By Vikas Mittal

Customer satisfaction is a major predictor of a firm’s financial health. Companies try to measure and improve customer satisfaction using customer surveys. Research shows many companies use a short, 2-5 item survey to document their overall customer-satisfaction rates. Typically, such a company finds a high rate of overall customer satisfaction (90% or more customers indicate they are “satisfied”). Happy with it, management becomes complacent.

Despite high customer-satisfaction rates, companies that only measure overall satisfaction have a difficult time realizing its benefits. Many of these companies experience low customer retention, declining profitability, and low rates of customer acquisition. Why does this happen?

Is it the case that customer satisfaction is unrelated to retention or profitability? No. Rather, this happens because companies take a narrow view of customer satisfaction. They can substantially improve the ROI on the customer satisfaction research if they tap into its ROI drivers.

ROI driver # 1: Develop a customer-based model.

Instead of focusing only on overall satisfaction, a customer-based model also provides:

• Insights for an execution plan
• Key performance indicators related to strategy.

Perceived performance on key-driver attributes can increase overall satisfaction with the firm. Overall satisfaction is associated with customer loyalty—retention and referrals—which can drive revenues, market share, and profitability. The execution plan and KPMs should focus on key attributes linked with overall satisfaction.

Most firms only measure overall satisfaction. Some firms measure key attributes. Many firms fail to take appropriate measures of customer loyalty. Still others fail to link loyalty to revenues and profitability. To improve customer satisfaction ROI, a firm should simultaneously measure and statistically model all aspects of the customer model.

ROI driver # 2: Identify key driver attributes.

Identify specific attributes that are actionable. An attribute is specific and actionable when it can be objectively rated by customers and operationally implemented by the company. In a satisfaction study for a document delivery company, qualitative interviews showed reliable delivery to be a key driver. However, this was not specific enough. We drilled down to discover that reliable delivery really meant delivery within two days. In the satisfaction study, we included delivery within two days as the attribute. It was specific, measurable, and actionable. The firm made it a goal to make 99% of its deliveries in two or fewer days.

Second, all attributes are not equally important. We can determine relative attribute importance using multivariate statistical analysis that adjusts for the inter-relationship among attribute ratings. Simplistic techniques such as rank-ordering attributes based on average scores of a correlation coefficient can be misleading. They should be avoided.

When a firm does not identify key-driver attributes, its management ends up investing limited resources on more attributes than is necessary. A study of automotive customers showed that among the 30 attributes measured in the satisfaction survey, only five were key drivers of overall satisfaction. These included: roominess, accessories, handling, transmission, and brakes. Further research showed that interior roominess has specific dimensions such as: leg room, elbow space, and high ceiling. Similarly, a study for a national lawn-care company showed only punctual service and competitive pricing were key driver attributes.

A key driver analysis enabled management at each company to narrow its execution focus. This enabled it to improve overall satisfaction with fewer resources.

ROI driver # 3: Customize key drivers for different segments.

Different customer segments ascribe different levels of importance to an attribute. For example, a satisfaction study among airline customers showed quality of meals was equally important to all customers. However, comfort was eight times more important among business travelers who more frequently took long international trips. Similarly, in a study of computer programmers, attribute such as documentation was more important among new users, but reliability and capability were more important for expert users.

By incorporating segment-specific differences firms can better optimize performance on the attributes most important for their target segment(s). Learning: ascertain the target segments for your company and then conduct separate key-driver analysis for each segment.

ROI driver # 4: Time changes everything.

A study of mutual-fund customers showed trust and confidence in the advisor is very important in the early stages of the relationship. However, over time efficiency becomes the key driver of satisfaction. Similarly, a credit card company found that among new users, credit limit and interest rate are more important, but among customers who have been with the company for a long time additional services such as frequent user points were more important.

Strengthen relationships and overall satisfaction by focusing on those attributes that are most relevant at different times in a customer’s relationship. Statistically addressing these time-sensitive changes allows a company to use a dynamic approach toward its customers.

ROI driver # 5: Link customer satisfaction to customer loyalty.

A large body of academic research shows a positive association between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty metrics like retention, word-of-mouth, and referrals.

Yet, for different firms and industries this positive association can vary in magnitude. A study of automobile buyers found satisfaction had a stronger effect on repurchase behavior among males than females. Another study showed the association between patient retention and patient satisfaction differed based on patient income.

Firms also need to customize their loyalty metrics. For an automotive company it may be purchase or repurchase of its brand. For a telephone company it may be the number and duration of calls made, and the number of days/months that a consumer stays with the company. The appropriate retention metrics for a bank may include share of wallet, number of accounts, and the balance in each account. Unless retention measures are carefully aligned with a firm’s strategy, they may consume resources without being actionable or improving financial performance.

ROI driver # 6: Monetize customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Customer loyalty benefits a firm in many ways. Higher customer retention means a base of customers who buy more frequently, in greater volumes, are more prone to try other offerings by the firm (“cross-buying”), generally require lower maintenance, and become less sensitive to the outreach of competitors. All this should increase revenues while lowering the cost of marketing and sales through positive word-of-mouth by satisfied customers. Therefore, retained customers are a revenue-producing asset for the firm.

Customer acquisition costs determine the price of this revenue-producing asset. Customer acquisition costs may be lower for a company whose customers engage in positive word of mouth, recommend the company to others, and refer it to their colleagues.

Research shows a firm that simultaneously focuses on customer acquisition and customer retention can be more profitable than a firm that only focuses on one. As an example, consider a firm only focused on customer acquisition. The revenue-stream from a retained customer is lost to the firm when a customer leaves. The firm not only loses sales, but also the benefits of retained customers such as lower servicing and marketing costs. The loyal customer has to be replaced (at a high acquisition premium) by a new customer who initially buys less frequently and in smaller quantities (lower revenues), requires more service (higher service cost), and is less likely to recruit new customers (higher marketing costs). Smart firms link their customer satisfaction strategy to their customer-lifetime-value metrics. This ensures the firm can identify, acquire, and retain the most profitable customer segments.

ROI driver # 7: Shun spurious loyalty.

There is a growing trend focus on customer loyalty metrics such as customer referrals, customer recommendations, and customer acquisition. As the recent example of Wells Fargo shows, an exclusive focus on loyalty metrics can mislead executives and employees and even harm customers.

