GOOGLE LAUNCHES 2 HOUR RECRUITING VIDEO STARRING OWEN WILSON AND VINCE VAUGHN

Google is launching a 2-hour recruiting video starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn. It will soon be in a movie theater near you.  Seriously. Check out the trailer below.

Okay, so its not REALLY a recruiting video, per se. It is actually a regular movie that takes place on the campuses of Google. It showcases what its like to work there and gives you a real feel for the great and wonderful things that take place there. Oh, wait a minute! Isn’t that a recruiting video?

Curiously enough, Google does not have a financial stake in the movie. (The LA Times said so.) But it did give the film crew access to their Googleplex campus and consulted with them on creating a Google-like set.

Fyi, the movie debuts on June 7th. I would really, really, really want to know how this affects their recruiting numbers. Will they get a surge of new applicants? How many of those candidates will they hire? And if so, how long before there is a recruiting video featuring Facebook? And not to be outdone, Microsoft produces one as well. Could this be a new trend in recruiting?!!!!

Probably not. But its fun to speculate. What do you think? Leave me a comment below?

Microsoft Could Make Billions From Office for iPad

By keeping its Office productivity suite off the iPad, Microsoft has given its new Surface tablet a key competitive advantage in a market to which it is a very late entrant. That might seem like a strategically sound decision — creating a perceived deficit on a rival’s tablet by limiting distribution of a very popular piece of software to your own. But it could prove to be a bad move fiscally.

To wit, a new report from Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Holt, who argues that Microsoft is leaving money on the table by not releasing Office for iOS. A lot of money.

Holt figures that if Microsoft were to release Office for iOS, pricing it at $60, it could potentially sell it to roughly 30 percent of iPad users. Extend that to an installed base of 200 million iPads in 2014, and Holt concludes that Microsoft would generate about $2.5 billion in revenue per year on Office for iPad — less Apple’s App Store commission.

Now, Holt’s math here is back-of-the-napkin at best, but even so, it makes a valid point. By not releasing Office for iPad, the company is surely leaving a bunch of milk in one of its most important cash cows.

But it’s not like Microsoft doesn’t know that. And it’s more likely than not that the company is very carefully weighing tradeoffs here, and trying to determine if keeping Office off iOS is a sufficient incentive for enterprise to use Surface and other Windows tablets. Indeed, asked about Office for iPad at the Goldman Sachs conference earlier this week, CFO Peter Klein seemed to suggest that Microsoft is keeping the door open for it.

“We have a history of cross-platform delivery broadly in productivity, whether it’s Office on the Mac, or email, communications, note-taking,” Klein said. “And with our Web applications you can access Office documents, do some light editing on any device and on any browser. So there’s a lot of things that we’re already doing to meet that need. And we’ll continue to think about other things going forward.”

Roses are Red, My Love

What's Luck Got to Do With It?

In the story of David and Goliath, David won by changing the rules of the game. Rather than meeting this giant in a head-to-head battle with spear, shield and sword, David used a slingshot. And this is a good allegory for the kind of strategy you should pursue in business competition. According to Michael Mauboussin, “When competing one-on-one, follow two simple rules: If you are the favorite, simplify the game. If you are the underdog, make it more complicated.”

The reason this is the most effective strategy is that luck plays at least some role in virtually every business conflict. If you're the underdog, making the game more complicated will give luck more of a chance to triumph, so you may end up the winner (this one time, anyway) even though the odds are against you. If you’re the superior adversary, on the other hand (more scale, more resources, better research, whatever), then you should simplify the game to make sure that your superior skill is more likely to determine the outcome. David was clearly the underdog, ergo the new and unusual weaponry.

Michael Mauboussin’s marvelous new book, The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing (2012, Harvard Business Review Press) takes a straightforward look at discerning how much of an event’s outcome should be attributed to skill or ability, as compared to how much should be attributed to luck or randomness. Most things in life depend on both luck and skill, but in varying amounts. Some things are more subject to randomness than others. And some things involve little skill at all.

