Nano Tools for Leaders XXXVII

Staying Motivated: Five Renewal Rituals

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: G. Richard Shell, Thomas Gerrity Professor, Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Management, The Wharton School; author of Springboard: Launching Your Personal Search for Success (Portfolio Penguin: 2013)

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The Goal:

Boost your success and satisfaction by keeping your motivation level high.

Nano Tool:

What motivated David Ferrucci and his team at IBM to stay committed, despite years of challenges, to create an artificial intelligence system (Watson) that could beat the smartest Jeopardy! players in the world? Renewal rituals.

The inner satisfaction that comes from doing what you love, also known as intrinsic motivation, acts like slow-burning fuel, allowing for sustained effort over a long period of time.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXVI

Building Resilience: “REAL” Ways to Thrive During Tough Times

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Katherine Klein, PhD, Edward H. Bowman Professor of
Management, Vice Dean, Wharton Social Impact Initiative, The Wharton School.

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The Goal:

Build resilience in yourself and your team.

Nano Tool:

Resilience — the capacity to bounce back from setbacks or to thrive during times of challenge or change — is not a fixed trait. It actually grows out of a set of “learnable” behaviors with results that interact to make you and your team less vulnerable to stress. Whether you’re dealing with the acute stress of sudden challenges, or the chronic stress of daily life, simple daily actions can increase your resilience.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXV

Virtual Communications: Getting the Most from Technology and Your Team

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Nancy Rothbard, PhD, David Pottruck Associate Professor of Management, The Wharton School.

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The Goal:

Make virtual communications and meetings more effective.

Nano Tool:

In today’s increasingly global business environment, face-to-face communication is often a rare luxury. The challenge for individual leaders and virtual teams is that we tend to rely on facial expressions and interactive feedback to fully interpret what people say. How do we know we’re being understood and that we understand others without those meaningful inputs?

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXIV

Entering Global Markets: Cater to the Niche

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Mauro Guillén, PhD, Dr. Felix Zandman Professor of International Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and co-author of the new book Emerging Markets Rule: Growth Strategies of the New Global Giants.

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The Goal:

Gain a foothold in a global market by delivering a unique product or service to a niche group of customers.

Nano Tool:

Over a century ago, Henry Ford became the world’s first billionaire by launching the age of mass production, paying attention to the mainstream market and ignoring the niches. “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black,” Ford quipped. And while that philosophy worked well in 1909, the world is now a radically different place.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXIII

Find Innovation Success With the “Real-Win-Worth It” Screen

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: George Day, PhD, The Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor, Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; and author of the new book Innovation Prowess: Leadership Strategies for Accelerating Growth.

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The Goal:

Effectively screen new products and services to decide which potential innovations are worth funding.

Nano Tool:

When it comes to innovation, many companies have it backwards. They start with the product or service instead of the market. Research shows that the vast majority of innovations fail because companies don’t ask questions in three key categories: Is there a real market for this? Can we gain and maintain a competitive edge? And will the expected payoff be worth the risks involved?

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXII

Finding New Ideas: The Value of Connecting and Reconnecting

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Adam Grant, PhD, management professor, The Wharton School.  Grant has been recognized as Wharton’s top-rated professor, and is the author of the new book Give and Take: A Revolutionalry Approach to Success.

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The Goal:

Leverage the hidden value in your network by making new connections — and reviving old ones.

Nano Tool:

When we’re looking for new ideas, we tend to go to our strong ties: the people we know well and trust. But evidence shows that people are actually more likely to innovate and find new jobs through weak ties. Whereas strong ties tend to hold the same knowledge that we do, weak ties offer more efficient access to novel information. Yet it’s often difficult to reach out to acquaintances, as we lack the trust and shared perspective necessary to ask for advice.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXXI

Crafting Contagious: Generating Word of Mouth and Making Your Product or Idea Go Viral

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Jonah Berger, PhD, James G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

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The Goal:

Make your message go viral by following six key principles.

Nano Tool:

Word of Mouth is the primary factor behind 20–50 percent of all purchasing decisions, and it’s ten times more effective than traditional advertising, according to a 2010 white paper published in the McKinsey Quarterly. The study predicts that word-of-mouth marketing will be a $5.6 billion industry by 2015.

But to get people talking about your product or idea, you need to understand why they talk and why some things get talked about and shared more often than others. Based on analyzing thousands of contagious messages, products, and ideas, there are six key principles (STEPPS) that can help get your idea or product talked about, shared, and imitated.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXX

Sell Your Ideas Through Attunement

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Daniel Pink is the author of five books on the changing world of work, including the New York Times bestsellers A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To Sell Is Human. His books have been translated into 34 languages.

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The Goal:

Increase your ability to influence and move others to action by attuning to their perspectives.

Nano Tool:

Research confirms that the ability to influence people — to engage and move them to action — is based on a complex set of skills related to attunement.  Attunement involves understanding other people’s perspectives, getting into their heads, and seeing the world through their eyes. But it is more than merely understanding what others are thinking; it also includes how they are socially connected to others.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXIX

Visionary Leadership: Creating Scenes That Change the Future

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Greg Shea, Adjunct Professor of Management, Faculty Associate, Center for Leadership and Change Management, The Wharton School; and Cassie Solomon, President and Founder, The New Group Consulting, Inc.

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The Goal:

Ensure your next change initiative is a success by envisioning the behaviors needed to implement it.

Nano Tool:

Leading successful change initiatives is an essential skill in today’s “perpetual whitewater” business environment. Yet nine studies done between 1994 and 2010 report that 50 to 75 percent of all change initiatives fail. Behind such failures you’ll often find a missing ingredient — one that may seem obvious in retrospect, but that many change leaders overlook — a clear, specific vision of the desired end-state.

Nano Tools for Leaders XXVIII

More and Better Innovation Through Outside Communities

Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead.

Contributor: Ethan Mollick, PhD, The Edward B. and Shirley R. Shils Assistant Professor of Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

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The Goal:

Harness key sources of innovation outside your company.

Nano Tool:

Joy’s Law, named after Sun Microsystem’s founder Bill Joy, states that “No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for somebody else.” Research on the sources of innovation has proven Joy’s Law correct. Many of the ideas and innovations that lead to breakthrough products and services start outside of companies, among users of products and informal communities of amateurs. In fields ranging from scientific instruments to commercial banking, from semiconductor manufacturing processes to plastic extrusion, researchers have found that key innovations were developed by users, not manufacturers.