Month: September 2012

As I've written about in a previous blog I'm speaking at a TEDX conference soon. So my eye was caught by an article in the Financial Times I was reading while sitting on the flight back to DC this week. It was called 'Life After Ted'. It's mainly about Richard Saul Wurman who first hosted a Ted conference in 1984 and in 2001 sold to the concept to the Sapling Foundation which now runs the events. The article reports that the TED events have 'developed a cult status' and 'TED Talks, a series of lecture videos posted online, have received more than 800m views to date.'

Wurman is of the view that as far as TED goes 'Now every speech is auditioned, rehearsed, edited, rehearsed again … the spontaneity has gone. TED today has become over-orchestrated, too 'slick'." His antidote to this is to put on WWW 'an exercise in improvisation through conversation'.

A couple of people I've talked to about TED (and the various TEDXs) share similar views – that it's a good concept that has peaked. The article notes that 'TED is running out of speakers to invite and, therefore, running out of big ideas'. It has now 'resorted' to auditions to identify speakers for future events. The article also mentions the paucity – although, for the WWW event – of women speakers, and I recall that one of the reasons I was invited to the TEDX Columbus was because they needed more women speakers. So I had a go at checking out the TED ratio of women to men speakers.

I didn't have time to call up TED directly to answer the question (and couldn't find a detailed answer on their website) but I did find a Huffington Post article (2010) that said

"Over the past two years, TED Conferences have featured 30-40% women speakers. This isn't ideal, but it's actually much more balanced than many other, similar conferences, and obviously a priority for them. "

And related to the ratio of women to men speaker question, there is, on the TED website, the question Is TED elitist? With the answer

"In a nutshell, no. It certainly attracts people who are regarded as elite in their area of expertise. But the word 'elitist' implies exclusionary, and there have been numerous steps in recent years to open up our conferences to as broad an audience as possible".

The page goes on to list these steps including (among several), "We've expanded significantly … the number of women."

Wondering about whether TED has had its day was partly triggered by an email from a colleague who emailed me earlier in the week saying,

"About 25 years ago, I read an article by a German economist who proposed that corporations have organic limits to growth. Despite best efforts, organizations cannot sustain beyond a certain rate of growth. They will outstrip the ability to grow and integrate the necessary infrastructure. The inevitable consequence of growing too quickly will be a collapse of the organization as it becomes unable to manage itself. The author proposed that limit was at best, 15% per annum, based on his analysis of international companies over the past few decades. Does any of this sound familiar to you? "

What it called to my mind was an article by Larry Greiner called 'Evolution and Revolution as Organizations Grow'. It's an old, but now classic, article first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1972. In it Greiner proposes five stages of organizational growth – creativity, direction, delegation (in a later version he changed this to decentralization), co-ordination, and collaboration. Greiner suggests that "evolution is not an automatic affair; it is a contest for survival," and asked the question "And what about very large organizations? Can they find new solutions for continued evolution? Or are they reaching a stage when the government will act to break them up because they are too large?" (He did not ask 'are some organizations too big to fail?' which was the 2007-8 question.) He suggests that to move from one stage to the next requires 'revolution', saying 'these periods of tension provide the pressure, ideas, and awareness that afford a platform for change and the introduction of new practices."

So going back to the TED Talks – are they in one of the 5 phases of growth? Looking at the Greiner article maybe so. TED could be described as being in stage 4 co-ordination, and I'm wondering if it is too far-fetched to say that TED, is on the cusp of its 'revolution' to move from co-operation to collaboration. The thing about the co-ordination phase is that it is characterized by the introduction of formal systems and processes which, if they get out of hand result in what Greiner calls a 'red-tape crisis', which is typical of a bureaucracy.

One of the outcomes of TED is that its originally highly successful formula has spawned a range of lookalikes and the FT article mentions some of these. In this respect it is much like Apple and a different FT article this one on Apple has an interesting observation from Guy Kawasaki who worked there. He says:

"The irony is that today, to use the old Apple slogan, 'thinking different' means you consider things that are not from Apple, because Apple is so dominant. Once you win the revolution, you become the bureaucracy. That's an interesting transition to make."

So rather than moving from co-ordination to collaboration, is TED instead in danger of becoming a bureaucracy and then ossifying? Again, maybe so, I say this because I am, in my current role of being a TEDX speaker, having to conform to very specific requirements e.g. TED Commandments, presentation length, slide format, dress code, and so on. Of course, it could be argued that this is necessary for a good event but is it too slick? Does this TED formula have in it the seeds of its own destruction? Will it succeed in redesigning itself into effectively into collaboration? (For example, are the auditions for speakers an indicator of movement towards collaboration? )

It's difficult to say and Greiner himself pointed out that to move from one phase to the next requires 'considerable self-awareness on the part of top management as well as great interpersonal skills in persuading other managers that change is needed.'