It's easy to tell whether an event is entirely based on luck: Just ask whether you can intentionally lose. You can’t intentionally lose a coin toss or a game of roulette (because each is 100% luck), but you can intentionally throw a football or basketball game (because at least some skill is involved). Similarly, you can intentionally invest in an unwise manner, you can intentionally lose business to a competitor, and you can intentionally manage your company in an unprofitable way. Mauboussin's point is that even though the outcomes of each of these endeavors still involve a good deal of luck, skill does play a role.

The Success Equation is the subject of this week's Friday Book Share. Mauboussin is the eclectically interesting chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management. His books are fascinating far beyond their implications for finance. I’m a big fan, and this is one of his best.

To help us understand how important luck and skill are in any situation Mauboussin starts with the law of large numbers. Toss a coin in the air 3 times in a row and it's not impossible for you to get 100% heads. The odds of that happening are in fact one out of eight. But the likelihood of getting 100% heads on 20 straight coin tosses sinks to less than one in a million (0.5 to the 20th power). It's much more likely that only about 50% of your tosses will be heads. That's the law of large numbers at work. The larger your sample size, the more likely your results will be about average, and in a coin toss the average is 50%.

Mauboussin takes this and other commonly known properties of chance and randomness and teases out of them some very intriguing and compelling conclusions about how much luck rules our existence in a wide variety of endeavors. In sports, for instance, the outcome of a single basketball game tends to be more skill-driven than a football game, primarily because basketball teams each generate a larger "sample size" of potential scoring events during a single game. And football more than hockey, etc. He backs these assertions up with convincing quantitative evidence.

Mauboussin argues that one of the fastest ways to improve your skill is to pay attention to good, reliable feedback. In sports the feedback is immediate and obvious, but in business and many other fields the feedback isn’t always so reliable. Business executives often don't take the time to gather feedback on the wisdom of a prior decision, in order to study whether it could have been improved, so that the next decision will be better.

In fact, business people seem to think they can succeed solely by studying success, rather than by analyzing failure, as well. And this is where Mauboussin makes an important point about books by various business gurus: Because business involves a great deal more randomness and luck than sporting events do, you need to be careful to use as large a sample size as possible when you make inferences, and not to leave failures out of your sample. He cites Jim Collins’ iconic book Good to Great as an example. If you recall this book, Collins reviewed thousands of companies to identify eleven whose performance went from good to great, and then tried to analyze the strategies that went into their successes. But as Mauboussin says, “The trouble is that the performance of a company always depends on both skill and luck, which means that a given strategy will succeed only part of the time. So attributing success to any strategy may be wrong simply because you're sampling only the winners. The more important question is: How many of the companies that tried that strategy actually succeeded?”

Why does this matter to businesses? Because risky strategies may be more likely to succeed, but they are also more likely to fail. “Going for broke” inevitably will succeed sometimes for a business, and when it does it will likely do so in a spectacular way. But if those companies that went for broke and didn’t make it are removed from the sample (either because they’re no longer around or because their lack of success meant they weren’t included in the study), then what are we really saying?

(And by the way, Martha Rogers and I are always careful to write about business failures as well as successes, to the extent we can get access to details about them. In one of our first books, Enterprise One to One, we devote an entire chapter to a case study on MCI's failed customer loyalty initiative, for example, while our latest book Extreme Trust critiques failures at AOL, Nestle, Netflix, and a few entire business categories, as well.)