Customer loyalty must be earned through customer satisfaction, and not garnered via shortcuts such as high-pressure sales tactics, easy giveaways to lure customers, and price-based promotions. Firms should develop an integrated satisfaction and loyalty strategy to optimize overall revenues and profitability. In industries such as banking, business-to-business, and healthcare, many companies are already doing this.

These seven ROI drivers can help ensure your customer satisfaction and loyalty programs generate the anticipated ROI. To do this, your company will also need to customize its approach to its strategic goals and execution abilities. This customization can drastically reduce the incidence of costly mistakes and help firms maximize their ROI on customer satisfaction.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management in Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice Univeristy. 

This article first appeared American Marketing Association's Marketing News as Seven Ways To Maximize Your Company's Customer Satisfaction ROI. 

By Claudia Kolker

When push came to shove, Diane Sanchez went for the hedgehog.

Why a hedgehog? Why, as Houston reeled under Hurricane Harvey, and putrid water rose in the 47-year-old teacher's house, when it became clear she would soon lose the home where she'd lived for 13 years – why did Sanchez seize the family dog, sling a bag of clothes on her shoulder, and with her remaining free hand, grab Auggie the hedgehog?

Disasters open unexpected windows into who we are. The question of why, in extreme moments, we choose to save what we do has no single answer. Instead, after that first impulse to save loved ones, the last object chosen from a left-behind life can be a signal of what really matters.

Marketing plays a role, of course; infusing objects with meaning is the industry's sole purpose, notes Utpal Dholakia, a marketing professor at Rice Business. The more compelling the story, the more valuable an item will seem. Yet it's rarely marketing that determines the truest object of desire. Instead, deeper instincts – some universal, some utterly personal – make the decision for us.

Six months after Hurricane Harvey drove some 39,000 people out of their homes, the stories of what those Houstonians grabbed under duress can be instructive. Many survivors had time only to save themselves and the clothes on their backs. But others could save a bit more. In the chaotic moments before plowing into the water to safety, these Houstonians grabbed an oddball array of objects from their old lives.

The items they took – and those they left behind – reflected more than what was just possible, or even practical. They signaled who these Houstonians were, and what they felt they needed to survive.

Holed up on the third floor of his house in West Houston, Allen Wuescher heard chimes. He was, he thought, alone. The neighborhood was underwater, his wife Lucie and three small children were in Austin. rescuers had yet to arrive. All evening, as the water crept in, Wuescher had hauled valuables upstairs. The first floor went quickly. Now, the second story was gone too, and Wuescher waited on his final floor in the dark to be rescued.

It was just before firefighters shouted from outside that Wuescher figured out the chimes. A box of wine glasses was floating near the living room ceiling, clinking as though held by unseen partiers. By the time he called his wife to say he was fleeing, Wuescher was so rattled he just did what she said: He jammed a Disney "Frozen" backpack with small valuables, and then he stuffed a Minions mini-suitcase with avocados.

Avocados? Even though he was armed with credit cards, a cellphone and friends who could shelter him, Wuescher still believes the avocados were a good choice. "I had no idea where I was going," he says. That Minions bag of vegetables signaled he was never alone. "Lucie made sure I had food," he says. "It's good in that kind of situation to have someone think for you."

Clearly, external sustenance like food and family are essential. But emotional rescue can take other forms. Psychotherapist Rosalie Hyde, who specializes in trauma and works with Harvey survivors, notes that all people hold onto things that have meaning beyond the object themselves. These choices, she says, can be conscious or unconscious, and often complex, rooted in very early emotional attachments.

One flood survivor, for example, might save a jar of pennies because it reminds her of someone tender and nurturing. But another might grab an object reminding him of a positive moment with someone who was not otherwise kind.

For Sharon Bippus, an ESL teacher who fled her townhouse, the cherished object was a deck of cards. Soft-spoken and impish, Bippus can put the most anxious student at ease. But moving back to her still-gutted house has infuriated and depressed her, as she recently indicated with a series of Facebook snaps of an Elf On The Shelf in dire poses in her unfurnished living room.

This wasn't Bippus' first encounter with disaster. More than a decade ago, Bippus lived in Izhevsk, Russia, with the Peace Corps when her apartment building caught fire. She left behind money and passport, but had just enough time to pluck a Russian English dictionary. "Totally impractical," she says.

So when the water invaded her town house last fall, she had given some thought about what to grab. This time she took money, documents and a garbage bag of clothes. She also took a deck of Tarot-style cards, and not because she needed to understand her future. "They're not for fortune telling," Bippus says.

Instead, by randomly choosing one of the cards with their lush, Edwardian images, and phrases such as "rescue" or "unexpected visitors," she can commune with her unconscious self no matter where she is. "It's like doing artwork," Bippus says. "A way to get in touch with my intuition, by meditating on pictures and symbols."

She's still pleased with the choice. "Everything in my house was torn up, everything was chaotic. I needed to do something creative, for my soul," Bippus says.

Mark Austin, a music promoter who manages the much-loved Houston soul band the Suffers, saw similar priorities as he rescued people by van in Harvey's wake. Shortly after the rain stopped, the Fender guitar company quietly asked Austin to distribute 30 new guitars to flooded-out musicians. Ninety percent of the guitarists who fit that description, Austin discovered, had lost everything but their instruments. "Once you find that guitar," Austin said, "you just know it can't be replaced. One guy hid from the water up in his attic. His guitar was the only thing he saved."

Another musician who lost everything else told Austin, "I don't have a really good relationship with my father, but he bought me this guitar. It's the only thing I have that carries a good memory of him."

For people fighting to keep their heads above water long before Harvey struck, though, saving even one sentimental object was a luxury. When the giant NRG Center – home to the Houston Texans – transformed in one day into a shelter for 10,000, it was obvious which flood survivors had no clue where they would go next.

Many who came from poor areas held nothing but blankets and pillows, said Angela Blanchard, president emerita of Houston's Baker Ripley human services agency, and the shelter's organizer. Blanchard's own childhood told her why.

"When you don't have a lot of money, and you go somewhere to visit, you know they're not going to have a couch for you, because someone will already be using it, and they're not going to have a linen closet full of pillows and sheets for you," Blanchard says. "You know you need to bring your own."

Some arrivals at NRG had instinctively prepared for the worst. As each drenched, exhausted guest entered the stadium, polite guards gently labeled and confiscated all weapons. The center's security locked away a couple of dozen guns, some 30 knives – and two rocks.

