people." To meet that need, brands must communicate a purpose beyond existing just to sell something.

Safety came next. In an age of anxiety, customers crave psychologically safe spaces. Comfort no longer comes only from stylish design and rich materials, but from knowing you'll receive "care and feeding" by a provider with meticulous standards. Brands that want to capitalize on customers' anxiety may find they cannot avoid taking an openly political stand on some issues.

Ease rounded out the list. Customers want to experience the world without seams. Where that once meant they craved superior craftsmanship, it now means they want simplicity, sincerity, and serenity. "Quality" now denotes "a state within ourselves, the actualization of our idealized self, which is both poised and productive, composed but committed, enjoying while excelling."

Americans and the Media: Disappointment and Distrust

Most Americans expect the media to inform them, but a majority (58%) think it's harder than ever to rely on the media for objective news, says a new study by Gallup and the Knight Foundation.

TV programs remain Americans' primary news source, relied on by two-thirds of the adult population. Websites are the next most-popular source.

Equal proportions of Americans (41%) rely on social media sites as rely on newspapers to stay informed, according to the study. Reliance on newspapers is most common among older Americans and Americans with graduate degrees.

Only a quarter of Americans are confident they can distinguish facts from opinions. Age, education and party affiliation affect that confidence. And a quarter of Americans admit they get their news only from sources with a clear political bent.