I posted a comment not long ago about Geoffrey Moore’s extremely thoughtful and well-argued recommendation to HP that bears directly on this topic. Moore recommends that HP should concentrate on just one innovation per half decade, because that’s all a CEO can truly focus the company on, and if the whole company isn’t focused on it then its go-to-market strategy will fail. But I'm not so sure about Moore's idea, and Mauboussin would almost certainly be on my side in this. Moore's logic is persuasive and, as usual, his knowledge of the venture and tech innovation business shines, but I think success at innovation inherently involves a great deal of luck and randomness. No matter how much skill you have (and no matter how much attention your CEO focuses on the go-to-market strategy), you're still going to need a large sample size before you can be confident that your superior skill will shine through. I don't think one mega-effort per half decade will do it. Fifty might, but one is just a crapshoot (IMHO).

Yet another useful lesson from Mauboussin's enthralling book is what he calls “the paradox of skill.” He says that as any field attracts more and more talent, the general skill level will rise, and as this happens the statistical variance of results will decline. As people get better and better, in other words, the differences among them shrink. Mathematically, this gives us the paradox of skill: As skill levels improve generally, luck plays a greater role in determining outcomes.

To illustrate this, he asks why Ted Williams was the very last baseball player to achieve a batting average greater than .400 for the whole season (in 1941). The answer, he suggests (and he's not the only one to suggest it), is that “the variance of batting averages has shrunk over time…as the skill of the hitters has improved…. This decline in variance explains why there are no more .400 hitters. Since everybody gets better, no one wins quite as dramatically. In his day, Williams was an elite hitter and the variance was large enough that he could achieve such an exalted average. Today, the variance has shrunk to the point that elite hitters have only a tiny probability of matching his average.”

To prove his point he includes a graph showing just the standard deviation and coefficient of variation for batting averages over the last 140 years:

(Note that this graph doesn’t say that batting averages have been going down, but that the differences between themhave been going down.)

The same exact logic applies to business and investing. As skills increase across the board (because of the competition for talent, better education, training, and so forth), the role of luck in determining outcomes also increases. Over the last several decades, for instance, “investing went from being dominated by individuals to being dominated by institutions. As the population of skilled investors increased, the variation in skill narrowed, and luck became more important.”

And in business, Mauboussin suggests: “Recent research shows that while some companies do sustain superior economic performance, the rate of reversion to the mean today appears to be accelerating". [Translation: The role of luck is increasing.]

So as randomness plays an ever greater role in business success, what should the well-managed business do? He suggests several things:

• Find and use more immediate feedback.
• Focus more on good processes, and less on specific outcomes.
• Balance your company’s emphasis on exploration of new opportunities with exploitation of current ones (when the rate of change in your category increases, more attention to exploration is called for).
• Use checklists to ensure that your skills and advantages aren’t unnecessarily undermined by random mistakes.

Numbers Count, But Feelings Come First

Long ago, one of my statistics professors in college cautioned me that statisticians tend to obsess about creating the highest R-squared. Inflating one’s R-squared might be just the ticket for getting your results published in an academic journal, but the resulting model, my professor told us, is not necessarily the most useful.

The most useful model is one that helps people make good decisions and take action. The more complicated you make your model in search of superior R-squared—lots of variables, logarithmic transformations, and so on—the harder that model is to understand intuitively and the less often people will have the confidence to use it and learn from it. Statisticians' hearts may start to palpitate when their model’s R-squared creeps upward toward 1.0, but nobody else is really moved by the square of the correlation coefficient.

This simple piece of advice stuck with me, and years later it gave me the confidence to develop a system that asks just one question to predict promoter, passive or detractor categories. That may not satisfy some hard-core number crunchers, but it has made a huge difference—both in my career and for the thousands of companies that have adopted Net Promoter.

In fact, we initially chose the question “How likely would you be to recommend my company to a friend” because it most strongly predicted what customers were likely to do based on their answers. Over time, we also learned that employees take their reputation seriously, so the customer’s response motivated action. Part of the power of the Net Promoter system is that it is based on a simple model that requires one simple question, yet it drives real, actionable feedback that helps companies grow.

Most humans aren’t fired with a passion to act when they see the results of a complex, multivariate regression formula. But they do take it personally when a good customer tells them that they would not recommend them to a friend.