Other last-minute grabs were fueled by emotional concerns. At 2 a.m. on the night of the storm, after her mother woke her announcing the family of seven needed to flee, 19-year-old Allison Daniel knew what she needed.

Rushing to her closet, she stared for a moment at the water bubbling malevolently through the floorboards. Then she grabbed the soft pajama pants she wears every day after school and some giant fluffy green earrings suitable for a Dr. Seuss heroine. Saving these objects helped to stabilize her after the storm, she believes.

"Oh yes," Daniel says. She has wide, espresso-bean eyes and a childlike jumpiness. "I just wasn't thinking – I brought things that comfort me. My clothes are a really big way I express myself. And my fluffy earrings: They were so fragile. I had to take care of them! These things make my life feel normal."

Clinically speaking, Daniel's split-second choices were quite sound. Even for nonteenagers, what we wear has a measurable effect not merely on our moods, but on our ability to function. In one set of experiments, researchers from Columbia and Rice University asked subjects to slip on crisp white coats. Some were told they were wearing lab coats; others were told they were wearing painters' uniforms.

The subjects who thought they were dressed in doctor garb performed better on attention-related tasks than those who didn't wear the coats. And those who were told the coats were painter's uniforms performed the same with or without the coats on.

But survivors didn't save just their own clothes. Jerriann Nettles, a 43-year-old school teacher, prepared to leave Harvey clutching a Chanel dress that was precious because of the person who could no longer wear it.

Nettles, who had moved to an expansive house outside Houston only the year before, was sure the hurricane would miss her tranquil neighborhood right up until the moment her adult daughter, now in the Coast Guard, called and told her to get out.

Frantically, Nettles and her husband dragged mementos from her daughter's childhood – trophies, tchotchkes, toys – to the second floor. Then, just before plunging into the water to rescue her elderly neighbors, Nettles grabbed her grandmother's Chanel dress. It was silky, covered with deliciously smooth loops of thread. "My grandmother didn't have a lot of money, and she saved to buy this dress from a resale shop," Nettles says. "To this day it still smells like her. She wore Chanel No. 5 perfume. She wore the powder. Anything she had held that combination of her body chemistry and Chanel."

Breathing that scent felt like having her grandmother nearby. "The smell," Nettles says. "It's the last thing on earth you may have on earth from someone's life. If the flood were to take it away..."

Flooded by social media advice about clutter and author Marie Kondo's exhortations to toss those possessions that don't "spark joy," Harvey survivors often apologize when admitting their sorrow. "I know they're only things and it could be so much worse," one man says, standing in the bare kitchen of his small townhouse. Contractors had stripped but not yet replaced the drywall, making it possible to walk straight into his neighbor's dining room. "But they were our things."

That's why, maybe, those items that Houstonians rescued still feel precious: not because of their monetary value, but because they embody the deepest feeling and investment of the individual. It's why we love our kids. It's the reason imperfect shelves built at home give more pleasure than flawless ones from the store, and why we will pay more for a coffee cup if we've cradled it for a little while in our hands.

It definitely explains why Diane Sanchez, bolting from her deluged house, grabbed her hedgehog.

The foul-smelling water sloshed chest-high in the front yard. Helicopters were roaring. Sanchez knew she'd have to leave the fish and the snail behind. But the family loved Auggie, even though one couldn't truly know if he loved them back.

Undeniably cute, with pointy noses and moist button eyes, hedgehogs are largely inscrutable. "They are not cuddly," says Sanchez. "They aren't going to learn their names or snuggle with you." They also dislike other hedgehogs.

What they do offer is the chance to lavish effort upon them. Without constant attention, Auggie would have been downright painful: His unrestrained quills might stab anyone who touched him. To gain a hedgehog's acceptance, its caregivers must carefully hold him in their palms every night (and it has to be night, because they're nocturnal). After several months of this, Auggie gradually began flattening his quills around family members – which is how Sanchez was able to pick him up.

After six months with relatives, the family has just returned to their house. "Figuring out how to put our lives back together is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And I've had cancer twice," Sanchez says. "I feel more out of control now."

But Auggie, impassive as ever, is a sure thing. Her teenage kids adore him, doting on him and taking comfort from the continuity he brings, Sanchez says. Saving their small, prickly pet from the flood might have been her first step toward saving her family, and herself.

This article originally appeared in Gray Matters, Houston Chronicle. 

Based on research by Scott Sonenshein

• When workers solve problems by using objects for new purposes, their workplaces can get by with less money spent on infrastructure. 
• Encouraging this approach can inspire workers and compensate for a sense of limited resources. 
• It's up to managers to nurture this creative mindset. 

Academics who study workplace creativity often ponder whether workers are more inspired by limited resources or abundant resources. Rice Business Professor Scott Sonenshein asked another question: How do resources themselves shape an organization’s creativity?

To find out, Sonenshein headed to the mall: specifically, BoutiqueCo*, a retail company that sells clothes, jewelry and accessories at multiple stores. It was an excellent model for studying both big and small business, because it was vaulting from a modest family-run operation to a public chain valued at about $1 billion. 

Sonenshein analyzed BoutiqueCo at two distinct moments in its evolution. The first was between 1999 and 2010. For most of that time BoutiqueCo was a family-run business with about 80 stores, although the family did sell a minority stake in the company to a private equity firm in 2008. The second period was between 2010 to the present, after the family relinquished control of the company in 2010 when it sold most of the organization to a private equity firm.

During the family-owned phase, the owners’ lack of retail knowledge, of official managers and of access to capital prompted them to give extra power to their workers, encouraging them to see the store as their own. Peter, one of the owners explained that even if they’d wanted to control the other stores, they couldn’t. “We didn’t have the staff to do it. We didn’t have the resources to do it. We didn’t have the processes to control it,” he said.

This prompted the family to give the store workers far more autonomy than they’d normally have gotten at their level. Employees were free to tinker, try new strategies and solve problems on their own. A culture of creativity flourished — by necessity.

The family’s lack of resources also forced employee self-sufficiency. Left to their own devices, employees improvised new uses for display fixtures, including the merchandise itself. When a sheer cotton dress wasn’t selling, for example, a family member who was also a store manager snipped all the straps, rolled the frocks up neatly and marked them down to market them as beach cover-ups. They flew off the shelves.