What are your views? TED – the start of its new revolution or TED – the decline into bureaucracy? Let me know what you think.

Last week I was in Shanghai teaching organization design to thirty people from various national and international companies. It was an amazingly interesting workshop – I learned so much and have come back with a raft of questions to answer on approaches to organization design. Several of them are complex and very worthwhile to answer but I'm still thinking about them.

One of them is somewhat less complex but no less worthwhile to answer. It's about getting and maintaining what in the jargon is called 'business savvy'. Why were the Shanghai participants in the organization design program interested in this? Because they felt that that HR people there (in China) are not thought of as 'business' people but as 'people' people. These HR practitioners wanted to know how they could develop their own skills so that they can have credible, forward thinking business conversations with their colleagues who are running the organizations and managing the business of it.

They want to move on from the notion that all they do is recruit , train, pay people, and make sure that the organization complies with employment law. They want to be trusted as business advisors skilled at developing business growth, profitability and performance through careful attention to the 'people asset.'

What they need to do this is 'business savvy'. This is explained by Ed Griffin (development partner at D3 Partners and interim HR director at Chime Marketing) in an engaging podcast from the CIPD as being

"About a deep and comprehensive understanding of the organization. I think fundamentally it's about understanding what makes your organization viable. So that's about understanding where does the funding or the finances come into the organization. It's knowing who are the people who bring that in and who are the people who support those who bring in the money. So what's the relationship between what your people do and the value that achieves the purpose of the organization. I think there's also something about understanding how your organization really works in terms of its processes, its procedures and its systems, and then there's a piece which is about the human dynamics. So it's about understanding what you might call organizational politics, who's really influential and who's not, who are the noise makers but not necessarily the powerbrokers.

And then there's a massive external piece. So actually business savvy is about understanding what's going on outside your organization, what's the context within which your organization sits. It's about understanding your customers, it's understanding the competition, it's understanding how products and services are developing in your field. It's about being able to get in the mind. I think somebody said once if you're not serving a customer you'd better be serving someone who is. So it's that proximity to the people who are the beneficiaries of your organization and its work.

Without 'business savvy' organization development practitioners (largely seen as part of HR) will not get their desired 'seat at the table' that is – a place on the management/executive team of the business. Some who have business savvy already are succeeding. Take Richard Booker, HR director at BG Group PLC, a global natural gas organization who speaks in the podcast. And note – he is a trained accountant. He left his finance job and joined HR out of sheer frustration with the HR function in his own organization. As he explains:

"I went through a variety of different iterations of a finance career, ended up at Citigroup in New York looking after risk management for derivatives and structured products. It was a great job but I had an awakening one morning that I realized I spent more than half my time on people-related issues as a manager and the HR function were generally the 'No' police."

A few years ago, in 2005 – Fast Company published an article more or less on the "'No' Police" theme. It was called Why We Hate HR, and describes the high level of barrier HR faced to get that 'seat at the table'. Five years later 2010 the magazine published a sequel to it Why We (Shouldn't) Hate HR, suggesting that.

The real problem isn't that HR executives aren't financially savvy enough, or too focused on delivering programs rather than enhancing value, or unable to conduct themselves as the equals of the traditional power players in the organization–all points the original essay makes. The real problem is that too many organizations aren't as demanding, as rigorous, as creative about the human element in business as they are about finance, marketing, and R&D. If companies and their CEOs aren't serious about the people side of their organizations, how can we expect HR people in those organizations to play as a serious a role as we (and they) want them to play?

I think that's a good point but it doesn't address the issue that many OD/HR people are not skilled at challenging their colleagues' conventional thinking about the human element in the business. OD/HR professionals lack the internal reputation, credibility, and authority to argue their case because they don't speak the language of business and don't know how to. It's a bit of a circular argument because to be credible they need the business savvy. How do they do this if they are not an accountant, or other trained business person? What is going to help them develop and then keep their business skills honed?

Well there are lots of ways but begin by taking small steps. Anyone in an organization who wants to develop and maintain business savvy can start by asking these ten questions, about their own organization. If they don't know the answers then they should set themselves the challenge of finding out and then keeping up to date as they are not likely to stay the same for very long.

