Women’s participation in the labor force has soared over the past 50 years, rising from 32% in 1948 to 56.7% as of January.
Yet those gains have not translated into the U.S. corporate boardroom, where women held just 16.6 percent of seats in 201…
For Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar, resilience requires diverse perspectives, local solutions, playbooks to help anticipate the unexpected, and a regard for unforeseen consequences.
Sponsor content from Accenture.
An analysis of more than 4,600 U.S. companies suggests that the negative impact can persist for three to five years.
We remember the conversation clearly, though it took place more than 20 years ago. He was sitting in his home office, a few miles from Palo Alto, California.
Across the table was one of our heroes, Jim March. An emeritus professor at Stanford University, March was regarded as one of world’s preeminent organizational theorists. The topic that afternoon was his seminal article, “Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning,” which had been published in 1991. In the piece, March laid bare the roots of one of the most perplexing challenges in business—how to wring the maximum value out of current assets and capabilities (exploiting) while simultaneously inventing the future (exploring).
The problem is that these activities are as different from one another as carpentry and painting, weightlifting and gymnastics, or, as our British friends would have it, chalk and cheese.
As the professor put it in his research paper: “The essence of exploitation is the refinement and extension of existing competencies, technologies, and paradigms. Its returns are positive, proximate, and predictable. The essence of exploration is experimentation with new alternatives. Its returns are uncertain, distant, and often negative.”
Gary’s question to the professor all those years ago was, “Can we ever hope to build organizations that are good at both explore and exploit? Must one always come at the expense of the other?” March peered out the window as he mulled the question, then quietly shook his head. “No,” he replied. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
He had good reason to be skeptical, and if he were alive today (he died in 2018), he would find little reason to reconsider his assessment. It’s still the insurgents, not the incumbents, that turn industries upside down, and try as one might, it’s hard to think of a large organization that’s as daring as it is disciplined, or as creative as it is cost-conscious.
Fortunately, not everyone has given up on the challenge of building organizations that are efficient and entrepreneurial. There are a few dogged souls (and we count ourselves among that number) who believe it is possible to turn either/or into both/and—and one of the most thoughtful is Eric Ries, the best-selling author of the The Lean Startup and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange.
Like us, Ries has spent a good part of his professional life trying to inject entrepreneurial DNA into established companies. As you’d expect of a serial entrepreneur, he’s an optimist, but not naive. He understands that the bureaucratic structures and processes found in most organizations are toxic to innovation.
In a recent interview, he shared with us: “Your average product manager often spends 50% of [their] time trying to defend a budget that’s already been allocated to the project. It’s just a complete waste of time.”
The problem goes deep, Ries notes. “In a traditional organization, everyone is paid to eliminate variations, [which] means eliminating new ideas,” he says. “You have a kind of status quo bias combined with incentives that reward defensive thinking over the pursuit of new opportunities. Then you add the disease of short-term thinking, and it’s a pretty toxic brew.”
Given this diagnosis, Eric agrees that Jim March was right—until a certain point. It is impossible to be both efficient and entrepreneurial in an organization that’s built on industrial-age management principles. “I don’t think it’s fair,” says Ries, “to expect that the top-down org structure that served Alfred Sloan at General Motors (Sloan was chairman of GM from 1939–1956), to be effective today. That’s asking a lot. We need to recognize the strengths of traditional management, and then expand the toolkit to encompass the things that harness and accelerate human creativity.”
Editor’s note: This article is part of the video and editorial series The New Human Movement, which aims to highlight bold thinkers and doers who are reimagining work and leadership.
Gary Hamel is a business thinker, author, and educator. He is on the faculty of the London Business School and author of the Harvard Business Review Press best-selling book Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.
Michele Zanini is cofounder of the Management Lab (MLab), where he helps organizations become more adaptable, innovative, and engaging places to work. He is the coauthor of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them.
We all fail, and failure can result in some of the greatest lessons. But would you share those failures with potential employers? Most of us would give that idea a hard pass, but Eli Joseph, author of The Perfect Rejection Resume: A Reader’s Guide to Building a Career Through Failure, suggests that you do just that by writing a “rejection resume.”
“Most people tell themselves not to think about the negative things in life,” says Joseph. “When we talk about Elon Musk and other successful people, we talk about the ways they’ve succeeded. But they’ve all had failures, too. It’s okay to fail. You can learn from your mistakes and rebound.”
Joseph has had his share of rejections. Between 2014 and 2019, he submitted more than 1,200 applications to various schools, courses, colleges, and jobs. He says the hundreds of rejections helped make him who he is today, which includes being a faculty member at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies—a school that rejected his application as a student. Realizing that his failures lead to successes, Joseph decided to document them and make them public by posting a rejection résumé on LinkedIn.
“Rejection and failure are never perfect, but they are perfectly aligned with your story,” he says.
How to Write a Rejection Résumé
From the time you started applying to colleges, you’ve likely had some successes and failures. Joseph suggests jotting them down and creating a résumé from it.
“Start just like a regular résumé,” says Joseph. “State your objectives or your purpose. Write down how many courses you failed, how many schools rejected you, how many times you were fired from a job, and how many jobs you didn’t get. Then, lo and behold, you will have a good solid résumé of your trials and tribulations.”
Joseph formatted his like a traditional résumé, breaking rejections into “Education,” “Experience,” and “Engagement, Honors, and Awards.” For example, he shares that he submitted 652 applications to JP Morgan Chase, had three interviews, and zero job offers. He also applied to speak at five TED events and was denied every time. Today, he is a TED member and he spoke at TEDxSyracuseUniversity in 2018.
How to Use It
Your rejection résumé can be a compass when plan A doesn’t work. “When you jot it down and have documented proof that your original plans don’t work, you can cultivate some alternatives,” says Joseph. “You may decide being an employee for certain jobs or organizations is not working out. Or you may want to become an entrepreneur. Try to decipher what you could have done differently.”
While you can keep this information to yourself, Joseph challenges people to share their rejection résumé by posting it on LinkedIn as a unique way to build a network and potentially field new job offers.
“When people post their struggles, it often resonates with a lot of others,” he says. “It says, ‘Here are the jobs and organizations that have rejected me, but I’m still here. I’m still optimistic about my future.’ If your connections or followers on LinkedIn relate to your story, perhaps it may go viral. You could have offers coming from the same organizations that have rejected you.”
You can also contrast your rejection résumé with your actual résumé to show your resilience. “When I showed my rejection résumé, my goal wasn’t to put a bad taste on the organizations, like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. I had applied to JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs so many times, and I’d been rejected. This isn’t pointing a finger. It’s saying, ‘It’s okay to fail. Keep trying.’”
Sharing your failures can also be helpful for other people and their path to finding success. “I get feedback from others who have failed, trying to do similar things to what I tried,” says Joseph. “When they see my struggles and how many times I failed, it feels reassuring to them. And when they look at the positive and good in my profile today, it can serve as inspiration. Use failures as navigation. Stay the course. Things will get better.”
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The company released its thoughts on the state of edge computing as part of its 2022 Cybersecurity Insights report.
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