Employees took similar liberties with store displays. Lily, an assistant store manager, told Sonenshein workers were allowed to experiment however they wished. “You can move the jewelry tables around, you can dress the mannequins. I mean anyone can do it. It’s the manager, the sales associates,” she said.

The unusual freedom did far more than save money. By allowing workers at the different stores to act independently and creatively, BoutiqueCo’s owners had money and attention to invest in opening more stores. 

The investor era ushered in a different mindset. Owners and employees knew more resources were available. Seasoned managers came onto the job. Yet BoutiqueCo stayed creative. How did they do it? By being intentional, Sonenshein discovered.

Despite the wave of new resources, managers purposely withheld fixed objects they thought might dry up employees’ creativity. Unusually for big retail chains, BoutiqueCo never provided a planogram, a data-based management tool mapping out where employees should place items for highest sales. Instead, because of their past success repurposing items and displays, the managers fed the workers’ gift for creative resourcing by offering some guidelines and an array of malleable objects they could use in multiple ways. 

Instead of dictating from above, the owners pushed employees to dream up themes or stories for their individual outlets and build displays based on these stories. The employees delivered. In one store, they fashioned a snakey, metallic necklace into an article clothing. Cinching the necklace around a floral dress, workers “topped the ensemble off with a solid cardigan, thin gold chains, and a straw clutch,” a store manager recalled. It became one of the season’s hottest trends.

Corporate managers also gave individual stores autonomy in fixing problems. They let each store have a unique look or personality, banishing the notion that all stores in a chain must be clonishly the same. The result: Employees created stores that catered to the niche markets in their area. 

BoutiqueCo’s story shows the power of boldly challenging employee resourcefulness, Sonenshein found. Giving workers a sense of ownership ⁠— not just in the businesses’ profit, but in its presentation and even survival ⁠— inspired more action from employee and higher sales. Not to mention a better use for that odd-looking necklace.

*Disguised name of company. 

Scott Sonenshein is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To read more, please see: Sonenshein, S. (2014). How Organizations Foster The Creative Use Of Resources. Academy of Management Journal, 57(3), 814–848. 

Based on research by Yuhang Xing , Huseyin Gulen and Lu Zhang

• Value stocks are company shares that investors think are underpriced. They’ve historically performed better than another popular investment type, known as growth stocks. 
• Value stock portfolios respond more to market volatility than do growth portfolios, but they act similarly to growth stocks when markets are calm.
• Because market volatility often occurs during economic downturns, value stocks may be riskier during such periods. On the other hand, value stocks also have more upside potential at these times, because the market rewards risk.

Value stocks are Wall Street’s Two-Buck Chuck. They’re shares that investors think deserve a higher price based on a firm’s sales, profits or other fundamental characteristics. 

Growth stocks, on the other hand, seldom show up on the bargain table. Even so, they often lure investors, who bet their prices will rise even more as the companies expand. While both types are popular investments, the less-glamorous value stocks historically get better over time. 

The performance gap between the two investment types is called the “value premium.”  In a recent study, Rice Business Professor Yuhang Xing joined two other finance scholars, Huseyin Gulen of Purdue University and Lu Zhang of Ohio State University, to review a half-century of data and calculated that the monthly value premium averaged 0.39 percent. They think they know why.  

In a multifaceted statistical study, the research team found that value shares are more sensitive to turbulence in the market than are growth stocks.

Every time the stock market looks stormy, value stocks get riskier. But because financial risk also carries the tantalizing whiff of higher returns, value stocks that weather such storms perform quite well. Growth stocks didn’t show the same sensitivity during such markets — and neither type of stock showed such sensitivity when the markets were placid.

To draw their conclusions, the scholars used a statistical method called a Markov process, which views data over time and through varying conditions called states — in this instance, periods of high or low market volatility. The researchers based their model on a study from 2000 that took a similar mathematical approach but asked different questions.

Xing and her colleagues then analyzed the performance of value and growth stock portfolios in each of the 648 months from January 1954 through December 2007. The start time was significant: January 1954 was the effective date of a policy that allowed U.S. Treasury interest rates to rise and fall with the market. The professors used the Treasury rates starting that month as a thermometer for measuring market volatility.

They found a correlation between high market volatility and recession and between low market volatility and economic expansion. The link wasn’t perfect, but occurred often enough for Xing’s team to conclude that economic slumps affect value stocks more than growth stocks. 

The researchers also used one-month Treasury bill rates as one of several benchmarks for assessing how growth and value stocks performed. These rates are a favorite of financial professionals who are calculating returns on risk-free investments, because the U.S. government backs the nation’s debt. (Treasury bills are loans to the government for a year or less.) Investors can lend with the confidence that Uncle Sam will pay them back with interest — though not much interest, because of Treasury bills’ low risk. T-bills currently pay around 1 percent annually, according to treasurydirect.gov, the official website for purchasing Treasury securities. 

Logic dictates that stocks are riskier than Treasury securities, because share prices wax and wane with firm performance, the market and the economy. So why do value portfolios outperform portfolios with growth stocks?

The answer: Value companies often are established players in mature industries. Many distribute some of their profit to investors through quarterly dividends. They’re a bit like a bargain wine from the grocery store — adequate, if unglamorous.

Growth companies, meanwhile, typically invest most of their income in expansion and product development rather than paying out dividends. They often offer breakthrough technical devices or innovative services.

Earlier research suggests that because value companies typically are better established than growth firms, they are less nimble in responding to worsening economic conditions. The value of their financial and physical assets, which accountants call book value, stays about the same. But their market value — the sum price of all a firm’s outstanding shares — falls because of their potential for sluggish response to hard times. 

At that point, like a not-so-fancy bottle of wine, value stocks live up to their name. Labels aside, investors think they’re worth more than they cost.

Yuhang Xing is an associate professor of finance at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Gulen, H., Xing, Y., & Zhang, L. (2011). Value versus growth: Time-varying expected stock returns. Financial Management, 40(2), 381-407.

By Vikas Mittal

Companies rely on dashboards to improve customer value—about 40% of the large U.S.-U.K. companies report efforts to build and use a dashboard. In some ways, dashboards are an evolution from the earlier practices of using control charts, scorecards, tracking studies and metrics-based snapshots. Fueled by advances in data analytics and visualization, marketing dashboards are becoming integral components of a company’s decision support system.