METALLICA - ONE - DRUM COVER BY MEYTAL COHEN

When it comes to professional services firms, young employees are often unfamiliar with the concept of marketing. They are unaware of the many quick and easy things they can do to advance their careers and help their firm reach its growth goals. Much of a professional’s early years are spent mastering professional skills, learning client service, and knocking out billable hours. While these are all certainly important areas, this scenario presents a challenge for young professionals as they begin to rise through the ranks. At a certain point, they may feel that they have hit a ceiling where they need to begin marketing in order to continue advancing. Or maybe they have already climbed to that point and have been tasked with bringing in new business through marketing and business development. Young professionals may find themselves thinking, “What is this marketing stuff? I don’t have time for this!” The great news is that young professionals (and all professionals for that matter) can use thought leadership and their subject matter expertise to propel themselves forward in their careers without having to invest a lot of precious time. 

One of the best things young professionals can do to begin developing a “marketing mindset” at an early stage is to monitor and share thought leadership.Thought leadership is simply providing content that your clients and prospects will find useful and informative. It can also draw on your expertise in a particular subject matter in order to help your audience learn something they are interested in or solve a problem. The following tips can help you monitor and share thought leadership:•    Monitor clients, prospects, and competitors online. One of the key ways you should be using online tools is to keep a close eye on any people or enterprises that might impact your business, either in a positive or negative way. This is often referred to as gathering “online intelligence.”•    Stay abreast of what is going on in your industry so you can react swiftly and accordingly. Be the first to share breaking industry news with your clients, coworkers and online professional network, and they will begin to think of you as a resource for the latest industry info.•    Use tools like Google Reader, Google Alerts, LinkedIn Signal and Scoop.it to gather online intelligence. Be sure to share the information with partners, coworkers, and via social networks like LinkedIn.•    You will stand out from the crowd by providing valuable information to clients and prospects if you are educating and informing them.•    Through regular distribution of content (content marketing) and social media, you can build an engaged community of followers. The key is to find and share useful content.One of the greatest things about monitoring online intelligence and sharing thought leadership is that it gives you a means to easily establish credibility and “expert” status among peers, clients, and prospects.Establishing subject matter expertiseAnother often overlooked tool for establishing professional expertise and gaining visibility for your firm is leveraging media relationships. You want journalists and other media professionals turning to you for your professional advice and hopefully sharing your expertise with their established audience. In search of savvy tips on how to leverage the media, I turned to Public Relations expert Debbie Goetz for her insight on this topic. Here are Debbie’s top tips for how to get the media to turn your way for professional advice and subject matter expertise:•    Media people love “tips.” Think about what tips you can offer to individuals or business people about your particular industry. Then share these tips with the media by email, phone or social media.•    Be sure to stay up-to-date on top current events, trends and industry updates, as well as their implications for individuals and businesses needing your firm’s services.•    Approach the media as an expert when there is something related to your industry in the news. For example, accountants might be able to weigh in on timely tax law changes.•    Try to submit articles to local or trade publications about newsworthy topics.•    Follow business reporters in the newspaper and online by subscribing to their news/blog feeds, following them on Twitter, and connecting on LinkedIn.•    Send media contacts an email or tweet when you like something they wrote or to offer additional insight into a topic they covered. Get to know them so that they can get to know you and use your expertise when the right opportunity arises.•    Sign up to receive HARO updates and respond to queries relating to your field of business.•    Be sure your LinkedIn profile is well developed and up-to-date. Join LinkedIn groups of like-minded professionals. Start discussions and participate in the discussions of others to establish your subject matter expertise.Following these straightforward tips on a consistent basis is all it takes to get the media to take notice of your professional expertise, and to eventually tap you for your industry knowledge and subject matter proficiency. Coupling these tactics with the regular monitoring and sharing of thought leadership will not only make the media pay attention to your savvy, but it will also catch the eye of partners and shareholders, setting you up to be a rising star within your firm.