1. If you work in a for-profit publicly traded company do you know what today's share price is?
2. Who are your company's current competitors?
3. What are they competing with you on? (Price, quality, customer service, product innovation, etc)?
4. What do your business colleagues worry about most in terms of operating the business?
5. What are the main strategies in moving this organization to being more successful?
6. What are the key short-term goals to achieve these strategies?
7. What are the main constraints in executing these strategies?
8. How confident are you that these strategies are the right ones?
9. Why should your customers be committed to your company?
10. What is the value proposition you offer your customers?

I go along with Ed Griffin and think that the main stumbling block to being business savvy is not knowing enough about the external operational context of the organization. So step 2 is to develop a personal strategy to keep up with the social, technological, environmental, economic, political, legal, and ethical backdrop that are the main drivers of change in a company. There are literally hundreds of sources of information but as a starter here is are the main things that I look at every week, they all come, in the first instance as an email alert to my inbox, but now I have a Twitter account I'm converting them to look at them on that.

• Co design (from Fast Company)
• Economist
• Emergent by design
• Fast Company
• Financial Times
• Idea Cast (HBR podcast)
• McKinsey Quarterly
• New York Times
• Psyblog
• Science Daily
• Stanford GSB-Knowledgebase
• Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Strategy+Business
• TechCrunch
• Technology Review
• The Mix Fix
• Wall Street Journal

It's a big mixed bag of stuff to look at, but covers the main areas that give me confidence to talk with the various business leaders and managers I meet with in the course of my work, and I find what I learn fascinating. For example, yesterday, from Technology Review, I found out about Baxter, the industrial robot, which uses technology that could bring automation to new areas of manual work – useful in my thinking about types of work and how organization designers need to be forecasting about how to design with such technology in mind.

How and where do you get your business savvy? Let me know.

Now I'm a member of the twitterverse, or 'twitscape' as my brother calls it, the organizational design challenge that social media in general poses to more traditional organizations have started to flash neon high alert in my mind. In my forthcoming book on organizational health I discuss social media but inevitably things have continued to move on since I wrote the chapter. As a colleague observed this week, "There is a clear need emerging, particularly among public service organizations, for skilled consultancy in digital communication and engagement, and the need to design around digital/social media engagement."

Accenture has three papers on the topic that, out of the many I have read, I think neatly summarize the issues. (Several others sources are referenced in my book)

The first "Are you ready for digital revolution" (2011) points out that "The ultimate promise of digital and interactive channels is personalization: bringing timely and relevant offerings and experiences to customers wherever they are, at that moment. … But many companies lack the technologies, analytics capabilities, leadership, and organization structures to capitalize on this seismic shift."

The second Harnessing the power of social media (2011) says that "The impact of social media is embryonic today but could ultimately surpass the predictions of the industry's most daring visionaries. Companies that actively experiment with embedding a social media mindset and capabilities in their business processes will transform their relationships with customers and create value in unforeseen ways. … its impact will be felt along the entire length of the value chain. Companies will be forced to reexamine outdated business practices and create opportunities to leverage these new capabilities in powerful ways."

The third paper Social Media: Enabling relevance at scale in an always-on, always-connected world (2012) tells us what companies can do in order to learn to use social media to a) transform how they engage with customers, b) collaborate with internal and external partners, c) align their operations to a common purpose and d) develop a new vision for high performance via embracing social media.

Summarizing the three papers I find that there are a number of aspects of digital and social media that have an impact on the design of organizations.

Relationships with customers

1. App development enables new ways of interacting within and between organizational departments and customers, e.g. apps such as Find Starbucks also allow customers to locate physical outlets quickly.
2. Organizational websites are being redesigned to foster straightforward online navigation with minimal number of clicks needed to complete a purchase or make a comment
3. Ability to segment by customer spells the end for standard responses and one-size-fits-all offerings.

Internal structures, relationships, and operation

1. IT departments have to be organized to learn and to cope with a very fast moving, unstable and complex environment, one in which new technologies and applications sometimes emerge and then disappear within a few months as strategies change, and where data volumes continue to grow exponentially.
2. HR department similarly have to consider policies and guidelines for social media use – both welcome and unwelcome. And additionally work out who has authority to respond to customer comments and queries, all the while ensuring that data privacy laws are upheld.
3. Employers will be compelled to recalibrate their own responses to the online musings of employees.
4. Social media also offers new avenues for recruiting, allowing companies to spread a much wider net and to differentiate themselves to younger generations.
5. Integrating social media will compel companies to make dramatic cultural changes,
6. The once clear-cut boundary between marketing and sales continues to blur
7. Companies are partnering with cloud monitoring services to track and respond to online complaints and comments that customers make.
8. Social media creates the opportunity for much greater collaboration between departments, engendering more experimentation, faster decision making and more precisely tuned responses.
9. Companies need a unified IT backbone and infrastructure that link data housed in the far reaches of the organization, often in different forms, as well as information held outside the company.