There are advantages to using a dashboard:

• A dashboard visually displays a consistent set of metrics that can be monitored at a given point in time (cross-sectional) and over time (longitudinal).
• This enables management to communicate trends in inputs, processes and outcomes with key stakeholders.
• A dashboard may also be used for planning purposes; key metrics that are part of the dashboard can represent goals to be achieved.
• Management can develop plans around measurable goals and further use a dashboard to monitor progress.

Don’t let dashboards make decisions tactical and reactive.

Many marketing dashboards capture an increasingly smaller slice of time, space and experience. Annual tracking of customer satisfaction became quarterly, then weekly and has become daily, even hourly, in some firms.

This all sounds great. Presumably, armed with more information, more data, more visibility into the customer experience, marketers can make better decisions, become more strategic and provide a competitive edge. The risk is that managers who are using detailed and elaborate dashboards may make suboptimal decisions due to information overload.

More importantly, the smaller slices of information that populate dashboards can make them more susceptible to outliers. Compared to yearly data, daily data—within a single retail outlet, based on a few customers—can be quite volatile. One or two customers—ecstatic or irate—can spike the daily average for an outlet. Focusing on these spikes can make managers reactive.

To avoid the “more is better” trap, step back and carefully delineate the role a dashboard should play in marketing decisions. A useful dashboard can help set goals, monitor performance, provide implementation metrics and help to provide strategic insights. How often do you need it and at what level? Answer these questions before you decide on the frequency and granularity of data used in your dashboard.

Don’t let dashboards mask strategic trends.

Dashboards that focus only on cross-sectional information can mislead. The cross-sectional information in a dial should be supplemented with long-term longitudinal trends to provide a strategic overview. Good dashboards should also display longitudinal trends relative to a control group (industry average, select competitors and aspirational firms outside your industry). From 2010 to 2013, the administration at a business school in Texas continuously showed a dashboard with increasing average salary of its MBA students as a KPI. Without a control group, no definitive conclusions could be drawn. Was the increase higher or lower than the increase experienced by other MBA programs in Texas? Was it higher or lower than the salary growth in the Texas region?

Don’t let dashboards focus on analytics at the expense of insights.

Due to their emphasis on quantifiable information, dashboards can push users to focus on analytics—trend lines, bar graphs, pie charts and dials. Is a metric increasing or decreasing, and by how much? How did an opinion or an attitude change since the last period? What percent of people engaged in a specific behavior? How does one subgroup compare to another on key survey items?

Answers to these questions may seem important but are not necessarily insightful. At worst, a focus on answering these types of questions can be utterly misleading. Recall the “dashboard mentality” exhibited by many in the media during the 2016 presidential election. Focused on analyzing the results of day-to-day polls, many in the media failed to gain insights. Every little change in day-to-day polls was overanalyzed. The media gurus became analysts—focused on analyzing one variable at a time: What percentage will vote for the Republican or Democrat candidate? Which issue is more important to which subgroup? Wading deep into analytics, they were unable to provide insights.

What is an insight, and from where does it originate? A practical way to answer this question is to distinguish between the what, why and how of a phenomenon. The “what” pertains to analytics, while the “why” and “how” provide insight.

What is the state of affairs? This can be answered using univariate data analysis—analyzing one variable at a time and comparing it among different subgroups: What percent of people say something? What is the level of agreement, satisfaction or intent based on some survey or behavioral metric? Dashboards adeptly answer “what” questions by displaying dials, trend lines, bar charts and pie charts.

Why is the state of affairs occurring? Why are the people saying something? Why is the level of agreement, satisfaction or intent relatively low or high? To answer these questions, you have to conduct qualitative research—in-depth interviews and prolonged observations—with your customers, coupled with multivariate analysis to understand how multiple variables are related to one another. In most cases, it is a combination of multivariate analysis and in-depth qualitative research that provides the insight—answering the “why” behind the “what.”

How can the state of affairs be influenced? A clear understanding of the “why” helps influence key processes that change future outcomes. A focus on how—by design—is forward-looking and requires an attention to detail to understand the drivers of the desired outcome and an understanding of the process. Companies that can supplement their dashboard with a process to answer the “how” create an enduring and unique capability. Doing this requires employee engagement through discussion forums.

Don’t let dashboards become an end, make them a means to facilitate discussion.

Dashboards, in a rudimentary form, were introduced in the early 1950s by W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and Walter A. Shewhart within the context of total quality management (TQM). TQM used complex statistical tools and experimental methods to generate data that were summarized and visually presented to front-line employees in the form of quality control charts.

The genius of the TQM approach was not in visual analytics. It centered on using visual analytics to generate insights. TQM did that by embedding the analytics in discussion forums such as quality circles. After presenting the dashboard analytics, discussion forums encouraged employees at all levels to elaborate upon the information. The insights generated helped address decision making, enhance manufacturing processes, frame the goal-setting process and develop incentives.

Frequently, it was not the metrics, but the discussions facilitated by the metrics, that led to quality improvement suggestions by employees. Dashboard analytics are important, but insights based on a discussion of the analytics are paramount.

Dashboards replete with numbers will not provide insights. To gain insights, embed the dashboard metrics within forums that facilitate discussions, generate ideas and motivate employees to more systematically use the “what” to move into the realm of “why,” and “how.” Do this at all levels frequently, and consider involving a core group of other stakeholders—customers, suppliers and investors—to broaden the pool of insights.

An exclusive reliance on marketing dashboards can be counterproductive for strategic thinking and decision making. To get the most out of your dashboard, use them as facilitators of discussions that yield insights. Keeping the dashboard simple, graphical and forward-looking will help the discussion. Provide a decision support system that can bridge the journey from analytics (what) to insights (why, how). Only by making your dashboard a vital part of a broader decision support system can you extract the most value from it.

Vikas Mittal is the J. Hugh Liedtke Professor of Management in Marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice Univeristy. 

This article first appeared American Marketing Association's as The Downside Of Marketing Dashboards. 

By Utpal Dholakia

This article originally appeared on Psychology Today. 

More companies are taking political stances these days. During the past week alone, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Walmart said they would stop selling guns to anyone under 21. Dick’s went even further and stopped selling assault-style rifles and high capacity firearms. Over a dozen other companies, including Delta Airlines, United, Hertz, and MetLife announced various actions such as no longer offering discounts to NRA members.

Defining a political stance

For this post, I define a company’s political stance as having two properties. First, a political stance is a visible business decision that shows support for the policies and views of one political party over another. For instance, when a retailer eliminates gun SKUs or an airline cuts off NRA member discounts, these companies are aligning with Democratic views. Alternatively, when Papa John’s Pizza denounced NFL player protests a few months ago, it allied with Republicans. The respective companies were concurrently distancing themselves from the opposing political party in a public way.

The second property of a company’s political stance is that the decision’s timing is fueled by some external event and is unrelated to a business outcome. For instance, stopping sales of assault guns because of poor sales performance or low profitability is a normal business decision, but doing this soon after a mass shooting is taking a political stance.

Many experts have noted the increasing incidence of political stance-taking by companies. Some of this is driven by pressure from within. In one study of senior executives at large corporations around the world, almost half wanted their company’s leaders to speak out on hot-button issues like climate change, gun control, and immigration. A second reason is that some companies’ CEOs are naturally outspoken and weight their own political affiliation heavily in their business decision making.   

Despite the potential for positive buzz and support from a section of customers and the general public, there are two important reasons why I think it’s a bad idea for companies, particularly large ones, to take political stances.

Political stances usually alienate a significant fraction of the company’s customers, employees, investors, and other constituents.

Every business operates in an environment with many moving parts that have complicated relationships among them. For lasting success, everything has to work more or less smoothly. For example, when employees are satisfied with their work environment, they feel empowered and fulfilled, and go on to deliver high-quality customer service, which in turn, delights customers. When investors view the company in a positive light, it creates a halo effect that makes it easier to handle difficult economic conditions.

However, when a large company takes a political stance, it alienates some significant number of these constituents and throws things out of kilter. This is because every large company, whether it is Dick’s Sporting Goods, United Airlines, or Papa John’s Pizza, is sure to have constituents across the political spectrum. Taking a stance that favors one partisan group upsets and alienates customers, employees, and investors from the other group. The morale of employees plunges leading to lower motivation and effort. Some employees may even leave. Customers will simply defect and find some other seller if they feel unwelcome. One recent study found that when offered an opportunity to purchase a deeply discounted Amazon gift card, consumers were more than twice as likely to buy when their political affiliation matched the seller.

Political stances take the attention of managers away from the company’s core business objectives.

The primary objectives of a business are to deliver high-quality products and services at a fair price to customers, provide an inclusive work environment with fair pay to employees, and deliver strong financial performance to investors. Taking a political stance usually does not fit well with any of these goals. What’s even more problematic, it distracts managers at all levels in the company from the activities that are crucial to achieving these goals because it occupies their time and attention. Just imagine how much turmoil must have gone on inside Dick’s Sporting Goods this past week over a policy change that contributed relatively little to their sales or bottom line. (The company sold assault-style guns only at 35 of its 750 stores, and the firearm product category sales had been declining long before this stance.)

There is a third pragmatic reason for avoiding political stances, which is that such decisions are unlikely to have a significant impact on the core issue. For instance, even if Walmart and Dick’s Sporting Goods stop selling assault-style rifles, there are plenty of other sellers who will continue to do so. If Papa John’s lashes out against NFL player protests, consumers will simply buy another of the dozens of available pizza brands. The stance-taking company is ceding ground to its competitors that decided not to take a political stance, without affecting any significant change.

Conclusion

I will conclude by pointing out one caveat. My discussion has focused on large companies that serve diverse constituents. For a small business with few homogeneous employees and a narrowly defined customer segment, this discussion would be reversed. Such companies should be the ones that wade deeply into political issues and take stances that align with their employees' and customers’ political views.

Utpal Dholakia is the George R. Brown Professor of Marketing at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Based on research by Kevin Crotty and Kerry Back

• Stock trades affect bond prices and bond trades affect stock prices. 
• Relevant inside information on the value or riskiness of a firm’s assets may shed extra light on the value of the firm’s stock and bonds.
• The type of inside information an investor has will determine whether stock prices go up or down when bond trading is heavy. 

Large firms finance their operations both by selling shares to investors and by issuing debt in the corporate bond market. The price of these shares and bonds, of course, is shaped in large part by public knowledge about the company. But there are other factors as well, particularly less-public knowledge such as private information about a company’s risk level or value.

What’s the impact of such inside details? That, say Rice Business Professors Kerry Back and Kevin Crotty, depends on just what sort of private information investors may have.

In a recent paper, Back and Crotty took a close look at the possible effects of private information and found that the type of inside information that certain investors have determines if the price of a given stock will rise or fall when there’s heavy buying or selling in the stock and bond market. By studying the content of buy or sell orders, the researchers were able to discern whether investors tended to have inside information about the value of assets or the riskiness of assets. 

When some investors know more than the market about the expected value of a company’s operations, heavy buying in stocks will predict higher prices in the bond market, while heavy buying in bonds corresponds to higher prices for the firm’s stock. But when some investors have private information about the riskiness of a company’s operations, the reverse happens: Heavy buying in stocks will predict lower prices in the bond market, and heavy buying in bonds will predict lower prices in the firm’s stock.

Back and Crotty used a sample of daily trades from 221 firms to estimate how prices in one market, such as bonds, responded to trading activity in the other main market – that is, stocks – and vice versa. Their sample skewed toward large firms, with a median stock market capitalization of $14 billion and median outstanding debt of about $5 billion. Based on the relationships in the data between trading activity in one market and prices in the other, the researchers concluded that private information about a firm’s operations is primarily about its expected value, rather than its riskiness.

What does this mean to the ambitious corporation looking to raise money? Investors demand a return for buying both corporate bonds and stocks. Back and Crotty’s research shows that, in addition to public information, both debt and equity returns are shaped by private information that some investors have about the expected value of the firm’s operations. Their new data confirm that a particular type of inside information pushes stock and bond prices in a predictable way. 

And what about those market observers who don’t have a $14 billion company to run? For them, these findings shed new light on how information gets into prices in the stock and bond markets. Not surprisingly, some investors know more than others, and their “inside” information eventually is reflected in prices. 

Kerry Back is a J. Howard Creekmore professor of finance and professor of economics at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Kevin Crotty is an associate professor of finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Back, K., & Crotty, K. (2015). The informational role of stock and bond volume. The Review of Financial Studies, 5(1), 1381-1427.