Innovation

1. Firms can engage employees, customers, suppliers and other third parties as active participants in the innovation process
2. Innovative companies are using social media to be more proactive in seeking customer feedback and engaging customers to diagnose and resolve problems.

Leadership

1. Leaders need to pursue technology-based solutions-—sometimes across partnering companies-—that enable them to crunch data better and faster, as well as predictive analytics that make it possible to personalize the customer experience in as close to real time as possible.
2. Strong, purposeful leadership also plays a critical role when it comes to design the organization for social media. Specifically in the area of integrating IT and marketing leaders have to make new investments in the talent, technology and processes needed to forge a new era of cooperation between marketing and IT-—and make this transformation an organizational mandate.
3. Management team's knowledge and understanding of online technologies must keep up to speed with the rapid developments and they must be willing to make a financial investment in a holistic approach to social media deployment

So how do organizations start to redesign around the potential of digital and social media? Here are some pointers:

Approach

1. Get a feel for the size and scale of the 'seismic shift'.
2. Map out a detailed change path that redesigns the organization around social media
3. Clearly articulate social purpose and harness the potential of the data captured by aligning actions accordingly

Leadership

1. Require CEO-level endorsement of, and engagement in, both the social media strategy guiding the change ahead and its robust execution.
2. Find, attract and retain tomorrow's digitally savvy leadership by searching for people capable of dealing with high uncertainty

Structure and process

1. Factor experimentation into the mix-—pursue small, manageable chunks of digital capabilities, which can enable measurement of business returns before making a larger investment.
2. Create new organizational structures that are nimble and responsive to an environment packed with uncertainty
3. Develop capabilities that provide an end-to-end customer view.
4. Allow generation and sharing of ideas in an open, unfettered environment
5. Incentivize, empower and encourage employees so they can become the listening posts for consumer signals to ensure a precise and timely experience is provided at every brand touch point.
6. Integrate multiple sources of customer data using real-time analytics, and then make sure the right people are able to use the knowledge generated to support ongoing relationships and more personalized products and services.
7. Create new ways of working based on alliances with previously isolated parts of the organization such as sales, service or R&D.

Customer

1. Constantly anticipate and respond to evolving consumer needs across an expanding array of media and digitally enabled touch points.

As I read and integrate these types of reports and watch the upward trends of use of social media I come to the conclusion that organization designers must put digital and social media at the center of their agenda as they work with organizations. It is clear that the deployment of these technologies will fundamentally change the design of organizations as we know them.

Your views on this topic welcomed.

Well, a new development this week (and shortly to be reflected on my website with the ubiquitous logo). I am, with some trepidation, entering the Twitterverse. This means first learning a whole new language – but fortunately there is a dictionary. Second it means finding time to tweet, tweetback, retweet, monitor twaffick, twadd people to my account and follow. Third it means controlling the amount of time I spend on the above activity. I definitely do not want to become tweetaholic or find myself twiking or twitterlooing.

So already you can see I am practicing. I may be a neweeter, but I'm willing to learn. On a side point I'm thinking of suggesting to Rosetta Stone that they add Tweeting (or is it Twittering – where is my teacher?) as a language to the list of languages they offer for self-learning. I pass their retail outlet everytime I go to Dulles airport (a lot of times this year), and am often tempted to re-learn my rusty French and Spanish. But no longer, I must master tweeting or else I might feel tweepish at my ineffectiveness, or might inadvertently tweetsult someone.

Enough levity and on to the serious part. Why am I almost a tweeter? Well from a business standpoint it might make sense. However, in a 2009 report Do Fortune 100 Companies Need a Twittervention? the findings were that

"For the majority of Fortune 100 companies, Twitter remains a missed opportunity. Many of their Twitter accounts, did not appear to listen to or engage with their readers, instead offering a one-way broadcast of press releases, company blog posts and event information."