Based on research by Yan Anthea Zhang and Haiyang Li

• The entry of high quality foreign firms into developing markets creates enormous opportunities for local firms.
• At the same time, these firms must learn quickly and efficiently.
• The ability of these firms to take advantage of the presence of foreign companies increases as the barriers to imitation lower. 

Foreign investors want shiny new factories, low wages and a pipeline to new markets. Their government hosts want local businesses to improve through learning from outsiders. What could be simpler?

A lot. Technology spillover to locals from foreign direct investment is mostly the result of slow, often unplanned contact. Because foreign companies try to keep their competitive advantages to themselves, local companies have to overcome various barriers for learning to get what they need to survive.  

To better understand how foreign direct investment affects local firms, Rice Business Professors Yan Anthea Zhang and Haiyang Li joined colleague Yu Li of China’s University of International Business and Economies in analyzing hundreds of thousands of local and foreign companies operating in China.

Scouring the gigantic annual Industrial Survey Database (1998–2007) from China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the researchers looked at 301,667 domestic firms in 511 four-digit Standard Industrial Classification code manufacturing industries (accounting for more than 93 percent of manufacturing industries in China). Then they studied data from nearly 65,000 foreign firms operating in these industries in China during the same time period. 

What they found was a clear positive relationship between the length of foreign investments’ presence in an industry and the productivity of local firms in the same industry ⁠— suggesting that local firms become more efficient by learning and competing with foreign entrants over time.  

This spillover effect, of course, is not specific to China. In the 1980s, India’s Bajaj Auto, which makes motor scooters, faced the daunting task of competing with Japanese giant Honda. At the start, the Honda scooters were more efficient. But as time passed, Bajaj learned a thing or two. First, they realized that the technology for developing motor scooters was relatively stable, which limited the cost of building a quality competitive product. Second, Bajaj learned to take better advantage of its strengths, including easy-to-access spare parts and ubiquitous maintenance facilities. In the end, Honda’s entry into the market made Bajaj more competitive.

The arrival of foreign firms into developing markets usually brings some opportunity for host industries. 
True, the newcomers typically drive some local firms (typically the less efficient ones) out of businesses. But those that survive tend to grow stronger and more sophisticated. When KFC came to Kenya, for example, the implications were enormous. The company was seeking to expand its markets not just in Kenya but throughout Africa, and brought with it the organizational and technological savvy to do so.

Exposed to new products and systems, domestic companies feel compelled to imitate them. If they want to survive, they must proactively dig for information about the competition and expertly back-engineer their foreign rivals’ products to measure up.

Local firms learn faster when foreign firms rely on tangible assets more than intangible ones. The secret ingredient to Coca-Cola, for example, is harder to reproduce than a piece of equipment or a production line process. Foreign companies whose competences are hard for outsiders to observe and understand can better protect their competitive advantage from local imitation. 

The local firms’ survival also hinges on how many foreign firms pour in, and how quickly. When foreign firms come in gradually, the researchers found, local businesses stand a much better chance of surviving. But when outside firms arrive en masse, local businesses can be overwhelmed trying to spot, interpret and emulate their practices.

While domestic firms can learn from foreign entrants to increase their productivity and improve their chances of survival, the impact of foreign firms dwindles with time. Curiously, that’s not all good for the locals: As time passes, the useful technology that foreign rivals offer diminishes too.

Thoughtful managers in both foreign and domestic firms can use these findings, Zhang, Li and Li note. Foreign firms need to calculate when they are vulnerable to local imitation. Domestic companies should be aware that the learning opportunity brought by foreign entrants is arduous and only pays off under specific circumstances.

Zhang, Li and Li’s look at the contretemps between local and foreign firms reveals just how nuanced the international investment process really is ⁠— both for the powerful foreign direct investors who want to stay competitive, and the local firms who plan to emulate, and eventually surpass, their foreign rivals. 

Yan Anthea Zhang is Fayez Sarofim Vanguard Professor of Management in Strategic Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Haiyang Li is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Zhang, Y., Li, Y., & Li, H. (2014). FDI spillovers over time in an emerging market: The roles of entry tenure and barriers to imitation. Academy of Management Journal, 57(3), 698–722.

By Jennifer Latson

You don’t have to ban words to get people to stop using them. 

That became evident in December, when reports that White House officials had banned seven words at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (including “diversity” and “science-based”) turned out to be a red herring. The words had, in fact, been changed in official documents by the CDC’s own employees to eliminate triggers that might make their projects the target of budget cuts. By replacing politically-charged terms with euphemisms and abstractions, the public health workers revealed their best guesses — and worst fears — about what would rub the administration the wrong way. 

It’s not the first time vague wording has made its way into a government document, but as an indicator of a larger trend, it’s troubling. Recent surveys show that self-censorship is on the rise in the U.S. — and that’s a hallmark of institutionalized fear, according to Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea. We normally associate fear-driven self-censorship with totalitarianism, but it can crop up in democracies as well, Robin explains.

Brutal regimes, of course, plant the seeds of fear especially effectively. Robin quotes a psychoanalyst who lived through Uruguay’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, saying, “The process of self-censorship was incredibly insidious: It wasn’t just that you stopped talking about certain things with other people — you stopped thinking them yourself. Your internal dialogue just dried up.” 

This is the danger of restricting speech: When people avoid discussing taboo topics, ideas themselves begin to disappear. 

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools, says there’s a crucial difference between curbing derogatory language and avoiding controversial topics altogether. 

These days, he points out, racial slurs have all but disappeared from college campuses — and it’s no loss that these words have become unofficially banned. But the fact that you rarely hear an open debate about affirmative action is problematic. He was surprised when a recent poll showed that 40 percent of professors oppose the policy — a stunning revelation because he’d never heard any of his colleagues voice that opinion. 

“Obviously it’s because a lot of us are self-censoring,” he said. “And that can’t be good for the university or for affirmative action.”  

Zimmerman’s concerns were further stoked last April, when Harvard University rescinded admissions offers to 10 students who had posted racist and obscene messages on social media. 

“Their behavior was unacceptable, and there should have been consequences,” but revoking their admission was not the best response, Zimmerman argued in an op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  

“My fear was that the penalty would not inhibit the stuff these kids were saying, which should be inhibited, but would inhibit other forms of open public discourse,” he said. “The best reply to bad speech is always more speech, not less.”   

Surveys confirm that college students are more reluctant than ever to voice an unpopular opinion, but self-censorship isn’t just an issue on college campuses. The rest of us are increasingly wary, too. A 2017 report by The Cato Institute found that a majority of Americans — 58 percent — were afraid to share their political beliefs. 

Why? It’s partly that political debate has become increasingly polarized. A 2014 study by the Pew Research Center concluded that “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades” — and that was before the 2016 election. 
 
But it’s also true that frank public discussion has become increasingly fraught in the digital age, when social media posts open you up to virulent — and viral — public shaming. The consequences of online shaming are very real, as Jon Ronson writes in So You've Been Publicly Shamed: people have lost jobs, reputations and relationships over things they’ve said on social media. Ronson argues that these consequences are wildly disproportionate to the crime of offensive speech. 

So what if you’re a Google employee who believes women are biologically ill-suited for roles in tech and leadership (partly because, as Google computer engineer James Damore wrote in a memo last summer, “women are on average more prone to anxiety”)? Should you be fired for voicing those beliefs? 

Most Americans think not, according to the Cato Institute survey. And while the Google case was a reminder that the Constitution doesn’t specifically protect free speech in the workplace, there are arguments to be made for allowing employees to voice unpopular views. 

For one thing, stifling free expression can also stifle innovation, according to research by Jing Zhou and Jennifer George, professors at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business. They found, in a 2001 study, that disgruntled employees came up with some of the most creative solutions to workplace problems — but only “if they were reasonably confident that voicing their dissatisfaction could bring about needed change,” Zhou said. 

“Leaders play a key role in boosting this confidence,” she added. “They should seek, encourage, and listen to employees’ input, even when (perhaps especially when) those ideas are different from the views the leaders hold.”

In other words, leaders can make it known that dissenting opinions are allowed by, well, allowing them — and by encouraging candid debate without penalizing unorthodox opinions. 

Zimmerman practices this approach in the classroom. Although some of Donald Trump’s public comments make his blood boil, he doesn’t punish any of his students for agreeing with the president’s political ideas.  

“What I say in my classes is that anyone can agree with Trump on anything — immigration, China, anything — you just can’t act like him,” he said. “You can’t vilify anyone who disagrees with you as beneath humanity. You can’t call women ‘pigs.’ You can say whatever you want to about Title IX and how it affects women, but you can’t call them pigs.” 

“The most important thing we can do is to try to actually practice free speech, which is different from saying you support it,” says Zimmerman. “Otherwise it’s just an abstraction.”  

Jennifer Latson is a staff writer and editor at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business and the author of The Boy Who Loved Too Much. 

Based on research by Scott  Sonenshein, Katherine A. Decelles and Jane E. Dutton

• More and more U.S. firms back social equality movements as a way to attract top workers.
• But it’s still hard to be an activist from the workplace ⁠— especially on the issue of climate change.
• Assessing personal strengths and weaknesses helps employees (and potential employees) be better advocates for their causes.

A few decades ago, it would have been unheard of to think of corporate America as a leader in social justice. Wasn’t the bottom line the only line that mattered?

Recently, however, several U.S. corporations have entered the fray on the side of the less powerful. For example, Dow Chemical and other firms were among those lobbying against the North Carolina bill limiting public restroom access for transgender people. In Georgia, the Disney Corporation helped persuade the governor to veto a similar bill. Even corporations that are controversial on one cause, such as Monsanto, have taken stands on other issues, such as what they see as discriminatory legislation.

There’s a reason some companies are looking out for the underdog: Firms that operate in states with discriminatory laws are struggling to recruit the best and the brightest. Talented employees, these companies know, are often motivated by social and environmental causes from LGBT rights to fighting climate change. In other words, it’s workers themselves who are pushing corporate America toward social activism.

How can they best harness this power?

In a recent paper, Scott Sonenshein, a professor at Rice Business, Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto and Jane Dutton of the University of Michigan explored how employee activists could maximize their often taxing efforts.

Some causes, the scholars found, are more daunting than others. Advocacy for LBGT rights, for instance, can be difficult, but at least the issues are clear-cut. The Supreme Court can make a ruling, and voila: same-sex marriage is legal in Texas.

Battling climate change, however, is trickier. First, as one research subject put it, the issue itself “is probably the most difficult and complicated challenge humanity has ever faced.” Second, at the same time that green advocates are wrapping their own minds around the problem, they must deal with others, including coworkers, who don’t share their passion. Some simply don’t care. “I’m going to make my couple hundred thousand dollars creating money for rich people,” a study participant imagined a coworker declaring. Others, of course, deny climate change is real.

Environmental advocates also face internal doubts. Do they have the wherewithal, some quietly wonder, to tackle climate change’s complexities? Even for individuals, living green can be pricey and inconvenient. Depending on the industry, convincing a company to go green can seem impossible.

Sonenshein and his coauthors propose ways for green activists to take heart. They can start by assessing their “self assets” – all the personal attributes an individual can call on for strength. A person’s values, knowledge and experience can all be assets. So can the ability to adapt. Over time, for example, one study subject learned to adjust the way she talked about climate change to match a given audience, even within the same workplace. The more you can put environmental issues into coworkers’ own language, she told the researchers, “the more you can get them to see the benefits to them” of effecting change.

Curiously, the authors found that practical constraints actually strengthened activists’ ability to promote their causes at work. Self-doubt, for example, often brought out activists’ resolve to improve their technique and turn weakness into strength – with an important caveat. They also needed to recognize their self-assets. That was especially true for those who could look at their overall lives and see that a perceived failure at work could be balanced by success in the same issue at home. If you can’t get recycling going in the office, in other words, don’t give up. Recycle more in your neighborhood.

“Know thyself” is one of our oldest injunctions. By looking at themselves in a multifaceted way, and acknowledging strengths alongside weaknesses, employee activists can appreciate their triumphs where they find them. Just as important, they can muster the courage to fight another day.

Scott Sonenshein is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Management at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

To learn more, please see: Sonenshein, Scott, DeCelles, Katherine A., & Dutton, Jane E. (2014). It’s not easy being green. The role of self-evaluations in explaining support of environmental issues. Academy of Management Journal, 57(1), 7-37.

Note: This article was originally published Oct 27, 2016.