Three years is an eternity in the Twitterverse so things have moved on a bit but not as much as one would think. A Pew Research Report Twitter Use 2012 says that

"As of February 2012, some 15% of online adults use Twitter, and 8% do so on a typical day. Overall Twitter adoption remains steady, as the 15% of online adults who use Twitter is similar to the 13% of such adults who did so in May 2011. At the same time, the proportion of online adults who use Twitter on a typical day has doubled since May 2011 and has quadrupled since late 2010-—at that point just 2% of online adults used Twitter on a typical day. The rise of smartphones might account for some of the uptick in usage because smartphone users are particularly likely to be using Twitter."

So what does this 'uptick' (Lucy Kellaway add the use of this word to your management guff list) mean for businesses who are interested in using Twitter? My company is interested as it is of the view that a lively Twitter presence will in the words of the Weber Shandwick report mentioned earlier

• Build a dialogue that paves the way to new relationships with clients and advocates
• Generate loyalty among new and existing clients [via useful information]
• Create a wider awareness of the company name and what it offers

In this respect it may be a relatively early adopter. Fast Company, in an article of August 30 2012 The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work told us that

"On June 6, Larry Ellison–CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world–tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world's Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn't tweeted since."

Interestingly though, the article points to several ways in which social media use can improve employee productivity, break down organizational silos, and unlock company knowledge. So rather than adding value to external relationship development it seems that at this point Twitter and other social media may have more value in enhancing internal productivity. This point is developed in the McKinsey report The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

"which finds that twice as much potential value lies in using social tools to enhance communications, knowledge sharing, and collaboration within and across enterprises. MGI's estimates suggest that by fully implementing social technologies, companies have an opportunity to raise the productivity of interaction workers-—high-skill knowledge workers, including managers and professionals-—by 20 to 25 percent."

But getting back to my role the company has enrolled me as one of their social media (i.e. Twitter) voices. My role (again in the words of the Weber Shandwick report) is to

"offer opinions and encourage discussions, reach out to their communities of customers and advocates, build relationships with new customers and look for untapped supporters."

A tall order in 140 characters per shot with rather tight conventions around them. I've found the Mashable Guide to Twitter a good source to help with these but almost as useful is just jumping in and giving it a go.

So having taken on the role a couple of challenges appear (some personal as mentioned) and others to do with organization design. What are the organization design implications of social media use? If we suddenly get a torrent of traffic to respond to will we be able to cope? Who will be detailed to deal with questions? What are the legal, ethical, privacy, confidentiality ramifications. Will my performance and those of other twitterers in the organization be measured on number of tweets or outcomes of our tweeting? To some extent we don't know yet – we're learning as we go. So far one person has been designated to support my tweets, guide me through the learning process, and monitor the traffic (I mean twaffic). But my guess is there will be all kinds of consequences that we will have to start designing in or out of the current organizational system.

So watch this space. In the meanwhile you can follow me on @naominbbj – comments on how I'm doing – please tweet me!

Over the past couple of weeks, in preparation for my TEDx slot on the future of work. I've been talking with various women in their early thirties. They've been talking about the difficult choices they feel they are having to make between:

• Looking for a long term committed relationship
• Having children which they believe will as one person said 'decelerate' their careers
• Accelerating their careers, or at least staying on a career path but sacrificing one or both of the committed long term relationship and children

All the women I spoke with are of the view that they can't 'have it all' in the way that men can have a committed relationship, children, and a career. For women both their future financial health and their work future is in the melting pot and will be shaped by these significant life decisions and choices. In the usual way of synchronicity the Economist last week had an article 'The Mommy Track' noting that 'Several factors hold women back at work'. Schumpeter's (the writer's) conclusion is that

The biggest obstacle (at least in most rich countries) is children. However organized you are, it is hard to combine family responsibilities with the ultra-long working hours of the 'anytime, anywhere' culture of senior corporate jobs.

The women in their thirties I've been talking with are single, married, with and without children. They are all of the view that having children is not compatible with maintaining a career track in corporate America/Europe. The Economist article provides a few figures around women in the thirties age-group in the US workforce.

America's biggest companies hire women to fill just over half of entry-level professional jobs. But those women fail to advance proportionally: they occupy only 28% of senior managerial posts, 14% of seats on executive committees, and just 3% of chief executive roles " and notes that "The figures are worse still at big European firms.

This bears thinking about more closely and a paper The changing impact of marriage and children on women's labor force participation from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics helps with this.This shows that:

The labor force participation rate of single mothers aged 25–44 years increased 9 percentage points between 1993 and 2000, while the rate for single women aged 25–44 years with children aged 5 years or younger jumped a full 14 percentage points over the same period. In contrast, the labor force participation rate for married women with children increased 1 percentage point, and the rate for married women with children aged 5 years or younger was flat. Even more interestingly, the negative impact of children on the labor force participation of married women increased.

The paper explains in more detail the research methodology and findings and makes the statement that:

The key contribution of the analysis presented in this article is to emphasize that focusing only on the effect of children on labor force participation provides an incomplete picture of the very different effect that the presence of children has on single women compared with married women.

The effect of marriages that also include children on the workforce is material and was a finding in a November 2007 McKinsey survey What Shapes Careers found that:

54% of the senior women executives surveyed were childless compared with 29% of the men (and a third were single, nearly double the proportion of partnerless men)."

From these two surveys one can take a view that married women with children are unable to progress through the corporate career ladder at the same pace as single women with or without children, or married women without children. So one view is that if you are a woman and want to keep your career path, but want to have children then have them as a single parent. Another is that if you want to have a career and also marry then do not have children.

This leads Schumpeter, of the Economist, to say that "It would be better if women could rise naturally to senior executive roles … But how can this be done when everything tried so far seems to have failed?"

One of the women I talked with – now married and the mother of a 2.5 year old observes that.

I feel like my own journey has been gratifying and successful, but nothing at all like what I imagined it being 10 years ago (when I was 22 or so). For context, I had just graduated college and was facing the post-2001 dot.com bust/recession AND the year after 9/11. As a 20 something with few female role models in the business or professional world (except for great teachers), I had a vague notion that I'd spend my years climbing the corporate ladder. I was determined to go as far as I could go, and had a few mentors who'd spent their lives with 1 or 2 major firms. Now, … being a mom. I think I have to carve out more room for all the roles I want to have versus the ones I'm given or offered.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, in her July/August 2012 Atlantic article Why Women Still Can't Have It All commenting on a talk she had given to a group of people in their mid-twenties said

Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.

This has been the pattern I came across in my discussions with women. Over these six statements emerged in relation to marriage and children.

• Men are not looking for long term committed relationships – they can get what they want from short term relationships.
• Men (in the US) are worried about marriage because they will become liable for the student loan debt of their wives
• Men are not willing work part time or leave the workforce fully in order to look after their children while their wives/partners work for career advancement
• The way work is perceived and organized in most corporates is skewed against women who want to have children and give some of their time to raising a family. (Childrearing is incompatible with standard career routes).
• The only way women will get equal access to career advancement is if men demand flexible work patterns that do not jeopardize their career advancement i.e. either parent should have the same ability to rear children and maintain equal parity in career advancement.
• Men should be as willing as women to decelerate their careers in order to help bring up children

So then I turned to conversations with men in their early thirties to see how they responded to these points.
They diverged on statements 1 -3 depending on personal perspective and experience, but on points 4 – 6 there was unanimity in their views that work as we currently conceive it, at least in the US, is skewed against childrearing – whether it is the man or woman who does this. One person put it eloquently when he said:

Only in America is something so beautiful and critical to our societal health and longevity viewed as an inconvenience and inadvertently discouraged through policy. We mistake efficiency and hours at work with productivity and progress. Women who prioritize children, and fathers who do so too for that matter, should be the rule and not the exception. Many corporations are still operating "business as usual" and thus become irrelevant, unworthy candidates to many of the world's best talent. '

All agree that men should seek, and get, flexible work patterns enabling them to parent to the same level as their partners. This, they felt was hard when much of corporate America is run by 'the ole boys' club'. Turning to self-employment is an option that is hard to carry through on when certain benefits (including medical) are tied to full-time employment. They weren't keen on the notion of anyone 'decelerating' careers but of thinking about careers differently. As one said

It's not about decelerating one's career, it's about accelerating one's LIFE. A desire for professional "domination" (ha, what all young boys think they are going to do… be rich, powerful, prolific…) is an epidemic occurrence of losing touch with what life truly has to offer in totality – professionally and finically, yes, but also relationally, socially, spiritually, educationally, experientially.

Thirty years ago when my children were infants I and my partner were in the same discussion. I wanted to work at least part-time, he wanted his children to have a full-time parent at home and felt that he wouldn't get back into the workforce if he took on this role. It was a very painful and difficult time for all of us as we worked this one through, and did not have any kind of storybook ending. It is very sad to see three decades later so little progress in the world of work and parenting. Do we want in 2042 to still be treading the same ground? What one thing could you do to design organizations to help men and women rear their children with fewer penalties than currently? Your thoughts welcome.